Homework--Threat or Menace?

I've recently become privy to a DOE directive about grading policies (and I'm sorry, but I haven't got a link). It says that homework may be used as a tool to measure mastery. It seems to place less value on teachers walking around the room and giving simple credit for homework, or giving a grade of 100% for completion. On this astral plane, that's more than a little disappointing.

Homework is routinely copied, and anyone who doesn't think so is either a fool, in some proverbial ivory tower, or composing directives at Tweed. Most homework I give is relatively easy. While I don't want to make kids miserable, I have no problem giving them a few minutes of review at home. Were I to always grade homework I gave, I'd have to not only penalize students who honestly entered incorrect answers (which they could review and correct the next day in class), but also grant higher grades to those who copied from someone more capable. I'd rather just give everyone 100%.

In my sordid past, I did not give number grades to homework. I simply entered check marks in a book. But I now grade via a program that likes numbers, hence the 100. It's certainly true that students who copy homework get undeserved credit, but I can see who does and does not understand in other ways. For one thing, I'm in the classroom every day and I can see who does and does not complete and understand the work. I have a pretty good idea of who will and will not pass actual tests, which happen to be another indicator of who has mastered the material. Homework alone will not make anyone pass my class.

Another advantage of electronic grading is the chance to assign weight to various assignments. A homework assignment that I grade up or down has a value of one. If I simply walk around and look, it's 100 for completed homework, 50 for incomplete homework, and zero for nothing. My program enables this by allowing me to give a grade of 100 to everyone, and alter only those who vary via icons I set in advance.

I don't do that for all homework, though. if I assign, for example, a paragraph, I'll grade each one individually, and assign a value of two, so that it counts double what a short-answer homework assignment does. If I assign a multi-paragraph assignment, I'll grade that individually, and assign it triple value. On assignments like those, copying is quite a bad idea, as I notice pretty much all of it.

Unfortunately, if I were to expect my students to do homework assignments like that on a daily basis, they'd likely as not hate me and everything I stand for. That would make me sad, particularly as there's no need for it. Also, some kids do not do homework alone, or at all. Some families employ tutors who simply do homework for students. Some kids hand assignments to these tutors, or friends and/ or family who complete them. Often kids, perceiving nothing wrong with this, just tell me.

For a few years, I taught ESL students how to pass the English Regents, which of course they should never have had to take in the first place. At that time, it was a marathon writing test. I showed students how to complete formulaic four-paragraph essays that I would never dream of using for anything but that test. At first, I had students complete a lot of writing at home. That didn't work well.

I'd get papers that clearly had nothing whatsoever to do with what students were writing in class. Sometimes they were not even on topic. Sometimes I could find sources from which students had plagiarized, but often I could not. To stop wasting my time, I utterly eliminated homework in these classes. Absolutely every piece of writing was done in class, before my eyes. It gave me a much better idea of what my students could and could not do.

In fact, there is another potential value to checking homework, one of which the DOE never dreamed (what with their not being real teachers and all). If teachers check homework immediately upon student arrival, it's a great tool to discourage lateness. Oops! You're late and I already checked the homework? Gee, that's too bad. Not doing it again. Hope you're quicker tomorrow.

DOE also wants to make sure there is a policy explaining how late homework can come in, and they're much more patient than I am. When can students make up homework? Should it be a week after it is due? Should it be up to the end of the semester? I'd argue that it ought to be made up only if the student were legitimately absent, and only within a day or two after said student's return. Are teachers seriously expected to monitor whether or not students copied late homework weeks after it was assigned? How long does it take a kid to copy thirty homework assignments and why the hell should I give credit for such dubious effort?

The DOE is obsessed with making everyone college-ready. I taught in colleges for twenty years and I was never handed a policy instructing me to grade like this or like that. The DOE thinks everything can be measured on a rubric. The DOE is wrong. We are routinely subjective in many things, but our opinions are crafted on observations of who is and is not doing the work, or at least trying to, when we spend time with our classes each and every day. There needs to be a balance, and in fact there needs to be trust. Of course people whose careers revolve around manipulating data to make themselves look better have trust issues.

Nonetheless, teachers, as professionals, ought to be able to exercise discretion. If not, why are we even here?

Why Skedula Still Sucks but Online Grading May Not

I'm on a UFT committee to study online grading. Since we're supposed to discuss it, I figured I'd better start doing it. It's something I've thought about, but put off. A lot of my colleagues do it. Many favor other programs. Some use spreadsheets, but most people I know who love it use Engrade. However, my school is set up to use Skedula. I don't have a whole lot of love for Skedula, as it's awkward, unreliable, and counter-intuitive, but I have to evaluate what my school uses, so that's what I did.

Skedula is enormously popular with administrators because it plays nice with STARS, the DOE record-keeping program they use. I'm told there is a process that very quickly uploads info from STARS onto Skedula. It used to take maybe a minute, but the geniuses at DOE found some way to inhibit it, so now it takes maybe five minutes. That's a big advantage for administrators who don't feel like sitting around uploading files.

