Bilious post

When I saw "Interim Reports December 11" on the Carihi Senior Secondary School sign today, I had one of those immediate and visceral reactions. I knew it wasn't reasonable and the topic no longer actually concerns me at all, but I could still feel my bile rise.

So why should the issuing of interim report cards still have the power to annoy after three and a half years away from the classroom? I'm glad you asked. Maybe if I explain it once more I'll retire that particular animus:

It's not primarily the implied increase in work load, although for some that's a significant factor. However, I was never in a school (they do exist) where the format for interim reports was mandated and hence time-consuming; consequently, my interim reports did not take a great deal of effort. Furthermore, in the later years, when class sizes ballooned, technology came to the rescue: if one used the mark manager effectively, one could produce a report for each member of an entire class with literally no more than a dozen keystrokes.

The downside of this method, unfortunately, is that while the results appear impressive, they rarely convey much useful information. Perhaps it could be useful for a parent to know that his or her child doesn't complete assignments, but the fact that he or she received 67% for assignment 34 gives only the impression of significance. For most parents (assuming he or she gets to see the report at all) the only important statistic is the percentage, and by three-quarters of the way through the course this is unlikely to be a surprise.

By the time December 11 rolls around, at a minimum parents will have had an opportunity to meet the teacher (typically September), will have received the first interim report (October), and received the first official report (November). Some of them will have received a phone call or two from the teacher, and all of them will have had the opportunity to phone or email or visit the teacher whenever they felt a need to do so. I can report that, in my 33 year experience in both high school and middle school, in BC, Quebec, and even Islington in Inner London, parents stayed away from the first teacher meeting in droves, they rarely phoned, and they were often less than grateful to be called. The parents who monitored their child's education made the contacts if concerned; those who didn't and weren't were not persuaded to by interim reports.

So interim reports are annoying because they take teacher time away from preparing for the classroom, and because they're not actually productive. They are also annoying because they suck hours of secretarial time and cost a considerable amount of money to mail.

Teachers are required to participate in this charade because interim reports are an administrative reaction to the statistical fact that too many children don't graduate from High School. Unfortunately, while there are many reasons for children not graduating, a lack of reporting is not one of them. In fact, this kind of reporting is a smokescreen: it gives the impression that something is being done about a real problem, without the school, the district, or the government having to spend the enormous human resources that would actually be required to make a dent in it.

And the kicker is that everyone knows it.