Today Mrs. Teacher2 told me that I need to start collecting and grading the notes my students are supposed to write while they're reading.
Umm... N.F.W.
(For the unitiated, the N stands for "No," the W stands for "Way." You can do the math from there.)
It seems that her students don't do any work unless they know it's going to be graded. I can't think of a better way to make more unnecessary work for me, to tell the truth. The quizzes I'm giving them on the reading in this unit are open-note, but not open-book. I'll know how good their notes are from their quiz scores. I've modeled the notes they should take, I make sure to point out important information they need to write down while we read in class, we've reviewed them together, and I think they have plenty of instruction on what constitutes good note-taking.
But she's right, in a way. Because she's created an atmosphere in her class in which she indicates what's important by the grade assigned, she's trained her students not to do anything they're not specifically told to do, and not to do anything that doesn't get them immediate credit. One of the other classes failed to take any notes at all until we started writing things on the chalkboard for them, then they copied verbatim. No thinking, little learning, lots of writing.
I don't think she realizes that she's also creating a population of people that will always do the absolute minimum required, and will always be lost for a way to start an assignment until someone shows them how to do it.
I don't know about you, but I for damned sure don't want to hire anyone for my business that's been trained like this. Not sure I'd want my kid marrying someone that just did the bare minimum, either.
She also said that while they're taking a quiz (even an open-note quiz) I need to be standing up and circulating through the room to make sure that they're not cheating. She says that they can be very sneaky and ingenious about trying to cheat if they want to. I suspect that's true, particularly if you create a system of oversight that makes them work incredibly hard to sneak anything by. Necessity is the mother of invention. Maybe if they don't have to work so hard at sneaking anything by me, they'll be sloppy and easier to catch trying to cheat. I'm not really concerned about it in any case. I trust my students, and the ones that don't know the information tend to throw in the towel pretty easily (remember that bit about doing the bare minimum?), and I can't imagine many of them putting in enough effort to cheat.
Umm... N.F.W.
(For the unitiated, the N stands for "No," the W stands for "Way." You can do the math from there.)
It seems that her students don't do any work unless they know it's going to be graded. I can't think of a better way to make more unnecessary work for me, to tell the truth. The quizzes I'm giving them on the reading in this unit are open-note, but not open-book. I'll know how good their notes are from their quiz scores. I've modeled the notes they should take, I make sure to point out important information they need to write down while we read in class, we've reviewed them together, and I think they have plenty of instruction on what constitutes good note-taking.
But she's right, in a way. Because she's created an atmosphere in her class in which she indicates what's important by the grade assigned, she's trained her students not to do anything they're not specifically told to do, and not to do anything that doesn't get them immediate credit. One of the other classes failed to take any notes at all until we started writing things on the chalkboard for them, then they copied verbatim. No thinking, little learning, lots of writing.
I don't think she realizes that she's also creating a population of people that will always do the absolute minimum required, and will always be lost for a way to start an assignment until someone shows them how to do it.
I don't know about you, but I for damned sure don't want to hire anyone for my business that's been trained like this. Not sure I'd want my kid marrying someone that just did the bare minimum, either.
She also said that while they're taking a quiz (even an open-note quiz) I need to be standing up and circulating through the room to make sure that they're not cheating. She says that they can be very sneaky and ingenious about trying to cheat if they want to. I suspect that's true, particularly if you create a system of oversight that makes them work incredibly hard to sneak anything by. Necessity is the mother of invention. Maybe if they don't have to work so hard at sneaking anything by me, they'll be sloppy and easier to catch trying to cheat. I'm not really concerned about it in any case. I trust my students, and the ones that don't know the information tend to throw in the towel pretty easily (remember that bit about doing the bare minimum?), and I can't imagine many of them putting in enough effort to cheat.
3 comments:
She says that they can be very sneaky and ingenious about trying to cheat if they want to. I suspect that's true, particularly if you create a system of oversight that makes them work incredibly hard to sneak anything by.
Very true. I worked in a bar in college, and the owner was paranoid about the help stealing drinks, so everything -- liquor and draft beer -- was metered. Press a button on the draft handle and the exact amount of beer to fill a 60 oz pitcher would be expelled and recorded on a counter. Same with shots. In theory, he could compare the number of clicks against the number of items sold as recorded on the register tapes.
Didn't take long for someone to figure out that it was easy to hit the happy hour two-for-one key on the register to cover for the extra click on the vodka dispenser....
You're on the right track, Eric.
I'm a teacher, too.
At a private (Waldorf) school, which, theoretically, gives me an enormous amount of freedom.
I would go one step further and begin letting them grade their own quizzes every once a while.
This 1) Shows them that you trust them and cultivates an atmosphere of trust, 2)Makes them live with their decision if they decide to cheat, and 3) Shows them that it's about learning and figuring out what what they do, and don't, know; not just what the grade is.
I do this in a very non chalant way.
"No...it's OK...just hand them in when you're done grading them."
You could also have them exchange papers and grade each other's work.
I, sometimes, don't even collect the quizzes.
"Did you get any wrong? Do you see which ones they are? Good...now you know what you need to catch up on."
I also give voluntary homework.
"Here's a little assignment (or 'here's a book or magazine article, if anybody is interested) you can do if you're interested in this stuff."
You'd be amazed at what you can accomplish by giving some options and trust.
And...if even one person does an optional assignment and you give him/her an opportunity to tell the class about it, you may see a level of interest and enthusiasm in your class that you never thought possible.
PS..Remember me from Mike's jam a few years ago?
Old Tele and tweed Deluxe.
Dude,
The reason you don't want to go down the path that she has isn't just your own selfish self interest (too much extra work for you) it is because it teaches people to only work on demand rather than as a part of learning and "self priming". It sounds like you are developing clear goals for your students.... if you haven't then you will want to. You have really good instincts, but you need to resist BS for the right reasons. Cheating is a pretty deep thing. By that, I mean that when kids cheat there are a myriad of things going wrong in the classroom relationship: teacher to students individually, teacher to students as a group, student to student and subject to student. The best classrooms are communities of trust. If solid, positive relationships don't exist within a class, it is almost a given that no higher order learning will take place.
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