More Coffee, Please

The last twelve days have been spent dealing with the fallout of the last major assignment—and “fallout” is the best word for it. I was not at all pleased with the after effects of my experiment in assigning real work to my students.

For my college prep students— which is full of kids who represent the top 20–30% of the junior class—fully half of them didn’t do the assignment. Of the half that did, only three or four did it well, earning anything close to a competent grade.

Tempt not a desperate man, children.

The ones that did it right, and the ones that did it poorly, sat down with me individually and we went over the English department rubric and we negotiated a grade. Generally speaking, there were two choices—they did it well, and they were going to get a good grade, or they did poorly. The former were happy and excited, the latter a little less so. But they all reported knowing what they needed to do to fix it.

So I made them. They were going to re-write the essay—not because it was going to change their grade any, but because they needed to do it the right way. You get the grade you earned, and you learn to do it the right way.

And MRHS has given me all sorts of new tools to make sure that happens. In addition to the standard detention, there’s also the learning lab—where they have access to a teacher to help them. They really don’t like the idea of a losing a study hall to learning lab.¹

Much the same deal was struck with the ones who didn’t do it, though they had the option of a slight improvement over a 0 so there was more incentive. We also had a long conversation about what they could have done to not let that happen in the future—why did it occur, what were the proper steps to learn from it, and what shall happen next?

Ultimately, they’re all writing it. They’re all writing it well. It’s like I told my seniors—they’re all walking at graduation, and my juniors are not failing. Not one of them.

Death first!²

One of the things that I love about the “new” English department is the time that is spent getting work done. Too often it’s too easy to give into the temptation to go home and to not spend the time as a team working towards a common goal. Department meetings that go for a half hour do nothing but convince people that there’s no need for department meetings.

So last week, we spent longer than we should have—until after 4—looking at how the year has gone and where we go next. Summer reading was a big part of that discussion, and so was student writing—which I love.

It took a good long while, but one of the things we managed to do was hammer out a really solid set of evaluation rubrics for student essays. I’ve already sat down and used them twice with my classes, and the rubric does what it’s supposed to do—push kids to develop their work more, and to really think about what it is they’re trying to say.

But what was equally valuable is that, for the first time I know of, students will be required to go look somewhere other than a webpage for information. Google and Wikipedia are not going to be acceptable places to go for a research paper. Students will have to dig into the “invisible internet” and take advantage of the resources that they have access to.

Oh. And the rubric makes the damn five paragraph essay pretty hard to justify and use, as well. They’re in high school—they can start writing like it.

At this point, some of my juniors have stood up and spoken to the class for the second time in month. They’ve figured out how to not be horrible at PowerPoint³ and I’ve been really impressed. They’re starting to go above what is required and starting to look to excel. I had two of them make up pamphlets for their presentation, and it was amazing—and yesterday, the last speaker dominated. She had some things to improve on in the materials side, but she spoke well.

And for a citizen in a democracy, that’s just a necessity.

The vast difference between boys and girls continues to stun—and dismay—me.

My first period class was assigned a task as their test on colonial literature—because whenever I can make someone do something rather than regurgitate it, I will. They were to create a two-scene skit about the colonial period that incorporated the qualities of colonial lit that we had been discussing.

We set a schedule. We defined benchmarks along the way—how will you know if you’re on track? They defined the criteria for what it should look like.

Boom, they were off. They split into two groups, along gender lines. Within twenty minutes, the girls were brainstorming, had a plot idea, and were working away. There was giggling, yes, and off topic conversation, yes, but they were working. They were getting it done.

My boys didn’t move from their desks. They stood and waited. After ten minutes of them starting at one another, I asked when one of them was going to step-up and be a leader. One finally did, and they got into a circle… where they continued to stare at one another.

Future of our country right there.

I’m all for women doing well—and they are doing well, achieving more than men in every facet of academics and dominating the college landscape. When I take classes, I’m often the only man in the room, especially when they’re “tough.” However, I firmly believe that in 300 million Americans are going to compete with 1.2 billion Chinese and 1.1 billion Indians, we’re going to need everyone and not just 52% of the population.

Never mind the social problems when those boys don’t “step-up” in their own families. That’s a much longer blog than I have time for…

I had my students read and reflect on this article. I got two responses which were memorable:

I started to read the article, and then got bored and couldn’t finish… just kidding! I had to pick on you. I think that it really has a point…

and

I started to read the article, but couldn’t finish. It seemed too complicated and I didn’t get it.

Guess which student is re-reading the article with me during their lunch? Slacking is not an option. Nor is not thinking!⁴

My tenth grade students are struggling through Antigone right now, which is killing me. I love that play… So we’re going to make a comic, see if that helps the more visual among them. Depending on how we do, maybe I can get it posted up here.

1 Nor should they. Study halls remain a joke—they’re where we put students not because they need time to do the work, but because we don’t have enough classrooms and teachers to give them something to do every period. ↺

2 A cookie to the identifier of that quote… ↺

3 Well, some of them… ↺

4 I might have had more sympathy if the student weren’t ranked in the top 30% of the class. As it is, that was just giving up out of the mistaken belief he/she wouldn’t be called on it. ↺

Gregarious

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