Excellence Awaits- End of Term Grading

My room is now covered in neat stacks of end of term exams, papers and portfolios waiting for my review. I used to dread this end of the term flood but I have changed my opinion on this.

It is really pretty exiciting.

Those stacks contain the sum of what my students have learned this term. Each paper is a snapshot of where someone is in their life. Some are wonderful, some middling and some not-so- great. They reveal what is important to people, how they chose to spend their time, their best efforts and the I-hope-I-get-by prayers. They are little windows into people's hopes and priorities.

They also tell me how I did as a teacher. What I taught well and what was a crash and burn. What people valued in the class and what was a got-to-get-through moment. After I score everything, I will take stock of where I am and what I need to improve for next time. Then I will write these ideas down so I can make use of them the next time I teach that course.

Pretty good stuff - a chance to improve as a teacher and understand my students better. Not a bad way to end the term. It is worth a few extra pots of coffee.

Listen to your Mom

I was talking to my mom today about the cool roof idea and mentioned that I never see a white roof. She knew the reason for this right away. Light roofs show mildew and pine tree tassels make yellow/brown stains that are very hard to remove when they sit too long on most materials. So a white roof would look terrible in just a short time. Dark colors hide this problem.

So now you know two things:

• We all have very dirty roofs
• Moms are naturally brilliant

Cool Roof / Greener Roof

Worked on the house again this weekend. Every muscle is sore and of course I am sunburned since I was working on the roof painting cupolas. The roof just holds the heat and it gets pretty hot on a dark roof even in the late spring.

This made me wonder why we have black roofs in the first place. Dark colors hold heat and yet even though I live in the Deep South, all the roofs are dark to imitate slate or wood. White roofs would make so much more sense. It would be easier to cool the structure and there would be less stress on the roofing materials.

Apparently, light or cool roofs may be an idea that will take off in the next decade since there is at least one company promoting this concept (see The world's best roofing blog).
It feels like one of those ideas that is obvious now that someone pointed it out.

According to articles posted on that site, the basic advantages of a cool or light roof turn out to be:

• Cheaper to air condition the building since a light roof is only 20 degrees hotter than the air temperature rather that 70 degrees hotter than the air temperature on a black roof (This explains the wonderful roasting sensation I experienced today)
• The roof lasts longer
• It reduces the build up of greenhouse gases

Sounds great to me. Now we need some creative architects to come up with some designs that make use of this idea so our homes can be cooler without looking like ice cream stands.

What is Worth Knowing?

It is the end of another term and as I think back over the many students that I have encountered in past dozen or so years, I am surprised at how little students have changed. We may have computers, cell phones, and Twitter but every spring even my most dedicated students begin to stare out the virtual window. They are wandering in Facebook, checking e-mail and reading movie reviews. This really isn't all that new; it is just that the virtual window provides greater opportunities for wandering away.

I recently heard a speaker promote this as a good thing since it shows that students are computer savvy and that they are curious about learning. I cannot agree with this. Not all knowledge is equally valuable or interchangeable. There really is some basic content that everyone should know to be a functioning member of society. Not all of this information will be picked up by a random walk though the Internet.

I was a high school student during the contract era of education. For those of you who do not remember that era, students signed a contract that committed them to complete a certain number of assignments to earn a specific grade. You could work as fast or as slow as you wished. The end result was a mad rush for everyone to finish Algebra in the last few weeks and the favored few who were done early had too much time in that class and were engaged in a dead run in some of their other subjects. This system lasted only one year. The honest truth is that not everyone is equally curious about every subject.

So how do you decide what is worth knowing for you as an individual?