Student: "Why do we have to do this?"
Virtually every successful organization understands the quote, "Innovate or die." If they don't, well, they're probably dying.
Then you walk into the world of education, and sometimes I feel like the quote changes to, "Innovate or just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming."
This idea was spurred by a moment I had while washing the dishes that I suddenly realized how to rewrite a section I loathe from the novel I wrote over a year ago and haven't thought about for seven months. And then I turn around and tell my students, "Rough draft due today, peer revision due tomorrow, and final draft due the next day," and somewhere in between what I do and how I teach, there is a huge rift.
The worst part about being a teacher is that kids know this. The dreaded question always comes up. You know when it's coming, too. You explain a new project or unit, and that kid in the back row, who at any other moment in your class wouldn't raise their hand even if you were asking for someone to volunteer to never have to raise their hand in class again, that student raises their hand. You call on them, mostly just because everyone else knows what's about to happen, and they'll think you're just afraid to answer the impending question if you don't.
"Mr. R, why do we have to do this? We're never going to have to do this after high school."
The worst part is that sometimes, when the expectations of the education world outweigh what I know is best for students, I don't have an answer. I make up something, hoping that it's good enough to lull the student back into their coma of unresponsiveness just so I can avoid the embarrassment of having to say, "Well, I don't know. Because we are supposed to. Because that's what I did in school."
The sad part is that when confronting issues that don't make sense in the education world, the two most common answers I hear are:
1) Because we've always done it that way.
2) Because it would take too much and be too difficult to change.
Can you imagine what would happen if a company ran their business that way? No, you can't. Because those businesses don't exist. Or if they do exist, it's only in some Buzzfeed list of the world's stupidest companies. They're probably in some business professor's slideshow where they mock the idiotic things companies and organizations do.
Yet, education does this every single day. When I take a step back, often I have to confront the fact that I do this every single day. Even with the amount of time I try to spend really examining my teaching, I find myself doing things simply because I did them as a student.
With this in mind, I want to explain some of the changes that need to be made to our system of K-12 public education.
1) Grades
It's Wednesday. You've just finished a report your boss asked for. When you go to hand it to her, she looks it over, writes a few comments, pushes her glasses down her nose a little bit and says, "Good work. This is an 84%."
What's wrong with this? Everything.
You know what does happen? Your boss thanks you and accepts your work, they ask you to make a few changes and bring it back to them, or you get fired because it's absolutely terrible.
Because that's how the world works.
Yet the education world still holds so desperately to its 100-point scale. Why? Because a grading system that tells students simply whether or not they learned the content doesn't allow us the opportunity to rank students and sort them into roles and positions. Because a 100-point system allows us to dictate which students go to Harvard and which students go to community college. Because a 100-point system lets us honor a valedictorian over the "learned it all while holding down a job and raising my little brother" student.
If the 100-point scale is useful in public education, then what is public education doing besides pushing students into socially defined roles?
I could go into all the ways grades negatively influence intrinsic motivation, autonomy, and the drive to become a lifelong learner, but that's another blog post in itself.
2) Academically penalizing late work or not accepting it.
You want to know what I did with my last batch of essays? I got them back to my students later than I had told them I would. Want to know what happened when I had to make my state-mandated teaching goals? I was a couple days late. (To clarify, this sounds like everything I turn in is late. That's not that case. Just go with my examples.) Want to know what happened? I still turned them in.
Granted, there will be things in life where there are hard and fast deadlines. I learned that last year when I forgot to renew my car's tabs on time.
The fact that we do this with learning is ludicrous.
"If you don't learn this skill by this teacher-appointed date, then your learning is not as valuable," or even worse, as is the case with not accepting late work, "If you don't learn this skill by this teacher-appointed date, then I don't expect you to ever learn it."
Think if we did this with homemade birthday gifts. You spend all month knitting a beautiful sweater for your sibling, but you don't quite finish it by their birthday. Their party rolls around, you share the bad news, and your sibling...outright objects to ever receiving the sweater? No! The gift is valuable to them. They still want you to finish it, even if it's slightly after the proper time.
As teachers, think about what happens to the student when we tell them they can't demonstrate their learning after the appointed day. Think about what that tells the student. If we want to whine about students not caring about their learning, why would we ever contribute to that message with our own version of telling them their learning isn't important?
Does this mean there are no consequences for late work? Not at all. We just need to stop pretending that learning or doing something slower than others deserves an academic penalty. Teach them how to turn work in on time without using the grade as the carrot on a stick because most of the students who need help turning work in on time are the ones to whom grades are not powerful motivating factors in learning to correct a behavior.
3) Homework as a required piece of a students' grade.
I'll keep this one short and sweet. Using the same two students from above, the valedictorian versus the student with a job and siblings to look after, sending them "home" to do work is the same thing as asking two runners to run a sub-five-minute mile when one is running on a track and the other is running through a swamp while carrying their baby brother on their shoulders.
Use it as an extension activity. Use it as extra practice. Use it as a warm-up for the next day's lesson. But stop using it to determine a student's academic ability.
- - - - - - - -
These are just a few of the changes that need to happen in how we treat students in our schools, but they're important steps in making sure our schools are places where every student is given the opportunity to succeed. If a student shows up with the odds stacked against them, let's not make the pile bigger because we've always done it that way or it's too hard to change.
