Should Teachers Assign Homework?

A few days ago, teacher (and founder of the short lived but hilarious #pencilchat hashtag) John T. Spencer wrote Ten (Really Useful) Ways to Cheat-Proof Your Classroom. Cheating - especially in the form of plagiarism - is a demon I am constantly trying to exorcise from my students and I think nine of Spencer's suggestions do just that. There's only one that I find disagreeable.

Spencer suggests that cheating takes place largely on homework assignments so the easiest way to solve the problem is to simply stop assigning homework. This is the equivalent to sawing off your hand to ease the pain of a hangnail. Homework is needed not only as a summative assessment but also as a means of teaching responsibility and accountability. What standard are we setting by making students responsible for nothing more than physically showing up to class?

While I agree that there are still far too many teachers assigning crosswords and word finds, meaningful homework absolutely has a place in the classroom. Perhaps there needs to be discussions in schools about what homework is and why it should be assigned in the first place. If a teacher struggles to answer these two questions regarding a particular assignment, then it's probably not worth assigning in the first place.

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When Parents Put Sports Before Education

A student came to me this morning asking if he could turn his homework in late. I asked him why it wasn’t done, and he responded by giving me a scene-by-scene rundown of his evening.

After school he had practice for the school's modified lacrosse team. He went home, grabbed a quick bite to eat, and then was driven over to the ice rink to practice with the town’s hockey team. After that practice, we immediately went to another hockey practice, this time for a travel team he plays for.

This boy left his house for school at about 7am and, other than a hasty dinner, didn’t return home until about 10pm. No wonder my essay didn’t get done.

Sure, I could have reminded him that I gave two days in class to work on it. I could have also told him that school should come before sports. I could have done a lot of things, but instead I gave him a pass to come up to my room and work on the assignment during one of his free periods. Why? Because it isn’t wrong (or abnormal) for a middle school boy to desire nothing more than living and breathing sports. What’s wrong here is the fact that his parents are letting him do it.

I don’t know all the details, and I’m certainly not going to put myself in the lose-lose situation of trying to explain to someone how to raise their kids, but this boy’s schedule just screams poor decision-making.

My students are reading Todd Strasser’s The Wave, and there’s a cautionary line in the book that we are discussing today in class. Interestingly enough, it fits this scenario nicely.

"This experiment involves young, impressionable kids. Sometimes we forget that they are young and haven’t developed the judgment we hope they’ll have someday.”

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Modeling How to Use the Flip Camera with Students

Every day, my team begins our daily meeting by entering homework into the team calendar on our school website. It's a nice way to communicate to parents, and also serves as a way to hold kids accountable when they are absent. Understandably so, it's not the most popular page on the website. Based on a quick poll in class, I'd guess less than a third of our kids frequent it more than once a week.

I'm trying to change that. For the past week, I've been taking the last 10 minutes of my silent reading group and filming skits with them that go along with the day's homework. It's giving me practice with my new Flip camera (yesterday's post explained how I got it), and since I upload the finished movie directly into the calendar, I'm assuming more kids are visiting it from home.

Right now the skits are more about the message than the process. I'm the one who writes up the dialogue, and the one who records and edits the video. But I'm hoping by modeling this process on a daily basis, students will soon be able to take over the task. Actually, that's already happening. Today, several students knocked on my door to ask if they could borrow the Flip for a Social Studies project.

Those kids probably aren't going to check the homework tonight, but I can guarantee they wouldn't have thought of adding a technology piece to their project if they hadn't seen how it was done first.

Here are our video skits for the last two days. I hope you enjoy!

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