Thursday, August 15, 2013

Homework thoughts

It crosses our mind at the beginning of each year. How am I going to handle homework this year? I'd like to get to the point that I know how I want to handle things and just stick with that. There's different philosophies on homework. I think students should have extra practice outside of classwork. My beef is dealing with how to grade homework. I used to go through each problem and grade it that way. That got overwhelming pretty quick and soon I was swimming in paperwork. Near the end of last year, I would look at the paper and verify answers and see that they had shown work and base a "completed vs. not completed" grade that ranged from 0-100. 0 meant they didn't do work or show work. 100 meant they showed all the work and have mostly correct answers. We would then go over answers and methods that way kids who didn't know what to do, would at least get a chance to see what they needed to do. Its not the most perfect method but encourages students to try. Every so often I would have them turn in an assignment (about once every two weeks) for a closer look at their work and a more detailed grade.
Today I saw a re post from http://livelovemath.blogspot.com/2013/08/throwback-thursday-homework.html. She talks about how she handles work and relates it to quizzes. I'm liking her method and am interested in doing something along those lines. I want to instill responsibility and accountability in my students, but need to allow for some pretty interesting homes lives.
One thought I had for this year was to do a "no homework slip". Last year I toyed with the idea of a missing homework binder but that didn't make the end of the first week. I also know I need to collect work for record keeping. So i'm trying to put all my ideas together.
Want to 1) have homework to grade 2) scan homework for student files 3) not have to deal with late work 4) have a way to track missing homework 5) periodically do a detailed grading to make sure kids are doing what they're supposed to. Perhaps I can walk around and take a picture with my ipad and load the homework to Three Ring. Then have the missing homework slip that I take a picture of and email that to parents. HMMMM. Ideas are forming. Wish I could think this well earlier in the day. At least I got my ideas down. :) What do y'all do for homework? Are you into detailed grading or are you a skimmer? Let me know what you do!

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