Snowplow Parents/Online Grading

[robcat2075]

I have an acquaintance who teaches online college-level classes who has lamented the need to immediately post everything online, but I didn't know that online class organization has reached into bricks and mortar primary and secondary school.

Snowplow Parents Are Ruining Online Grading

During the 2011-12 school year, Roxanne Greitz Miller was a professor-in-residence at a California middle school that had just started using an online grade book app that allowed parents and students to see students’ grades as soon as they were posted. I recently spoke to Miller, who is now the dean of the College of Educational Studies at Chapman University, and she said it was clear to her almost immediately that this technology was “game changing” for parents, teachers and students — and not in a good way.

“I’ll never forget the example where there was a student in an English classroom in eighth grade and the teacher said to the student, ‘You need to put your phone away.’ And the student said, ‘I can’t. It’s my mom. You still haven’t posted my makeup work that you graded, and if it’s not posted by this weekend, I’m going to be grounded,’” she told me, highlighting how stress provoking and disruptive to learning the technology could be....

(What is "grounded" for an eighth-grader?)


Passage noted:

...harried middle and high school teachers, some of whom teach more than 100 kids on a given day...

I had 120

[JohnL]

Passage noted:

...harried middle and high school teachers, some of whom teach more than 100 kids on a given day...

I had 120

At the high school where I worked (not as teacher), it was common for a teacher to have close to 200 students (class sizes of up to 40 students and teaching five periods a day).