Grades that say nothing! They made me a better teacher.

So, I jumped into a couple of new things. I developed my I can statements for an introductory mini unit on the periodic table, and decided to punch it up to letting the students work towards the I can statements without me direct teaching it. First, why the changes? They have come to expect the 4, 3, 2, 1 leveled assessments from me but were surprised when it started showing up in other classes. So, I decided that I had the ability to explain the changes. Now, I explained to them that this was not some overnight thing that I had cooked up and that this had been rolling around in my head for the almost decade that I have been teaching. The way my class has been set up from the beginning was an attempt to set up a class where a student like me couldn't do well just by playing the game. I want my kids to really learn. I told them about the AP Calc class in high school that I dropped out of after a semester because it was the first time that I had been challenged to learn and have to get teacher help to be successful at and I didn't know how to do it so I just didn't. In the end, after spending a good chunk of class time plotting coordinate points into my TI-81 graphing calculator to make an animation of  an arrow shooting a target, I had to approach the teacher to tell him that I was switching out. Here's what he said to me, and I still remember it after all these years, "I don't know what grade you actually have but I won't give you any lower than a C." Why did he do that? He gave me a C, when if he had assessed my learning would have found that I probably was more on the low end of a D. He gave me a grade because I had turned in work and had completed everything for the class because I was doing it at home trying to figure it out on my own. That's not the worst part. When I went to college and took the math placement test guess what math they wanted to place me in? ALGEBRA! So, somehow I had gotten all the way to AP Calc in high school and could only test into college Algebra. How did that happen. I had a 3.95 in high school and that one semester of AP Calc was the only non A I got. That would say that I was advanced at the curriculum but yet I couldn't even get placed beyond college algebra. You don't even get credit for that, its a remedial course. To this day, I can't get that out of my mind. So, when I became a teacher I committed to make a class where the students left my class understanding the material or they didn't get a grade. I explained that this is why I don't demand that they complete everything, and that all they have to do is the assessments, and I had been saying this to students over and over again for years, but something in this round finally clicked with students. Maybe it was me relating learning in school to learning outside of school in terms of skateboarding and mountain boarding. Maybe it was because I told them that I didn't like formal education and that I wasn't going to go back to school to get my masters until college became less boring scoring and more about learning for the sake of learning. Maybe it was the I can statements, maybe it was the rule breaking. What??? Rule Breaking? OK maybe that's the next post.