The Secret Life of Teaching, #4
By Horace Dewey
The following piece has been published on the home page of the HNN website.
The
phone on my desk is ringing when I arrive in my office at 8:17 a.m. on the
Thursday morning in the week before winter break, though with the temperature
stuck in the thirties, Spring feels like an eternity away. I pick up the
receiver—how much longer is there going to be a phone on my desk?—while
simultaneously trying to slip out of my coat. I’m tempted not to answer it.
"Hello?"
"Mr.
Dewey?"
"Speaking."
"I'm
so glad to reached you. This
is Ruth, Jason's mom? We met at the basketball game a couple weeks ago."
"Yes
of course. How are you?" In my mind I see nothing, no name, no face. But Jason—Jason
Thompson—will be enough to work with. I drape my coat over my desk chair, pull
my laptop out of my briefcase, and power it up.
"Well,
I've been better,” she’s saying. “I'm calling about the History Day project. As
you know, Jason's working with Tom Schlacter."
"Yes.”
I sort of do know that. I’ve
got a hard copy of the master list somewhere in my inbox. I begin to rustle
through it.
"A
thoroughly depressing subject, if you ask me." Now I remember: They're
doing the decision to drop the atomic bomb. Originally, they wanted to do
World War II. I
told them the subject was too broad. They've narrowed it down to the bomb, and
are working on a PowerPoint (the first refuge of scoundrels). The first draft I saw
was not too promising. Big
slabs of text, relatively weak in conceptual organization. Technical glitches. Normally, one or both of
them will be working with Joey Rizzo. But Joey has grand plans for a tabletop
reenactment of Pickett's Charge that he says he's been working on since July
with Roy Shimkin. Ominously, I’ve seen nothing new on Jason and Tom's project
since they handed in their notably sketchy first draft last week, only an email
with a string of questions that could have been answered if they’d actually
studied the assignment’s parameters.
Then
I realize that I've not been paying close attention to Ruth, who has been
explaining the series of obstacles Jason and Tom have encountered. "It
doesn't help matters any that Tom lives so far downtown. He never wants to come to
our place. Did you know that they spent all
night working
on this Saturday?"
Given
the taciturnity of both of these boys, I'm tempted to ask how I would know
that, but bite my tongue. I also imagine an empty pizza box, a Madden NFL game
on a laptop, and vintage Ludacris blaring from a set of speakers. Still, I feel a twinge
of unease. Truth is, the History Day Project has long been a sore point among
some administrators and colleagues, who think it asks too much of the kids at a
difficult time of year. We have revisited the subject from time to time as a
department, and concluded that the pluses outweigh the minuses. For grading purposes we
like to have a substantial grade-wide assessment at the end of the quarter, and
see bona fide value in a group undertaking in which students get to choose
their topic and work on it in a planned sequence of stages. And some of the final
results are truly extraordinary. Alas, that's not going to be the case here.
"I'm
sorry to hear that,” I say soothingly about the all-nighter. “I know that this is a
difficult undertaking. That's
why I always emphasize at the start of the project that students need to think
carefully about with whom they're going to work and to emphasize that the
quality of their collaboration is an important dimension of what this is all
about. I
also emphasize that they stand or fall together, and that if one kid coasts and
another kid does all the work, that itself can be a valuable lesson."
"Well,
I'm not sure I agree with you about that,” she says. “Don't get me wrong— I'm
not saying that Jason has handled this perfectly. He can be lazy. But I knew as soon as I
heard that he was can be working with Tom were going to be problems. Tom is a
nice kid, but I don’t think he’s capable of pulling his weight, intellectually
or otherwise.”
Not
a kind assessment, but not an inaccurate one, either. I click on my browser, go
to my bookmarks, and choose the weather page. I see something about an
approaching storm.
"What
I don't understand," she continues, "is the timing of this project. Why
does it have to be just before the break? We're leaving for St. Bart's tomorrow
morning. We’ve
planned this trip for months, and I'm pulling the kids out of school tomorrow
to get an early start.”
I
click on the WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY link. Snow to begin late this afternoon;
six to ten inches by morning. Fine by me: I’m not going anywhere.