Everyone in my school has an iPad, and Skedula has an iPad app that most of us have deemed unusable. I have a keyboard case, so that helps me with the web app, but it places a nag screen for the iPad app every time I open it. And while my keyboard works with everything, sometimes it simply does not work with Skedula. Also, Skedula forgets who I am on an almost daily basis, despite the fact that I ask it to remember my email. When I entered report card grades on my iPad, twice, Skedula failed to record them. I had to find a computer and enter them for the third time.

Another questionable feature of Skedula is that on the report cards, comments do not appear. I finally found out you have to hover over the grades to see them. You have to do so very deliberately, because if you don't do it just right, they don't appear. I had to ask my principal what happened to my comments. I have no idea how parents or students are going to know that, since there are no instructions whatsoever available. I'm very happy admin at my school decided to issue paper report cards this semester.

On the positive side, I love that my kids can see their grades so easily. I was being observed a few weeks ago, and a girl stood up for no particular reason and asked, "How come you only gave me 85 for participation?" Maybe I should have been upset, but I was thrilled. "Wow. You actually looked at it?" Now that this girl, and perhaps her dad, will know every time she misses the homework, I'm hopeful she'll miss less of it. It turns out she was right about her participation grade, and I raised it. I don't mind getting complaints about things I'm wrong about. It might be better if students would wait until I'm not being observed, but what can you do?

For me, I'm going to keep doing it. I like the back and forth about grades with my students who've decided to keep track, and I'll encourage others to do so as well. On parent-teacher night, I'll be able to pull up an online gradebook that shows grades of only the student in question. That will be good.

But there are a few things I've learned---one is it certainly takes longer than using a gradebook (which I still do, just in case). I cannot rely on Skedula not to crap out, and I'm not sure about reliance on school internet either.  If I'm not collecting homework, I can walk around and check it with a book. I can't count on Skedula and my iPad for that.

Here's what I really wonder--why can't a grading program that does not suck figure out a way to quickly and seamlessly hook up with STARS? That would give principals an incentive to offer a better program, and could possibly make a whole lot of profit for a company interested in helping out the largest school district in the US of A.

Man vs. Machine--Further Adventures with Skedula

Yesterday I had a big problem contacting a student's home. A girl walked in 20 minutes late, like she owned the place, after having arrived just before the ending bell rang two days ago. She had a big smile, looking as though she was expecting to win a prize. At least two times I caught her fussing with makeup rather than paying attention. This was fairly easy for her to do as the only seat in my 34-person class was one in the back.

The girl had written a contact number on the card I gave her, but there was another one on Skedula. I went up to her and asked whether the number she gave me was her mom's number. She assured me it was. But it wasn't. And neither was the number on Skedula.

Personally, I hate when kids come late to my class. My feeling is this--if I have to be on time, so do they. So I went to her guidance counselor, hoping she might have the magic number to send this girl's behavior home with her. The counselor remembered seeing it somewhere, and opened up our old program Daedalus, where she found a note someone had written with the correct phone number.

I struggled on my iPad to make a similar note in Skedula. I clicked and prodded. After several false starts, I finally found the anecdotal, which, by default, is academic negative. I tried to change it, but it wasn't all that responsive. Is it negative to leave a current phone number? Well, it would be today. Unfortunately, no matter how many times I touched the window, my iPad keyboard would not appear. So that particular mission failed.

"It's the iPad," said the counselor. "It works better on my computer." So she made the note and then cursed herself because she'd forgotten to change the default academic negative category. Is that the most popular thing we do? Write negative things about kids? When I write about kids on venues like those I try to describe only behavior and let others decide whether it's negative or positive.

Then the counselor told me this girl has been having issues for a few years. I pushed several buttons on Skedula trying to pull up her previous report cards, but had no luck at all. It's very hard for me to fathom what is worthwhile about this program, though I will grant that one member of our faculty had nice things to say about it the other day. Still, the overwhelming number of comments I get are about time wasted trying to do things.

No one ever talked about Daedalus. I never wrote about it. We just used it. It was a handy tool. Teachers can always use handy tools. It's remarkable what we get are arcane, overblown, convoluted programs like Skedula--programs that cost schools up to 40 grand a year. To me, that's potentially the price of an additional teacher, and perhaps fewer classes of 34.

Skedula Still Sucks

It's funny. I put up a post saying Skedula sucks, and I got dozens of responses from people who'd never posted on the blog before, most of whom had never used Disqus, a very popular commenting platform. One person would say the technophobes love it, then an hour later someone would post saying, "I'm a technophobe, and I love it."

I got multiple posts calling me a liar, and characterizing those who criticize Skedula as Luddites or worse. I took them down, and I will continue to delete such posts, so please don't even bother.

I know many teachers, I know what teachers are passionate about, and I do not know one single teacher, not even a  tech-oriented teacher, who is passionate about a grading program, any grading program. I have read all the comments, and I do have a response.

Several posters insisted Skedula does not, by default, make posts public. They are wrong. When you write an anecdotal, the public box is checked by default, and you must uncheck it. I would not advise teachers to make negative posts open to all. If you've read Chancellor's Regulation A-421, you think twice about what you want people to hear. There's a prominent case of a teacher being fired for writing unsavory things about her students on Facebook. I'd think a school audience would put a teacher at even more risk.

