Lesson 6

About Your Lesson Card Signoff Sheet

Cards clear out loud, not on paper. But something has to remember that they cleared, and that something is one sheet in your folder. Forty rows, one per card, and by June it is the most complete record of what you learned this year that exists anywhere.

The signoff sheet template

What a row looks like

Sprint	Card	Card title	Date	Verified by	Signature	Teacher
3	1.1	Archimedes and Buoyancy	10/14	Guido van Rossum	GR

You fill in the first four. The person who ran your check fills in the last two they own: printed name and signature. Print the name, because six months from now a signature is a squiggle and nobody can tell whose squiggle it was.

Sprint is the first column on purpose. Roughly three cards a sprint keeps you where you need to be, and three rows with the same number in front of them is something you can see without counting. So is a sprint with one row.

Who can sign

Any student who can run the check can sign it. That is the whole point of a card ending in a ninety second oral question: the question is short, the answer is either fluent or it is not, and you do not need a credential to hear the difference.

Three guidelines.

Only sign if you believe the teacher would agree this person knows the content. The point is for somebody to let you know if you learned a topic or if you still need some help. The teacher is busy. The check is about your learning.

Signing means you watched the check happen. Not that you heard it went fine. Not that you saw the artifact afterward and it looked right. You were there, you asked a few questions, you believe your peer understands the topic.

Cards marked teacher-only clear with the teacher. Anything where a wrong answer near water or wiring is dangerous, and anything where the check is watching you modify live code. The card tells you which ones those are.

Why we do it this way

The honest reason is arithmetic. One teacher cannot personally run four hundred oral checks in a year, so a system that requires it is a system that quietly stops happening in November. You have seen that happen in classes before.

The better reason is that running the check teaches you more than taking it. You cannot ask a good follow-up question about buoyancy without understanding buoyancy, and you find out fast which one you are doing. Half of what a senior engineer does is review other people’s work, and this is where that starts.

What happens at the 1-on-1

Bring the sheet. The teacher reviews it at most 1-on-1s, which means reading your rows, counting them, and sometimes asking you a question from one of them. If a card comes back not yet, it comes back with a redo, same as everything else here. Redos are always open.

Where it lives

Your folder, in the room.