Week 6B: Report Card Comments

This week I have report card comments due.  This is my opportunity to communicate with parents and fill them in on what we are doing in class and how their son/daughter is doing in the course.  FA asks teachers to write full narrative comments (160 words) for each student.  This is a daunting writing task when you have over 60+ students.  I find writing these so challenging because these narratives are attempting to accomplish more than one purpose.  They are intended to inform parents about the course itself as well as how students are doing.  They are also to share suggestions and strategies for how the student can continue to grow.  Additionally for a private school these are a marketing tool to demonstrate how our instruction is individualized carefully laying out all of the benefits of FA.  It is sometimes almost impossible to explain to a parent their son/daughter is doing poorly while at the same time leaving them with a positive feeling about the education they are paying for. 

This type of writing is complicated and takes time.......lots of time. This is something as a teacher and mother of three (soon to be four) is so hard to come by.  Writing is labor intensive for me and is very much a process.  It was interesting approaching this writing task after being in this course.  I found myself willfully attempting to write my comments enough  in advance to allow for drafting and revising.  Yet even knowing how beneficial it would be to draft/revise I am just struggling fitting it into my already jammed schedule.  This has been a good reminder that my students are dealing with the same issue of time constraints which is why it is critical to build in checked benchmarks.  If students are just assigned a longer project with one due date many will procrastinate and not go through the steps of the writing process.  Many writers (including myself) need more than self created deadlines for pre-writes, drafts, revisions......they need help holding themselves accountable and for students that can be accomplished through a clear and detailed plan with a calender schedule.  Young writers need this guidance and help.  

 Follow UP:  my boss complimented me on my comment "skills".  This does not mean that I look forward to February when these are due again  but it was fun to reach out to my students families and compile and review each student and take tone of the growth of each of these students.