Gladly Would I Teach

Canadian Parents Win Legal Battle Against Homework

Two Canadian lawyers just won an agreement that stipulates that their three children do not have to complete homework so long as the children read each night, complete all of their work in class, practice their musical instruments at night, and come to school prepared to learn.  As evidence in their case, the parents stated that research does NOT show that homework improves learning.

While curtailing homework in elementary schools might make sense in order to give young children time to rest and play after working all day in school, I shudder to think what would happen to high school classes if homework were not permitted. Looking only at English classes, I see huge potential problems. All papers would have to be written during class and all novels and other reading selections would have to be read during school hours. I’m afraid that English classes would consist solely of quiet reading and writing with virtually no time for teacher instruction or discussion of what students are reading and writing.

However, putting all that aside, why in the world would parents launch such a lawsuit?  This situation would be funny if it weren’t true. How many other lawsuits will this one case spur? The article explains that the parents were prompted to take the homework issue to court because they had suffered through years of trying to make their children complete their homework. Isn’t that part of a parent’s responsibility?

This situation reminds me of a special education student whose parents created major problems for teachers at another school several years ago. In a parent-teacher conference, the parents declared that it was the teachers’ responsibility to ensure that children complete homework, not parents. The parents then demanded that the school send a teacher to their house each night to help their child complete his homework.

It would be funny if it weren’t true.

How much stress do our students face daily? Take a look at this article from The New York Times.  The article reports on a study of stress that found that one-third of students 8-17 feel more stress today than they felt last year.

Helping Our Children With Stress

Identifying Signs of Stress in Your Children and Teens

Talking With Your Children About Stress

Earlier this week I responded to Sunday’s New York Times article about Teachers pay Teachers and whether or not it is ethical for teachers to sell materials they create.

Is It Wrong to Sell Teaching Materials?

Friday’s Teacher Magazine also considered the issue and most teachers agreed that teachers should be allowed to sell the materials they create so long as they do not create them or post them for sale during school hours.

Should Teachers Sell Their Class Materials?

Growing Backlash Against Overparenting

In the past week, I have heard repeated complaints about overbearing parents who challenge everything that teachers do. Some teachers report instances of angry parents who email them when their children make low grades or write letters to administrators and include a litany of grievances against teachers who they believe mistreat their children.

It’s common today to hear teachers state that they enjoy working with students, but parents wear them down. As anyone who has spent any time inside a classroom knows, however, most parents are supportive of teachers, and only a handful of parents have unrealistic expectations and  believe they must intervene repeatedly in their child’s education instead of allowing students to handle their own problems.

Oh,  those demanding parents may be in the minority, but they often create so much stress and so many problems for teachers that some teachers actually leave the profession.

A new article in Time Magazine suggests that the tide may be turning as more helicopter parents recognize the need to step back and allow their children to make their own mistakes.

Here’s another article about the need to require students to write longer research papers in order to boost their critical thinking skills and prepare them for college.  As long as our classes remain so large and our curriculum requirements remain as extensive, teachers in the future will probably decrease the number of writing assignments they require instead of increasing them. Oh, what we could accomplish if we had control over our curriculum and only 20 students in a class!

Coming to terms with the effects of no longer requiring long papers

We are in the final two days of school before having a week off for Thanksgiving Holidays!  We are all tired and ready for a vacation. It’s the perfect time, however, to do something a little different in class.

As an English teacher, I talk about writing every day – from discussions of literature and an author’s style of writing, to analysis of various writing strategies, to reviews of grammar and usage rules, to construction of timed-writing responses and research papers, and to oral reading of student papers in class. Amidst all of these lessons about proper writing and preparing students for the writing assignments they will face in college, it’s easy to lose sight of the most important writing that students will complete during their lifetimes: personal writing.

I suspect that we spend so little time on personal writing because we assume that students know how to write personal notes. With today’s influx of technology, however, I’m afraid emails, instant messaging, and other forms of digital correspondence may replace personal correspondence if teachers don’t step in to teach the need for personal correspondence.

Today as Thanksgiving approaches, I’m teaching students how to write thank-you notes and then giving them time to write thank-you notes in class. I’m going to encourage them to write a note to their favorite elementary or middle school teacher. I picked up cheap cards from the dollar stores.  If you want to include this activity with your students, here’s the handout I’m distributing to my students.

Writing Thank You Notes

The Creator of Wikipedia Turns to Education Videos

Although this is a new video site with a limited number of videos, I suspect it will become a treasure trove for teachers and students in the next few years.

Yesterday a teacher asked for advice about easy and quick ways to grade notebooks. I’ll pass along the information I gave in case you are staring at a stack of notebooks you have to grade over the holidays. My method is so simple and practical that I am embarrassed it took me over a decade to figure it out.

The best aspect of my notebook grading is that I do NOT take home any notebooks, nor do I have stacks of notebooks on my classroom floor for days and days as I grade them.

