How am I going to make this assessment relevant?

Peter Greene said:

. . . if your spouse says, “I’m looking for ways to make you interesting and appealing,” that is not a good sign.

Once you look at a lesson and ask, “How am I going to make this material relevant,” you have admitted that the material is not actually relevant. If that’s true–if the lesson is inherently irrelevant–then you need to ask a bigger question. Why are you teaching it at all? Because it’s on the test? Because your boss said you have to? These are lousy reasons to teach anything. More importantly, no amount of stapling on pictures of movie stars will convince your students that you aren’t wasting their time, and wasting students’ time is one of the unforgivable sins in the teaching biz.

Know why you are teaching what you’re teaching. Know why the material has value for your students. This is not always obvious, but this is where your expertise in the subject matter is supposed to come in. You’re the teacher–you’re supposed to know what the connection is between your content material and the business of being fully human in the world. If you don’t see a connection, you need to go study and look to find it, or you need to reconsider whether you should be teaching it at all.

[Via www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/06/08/dear-teachers-please-dont-make-your-lessons-relevant — Found on Scott MacCleod's excellent blog, Dangerously Irrelevant, about the need to move schools forward into 21st century.]

The same is true of assessments. It's easy to come up with assignments that generate grades for a report card, that rank students against each other, but does the activity actually have anything to do with anything that matters? If the assessment isn't authentic, don't do it.

Homework Assignments

A clear explanation of why homework is stupid and why standardized testing has problems.

I have always opposed homework. Teachers should teach, parents should be family. Asking kids to take work home in K-12 system is wrong-headed because:

Homework Significantly Undermines Equality of Educational Opportunity

Homework greatly increases the disparity between family backgrounds, undermining equal educational opportunity

• Some parents work at two jobs to support their families, or work evenings or otherwise are unavailable to help their kids with homework. It is clearly unfair to pit these kids against kids whose parents can do their homework for with them.
• Some families speak white-middle-class English; some families speak lower-class English; some black dialect; others speak little or no English at. It is unfair to send home assignments in the expectation that all parents can help their children equally.
• Some families need the children to do chores to help with the farm or family business; or disabled siblings, or elder care; or other responsibilites; while other families place no such demands on their children.
• Some parents value education and school work; others—having been traumatized by their own school experiences with racial, class, religious, or other biases, and bullying teachers—think, for example of residential schools, to take just one obvious example—do not. It is not fair to demand that kids from these different backgrounds be pitted against each other on homework assignments.
• Some homes have resources—computers, books, a table/space to work at, separate bedrooms for each kid—while others do not.
• Some homes have the income to hire tutors when kids struggle; others do not.
• Homes vary (across all classes, cultures, and backgrounds) in stability. Why are we asking kids to complete work at home when their parents are in the middle of a screaming divorce, or they have bullying siblings, or there are other types of disruption?

Schools are supposed to be safe places for students to learn. Our responsibility is to teach them in schools where we can control the learning environment and make sure it represents a level playing field. Any time we send work home, we privilege some students, undermine others.

Homework Undermines Teacher Accountability

As a parent, it frequently drove me crazy to find that I was expected to teach my child reading, writing, and arithmetic, while my child's teacher devoted hours of classroom time to non-academic activities. For example, I routinely experienced that whenever the family sat down to enjoy a family movie night on the weekend, that my daughters had already seen the film at school. "Thursday afternoons are movie-day," they would tell me. Why do my kids have two hours of homework each evening, but teachers have time to pre-empt family activities? What's wrong with this picture?
I get that there should be some 'fun' times at school, to team-build, to reward diligence, to enhance learning. But what I am increasingly observing is these activities displacing learning. I increasingly see a generation of teachers who are more concerned with occupying the children than teaching them.

To cite just one blatant example from my child's education: my wife was present in our daughter's classroom as a volunteer when, in the last week of school, the teacher announced, "Oh, by the way, I forgot to teach printing this year. I'm going to hand out the printing exercise books now for you to take home. Have your parents teach you printing over the summer because you'll need that for next grade." An extreme example to be sure, but underlying every homework assignment is the delegation of teacher-work to parents, who may or may not be in a position to take on the responsibility.

