When John and I attended Back-To-School-Night a few weeks ago, I signed up to be one of the teacher’s helpers. This meant I would volunteer to prep projects for 20 kindergarten students by cutting things up/out, gathering some craft supplies, ‘grading’ some papers, etc. I hadn’t heard anything from Jack’s teacher about helping out until a few days ago when Mrs. G. sent a fat black bag home with Jack. The bag was full of papers with a note explaining how to grade them. I was to check that capital letters were capital letters, make sure children matched upper and lower case letters correctly and that they had glued pictures in the proper places. I was to put a smiley face or a star on EVERY paper, even if the child missed everything on the page. No problem and kinda fun - except when someone missed a lot and I had to cheerfully write "Keep trying!" at the top of their paper. Anyway, in the middle of ‘grading’ these papers Jess came in and asked me what I was doing. "Grading papers." I said.
"For who?" She aksed.
"Mrs. G." I replied.
"Um, is that LEGAL?" She asked indignantly.
"Yes." I said.
"Is she going to get fired for having you do that?" She asked.
"It's not like I'm grading graduate essays on quantitative easing, Jess. I'm correcting capital letters."
She looked at me blankly. (I threw her with that bit about quantitative easing!!!)
My ethical dilema occured when I had to grade Jack's papers. Fortunatley I am an honest person and even more fortunate for me, Jack did all his assignments correctly. I gave him big purple smiley faces!
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