Before revealing my grading suggestion, however, I’ll review why I have students keep notebooks in some classes. I want students to keep all handouts, assignments, notes, and graded work in an organized fashion. I want them to be able to find everything they need to study for tests and to study for the final exam. I hope during the process that they will also improve their organizational skills. I’m not particularly interested in whether or not their notebooks are pretty so long as they can find what they need and read it.

At the beginning of the semester, I tell students how I will grade their notebooks and I make suggestions for how they should organize their notebooks (how many dividers they need, sections they need to establish, etc). I also insist that they have a notebook just for my class since I may take it up during the semester. I emphasize the importance of bringing the notebook to class each day and, particularly at the beginning of the semester, I remind them to place their work in their notebooks.

Instead of collecting notebooks to grade, this is my process.

1. I tell students to place their notebook on their desk and prepare for a notebook check.
2. I distribute a one-page notebook check (See example below.)
3. I tell the students that the notebook is timed and that they must finish it within 30 minutes (adjusted for individual classes). Students must write answers on the notebook sheet. They may not use their textbooks, hunt for papers in their book bags, or ask me for help. They can only use their notebooks to find the answers.
4. The notebook check includes abbreviations that I have to explain to students before they begin. For example. The first question may state:  Night 3.12.  I explain to students that this means they have to go to their questions on Night.  Look at the questions on chapter 3 and provide the answer to #12.  All answers should be 2-3 words. (I don’t ask essay type questions on notebook checks.)
5. Depending on the class, I ask from 20 to 50 questions.
6. I walk around the room to ensure that kids don’t pass papers from their notebooks to other students and to ensure that they can’t copy other students’ work. I collect papers as students finish.
7. If I have multiple classes of the same subject, I collect the notebooks at the end of the notebook check and keep them overnight so students in one class cannot give their notebook to a student in another class.
8. Instead of taking home stacks of notebooks to grade, I only have a stack of short answer questions to grade. Since I make students write answers in little blocks, I am able to grade the papers much faster.

Some teachers wonder about students who are able to answer questions on a notebook check even when they haven’t written down the answer. For example, what if a student did not write down the answer to question number 12 in chapter 3 of Night? As long as the student knows the answer, I don’t care. Students tell us all of the time that they don’t need to write down the answers because they know the answers. If that’s the case and they can indeed remember the answer all semester, I am happy to give them credit for that question. (As we all know, however, most students cannot remember the answers.)

By utilizing a notebook check of this type, I test whether or not students have maintained the papers that I requested and whether or not they have them in a reasonable order that THEY can retrieve easily.

If you still feel the need to check notebooks to see if they are pretty or tidy, you can always add a category to the notebook check and flip through notebooks quickly to add that score after grading the notebook check.

For years and years I plodded through notebooks for hours until I reached the point that I really didn’t care what grade I gave them! Then I went through a period when I didn’t require notebooks because I didn’t want to mess with grading even though I knew it would help students if I required notebooks. When I finally figured out how to grade notebooks through checks of this type, I was delighted because I could emphasize the organizational skills I wanted to instill in students and grade their notebooks quickly and painlessly.

I’m attaching a sample notebook check and answer sheet below.

Notebook Check

Notebook Check with answers

Just when we least expect it, something comes along to wake us up!  Between first and second period yesterday, one of my students walked in and said, “There’s a fight in the hall,” as if this were a common occurrence.

I maneuvered my way through the students in the large commons area until I found three male teachers trying to break up two angry, very angry girls, who were fighting. Since I came up from behind, I grabbed the smaller girl who had her back to me and moved her away.

She didn’t top five feet and probably only weighed 90 pounds on a good day, but that child was angry and STRONG, very strong!  While I tried desperately to hold on to her, she drug my very large body all over the hall and finally got away and picked up a chair to throw.

I grabbed her again and pushed her inside an empty classroom where she did her best to try to escape as I closed the door and blocked her passage. She kept trying to get out to go after the other girl – even when administrators and the campus police officer arrived.

Out of Control!  The girl was out of control!

In all of my 50+ years, I have never been as out of control as this young girl was. How does someone so young, probably 13 or 14 years old, become so angry?  Why does someone so young become so angry?

I don’t know what happened to the young lady. In fact, I don’t even know her name. I suppose she has been suspended for a few days, probably a few more days than the other girl since she had to be restrained and refused to stop fighting.

After the fight, I walked back inside my classroom and then it hit me that the fight was the first fight I had helped to break up in almost a decade.  Momentarily, I remembered all of those days at a different school when I had to break up fights every week. Once after a particularly violent girl fight, I had promised myself that I would never try to break up two girls again.

I forgot that promise yesterday, but I survived.

As long as I stick to breaking up fights between girls half my size, maybe I’ll be just fine.

Here’s one more example of inappropriate teacher behavior. According to the report, the teacher was just kidding.

WSB TV Teacher Accused of Putting Hit on Student