Homework Encourages Racism, Class Bias, and Victim-Blaming

I hear teachers—and not just my inexperienced student teachers, but senior classroom teachers—dismiss this or that student's lack of progress by blaming the parents. "What can you expect? Ruby comes from ________(fill in the blank with "broken home" or "native home" or "trailer park home" or whatever other unacceptable bias teachers allow themselves. There is no clearer example of blaming the victim than the lowering of expectations for students based on class, race/ethnicity, parental marital status or whatever. What can I expect from Ruby? The same as every other student in the classroom because it is the teacher's job to get every single student to mastery of the subject content. There are no valid excuses for a student failing, except perhaps a doctor's diagnosis of massive brain injury, in which case they are probably not in your class anyway. Homework assignments mask teacher bias by shifting responsibility, along with a high proportion of the teacher's workload, to the family. Instead of taking responsibility for each child's learning, they accept responsibility only for those students whose parents have the social capital to do the teacher's job for them.

Bah, humbug.

Good teachers get the work done in their classrooms; they do not assign homework.

Tricky Directions in Test Questions

This is another meme doing the rounds on the web:

I think we can take it as read that "Draw a dinosaur wearing spectacles and holding a pen" does not relate directly to course objectives. I am a somewhat open to the idea of demonstrating to students the need to (a) read what the question is asking carefully and (b) the importance of showing one's work in such examinations, but um...hoping this was for an ungraded assignment (in class or homework) not a question on an actual exam. As a practice exercise, one of these a semester is fine—a little levity goes a long way, and there is a point to be made. [Doing this more than once would be bad: once is about student learning; twice is about the instructor projecting their self-image as a cool teacher. I think it safe to assume the current example is a one-off by a superior instructor, not role modelling a routine to be adopted by other, less grounded instructors.] So, no harm done if used sparingly and only in a non-graded context.

As an actual exam question, humour is a no-no. Because the examination is supposed to be targetting legitimate curricular objectives: unless your science curriculum includes "demonstrates a sense of humour" or "fine motor skills in the production of art" questions such as this example are out of line. Further, although the instructor may believe the injection of humour is a way to reduce stress, the fact is that at least some students will be panicked by it. Knowing in their hearts that an examination is no place for levity, their reaction to encountering it is likely to be disbelief and the assumption that they have misunderstood the question. In this instance, they will waste precious seconds obsessing about the meaning of the dinosaur. How does the height of the dinosaur change the question? Is the question now 32 meter's height, plus the height of the dinosaur? What is the significance of the pen? the Spectacles? Such superfluous information can drive a student crazy. And that's for normal kids. Throw in say, OCD or second language issues, and one is screwing up the accuracy of the assessment, not only for that question, but all the other objectives being examined that had that fraction of time less to think about.

So, occasional funny questions on practice exercises, maybe. Understand that some students will share your sense of humour and respond well, but others will not. But that can be addressed in class if the class atmosphere is a positive and safe one. On an actual for grades test or assignment, never.

Homework

I am not a huge fan of homework, especially in the elementary and middle grades. I understand homework as something assigned to students who were unable to complete the task during class time, either because they were goofing, or because they need extra time because they are slow. Slow and steady wins the race and all that. Assigning homework because the teacher was goofing or slow, however, is another matter entirely.

