Brighter Flames Arrayed

I’ve been thinking about homework in general for a while now, and moreso ever since hearing Alfie Kohn speak a month ago. But I thought about it extra hard after seeing the reactions of a couple dozen teachers after they’ve been assigned homework for a professional development workshop. And it wasn’t just reading or busywork, it involved writing and thinking and spending time on things that get assessed promptly with carefully written feedback. It was the best case scenario of homework assignments; we should know because we’re teachers. But oh man were folks upset. It was a civilized reaction but I’ve not seen students react that strongly when they get told that they have homework. And if you are in any sort of academic administrative role you’ve probably seen it too: teachers (and unions) get real upset when you ask them to do extra work beyond what they have to do during the day, even if it’s something you think is really important and minor.

Okay, so teachers don’t like to do homework. Yet we insist on assigning it to students.

I’m not saying that homework is bad. Alfie Kohn is smarter than me and wrote an entire book about why he thinks homework is bad and you should probably read it if you’re interested in the topic. I’m more interested in homework-the-idea, which can be quantified. I don’t entirely agree with Kohn’s idea on homework-the-practice but what I do see is that assigning homework isn’t really fair or consistent behavior. In fact, I think that homework goes against our Good Old American Values.

In his talk, which I will link to when it is finally online, Kohn said that giving kids homework is essentially making them work a second shift. That maybe a little dramatic but the point that we expect students to work more than an eight hour day still stands. We have laws saying “hey you can’t make a grown-up work more than eight hours a day without giving her extra money to the tune of 50% more than usual” but none that say “hey you can’t make a kid work more than eight hours a day without making sure that the learning she’ll do beyond regular school time will be at least 50% more effective”. Sure, kids don’t actively learn during the entire school day but adults aren’t productive the entire day either. Oh, hello to you if you’re reading this at work.

More importantly, we’re asking students to take work home. Homework; that’s what the word means. In our culture an employer who never asks an employee to take work home is a good boss. Yet a teacher who does not ask a student to take work home is a bad teacher. In fact, in order to be a good teacher not only should you ask students to take work home but you need to take their work home with you the next day. This somehow doesn’t make very much sense and, given how students and teachers alike do not enjoy the process, seems to create a spiral of misery.

In our culture there’s a general “leave your work at your workplace” mentality that only gets broken for poor people and people who are passionate about their work; luckily teachers often fall into the second category. When you’re done with work you’re supposed to go home and play catch with Junior in your suburban yard. That’s the American Way. It applies all the way from corporate CEO to burger-flipper. It doesn’t always happen but that is what we expect. In the case of school, though, that is never the case. In fact, not having homework is a reward, which in itself is an issue; hey lets teach our kids that not doing work is a reward! Anyway, if we take this idea of homework and apply it to an adult in a job it starts offending our cultural values. Example: is it cool when a diner manager ask a line cook to take some potatoes home to peel and cut them because he should spend his time at work taking advantage of the facilities-I-mean-fry-o-lator?

Let’s take the most pessimistic views of education: that schools are daycare facilities that prepare students to become drones in society. Well, certainly our worker drones don’t like working more than eight hour everyday, and certainly not on weekends. So it makes no sense to assign work beyond regular school time as training for drone work. What about getting kids out of trouble before the family unit returns two hours after school ends because kids could cause trouble when they have nothing to do? First of all, the kids who get into trouble are usually the kids who don’t do their homework. Second, let’s examine a limiting scenario.

Imagine a boss saying “hey Mohammad, I heard through anecdotal evidence that some of you Muslims are troublemakers, so here are some reports for you to finish tonight so you don’t have time to blow up buses just in case you are one.”

Suppose that Mohammad is, in fact, a terrorist. Would a stack of reports stop him from blowing up a bus? Now, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much more likely (as in with a probability of 1) Mohammad will just be extremely offended, as he should rightly be. If we’re saying we’re giving kids homework to stay our of trouble then we are just insulting a whole heck of a lot of them. Except unlike Mohammad the kids are required, by law, to not just walk out on their teachers and find another school.

I do think that homework isn’t fair. But, of course, life ain’t fair. In the best case scenario we should make sure whatever work students take home are in fact necessary and efficient. To go back to my imaginary law I think every hour of homework should carry 90 minutes’ worth of learning, or at least make it so that the learning done the next day will be 50% more effective. Unfortunately most homework assignments (and I’m sometimes guilty of this too, even though I actively avoid it) carry less “stuff” than regular class time. But at least, though, we can acknowledge that homework isn’t fair, even though it may be a meaningless gesture. Maybe if we repeat a meaningless gesture enough times we’ll discover meaning behind it; hey, that’s a metaphor for modern math education!

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cayusa/2194119780/

Wing :: Jul.22.2010 :: Posts :: 3 Comments »

I’m cleaning out my pile of old documents and I found… a stack of transparencies with problems written on them. Back in the old days I used to write problems that were long on transparencies and project them on a side screen while we worked on them on the board.

That was… 2006. Or maybe 2007? It wasn’t actually until 2008 that I had an LCD projector in every room I taught in. It’s kind of crazy that I’ve only actually been (able to be) using tablet PCs for two years and it feels like forever since I picked up a transparency marker.

There is actually a stack of transparencies sitting in the department office supply closet and several transparency pens and I have no idea what to do with them. Don’t say “make ’stained glass’ art”, though, because we have a real stained glass studio like 200 ft away from that same closet.

Wing :: Jun.18.2010 :: Posts :: No Comments »

The school I work at doesn’t give final exams.

Okay, that was a lie.

When I say we don’t give final exams I mean that we don’t use a final exam as a make-or-break assessment tool. Some of my coworkers and I do give final exams in the literal sense: they are exams and they are at the end of the year/semester, and they catch everything important that the course covered.

