Back to School- Both me and my students

So, here we are. Another school year beginning at AHS as well as a new endeavor beginning for me outside of AHS, I am a grad student at the OMET program through Pepperdine. Balancing these two elements of my life, not to mention all the others that I won't mention here, will be a challenge for sure. It seems like the two definitely will overlap: good conversations, lots of thinking,

I am already formulating an action research project where in my English 9 class we are going to get rid of the D. Students will either earn an A, B or C but there will be no D (we are not even considering an F). We have spent some serious time in conversation talking about what constitutes A, B, and C work, and then we are next going to formulate a rubric that I can use to evaluate their work, eventually they will use it to evaluate their work, and compare the two instances. The main objective that I am trying to get across to both myself as well as my students is to really focus on learning and understanding. Are their grades measuring this or am I just passsing them by with a D? Are they letting themselves settle for a D? You can follow my thoughts about this on my grad school blog:

http://myomet.com/blog/index.php?chooseby=user_id&tvalue=545 (the most recent post is about A, B, and C qualities my students created)

Also, here are all of my new class blogs for this year:

http://smith90809.blogspot.com/

http://smith9h0809.blogspot.com/

http://smithewl0809.blogspot.com/

Happy School Year!