Friday, May 3, 2013

Oral Comments

    Most of you probably have local people who fare non bloggers and they follow your blog . Sometimes they will comment when they see you. It's a different kind of comment that can get very interesting.

    Buddy is one of my most faithful readers. He is a critical reader so he makes judgments and connections as he he reads. As a result some of his comments enlighten me if that is at all possible. Usually he will make a comment that is quite distant from my post and will wait to see if I catch on. Usually I don't catch on and it's a big joke. We were both teachers and teachers rib each other continuously. We also support each other like family. I hope I'm not giving away too many trade secrets.

    Yesterday Buddy phoned me and wanted to know if I was all right. He was worried about my condition. He was concerned that on my previous post all the names were messed up. Buddy knew all the people involved in my last post but the names didn't match. Was I all right? This is just the typical Buddy comment. Also one of the names had a period after it and it wasn't supposed to! So I get some fun oral comments.

    Yes I do change the names when I write about local people. I feel that if I write about people without their permission and knowledge I should change the names so that they would not be in danger of having their identities used. I don't show pictures of children anymore as I don't want to see a picture taken and used for some other purpose.

     Now this situation got me thinking about another topic...evaluation of student work. I insisted that I had to develop a criterion that gave the student credit for what they did on an assignment rather than taking marks off for something that is missing or wrong. I know some of this is semantics but I wanted my students to know that they would be rewarded for using the concepts that they understood. My emphasis was on giving positive feed back so that a student would feel that they were rewarded.

     So Buddy keeps me thinking that it is well worth while to blog.

      Thanks Buddy, for reading and caring enough to comment.