Today I was talking to a colleague who teaches history about final exams and he told me about his final “exam”: a short essay that answers a question, written in half an hour. The thing here though is that the students come up with their own question in advance; the only requirement is that the question has to capture the entirety of the course or at least most of it. This means that students think about broad concepts of pivotal moments in what they studied; more importantly the students get to think about and decide what was important in the course. If a student’s topic is about the Romans instead of the Greeks she has to first be able to defend why the Romans were more worthy to be placed on her exam.

We as teachers have ideas on what the most important skills in algebra or geometry or calculus are. It’s not hard (but also not easy) to make a list of things that a student who studies high school algebra should know. In fact a ton of people have done it. Some of those people publish those lists and say “this is the official list of stuff kids in this state should know because they are important”. And then we create summative assessment based on the lists. And we tell the kids that these ideas on the list are important. Some of us try to convince the kids that these ideas are important through motivations and discoveries and projects. But we never really ask the kids, at the end, what the list is. Instead of saying “the final covers this this that and this” when students ask “what would the final cover?”, why not ask them what would be fair on the final? Even if there is in fact a set list (and hence, right answers) it’d be a nice discussion and assessment on whether what the students think are the important topics matches up with what we decide are important.

Here’s the experiment I’m running for the next ten days:

I have three students who have completed all the material in a standard college level calculus course doing an independent project with me for the next week and a half. Their goal is to recall calculus and try to solve harder problems than the problems they have done in class. They have a pile of calculus textbooks and they have to choose what problems to do (and come up with their own problems) given that those problems require using all the skills that they believe are the most essential in calculus, be of reasonable difficulty and be interesting. I have my own ideas of what that list should be but I’m very interested in seeing what they come up with.

Wing :: May.26.2010 :: Posts :: 2 Comments »

I teach both high school freshmen and seniors. Recently I’ve been noticing that the freshmen have active imaginations and like to interpret the simplest problem in unconventional and often complicated but rich ways. The seniors, on the other hand, will face a complex problem and not even try to interpret the problem. Everyday I’m surrounded by 14 year old kids who are eager to explore and argue and be creative and in three years they too will get their creativity and joy beaten out of them. And it’s all my fault.

In fact, Keith Devlin wrote a column about my failure.

Whenever I teach combinations and permutations (say, last Monday) my class inevitably gets into an argument about whether one problem should be solved using combinations or permutations. Although the textbook tries to be clear beyond reasonable doubt whether order matters in every problem there is always one problem that can be open to interpretation—unless you know the keywords and templates that textbooks and standardized tests use, then it’s crystal clear. The kids, especially the younger ones, love to argue about the problem and I’d do them a disservice if I didn’t assign said problem.

But.

Ultimately, I have to say “yes, you’re right in that the problem can be interpreted that way, but if you use that answer on, say, the SATs or in college you’ll be marked wrong” because while they are indeed being reasonable and the discussion that arose from an ambiguous problem is usually a great one part of my job is in fact to make sure that my students won’t be judged as idiots by people whose standards my employer, my students, their parents and myself do not agree with. I am fine with the answer; straight As for the kid who can think for herself and defend her answers reasonably even though she interprets the problem differently than those guys with PhDs on the inside front cover of the textbook. But I also have to tell them that those guys with PhDs represent an establishment that will say they are wrong because I owe it to them and their families to let them know that this is how the world we live in works.

This is the precise moment when they feel the first ACME brand iron weight slowly crushing their spirit. Soon they will become jaded, weary eighteen-year-olds ready to accept other soul-crushing responsibilities of adulthood like bills and children and (lack of) jobs and the cold comfort that, perhaps, if they make enough money, they can buy a motorcycle and feel some glimpse of happiness they once felt in their childhood before their math teacher told them that if they wrote down what they believed in they would be marked wrong by The Establishment.

We want our students to be special and not necessarily conventional. We want them to think for themselves make their own healthy choices even if others may not like those choices. But in math education, wrong means wrong. It’s not a you-are-playing-with-gender-stereotypes-and-we’ll-look-at-you-weirdly-while-judging-you or you-are-playing-in-a-band-even-though-you’re-thirty-you-should-have-a-real-job kind of wrong. It’s a stamp that says you are scientifically proven to be worse than the kid who follows all the steps in the cookbook. Sadly, you’re not going to find a support group for people who don’t interpret word problems as they are “meant” to be interpreted as much as support groups for people who fail to interpret word problems.

My personal goal is that my students would be able to think for themselves but be able to be on their “best behavior” and restraint themselves while applying their best analytical skills when it comes to things like standardized tests and passing that required college stats class (where there are actually right answers to all the questions, unlike statistics in real life) when they need to. And the first step is to let them know that I don’t actually have an answer and it’s up to them to find one on their own and convince me that it’s true. I’ve been doing that a lot in the past years but I’ve slowly slipped over the last year. It’s a good thing that I just watched the Dan Meyer TED talk and he reminded me to be less helpful. I’m part of the problem, but let’s hope that I can be part of the solution as well.

Wing :: May.20.2010 :: Posts :: No Comments »

A few years back at a math/science teachers’ conference a woman suddenly got a standard ovation from her table during lunch. Turns out it was because they found out that she had four preps. I didn’t really see what the deal was.

Of course, now that I have four preps I totally understand. Not that I deserve any applause for it since I’m not handling this situation nearly as gracefully as she did.

At some point I’ll actually write about that and detail exactly why having four preps leads to not blogging. But in the meantime I am trying to plan four different cumulating projects while packing for a four day trip into the woods, so I’ll cut this mini-post off here.

Wing :: May.02.2010 :: Posts :: 1 Comment »