School and Covid: how students will be evaluated
The surprises of this anomalous school year continue and seem not to want to end: in addition to the difficulty of understanding how the exams for the end-of-course classes will take place, the issue of assessments is also quite complex and has been the subject of several rethinks.
The problem arose when it was not yet legislated whether the evaluation for distance learning had the same legitimacy as the face-to-face one. The approval of the Cura Italia decree then clarified the matter, establishing its mandatory nature and the faculty of teachers to be able to express judgments, as would have happened during a traditional school year.
On the other hand, a school whose regularity was already dramatically compromised, how could it have maintained that rigor, even minimal, necessary to get our children out of bed and stand in front of the PC to attend classes?
Where the best and most deserving would have found the motivation to continue to be, without an applause of merit? How to tell if a task was done well or badly? Because basically, the votes are for this. To orient oneself in the study and to understand how to improve. Even a failure can be a moment of growth, a STOP to question oneself and reschedule one's school path.
Fear and the desire to obtain a result are two fundamental levers that determine the actions of each of us: for example, we study for the fear of having educational debts and spending the whole summer on books or for the joy of having won a challenge, and got a little bigger. Emptying the school also of an outcome, as well as of the human contact that makes it a privileged experiential place for development and growth, would have been to inflict a new blow. Deadly this time. At first it seemed that things would go just like that when the Ministry made it clear that the children will all be admitted to the 2020-2021 school year, without failures.
Then came a new specification: those who have an assessment of less than 6/10 in one or more subjects, will have to work to recover them in September, through an individualized teaching plan that will be prepared by the teachers.
The rejection is foreseen instead in the case in which the frequency of the didactic activities has been sporadic or completely missing, so as not to give the class council a way to express different judgments. Thank god!
Some kids and even their parents just couldn't bear that classmates who were never connected during class could get away with it!
As regards primary school evaluations, it was decided to modify the old parameter consisting of grades in tenths to adopt one based on judgments. So for this year, goodbye to the numbers and instead to a new formula, still unknown.
The Minister's proposal is based on the fact that Dad has particularly penalized the learning of children, who have, as a basic need, interaction in presence with teachers, to a greater extent than at other school grades. The evaluation in tenths would therefore have been too hard for them, given the profound inconvenience that our little ones and, we and them, have suffered.
Yet perhaps the children would have liked to have their efforts recognized by giving that semblance of normality to which they could cling. Perhaps such a critical school year would have been able to save itself in their memory by adding the memory of a new report card, similar to the previous ones. Instead, even the last scene of this film that we would never want to see again risks being even more gray than all the others.
Researching the possible evaluation grids that primary school teachers will have to draw up, we find the following criteria:
- frequency, punctuality and autonomy in the interaction and access to multimedia tools by children;
- compliance with deliveries;
- the type of attitude with which the child approached the new methodologies: superficial, adequate, serious, mature;
- collaborative spirit: scarce and in need of help, adequate, autonomous or significant.
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Considering the innovations that Dad has brought and the efforts that the schools themselves, the parents, the children have had to make to adapt, does an evaluation that is based on the reception of the new methodologies make sense? Isn't that even more penalizing than the situation itself?
Can a child really have a “mature” attitude towards a scenario so far from his everyday life?
How many scenes have we adults seen of evident immaturity, of disrespect, on the part of those who gave more value to an aperitif with friends, ignoring the rules, than to the health of the community?
And can you evaluate the autonomy of a child considering that Dad needs, in an essential way, the help of parents to function? Starting from the fact that, by law, a child cannot be left alone in front of a PC. Add to that the daily need to download assignments, print them, have them done and send them back to teachers. And last but not least, the tireless notifications of the class group.
Do we really think that a child could be autonomous and mature in the face of all this?
Veronica Leardini
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