Head Grades

or as they are called here in the State of North Rhine Westphalia, "Kopfnoten" are appearing today on the report cards for the first time since the 1970's. These grades should evaluate the pupil's work habits and social behavior. They are broken down into six separate categories: readiness to achieve, reliability, carefulness, readiness to be responsible, conflict management, and cooperation skill. The re-introduction of these marks is the result of a new school law. The fact that there is controversy about this is somewhat surprising to me. The headlines and the quotes assert that these young people will be stigmatized for life by such marks on their record, that they won't be able to get a job and that prejudices will be cemented into place. I personally wanted to take the professor of pedagogy who does educational research to task. I would like to see him managing a group of insolent, attention-deficit 13-year-olds over the course of a year. I am wondering how sensitive he would remain to their fragile egos. Take the teacher's perspective. A few days before the grades are handed out, the teachers take an entire day to meet and discuss the pupils' grades. Since the pupils are organized into classes, roughly three per grade level, all the teachers for that class must meet. These meetings begin early in the morning with grade level 5 and go on throughout the day, ending with grade 12. Grade 13 had already received their grades. At-risk pupils who are in danger of having to repeat a grade as well as outstanding pupils are mentioned. Strategies for helping pupils are presented. Since the head grades are dealt with as a class, we have to vote on any aberration from the norm. The class teachers often have collected this information in advance, but sometimes individual pupils still needed to be discussed and voted upon. Since I am used to assigning citizenship grades myself for my pupils, this was all very strange to me. Since all of the grades assigned to a given pupil are on the table, nothing is secret. If a certain teacher appears to be a hard grader or an easy grader it is evident to everyone. What does this indicate about the teacher? You can see the advantages as well as the disadvantages of this structure. It would be hard for a child to fall through the cracks or "be left behind", as Bush is so fond of saying. It still really sticks in my gut that teachers should be afraid to label a student with anti-social behavior as anti-social. Why cover-up the truth? Perhaps parents don't want to know the truth about their children. From what I have observed the teachers here are very knowledgeable about pupils' personal and familial problems. It doesn't mean, however, that we can make those problems go away. It is tradition that the grades are handed out during period three and then the school day ends early so that the rush to go home doesn't coincide with rush hour. This is fine with me since on Fridays I don't teach until period four which gives me a day off. One of my grade 8 pupils tried to convince me that another tradition is to play games during the last class meeting before grades. I mostly just ignored him. It gives me a slight feeling of dread leading up to the last ten days of school which take place after grades have been handed in. Why would anyone even come to school? But I have been told that school will go on as usual.