When Finalizing is Frustrating vs Fun

 This past week was a four-day week with the students. Friday, June 6 was a report card writing day. I was extremely grateful to have this day, as I needed the time to consolidate evaluations and create these summaries.

Marking is not my favourite task. I've talked about this A LOT on my blog. A quick search of the term leads to posts on my desire to procrastinate, the reason why I tend to shun the use of AI with evaluation, and ways to make marking manageable as a classroom teacher. I talked about this with a colleague - when we were little and would "play school" or "pretend to be teachers", we happily placed checkmarks and crosses on tests, yet this is the least appealing part of our jobs now that we have them! 

It can be difficult to ascertain how much weight should be given to particular tasks, and whether this was an accurate portrayal of the student's abilities or if he/she/they were just having an "off day". One of my other colleagues reminded me about the guiding principles from "Growing Success" - focus on what's most recent and most consistent. 

Assessment can be frustrating. I like seeing the end result - but the process can be a bit bumpy. Seeing the "last chapter" sometimes makes me want to try to alter the conclusion. Is there anything else I can do to change things, or improve the conclusion? 

I provided a satisfactory conclusion to our Quiz Bowl event when we hosted a Quiz Bowl ice cream party on Tuesday, June 3 for the students who participated. A couple of weeks ago, we hosted the most recent Quiz Bowl competition and, to my surprise, my students won the Fiction event. As we were walking to the host school on the day of the contest, the students and I were chatting and I frivolously said that if they won, we would have an ice cream party to celebrate, never thinking that they'd be able to pull it off. These were words I were happy to have to eat. (I myself didn't eat any of the ice cream. I'm still on my Lean and Clean Challenge.) 

This was a fun way to follow-up and wrap up this significant portion of the Forest of Reading program. The students ate themselves sick and we examined the statistics that were compiled during the competition to see where we did well and where we could have boosted our numbers.

During our Quiz Bowl Celebration Party, we also took a photo for our Quiz Bowl Book Trophy. This was a bittersweet task. One of the schools that participated in the past, who shall remain nameless in this blog post, actually lost the fiction book trophy. I was really upset when I heard the news. The "book trophy" isn't worth a lot of money itself, but it is a historic artifact that cannot be replaced. The original pair of books, made by now-retired teacher-librarian Claire Perrin, had not only the list of every school that won the award since we began this tradition in 2009, but the names and signatures of every child that was on the winning team. (Below is a photo of the pair of books from 2019, when Agnes Macphail PS won the non-fiction category and C. D. Farqharson PS won the fiction category.) This information and these names are not recorded anywhere else, so with the loss of the book, this data has vanished completely.

My close TL friends that I first shared this disappointing news with advised me to insist that the school that lost the book make amends somehow, by replacing the book or at least informing the other participating schools that this has happened. In the end, I decided against these punitive actions, but I still felt the need to share the tale. I bought a new book and will record the schools that won, if I can locate those results somewhere in my scrapbooks. (Thank goodness for my own silly need to document!) Congratulations again to the team from my school for the incredible results.