Upattinas and WHYY

A variety of students, staff, parents, and alumni will be answering phones today from 3:00 to 8:00 p.m. during WHYY's pledge drive. Tune in to 90.9, listen, and pledge!

Conference week, aka EVALUATIONS!

Last week was conference week at Upattinas, which meant writing evaluations  for high school students.  Families meet twice a year with teachers and advisors to review the previous semester and plan for future work. High school students write an evaluation for each of their classes, outlining their course of study, books and materials, projects, and field trips for each. Teachers add their comments and assign credit along with their signatures, and the evaluations are reviewed as part of the family conference. 

The computer room is a flurry of activity during the week leading up to conferences. Students are encouraged to make duplicate copies and to save their evals electronically but there will still be a:
lost, 
found, 
misplaced, 
abandoned,
deleted, 
tossed,
unfinished,
unsigned, 
unfiled, 
undated, 
or
unnamed
evaluation or two,  which can be tragic or just mildly annoying, depending.

In the end, students enjoy seeing the file grow thicker with each passing year as a collection of writing accumulates to represent years of high school work. It's a valuable process we should all participate in periodically, taking the time to review what we've done, and plan next steps.

Conference week is over and "writing evals" is off the table...for a few more months!