Harder than I thought..

Just recently my teacher has been having me grade the student's writing pieces. She gives me a rubric that is divided into 4 domains. The domains are Ideas, Organization, Style, and Convention. Each domain gives components of a paper that fail, meet, or exceed the standard. I thought this would be easy considering that the rubric is so specific, but I have found it is very difficult. My main difficulty was the Convention domain. The other domains only had about 2 or three components, however; the Convention domain had about 8 different components. It was very hard to label that section as fail, pass, or exceeds because there were too many components to be graded as a whole. It was also difficult because I wanted to judge the success of the students based on the peformance of the other classmates. I feel like the rubric was so strict that it needed a curve of some kind. My teacher explained that if I judge them purely based on the rubric it would be best because I would be able to compare the student's work more acurately. I feel like grading writing is soo subjective and I wanted to be fair. I had to keep going back and changing scores. My teacher said that means I was doing it correctly. I had no idea how difficult and time consuming it could be!

Chapter 12

                Multigenre research papers seem like a wonderful way to get kids engaged in learning. I love that the assignment gives enough freedom for children to learn about their own interests and be able to present the information in way that is meaningful for them. This way kids are motivated to do a research project because they are learning about something that is interesting to them. When I become a teacher I will definitely have assignments like this for my students. As a child I remember that the projects that I enjoyed the most were always the projects where I was given freedom to express my ideas and interests in my own ways. I have always been interested in art so when I was given an option to make a diorama or some type of visual aid with my project I always made a better grade. I was not mad that I had a book report because I was able to report it in a way that was enjoyable for me. In return I learned way more, and to this day those projects stand out the most.