As a past winner of the STEM award for my district, I have to read this year’s applications. I have done this for two years and I am always discouraged. <\/p>\n
Please read the instructions. I did. And I was very careful to follow the rules. If you want an award, follow those rules, and get someone else to help you read them. <\/p>\n
I don’t know how the other evaluators handle this, but if you don’t follow the instructions, I’m automatically going to give you a low rating. <\/p>\n
In fact, two of the applications were from people who didn’t teach a STEM course. Guess what, you got a 1. One applicant single spaced their application. Guess what, you automatically lost two points. Worse yet, you didn’t answer the question correctly so you ended up with a score below a 5 on each count.<\/p>\n
I also took off if you wrote past the one half page and what you wrote didn’t add to your essay. Also, have someone else read the essay and use the spell check and grammer check provided by the word processing programs. I also took off for typos.<\/p>\n
The good news is that there were several outstanding essays and best yet, one of them is a guy I know and really respect. I think he’ll make the top 5 cut because he DID follow the directions.<\/p>\n
When I wrote my essay and they asked what was unique about my classroom, I focused on the technology tools i used. I was looking for that in the essays and that’s what got people points. It’s a STEM award, and its to encourage innovation in the classroom. Show you how you innovate! Don’t tell me you use the principals of learning because we always do.<\/p>\n
Here’s another question that the answers all dissatisfy me. It’s about evaluating students with tools beyond standardized test courses — I like to emphasis the tools that use the standardized test scores precisely because we and the students live and die by them. Especially if you teach an AP class, you darn well be better using those scores to improve your teaching! <\/p>\n
The moral of the story: read the rules and follow them carefully and you’ll come out ahead! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As a past winner of the STEM award for my district, I have to read this year’s applications. I have done this for two years and I am always discouraged. Please read the instructions. I did. And I was very careful to follow the rules. If you want an award, follow those rules, and get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/975\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kweaver.org\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}