The absolute buffoonery of finals week

Finals week is, in theory, the culmination of an entire year of work. One more assessment that is supposed to be the gauge of a student’s learning. It’s supposed to be the last half mile on a long hike or the plating of a home-cooked meal. And while that may be the case at the college level, in my own experience teaching middle and high school, finals are perfunctory at best. One of the schools I’ve worked for made their final worth a piddly 7% of the total semester grade. Admittedly, that school was an outlier, but even where I’m currently working, the general practice is to toss the finals underhand. But this post isn’t just about the actual finals, but the way schools break down in those final few days. With double digit hours mandated by the state remaining, there’s not much we can do to get kids on task. While you can hold impending finals over them, the fact that finals may as well be a strongly worded letter means that you’re essentially relying on social norms to maintain…