Here’s Your Permission to Stop Chasing Missing Student Assignments
Is your exhausting pursuit of student work actually supporting learning?
I still remember the conversation like it was yesterday. A teaching colleague looked me earnestly in the face, her expression a mix of concern and compassion, and said something I’ve never forgotten.
“It really doesn’t make a difference if a student misses one or two spelling quizzes,” she said. “Once you’ve recorded their scores from five quizzes, their average hardly changes after that.”
Of course, this was back at a time in my career when I thought middle school spelling lists, worksheets, and quizzes were great pedagogy. And I recorded numbers in my gradebook. And I calculated averages.
I don’t do any of that anymore.
But my colleague’s point is enduringly true and as impactful in my practice as ever.
Let me explain.
This is how sad things actually were for me
At the time I received this advice, I was giving spelling quizzes once a week to my seventh graders. It looked something like this:
- Monday: introduce a new list of 25 spelling and vocabulary words
- Wednesday: a worksheet of exercises
