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Home : 2002 : April : 26

Been There
By lame principal

My principal told me all year that he wanted to have a meeting with me regarding grades, to make sure I was grading fairly. Well, being the "my lack of planning constitutes your emergency" kind of guy he is, he decided to
hold that meeting two days before the grades were due. I was freaking out and told him that I was concerned that there wouldn't be anything I could do if he did have a problem, and I asked in the nicest way possible why he hadn't met with me previously, as he had always promised to. To cover up for his flakiness, he was like, "Oh, well I couldn't have discussed grades with you before

you had any, could I?" (Mind you, we do not hand out letter grades until the semester, four months into the year, so he could have cornered me halfway at the quarter to see how things were going.) Anyway, his big concern is that there be a range of grades. Well, at my school the fifth grade could not possibly be less evenly distributed according to ability level. Everyone knows there's a high track, a middle track, and a low track. (Our kids switch classes for different subjects). For the low track, there is a very high percentage of D's and F's, whereas the highest track is almost all A's and B's. This is true for all the teachers. However, due to the principal's demands that there be a range, I have had to "dumb down" the curriculum for the low track and lower the breakdown of what percentage constitutes what grade. (As in, a C should really be 70-79%, but I had to drop it to 65%.) The kicker, however, is that the sixth grade teachers who have our kids the next year complain that the kids' grades were overly inflated in fifth grade!