Rather than reiterate getting lost in the numbers, charts and formulae (I did to), I want to focus on a single point from Lauer and Asher, from page 123.
“While this caution about adding variables may seem unrelated to the concerns of most English instructors, they do in fact engage in a form of such combining when they add grades for tests , papers and class participation to obtain an overall course grade, inadvertently weighting the papers or tests with the greatest individual differences the heaviest.”
Having just gone through the ordeal of entering Mid-term grades for the first time, this process is quite dominant in my headspace. But what to do with it? My freshman comp course has 800 points available, with 500 of those points allocated to the essays themselves. No tests. Every point giver is from writing, so does this suggest that I'm keeping the cohesive focus where it should be, or is it mainly a reminder that different tasks, skills and behaviors, while addable for grade determination, cannot be lumped together when creating predictor or criterion variables? (Mostly likely it's both or neither—interval variable set as 0 or 1, get it? [a little statistical humor there])
Just a single point from page 129 of Brodkey, (Because Ms. Farling scooped me):
"In much the same way that you don't resist racism by denying that racism exists...teachers cannot divest themselves of those vestiges of authority that strike them as unproductive by ignoring the institutional arrangements that unequally empower teachers and students."
How much do we (and by we I mean I) rely on being accessible to my students as enough negation of those long established institutional arrangements, effectively putting a Band-aid on a malignant tumor and wondering why they don't relax or participate or speak up?
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