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Finding The Meaning Of Life In School

4/27/2015

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My personal theory on homework, as a teacher, is to not give it at all unless students don’t use their face-to-face time in an efficient way during class. 

However, homework is not something I ever really engaged in as a student, and yes, I realize this probably biases my opinion on the subject. 

There are teachers (and administrators, and other powerful educator-types) that claim homework teaches responsibility. 

Nope. 

Learning responsibility comes from the teacher (or authority figure) gradually releasing control of the learning tasks when the students/apprentices are engaged in a task they they intrinsically find to be worthwhile. It does not come from me telling a bunch of sixteen-year-olds what they should add to their overstuffed lives when they’re not sitting/standing/playing in my classroom. 

So really, the discussion of homework/no homework steers into a conversation about value in class. What do you value as a teacher? What do students value, beyond prom dresses and bandanna-print vests? It is reductionist to say that teenagers don’t care about schoolwork at all, which is an argument I hear often. Teenagers don’t care about THAT schoolwork, because it’s little more than checking off a series of boxes to them. 

Any kind of work, inside or outside of class, has to be connected to a larger learning goal that the students understand. And in my class, it often takes them a LONG time to get the connections, because the class is very non-traditional-- but the moments when they get it-- those are awesome. 

For example, today, I had a colleague come talk to my AP class about presentation skills, so the kids could hear a different voice and a little different perspective. He told them that slideshows shouldn’t have tons of words on them, and that they should hand out a short document after the presentation that gives notes/helps solidify the information. (I make them do this, and they mutter things at me.) 

As he said this, I saw several students look at me, the light registering on their faces… like, Oh. THAT’S why we do that. 

Yep. 

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The Innovation of Phone Book Students

4/13/2015

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Innovation most often happens in my classroom when I’ve built good structures and skeletons, but leave lots of room to break out of those molds. This is useful, I believe, because I have students that would do anything I told them to do, even if it was “copy thirty pages of the phonebook for class tomorrow,” and I have students for whom following all the steps of an assignment would be the first time they’d ever done just that.

I have students who insist, repeatedly, that they are not creative or innovative. Many of them are the “phone book” students.

But often, both students and adults confuse the word “innovation” with “something that descended straight from Mt. Olympus into my brain, and I’m sharing something with you that has never been thought in the history of humankind.”

Innovation is not quite that. Innovation is taking what already exists--ideas, structures, bursts of light--and retwisting, repurposing, re-puzzling, or maybe even disentangling them. That’s a complicated way of saying that I can’t take full (or even partial) credit for the innovative things that happen in my room. They exist as a kind of alchemy between people I talk to, books and blogs I read, and videos I watch, which are then poured out into the volatile mixture that is a high school classroom.

If you get it right (or get lucky), the students become the real innovators, taking what you’ve given them and making something extraordinary.

But the innovations I see in school often are the innovations kids come up with to avoid/subvert the assigned tasks, or maybe just to make them more efficient. There’s real innovation happening in a student trying to stretch a two-page essay to a third and fourth page. There’s real innovation in trying to do Calculus homework for next period in English class while still keeping your head above water in both disciplines. There’s real innovation in trying to create a compelling presentation the night before it’s due, and equal innovation in trying to give a compelling presentation when you haven’t rehearsed.

Traditional school doesn’t see a place for those innovations; frankly, it downright discourages some of them.  But all innovation is rejected at first.  And slowly, paradigms shift and what was once maligned is now mainstream.

I get to be an early adopter of that kind of innovation.






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    I'm Andrew. I write about learning. I like to learn. 

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