A terrible lesson

I was observed on Friday by one of the head people at our school, and the results were disastrous.

One small mistake I made snowballed into a terrible error. Here's what happened.

The first observation was with one of my youngest groups of kids. They are about 7 to 8 years old. I was thoroughly prepared, but today was a test day. The kids took the test. Then I had them swap papers and grade each other while I read the answers to the test aloud.

Does that sound reasonable to you? It did to me. But what I didn't anticipate was everyone having a different answer, and all the kids simultaneously asking me if this was O.K., or if that was O.K. Virtually no one had every answer exactly correct. Eventually complete mayhem ensued, and every kid wanted to know if every answer was O.K.

Since I am an easy grader, when kids made one small mistake but had the content of the answer correct, I graded it as correct. The person observing me was not happy about this; she actually looked horrified. It seemed reasonable to me at the time, but in hindsight I could see why they would want us to grade strictly. Grading this way, virtually everyone in the class failed. But that's how it's supposed to be done. (Short tests such as this one aren't a large percentage of their grade.) The person observing me actually had to stop the lesson and make copies of all the answers and distribute them to the kids. It was embarrassing.

I've had things go horribly wrong at work before, so this was nothing new to me. But each time I learn from it and I certainly learned something this time.

Moments like these always seem more cataclysmic when you replay them in your mind then they probably seem to other people. I think I'll be O.K. in the long run, so long as I don't make the same mistake twice.

Having said all that, I like the job. All things considered, it's not bad -- it's engaging and can be fun at times. I still haven't had any problems with discipline, but I'm sure that will come soon enough.