If I lived my life by those two rules, I'd either be dead or still watching Netflix. Or going to bed right now.
Then you walk into the world of education, and sometimes I feel like the quote changes to, "Innovate or just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming."
This idea was spurred by a moment I had while washing the dishes that I suddenly realized how to rewrite a section I loathe from the novel I wrote over a year ago and haven't thought about for seven months. And then I turn around and tell my students, "Rough draft due today, peer revision due tomorrow, and final draft due the next day," and somewhere in between what I do and how I teach, there is a huge rift.
The worst part about being a teacher is that kids know this. The dreaded question always comes up. You know when it's coming, too. You explain a new project or unit, and that kid in the back row, who at any other moment in your class wouldn't raise their hand even if you were asking for someone to volunteer to never have to raise their hand in class again, that student raises their hand. You call on them, mostly just because everyone else knows what's about to happen, and they'll think you're just afraid to answer the impending question if you don't.
"Mr. R, why do we have to do this? We're never going to have to do this after high school."
The worst part is that sometimes, when the expectations of the education world outweigh what I know is best for students, I don't have an answer. I make up something, hoping that it's good enough to lull the student back into their coma of unresponsiveness just so I can avoid the embarrassment of having to say, "Well, I don't know. Because we are supposed to. Because that's what I did in school."
The sad part is that when confronting issues that don't make sense in the education world, the two most common answers I hear are:
1) Because we've always done it that way.
2) Because it would take too much and be too difficult to change.
Can you imagine what would happen if a company ran their business that way? No, you can't. Because those businesses don't exist. Or if they do exist, it's only in some Buzzfeed list of the world's stupidest companies. They're probably in some business professor's slideshow where they mock the idiotic things companies and organizations do.
Yet, education does this every single day. When I take a step back, often I have to confront the fact that I do this every single day. Even with the amount of time I try to spend really examining my teaching, I find myself doing things simply because I did them as a student.
With this in mind, I want to explain some of the changes that need to be made to our system of K-12 public education.
1) Grades
It's Wednesday. You've just finished a report your boss asked for. When you go to hand it to her, she looks it over, writes a few comments, pushes her glasses down her nose a little bit and says, "Good work. This is an 84%."
What's wrong with this? Everything.
You know what does happen? Your boss thanks you and accepts your work, they ask you to make a few changes and bring it back to them, or you get fired because it's absolutely terrible.
Because that's how the world works.
Yet the education world still holds so desperately to its 100-point scale. Why? Because a grading system that tells students simply whether or not they learned the content doesn't allow us the opportunity to rank students and sort them into roles and positions. Because a 100-point system allows us to dictate which students go to Harvard and which students go to community college. Because a 100-point system lets us honor a valedictorian over the "learned it all while holding down a job and raising my little brother" student.
If the 100-point scale is useful in public education, then what is public education doing besides pushing students into socially defined roles?
I could go into all the ways grades negatively influence intrinsic motivation, autonomy, and the drive to become a lifelong learner, but that's another blog post in itself.
2) Academically penalizing late work or not accepting it.
You want to know what I did with my last batch of essays? I got them back to my students later than I had told them I would. Want to know what happened when I had to make my state-mandated teaching goals? I was a couple days late. (To clarify, this sounds like everything I turn in is late. That's not that case. Just go with my examples.) Want to know what happened? I still turned them in.
Granted, there will be things in life where there are hard and fast deadlines. I learned that last year when I forgot to renew my car's tabs on time.
The fact that we do this with learning is ludicrous.
"If you don't learn this skill by this teacher-appointed date, then your learning is not as valuable," or even worse, as is the case with not accepting late work, "If you don't learn this skill by this teacher-appointed date, then I don't expect you to ever learn it."
Think if we did this with homemade birthday gifts. You spend all month knitting a beautiful sweater for your sibling, but you don't quite finish it by their birthday. Their party rolls around, you share the bad news, and your sibling...outright objects to ever receiving the sweater? No! The gift is valuable to them. They still want you to finish it, even if it's slightly after the proper time.
As teachers, think about what happens to the student when we tell them they can't demonstrate their learning after the appointed day. Think about what that tells the student. If we want to whine about students not caring about their learning, why would we ever contribute to that message with our own version of telling them their learning isn't important?
Does this mean there are no consequences for late work? Not at all. We just need to stop pretending that learning or doing something slower than others deserves an academic penalty. Teach them how to turn work in on time without using the grade as the carrot on a stick because most of the students who need help turning work in on time are the ones to whom grades are not powerful motivating factors in learning to correct a behavior.
3) Homework as a required piece of a students' grade.
I'll keep this one short and sweet. Using the same two students from above, the valedictorian versus the student with a job and siblings to look after, sending them "home" to do work is the same thing as asking two runners to run a sub-five-minute mile when one is running on a track and the other is running through a swamp while carrying their baby brother on their shoulders.
Use it as an extension activity. Use it as extra practice. Use it as a warm-up for the next day's lesson. But stop using it to determine a student's academic ability.
- - - - - - - -
These are just a few of the changes that need to happen in how we treat students in our schools, but they're important steps in making sure our schools are places where every student is given the opportunity to succeed. If a student shows up with the odds stacked against them, let's not make the pile bigger because we've always done it that way or it's too hard to change.
If I lived my life by those two rules, I'd either be dead or still watching Netflix. Or going to bed right now.