I posted a few months ago about the proposed changes to report cards. Apparently the Toronto District School Board has gone ahead and made changes to the “comment bank” that the teachers use, attempting to put them in plain English. So, while last year a Grade 3 pupil would have “applied critical analysis to the communication of feelings, ideas and understanding in response to a variety of dance pieces and experiences,” she now “shares ideas and feelings about dances that were viewed or created.”
60 teachers sat down to take the 700 previous comments and change them to be more easily understood. I’m still not convinced, and since my kids aren’t in the TDSB I don’t know if their reports will be any different or not. I realize that the intention of the comment bank was to make sure that report cards were more uniform from school to school and class to class, but I still feel that students and parents were better informed when the teacher actually handwrote personal comments on how the child was progressing. As a parent, if my child is having difficulty in math I need to know that, and possibly which part of the math curriculum. If I need any further information about the specifics of the problem, I can contact the teacher and talk to him/her personally. I would still rather have more specifics about my child’s overall progress, rather than such minutiae.
You can read more about the “progress” of the TDSB report cards here.