My latest crop of students are fierce completers of homework and I love it! I’m a firm believer in the need for individual student practice outside of the classroom. However, I’m not a huge proponent of “grading papers” in the traditional sense.
I generally take the time to go over it with them in class the next day to make sure they understand what I’ve asked them to do and to ensure that they’ve taken the time to practice the skills that I’ve taught them. However, I rarely, if ever, sit with my red pen and go over every single paper to make sure they’ve multiplied or divided fractions correctly. There just isn’t time for that nor does it benefit them.
Checking it in class allows them to follow along with me as I show them ( or reinforce ) the correct processes, techniques, strategies, and skills involved in mathematical problem solving. They get to ask questions, share common misconceptions, and generally get more out of the experience than if I were to simply slap a grade on the paper and hand it back without ever discussing what went wrong with them.
Popular schools of thought suggest that all graded student work should have teacher commentary either attached or written on the assignments. The realities of modern schools ( data collection, item analysis, disaggregation of individual student achievement data, law suits, faculty meetings, club sponsors, and teacher personal lives ) doesn’t allow me to sit with my coffee on the back porch and check 160 papers every night. This being the case, going over it with them in class is more beneficial to them and a better use of my limited time.
(Parents and nay sayers don’t worry. My students all get credit for doing the homework. I recognize that many of us are still stuck in that extrinsic reward mentality when it comes to school work and as such, they should get something tangible for the work they put in…other than a better understanding of the content.)
Kids don’t really want to know why or how things work anymore…only that they work. Our quick fix, instant gratification culture has robbed children of the innate curiosity that gave rise to some of the greatest minds that ever existed.
My current crop of students are all incredibly bright, but not exactly curious. They see information as bytes and bits to be stored, retrieved, and used only to solve some formulaic problems they may encounter in a classroom somewhere. Learning for learning’s sake isn’t a reality to many of them. They learn because of the potential rewards that proof of said learning can provide them. Essentially, their education has become a commodity to be bartered like any other natural resource.
Times like this make me hate what NCLB and technology have done to children. High stakes testing and the answers to all of life’s questions being only a Google search away have made kids intellectually lazy when they should be able to use these vast stores of knowledge to synthesize new ideas…but the new ideas can only come from the whys and hows and they just don’t seem to ask those questions anymore.
Sigh.
Way back in the mid to late 90′s when I was a high school student I always hated being in the classes of teachers who had no personal life outside of school. They never had any stories to tell, tangents to go off on, or funny anecdotes to share about why or how they do what they do.
My favorite teachers were always the quirky, sarcastic, and eccentric educators who dressed sharply, possessed a quick wit, and just lived more outside of the classroom.
I’ve worked with a number of teachers, young and old, of both types and I think that early educator prep programs should require all applicants to have at 3 least hobbies, 2 extracurricular activities, and a tattoo, piercing, and a questionable night in some major international city.
Teachers should bring more to the classroom than content knowledge. They should be exciting, interesting, and engaging.
Essentially, if the babies are interested in who you are, they will be interested in what you have to teach them.
Sometimes I get so caught up in the whole climb up the ladder in education that I forget why I do what I do.
The kids make everyday worth it. All of the rest of the stuff that surrounds the daily grind in K12 education is secondary.
Gotta love Fridays.
Sometimes face to face collaboration between educators just isn’t possible. Over the years I’ve had to be creative in finding solutions to get the work done.
In a previous life I served as math department chair at a small Atlanta middle school. One of our major challenges was learning, and finding the time, to collaborate within and across grade levels. I implemented the use of a couple of tools and strategies that made us better at working together without being together.
The tools we used are readily available to anyone with an internet connection and are commonplace in corporate and high tech environments. As usual, educators are woefully behind the learning curve in the effective use and implementation of tools that can make our jobs easier. Hopefully this post will find its way into the hands of educators with too many tasks, very little time, and a need for something to make the job easier.
The Tools
Skype – We often used Skype to either have video or chat conferences on evenings and weekends. Skype lets us have real time conversations when writing lessons or modifying plans for special needs students when face to face meetings just weren’t possible.
Google Docs – I love Google Docs because it let all of the math teachers on a particular grade level edit a single document. In this way, we were able to cut the time needed to write unit plans ( usually 4-6 week units ) down from days to hours. General education and special education teachers each contributed to the plans and in this way we were able to effectively serve our entire student population. We generally used Google Docs and Skype at the same time so no one stepped on anyone’s toes while we worked.
Drop Box – Drop Box is my newest asynchronous collaboration tool. The free account provides 2GB of space and it provides you with a local folder on one or more computers that automatically syncs and updates whenever a net connection is available. I have Drop Box on my work issued laptop as well as my personal laptop. This allows me to work on writing curriculum anywhere and always being able to access those files. It’s like a virtual thumb drive minus the hardware. I always use my Drop Box folders to store lesson plans, unit plans, tests, or other curriculum materials that I’m writing.
What tools do you use to collaborate when time, space, and distance do not allow face to face work to take place ?
You can see me for exactly 1 second from the 30-31 second mark. Pretty cool.
I registered for my leadership test today. I’ll be able to work as an administrator in less than a year. I’m a bit conflicted about my decision…seeing as how I’ve railed against the evils of so many school administrators. I only hope that I don’t lose sight of what truly matters in this job. Only time will tell. Updates to come.
So, I have since moved on from my former post as a public school math teacher in a “needs improvement” school to a post as a math teacher in a very successful charter school. The major differences between the schools are the student population and school culture. So far, I see no major differences between the instructional best practices of my current and former colleagues. That being said, I still have major qualms with one thing; the Georgia Performance Standards integrated mathematics curriculum.
I wrote about my issues with the curriculum once before on this blog and on classroom 2.0 ( shameless plug ) and a nice little discussion ensued about the pros of pushing higher level mathematics concepts down to the lower grades. However, even with a student population that is ready, willing, and excited to learn everyday ( not an exaggeration ) I still see gaping holes in my students’ learning because of the disjoint hodgepodge of mathematical skills that have been arbitrarily grouped together and called a curriculum.
Forcing students to learn number sense, algebra, geometry, measurement, and data and statistics concepts in a single school year always feels wrong to me. I think it would be much more beneficial and more students would actually attain mastery if, in the middle grades, 6th grade students learned all that there is to know about number sense. 7th grade students took a full pre-algebra course, and 8th grade students took and completed algebra 1 or a second course of pre-algebra if necessary. Geometry and Statistics can easily be folded into stand alone courses in high school.
I became a teacher because I wanted to help students who otherwise would not reach their full potential. I worked in an under-served community for four years and I used humor, pop culture, and created a feeling of familiarity and informality usually frowned upon in traditional schools. Essentially, I mixed my professional responsibilities, personality, and my students’ personal needs to create a classroom environment that showed them that I cared about them as people. In the past, my efforts to build a rapport with my students made them much more receptive to what I wanted to teach them.
I joked with them before and after class. We shared stories about our lives and I had a habit of giving my students nicknames. Up until today I felt that those were all positive aspects of my particular pedagogical style.
Without going into too much detail, lets just say that my particular approach to building a rapport with my students is not appreciated by everyone. That being said, I’ve decided to separate the personal and the professional. I just don’t want to have to deal with the potential fall-out.
However, I somehow feel that by doing this I will be harming more than I help. I hope I’m wrong.
Recent Comments