Why I No Longer Really Care That All Students Do Assigned Homework
I could have looked at my own record
Why I No Longer Really Care That All Students Do Assigned Homework
I was a remedial Math Instructor for decades. I still teach a little, at one of the several franchise teaching/tutoring outfits. I used to care very much whether students do their assigned homework. Now, I’m letting go of that. Here’s why:
1) Hard-working students do the best, but slackers often pass. I should have looked at my own freshman and sophomore years at high school and university more closely. A friend of mine from high school said, years later, that she envied my academic gifts. Knowing I was a B- student, I asked her why--“because I never saw you take books home from school,” was her reply. My friends on the college dorm floor often observed that while I was always reading, I was rarely reading my course work. In both high school and university, I geared up during my junior and senior years and got my acceptance, got my degree. I sometimes wonder how different my life would be if I worked harder in high school and college, but I don’t dwell on it.
2) Students often don’t do their best work until they see the connection between mastering the subject and being the selves they want to be. I use math every single day, to frame problems and make models. My youngest daughter, however, doesn’t see that. She prefers modeling via art or music or science. There’s nothing wrong with that. My oldest daughter is a math major, but that probably will change when she finds another passion. By the time any student knows he needs, let’s say, Statistics to be a great professional in his chosen career, that student will be motivated to study Statistics. There is a reasonable chance that, by that time, Statistics will be very hard for that student to pass. I’ll take that chance. I didn’t do well at Calculus at college, so the first thing I did after being hired to teach math was re-take Calculus, even though it was two levels above what I was teaching. I did that because I wanted to tell my students what they would use their math for, and to prove to myself that Calculus wasn’t hard. Internal motivation beats external motivation every time.
3) I’d rather encourage than judge. I’d follow my students’ progress through upper level courses on their way to a degree, if they let me; my door was always open for extra help. Roughly half of the students who “made it” were the ones I’d supposed would make it. So much for what I thought! If there is a place for hard work in a student’s progress, I’ll say so. In math, it’s clear that if your current class is two levels above your ability, you need to relearn the lower level, most likely at the same time you’re trying to pass your class. (This is why a “C” in college math is often the grade that required the most work.) This is also true of mastering the SAT and ACT math tests; coaching can boost you score five or ten percentile points, but if you want a 90th percentile score, you must know the vast majority of the material, and that means review and hard work. But if a student concludes that the goal is not worth the effort, I don’t mind. There are always other goals.
So, when my students now tell me they didn’t do the problems I assigned them, I might ask “why?’ but I don’t hector them, and I don’t warn them they could fail, whatever “failing” means. I say “okay, let’s move ahead.” And we usually do just that.