No more busy work.
From the desk of Katie…
Highschool. Large classes, playing sports, clubs, social events, wanting to sleep late and stay up even later, driving, prom, and college applications. Highschool is supposed to be busy but not miserable, we should be able to have a life outside of school and homework, and that just isn’t possible if we are being loaded with busy work.
In the busy life of highschoolers, one thing we really want is meaningful assignments. I think there are teachers who think the work they assign is meaningful, but it is not. I have had some teachers who are able to bring more meaning to the work they assign. I wanted to pass along what I have learned from them in case you are looking for some tips on adding meaning to your assignments:
1. Talk to us. Talk to all of us. Not just the extroverted students who are going to talk anyway.
2. Stop teaching at us and try to make it more fun. We know you have a lot to cover. We can see the large textbooks and mountains of paper and we definitely know about the tests. Try to make it more fun by letting us work in table groups. Try to rotate us so we can work with different people every two weeks. Think about looking on YouTube for a video that will teach us instead of you. Even though it may be the same topic- we love videos and real life examples.
3. Listen to us. Stop worrying about covering material and listen to what we are saying. Some of the things get repeated over and over and we already know it. Come back to our comments and help us understand it more clearly.
4. Put us in groups. You can do this randomly or you can do it by boy-girl ratio or even have the kids pick the groups. Change the groups so we don’t get bored with each other and help us work with people we don’t normally talk to.
5. When we get the problems or work wrong, give us feedback. We do care about grades, but we really need to know different ways to figure things out. Putting a grade on the paper or not giving us any direction does not help us learn.
6. Lots of extra work doesn’t help. Too much work can stress us out especially when it comes to homework. No matter how many times you make us do it, if we don’t get it we just don’t get it. And the stress from all the extra work and our other classes makes it harder for us to succeed in getting the work done correctly.
My honors chemistry class was one of my favorites because it made chemistry real. The teacher was able to do the things listed above. He always made an effort to come around and talk with each group and help us through our problems and show us multiple problem solving methods.
It also helped that he made his expectations very clear so we knew what had to be done and were able to talk with him about how to get it done. Another thing he did was engage us on the first day of school with an experiment so that from day one we were fully alert and paying attention to him. On the first day he also showed us what curriculum had to be covered which helped us to understand why we focused more on one thing rather than another.
He always worked towards us having a full understanding even after the test on the subject. He would work with us until we felt comfortable with it. Doing that helped each new step make more sense and we, as a class, felt better doing the work which motivated us to complete the assignments. And he never loaded us with busy work, not even with a substitute. We rarely had any homework because we did our work in class, because we enjoyed it (as much as you can enjoy work) so we got it done. He made sure we had a full understanding without burying us in worksheets, and literature that none of us wanted to read or could even understand.
His class is proof that you can cover the content you need to cover without busy work and we will actually learn more if you do.