"Well,”
I respond, “the deadline for this project is something my department
periodically reviews. But
we've learned from experience that it makes more sense to
have the project due before the break so that really we clear the decks for
kids to have a real vacation. Nobody likes to have a big assignment hanging
over their heads going into a stretch of time off." Actually, I have
traditionally had this assignment due a week before the break, but watching
my own son scramble to complete it (a documentary about strategic bombing --
the boys always seem to go for war) has led me to conclude that a little more
time really does make a difference. He kept me out of the loop on that one, I’m
happy to say. His
partner’s dad was a documentary filmmaker, so that's where they got most of
their help.
Ruth
is pressing the point: "I've got to tell you, an assignment like this
really wreaks havoc on family life."
"Again,
I'm sorry to hear that. Is
there something you'd like me to do? Would you like me to talk with the boys?”
“That
would be good," she says. "But
what would really help is giving them more time. I don't think these two really
understood what they’ve gotten themselves into. The geographic factor has
really proven to be a major complication, and coming up with good times to
collaborate has been a major, major problem. At my urging, they made plans to
meet after school today—Tom is going to skip practice and come over—and my hope
is that they’ll forge a game plan to finish it. I think Jason will have lots of
down time between connecting flights and will be able to work while we’re on
the plane. They can communicate by email or instant messaging or whatever. Do
you think you could give them another day or two?"
I
can't resist a smile. Normally,
I'd be in a position I really hate: having to say no. To accede to this
request would not only precipitate an avalanche of similar ones—the word would
be on the street almost immediately—but get me into trouble with my colleagues,
as we've all sworn a blood oath to hold the line in the face of these
pressures. I realize I'm taking a chance here, but if my bluff gets called, I
can say I was certain, however mistakenly, that there was going to be a snow
day, rendering the deadline moot.
"Well,
I don't like to do this, but understand extenuating factors in this particular
situation. So
I'll allow Jason and Tom a little more time to finish this up. As long as I have it we
get back from break, there should be no harm done."
"I
really appreciate that. I
want you to know that Jason loves your class.”
Yeah,
right. "Thank you. I
enjoy working with him."
"The
best part of this," she tells me, adopting a confiding, even
conspiratorial, tone, "is that Jason will be spending the second week of
the break with his father. For
once in his life, the man will actually have to pay attention to his son's
needs. Can't
wait to see that.”
"Glad
to be of service," I say with a chuckle. And though I don't know why, I
mean it. Though
she's given me little reason to think so, I suspect her grievance with her ex,
whoever he is, may well be legitimate. "Have a good trip, Ruth."
“Thank
you, Mr. Dewey.”
“Please call me Horace.” But she’s
already hung up.
Turned
out to be more like a foot. But they got out in time. Jason came back with an
enviable tan.
* * *
There are multiple frictions in the
triangular relationship between parent, teacher, and student, ranging from
grades to school budgets. But on a day-to-day basis, the most pervasive, if
evanescent, is homework. It’s a
subject on which each party feels ambivalence. Students typically say they hate
homework, but it’s often the source of their most substantial achievements.
Teachers feel they need homework to make class time more productive, but
assigning it usually means more grading. Parents want to feel their children
are learning, but worry about the demands on their time and the way homework
can sometimes interfere with extra-curricular and/or family activities. (Having
been involuntarily been drawn into my own children’s projects, sometimes as a
matter of the specific mandate of teachers, I can sympathize with this
exasperation.)
Of these three constituencies, it’s
teachers who are the most stalwart champions of homework. Mastery of anything
is always to some degree a matter of a willingness to invest—and a willingness
to waste—time in the pursuit of long-term gain. This is a truth that students
experience in realms ranging from sports to computer games. Not all students
are eager to make such an investment in Spanish or chemistry, but they
certainly can understand why their parents and teachers want that for them.
Which
is not to say that homework is always assigned thoughtfully or usefully by
teachers. Inexperienced or lazy ones will sometimes use homework as a crutch to
compensate for failures to use class time efficiently. Or they will assign
homework that has no clear relationship to the material being covered in class.
Or assign it without assessing it in a timely way—or at all, an omission that
breeds resentment and fosters corrosive corner-cutting by students.