As a parent, I was constantly amazed at the apparent expectation that we teach our children the school curriculum while being regaled with stories about "Thursday afternoon film parties" or "Friday candy parties" or whatever. Every time we went to show our daughters a movie, we inevitably got "We saw that in school already" but when we asked about math or English, we were told "she gave us the worksheet and told us to do this at home". I might not have believed my kids version of things if my wife hadn't been in the classroom at the end of the year when the teacher said, "I forgot to teach printing this term, so here's the booklet, take it home over the summer and have you parents do it with you." I kid you not. I might not have believed my wife, had the same teacher not told me that she wasn't doing parent-teacher interviews during the two days set aside for them (i.e., classes cancelled and school closed for parent-teacher interviews) because she was going to Los Vegas with her boyfriend. (I actually get there may be circumstances when skipping out may be necessary, but should you be telling parents you're blowing them off? What drives me the most crazy is that many of my best graduates can't find permanent teaching jobs, and yet this lazy incompetent is teaching my kids...)

Don't be that teacher: don't send work home because you lacked the motivation or classroom management skills to actually cover the curriculum in class. Occasional homework for the few students who didn't get the job done because they were having trouble focusing that day, or for a whole class that was having one of those days, okay. Part of learning to manage time and deadlines is that if you miss the deadline, there is going to be homework. Kids get that, and parents get that. But if 'occasional catch up' turns into a regular pattern, then the problem is structural—i.e., you. Assigning out of class work to the whole class routinely is just bad teaching in the lower grades, and probably way overdone in the higher ones.

The cartoon at the top of the page nicely illustrates one of the problems: most parents aren't professional teachers and won't necessarily know anything about whatever you're teaching in class. Asking parents to teach for you by asking them to supervise homework is saying "anyone can do this, you don't need an Education degree or have any content knowledge." Do you really want to send that message home on a daily basis? Because that is not a good thing for the public to believe when it comes time for salary negotiations. Just saying.

But the cartoon is about a middle-class stay-at-home dad working with his average kid. In reality, one has to be careful sending work home when one knows nothing about what 'home' is like. Sending work home to my house is great: my kids have two professors for parents, both of whom happened to have trained as teachers as well. As professionals we have the resources to find the books, computers, study area, and—if necessary—even tutors to ensure that our child can keep up with (or get ahead of) the rest of the class. Oh, and our kid's parents are happily married, so there is not a lot of yelling or drama interfering with quiet homework time.

Ours is perhaps not an average household. I stopped sending homework home when one of my students explained that her parents didn't speak a word of English when I asked her why she hadn't gotten her parents to proofread her essay. Well, duh. A moment's reflection and it should be obvious that relying on parents to take charge of the student's reading program or math facts or whatever else you're sending home ignores the fact that many kids come from ESL homes; or working class homes where both parents have to work, work two jobs, or shift work, or otherwise aren't available; or unstable homes where parents may have other preoccupations than spending an hour on spelling practice; or just a home with three other kids, all of whom have been assigned the same two hours of homework; and so on. You don't know what their home life is like, and by counting on someone else to do the teaching for you, you are widening the gap between the haves and the have nots. School is supposed to be the great equalizer, the one fair and safe place in the world for kids. Not so much if you routinely ignore the very different opportunities available to kids outside the classroom.

Or how about this: maybe home time should be about family, not work that the teacher didn't have time for in the six or seven hour work day. My kids have Tae Kown Do four nights a week (with some of the best teachers I have ever encountered) and music lessons, and recitation, and all the extras our incomes provide. Fitting that in with supper and actually having time to talk with my kids is already making me wonder if I am over-programming my kids—I am therefore not happy to find my family time has been appropriated by apparently lazy teachers who feel they have the right to program, not just my child's time, but mine too! And I'm a ridiculously privileged white male. If I resent teachers intruding on and colonizing my child's after school hours, how do you think the average parent feels.

So, you know, don't do that. If my kid brings homework home because she was goofing and that means she has to miss out of some fun family activity that one day, fine. That's teaching her about consequences and I am all for it. If I have to cancel Tae Kown Do or music lessons altogether because homework has become a routine timesuck, then that is not okay, especially in the lower grades. My oldest is currently in Grade 12 IB, so okay, there is going to be some homework because a Grade 12 IB student is developing the time-management and self-direction one expects of an adult. But if you are sending anything home in elementary, or more than 20 minutes/day in Junior High/Middle school, you're making a mistake.