Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy online grades. (rant)

Zarfitty, I feel your pain. Online grades have caused me to lose a few years of my life as well. Your heart just drops to see that sort of stuff. My DS13 has a real issue with turning in work. In addition, his teachers only take late work for 1/2 credit so he can only get a 50 which is still a F, but at least is a little easier to average than a 0. From your DD being 10 I assume she is in elementary school and yes I would expect the teachers to be able to enter grades quicker. I hope you contacted them about your displeasure. From their perspective, Im sure they wonder how many parents even look at online grades. My DS is in middle school and with so many classes I do wonder how the teachers can get all the stuff graded and entered timely so I do allow a little more slack, but still there is usually one teacher out of the bunch who seems to need to enter several grades at once. I hope that once you contact the teachers even if they can't enter the grades quicker they could at least shoot you an email to be notified of missing assignments quicker.

This is a bit of different perspective but I have to say that I have very mixed feelings about online grades. I tend towards the school of thought that K-12 years are as much about cultivating organizational habits and personal responsibility as they are about anything else. While I do think that a teacher should communicate by phone/email/letter if a student is consistently late with, or missing assignments, I also think that there is an important lesson learned when a student misses deadlines and then sees the results on their report card. Eventually, IRL, we no one checks up on us. If we don't pay our bills on time, meet work deadlines, etc. we are faced with consequences. Some guru out there (maybe from Love and Logic?) talks about letting kids experience the consequences of their actions while they are young and the consequences are still "small". Relatively speaking, during the elementary and middle school years at least, the consequences ARE still small, even if they don't feel small to the child. My worry about online grade reporting is that it seems to shift the responsibility for staying on top of work/assignments to the parent and away from the child. I'm more than willing to add consequences to the natural consequences after my DD has experienced them (e.g. if she brings home a report card full of missed assignments, I'm willing to point out the results on her report card and let her know that until she makes up all assignments she will not have free time for other things). What I don't want to do is become her an excuse for not meeting her responsibilities ("but you didn't check my grades and tell me...."). Of course, so far she HATES being on the bad side of a teacher and it panics her into overcoming most of her organization flaws, so it's easy for me to take this position

Now that D is in high school, she has an id to look at her online grades herself. I gave her mine to use in middle school to encourage her to keep track. Sometimes teachers post upcoming assignments (tests, quizes) out there with no grade yet before they tell the class about the test! So it is a tool for D to use to see if something is coming up or if she has missed something. Sometimes I wish the teachers were more timely about posting grades, but all in all it has been a benefit for us. It only becomes all about the parents following up if we let it...