Even
if one assumes that every teacher is thoughtful about the way homework is
deployed, the fact that any middle- or high school student will be taking up to
a half-dozen subjects at a time creates significant stress in even the
best-organized student’s life. It’s not unusual in some school districts for
students to routinely have over three hours of homework a night, a particularly
daunting prospect for a kid in a play or on a team who returns from school on a
late bus, has dinner, and gets to work circa 7:30 p.m., twelve or more hours
after the day has begun. While schools often have circuit breakers of various
kinds in place for this kind of problem (no homework over weekends or holiday
breaks, make-up provisions for students saddled with multiple assessments on
the same day, et. al.), they’re such
complicated organisms with so many moving parts that it’s virtually impossible
to craft an even work flow for any given kid. Even if this was possible from an academic standpoint, the discretionary choices
students make—clubs, theater, sports—and their varying ability to juggle such
balls, complicate any attempt to create a truly level playing field. Under the
circumstances, teachers can not only plausibly say they can’t know what else their students are doing, but also that they shouldn’t allow such knowledge to become
a consideration, lest their particular enterprise be crippled altogether.
It’s
for reasons like these that education reformers like Alfie Kohn argue for the
elimination of homework entirely. Such arguments get additional support when
one considers how little a role homework plays in leading educational powers
like Finland. And how much of role it
plays in others like South Korea, where saddling students with extra work has
become an arms race of sorts generating so much misery and alarm that the
government has resorted to police raids on tutoring classes that run beyond the
state-mandated curfew of 10 p.m.
Perhaps
predictably, I will state that I’m a homework partisan. I try to be intelligent
and efficient about it. Even more than work undertaken during class time,
students should have a clear understanding about how what they’re being asked
to do fits into a larger curricular schema or prepares them for an upcoming
assessment. Homework should be relatively modest in scope—the rule at my school
is an average of 45 minutes a night—and ideally give students some leeway in
the timing as to when they complete it, as in an assignment given on Monday but
not actually due until later in the week.
There
are two core tasks that homework is good for—that homework is uniquely good for. Both are alike in
that they demand a measure of concentration and reflection difficult to come by
during the school day. The process of education is inherently social; while
home schooling has its partisans and may be necessary for any number of
reasons, children learn best in school because interacting with peers on
multiple levels is central to learning (including the acquisition of self-knowledge).
And yet—in part for that very reason—an educational process that does not build
in opportunities for solitude and absorbing lessons, implicit as well as
explicit ones, is incomplete. Students need time to make sense of things. This work of making sense can happen in the
hurly burly of class discussion or in scribbling down notes while a teacher
talks, but processing and integrating information is typically work that gets
completed off-site.
The
first important homework task is reading. Adults typically laud it, for
themselves and children—“readers are leaders,” a beloved uncle of mine, a
construction worker who as far as I can tell was indifferently educated at
best, used to say—but few of us really have much stamina for it. Reading
requires a sense of focus that’s difficult to attain, because there’s so little
time in the day, or because of our physiological limitations, or both. I think
of reading as really quite akin to physical exercise: the more you do it, the
better you get at it, and the faster your mind works. Reading may well be less
important for the actual content you encounter than the habits of mind it
inculcates—attentiveness, imagination, a capacity for abstraction. In the end,
reading is the sin qua non of learning: everything else is a short-cut, a
compensation, a substitution (like a fad diet in lieu of exercise). To use a
cooking metaphor: reading is homemade; getting it in lecture form is
store-bought. Sure, reading takes longer. But it’s just plain better.
Precisely
because reading is so difficult, teachers should assign it with care—something
which, alas, is difficult when one is subject to district-wide mandates.
Textbooks are like baby food in that they’re age-appropriate, relatively
substantial, and segmented into measured servings. But that doesn’t mean
they’re tasty. Far better are selections chosen by a well-read teacher with a
sharp eye for the relevant newspaper article, blog post, short story or poem.
As in so many other ways, less is more. In part that’s because the ability for
students and teacher to read together, to close-read
sentences and passages, is an excellent use of class time after students come
to class having already had a first coat of exposure to a piece of text.
Reading intensively, which is to say
reading things more than once, is among the most important wellsprings of
learning.