I find it incredible there is no feature for a guidance referral, and thus far no poster, not even the ones saying they are from Skedula, has addressed this fundamental flaw. If you wish to send a message to a guidance counselor, you must then look up who the guidance counselor is, if you have not already done so, then check the name of the counselor. In a school like mine, with a dozen counselors, that's unnecessarily time-consuming. Daedalus selected the counselor automatically in one step.

Yes, I know, you need training, as many posters repeated. As a matter of fact, I've had it, and one of the reps from Skedula was in my school just last week. The first time I mentioned guidance referrals, the rep answered a question, but not the one I asked. When I repeated it again, he said the beauty of Skedula was that I could set it up to do it myself. That was akin to bringing my car in and having the mechanic tell me the beauty of his shop was that I could come in and do the repair myself. There was no discussion of adding this very basic and useful feature from this rep.

Let's look further at training. I'm using the Blogger platform right now. I've had zero training. I also had zero training in MS Word. Last week I edited a film using iMovie, with zero training, for the first time. The teachers using Engrade in my building did so with zero training. An intuitive program is user-friendly, and requires little training. I had zero training in Daedalus, and I've had zero training in any computer program I can think of. But let's go back to our experience with the Skedula rep.

A young tech teacher raised her hand and asked why a screen with our school name pops up every time we log in. She felt it was a waste of time. Could we bypass it? No, said the Skedula expert.
A young math teacher told me it was faster and more efficient to use a Delaney book to take attendance, and that using Skedula ate into valuable class time. In fact, several tech-oriented teachers had already told me they'd found taking attendance with Skedula was awkward, so I haven't even bothered.


Several issues came up about viewing students. Why were their faces blocked? That was because of the iPad. Why do we have scrolling issues? The iPad. But there will be an iPad app, said the rep, sometime soon, that will fix that. Pardon me if I believe it when I see it. Meanwhile, the teachers at my school, almost all of whom use iPads (on which they needed no training), can wait.

Other commenters on the blog were thrilled you don't have to write grades on Skedula. You don't have to use the EGG. Yet the rep was unable to demonstrate it, saying the grades were not up yet. The principal made sure to set up an EGG because our grades are due on Friday. I suppose he could've used Skedula and hoped for the best, but I thought it was a good idea when he bet on a sure thing. Still, maybe when Skedula works, it works. Again, I'll believe it when I see it.

Today I wanted to pull up a student schedule. I clicked "schedule" and got a choice of three schedules. I could view the student's test schedule, if I wished, and there was some other schedule, I don't recall which. Perhaps there is a school somewhere where people commonly need student test schedules, but with only 28 years teaching experience, I don't know where it is. So there I found an extra step, for no particular reason, when I was trying to find something very common--here there should be a default, and it should be the student schedule.

Now I know I will get another mountain of responses telling me how wonderful Skedula is, and how it's changed their school cultures, and their lives, and how birth control pills were a relatively unimportant invention compared to Skedula. But here's a fact. I talk to teachers and administrators all day at my school.

Not one single person has had anything good to say about it. We use it, because the school probably paid 40K for it, and is stuck with it for the year.  I use it every day because I have no choice. I find it counter-intuitive, and not user friendly.

In summary, please review the headline.

Skedula Sucks

In our school, we have a new system. It's new and very glitzy looking. And you can enter grades and attendance on it, if you dare. We used to have a system called Daedalus, with which we could look up student schedules, and phone numbers, and things like that. You can do that in Skedula too, with only a few more inconvenient steps.

Daedalus had a big calendar you could pull up and show to parents. All the cuts would show a sea of pink, if I recall correctly. It was a very dramatic thing to show a parent. Skedula does something, but not that. In my school, there are a lot of technophobic teachers. I expect them not to like new systems. This year, it's not them, but the young tech-oriented teachers who are complaining.

In Skedula, if you send a note, it is by default public. This is pretty inconvenient. Several people have written things they did not expect everyone in the building to have access to, but there you are. I like to send notes to guidance counselors. In Daedalus, you'd press a button, write a note, and it would go to the kid's counselor, whether or not you happened to know who the counselor was. That way, at the end of the year, when the principal asked me why the hell I failed that kid, I could point to this correspondence. In Skedula, you have to look up the counselor and do it yourself. You may as well use your email account.

After noting that, I found an option to send comments to Skedula. They don't seem to really want them, because a box that could not have been more than one square inch popped up. I dutifully wrote a complaint, but it didn't go through.

Skedula looks more professional than bare-bones Daedalus. But Daedalus was more simple, more intuitive, more user-friendly. I miss it. Teachers who've adopted their own online grading systems, like Engrade, swear they're better and easier, and lament being asked to swap.

We need not even mention ARIS here, a total waste of 80 million bucks, soon to be scrapped for a state system that will no doubt prove more costly and even worse.

Does your school have an online system? What is it? How do you like it? Is it free so we can use it instead of Skedula?