email to the math chair

a Mother's Day Special —

Hi Karen—

We’d like to request that you place a note in Christopher’s file to accompany Ms. Kahl’s midterm report, dated 5-10-2006, which Ed and I have returned to her with our signature. We’ve kept a scanned copy for our files.

We’ve signed the report only because Ms. Kahl will lower Christopher’s grade if we do not. Our signature should not be taken to imply approval, acceptance, or “resolution” of grading disputes with Ms. Kahl, all of which we consider to be open and ongoing. We would appreciate your making a note of this in Christopher’s file, as well as in any and all administrative files concerning Ms. Kahl’s performance and effectiveness as a teacher and her ability to work cooperatively with parents.

From her latest report, we gather that Ms. Kahl has given Christopher grades of 50% on several assignments due to missing labels on charts and graphs. Her grading has grown even more punitive than was the case with her previous 20-point deduction from Christopher’s scale model drawing, a 4-hour assignment, for failing to show his work in the manner she desired.

As an aside, we understand that IMS considers the latter grading dispute to be “resolved.” We do not. To this day we do not know what Ms. Kahl considers “show your work” to mean on that assignment as on many others. We allowed Christopher to hand in his drawing without further effort because we believed that he had shown his work. Obviously we were wrong, but Ms. Kahl has neither answered our questions concerning the “right” way to show work, nor provided us with a Solution Key. We remain in the dark.

Now matters appear to have deteriorated even further. Ms. Kahl reduced Christopher’s grade on the drawing from an A+ to a B-; currently she is making deductions of 50% for a failure to label.

Punishment is poor pedagogy. If Ms. Kahl wishes Christopher to learn—and to remember—to label charts and graphs, she needs to provide him with distributed practice. That is what we will do this summer when we re-teach pre-algebra at home.

Distributed practice is particularly important in light of the fact that Ms. Kahl is deducting points not for accuracy and comprehension, but for issues of organization and memory. Like many 11-year old boys, Christopher has trouble with organization; keeping directions and instructions straight is a challenge. That is to be expected. Frontal lobe development in boys lags two years behind that in girls.

Ms. Kahl cannot alter the speed or timing of her students’ brain development through punitive grading practices, a fact her latest report amply demonstrates. She has been docking points all year long, yet Christopher remains disorganized and forgetful. The only way to teach an 11-year old consistently to label charts and graphs is to provide him with enough practice that the procedure reaches automaticity.

Finally, a word about Scott Fried’s recent statement to the community concerning the distinction between punishment and discipline. We gather that Principal Fried regards the practice of lowering a student’s grades for issues of forgetfulness and disorganization as a form of discipline, which is “educational,” not punishment, which is not. Parents punish; principals discipline.

We disagree.

Behavioral psychologists define “punishment” as: “[providing] a consequence that makes a particular behavior less likely to occur in the future.” Ms. Kahl’s grading practices are clearly intended to decrease the behavior of turning in work she considers sloppy or incomplete. A consequence intended to decrease the behavior it follows is a punishment.

Throughout this year Ms. Kahl has repeatedly punished Christopher for failing to remember, failing to understand, failing to know what is required of him. The choices she has made have had predictable results. Christopher entered Irvington Middle School telling us that he liked math. Today he may dislike the subject as much as he did at the end of his 4th grade year, the last time he had a teacher who was sub-par.

We would very much appreciate your appending this response to the appropriate documents, and entering in the appropriate files. Thanks so much.

Catherine Johnson
Ed Berenson





email from the math chair



-- CatherineJohnson - 15 May 2006

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