Reading
is so crucial because it’s foundational for success in an even more demanding
intellectual task that’s also best undertaken as homework: writing. Writing is
among the most complex neurological tasks the human brain performs, and it’s
hard work. Paradoxically, good writing seems effortless. Which is one of the
reasons students find it so daunting: it seems
like it should be easy, and when it isn’t they assume they’re bad at it, which
makes them even less willing to undertake it. But knowing that it’s hard for
everyone will only get you so far: writing is like bench-pressing a lot of
weight—you have to work yourself up to it. That’s what school is for: creating
a space where such activities are promoted and sustained, precisely because
there’s really nowhere else it would happen on a mass scale.
But—really—the
single most important reason to ask students to write is that it’s something
that they must do alone. Only when they’re by themselves, grappling, seeking,
struggling to communicate with somebody else, are they fully engaged in the
task of learning. Actually, they can’t really begin to explain something to
someone else until they’ve explained it to themselves, which is what first
drafts are for. Writing is also a collaborative enterprise, in that peers and
parents can provide feedback, and in some cases teachers can sit beside
students and coach them through the process. But even when this happens, there
still needs to be a time and place where students follow through on their own:
the coach must step aside.
The
coaching analogy is a very rich one for understanding teaching generally, but
it has particular value in the context of homework. Coaches prescribe workouts,
some of which are executed on the field of play, but much of which take place
offsite. The coach can’t monitor any given athlete continuously; nor can a
coach be certain that a particular routine will pay off equally or at all for
every athlete. It’s a game of percentages which, should the student honor the
coach’s instructions, is likely to yield long-term gain. Beyond some general
parameters (like the length of a practice and care for the health of the
athletes), the coach doesn’t know or care what else the players may have to do,
and a coach’s personal regard for a player should not cloud the coach’s
judgment about who is or isn’t in shape. There are no guarantees. But the best
way to win games is to practice.
* * *
The
goals of the History Day project that Jason and Tom are working on are a bit
different than what I’ve been outlining here. My school participates in the
National History Day, a program that annually involves 50,000 students from 49
states who work within the parameters of an annually chosen theme like “Turning
Points in History,” “Revolution, Reaction and Reform,” or “Rights and
Responsibilities.” Students can work alone or collaborate in groups of up to
three people, and choose formats within a menu of options that include tabletop
exhibitions, documentaries, dramatic presentations and websites. My colleagues
and I believe that the work of formulating arguments may be easier for students
when working in media other than traditional essays, which is why this project
is a capstone assessment for the quarter (a grade-wide research essay is the
main undertaking for the end of the year).
We’re
pretty upfront with students at the time when we assign this project in January
that it’s as much about managing the enterprise as it is about the content. That
means planning ahead for deadlines that come up in stages: topic, bibliography,
first draft, final draft. We tell
them: choose your partners carefully, because you sink or swim together.
Someone who does all the work will get the same grade as a member of your team
that does none. (In fact, we keep an eye on this, and make a mental note the
balance the ledgers in some silent way.) “I'm not sure I agree
with you about that,” Ruth had said when I explained my colleagues’ thinking in
our phone conversation, and she might be right. But we try to get kids to
perform different kinds of intellectual tasks, and revealing her son’s
difficulty in performing this one is part of the point.
For
all our planning and justifications, however, we never entirely feel we’re in
control of the assignments we give. Loopholes and ambiguities inevitably
present themselves; so do unplanned exigencies like snowstorms. My delight in
conferring on Ruth and Jason Thompson an extension dissipates quickly as my
colleagues in the History Department realize the storm is creating a logistical
mess, and a flurry of emails swirl among us. If the History Day project was a
run-of-the-mill essay, we might simply expect students to email their work to
us, whether or not school was in session. But given the number of projects that
actually have to be brought in and set up (the kindly librarians have given us
some space), we can’t expect that. Since we need to be uniform, we decide the
project will have to be due the first day back after the break. The very thing
we were trying to prevent—having kids with homework over the holidays—has come
to pass. Jason and Tom’s project, long on images and short on interpretation,
gets a B. On the acknowledgments panel of their PowerPoint, Jason thanks his
Dad, “for help in proofreading, and for the pizza.” Motherhood, apparently, is
truly a thankless task.
In
the aftermath of the year’s assignment, we decide that maybe a post-break due
date isn’t such a bad idea after all. In fact, we agree, the thing to do is to
have draft workshops the first week back, and have the projects due the second
week. That will create a grading squeeze before the semester ends, but it seems
worth it. For teachers no less than students, there’s no substitute for
experience. We learn by doing—and redoing.
