I don’t know about you guys (remember the old Electric Company intro: “Hey You Guys!”), but I’m having trouble finding any sort of groove so far in 2012. The kids are all dopey and spacey (I know; how can you tell?), nothing much is happening around school, my student servant doesn’t even have much to do right now, things are just feeling …weird.
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They seem to be enjoying The Giver though. I have a Q/A each day before the reading quiz, and the questions have been coming fast and furious.
“They don’t know what elephants are? What are they, stupid?”
“Are all the kids adopted?”
“So you don’t get to pick who you marry?” (Ask Depeesha over there in the third row.)
“Why do they call it a family unit?” (What? They’ve never seen the Coneheads?)
‘Why aren’t there any cars?” (THAT sounds like utopia to me.)
“Why is this book weird?” (I know you are, but what am I?)
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Regarding the discussion beginning over there on the right side: Mrs. M, I really want to read that book. I went to their web site and read their brief excerpts, which were no more than one sentence teasers. And they don’t sell it in e-book! How am I supposed to satisfy my need for instant gratification?
Is this no-zero policy about homework? Tests? Essays? Or all of the above? I mean, for some assignments there isn’t much point after a quarter or whatever. Also there is the issue of any reteaching that might be needed to complete these old assignments. How does that happen?
I would really like to read that book. Sigh. Guess I’ll just have to order it old school.
I want to talk more about this, but first I want to rerun an excerpt from almost three years ago that is very apropos (I can’t remember the last time I used that word) for this discussion. In fact in honor of this new topic we’re tackling, I am running the experiment again, only this time I am eliminating written homework entirely (essay assignments excepted).
I guess the term these days would be lab rats. Maybe Guinea pigs were too cute. Seventh graders make for good experimental subjects too.
Kids think we do the exact same thing every year. And being seventh graders, they are of several minds. They think that would make things so easy for us (which is a huge plus), but also be “boring” (which is practically a cuss word for them). But when former students come back to visit, and ask what we’re doing, and I tell them about something new, I get the inevitable,
“That’s not fair. We never _______.” (Insert: made web pages, read The Giver, had open mouth quizzes, used clickers, had discussion boards on Moodle, saw that video, made wikis, used the laptops, had homework be optional, etc. )
Open mouth quizzing is a regular feature in my class now, but just a couple of years ago, it was a fairly radical experiment for me. I even told them at the time that it was an experiment, and they were the Guinea pigs for future classes.
“Can we vote on it?”
“This is not a democracy. It is a benevolent dictatorship.”
That experiment has worked out beautifully. A recent experiment that I’ve tried a couple of times, and am still undecided about, is the optional homework concept.
The first time, I told them I was thinking about eliminating almost all written homework (not including essays and end of novel projects). I told them I would still assign it and we would discuss/correct it in class, but I wouldn’t check to see if they did it, and it wouldn’t count in the grade. If they wanted to, they could live a life free of Pink Sheets (the from-the-textbook grammar sheets we do weekly), vocabulary definitions/exercises, and novel responding/study questions. We would still correct and discuss everything, for those students who wanted to do the work and maybe learn from it, but I wouldn’t care if they did the work or not. The exceptions would be their sentences using the academic word lists, and as I said, essays and the like.
The other side of that freedom, however, would be the fact that the material still had to be learned, and so I would have to test them a bit more and make those tests worth more in the grade. Since there wouldn’t be any grades in there from homework, their entire class grade would depend on the scores they got on the grammar, vocabulary, and reading check tests (along with the writing portion).
At first there was universal jubilation. Then I explained how, for most of them, the homework part of the grade was the only thing keeping them afloat. That if their whole grade were based on test performance, most of the class would have a significantly lower grade. Some of the joy wore off. And then in some classes, the truth came out: they admitted that without the requirement, they wouldn’t do it, that they needed someone (me) hounding them, requiring them, to do the work, or they wouldn’t learn. And then they’d regret it. By the end of the discussion, they were begging me not to do it.
Of course, I tried it anyway. And I was right. Grades went down almost universally among those who chose not to do the homework. The first time I tried this, I had to call it off after two weeks due to the dip in grades. The second time lasted three. I don’t think this year’s bunch is quite ready for this one yet.
That was back in 2008. I think things might go a bit differently this time.
More tomorrow.
You know, that whole “no-zero” policy goes hand-in-hand with the “no-failure” or “no-retention” policy, and my school district is a definite contributor to this madness. I can understand the desire to stop giving zeros and MAKE the kids do the work (giving countless opportunities until successful), but I have been in a situation where a principal required that we give nothing less than a 50%… even when nothing had been turned in (regardless of the multitude of chances given). I’m all in favor of raising student learning, but passing kids forward to the next grade when they haven’t put in the work or learned the material might explain why so many kids are unprepared for college and life in general…
I think a bigger part of this problem is that we’re too focused on whether or not these kids can correctly answer 50 multiple choice questions on a state exam… Any ignoramus can guess a handful of questions correctly, but what have our kids really learned to do? Take a test. We test them to death and pass them along from grade to grade, and then send them out into the real world where there aren’t many multiple choice tests and certainly no one pats you on the back when you fail and gives you never ending chances to correct fix it.
There was a district I student taught in that hand the no fail policy. I child could not be held back a grade, even if they did absolutely nothing the whole year, until they were in high school. It took most of the middle schoolers about 3 seconds to realize they didn’t have to do any work and would be fine. From what I understand they are looking at getting rid of the policy since its caused so many problems.