LY #73 The Cost of Innumeracy

 Today a student decided to make-up a missed assignment.  She wasn't at her number when I made the second phone call a couple of days ago.  By making it up she changed her course grade from a D to an A-.  How could that be?  Well, the non-defensive response to criticism is worth 1/3 of a set of two communication skills assessments.  These two assessment are worth a full 30% of the course grade.  That's a chunk!  Not performing the second skill makes 30% of the course grade an "F." Two other students who missed the assignment have decided not to make it up. I don't get that.  It's a relatively easy assignment and very costly if missed.

My assumption is that innumeracy is partially to blame.  I recognize the symptoms because I myself have issues with numbers.  I have not taken a math class since my sophomore year in high school.

How is that possible?  I managed to squeak through my undergraduate years during a period when math could be replaced by language courses.  (Odd, I know, but there ya go.)

Now, I did like math when I was in grade school.  I was actually part of an SMSG (School Mathematics Study Group) core in 4th grade and learned set theory. Yes, the New Math!  As kids we called it Some Math, Some Garbage or Some Mad Scientist Goofed.

Example of an old score sheet

I really enjoyed it.  In fact, I did well with math until that ugly geometry class in high school.  The lady teacher whose name I have forgotten was rough with me -- making fun of my incompetence and slowness.  After that, I just got scared and rather than seeing math as an opportunity to expand my understanding of the world, I saw it as another opportunity to fail.

Thus, as you might imagine, when I started calculating grades as a teacher, I faced a bit of a struggle.   Before I learned to use the grading software Micrograde and its uplink called Webgrade, I used a score sheet with the grade weights calculated.  (See the facsimile.)  Then, for each student, I would add up the sums.  This way of doing things was incredibly tedious and often required careful thinking when students were close to the next score up.  It made finals week each quarter a nightmare.

And no, I've never learned to use a spreadsheet.    

Sample student Final Grade

Now I use Blackboard, of course, because the school had to get rid of the expensive but (to my mind) far more user friendly Micrograde (Webgrade).  I was one of the few people still using it.  Blackboard is okay, though, now that I'm more used to it.  The best thing about any weblinked gradebook is that the students can access their scores anytime they like.   That means they can keep track of their grades and make sure that I'm not making entry-errors.  I love sharing the responsibility there.

But sadly, there are still those who don't understand how the math works.