the beginning

I completely agree with April’s post that weather or not students succeed or improve completely depends on how we define achievment. Achievments will variey from student to student, and thats something I think more educators need to gain an understanding of. Too often do we categorize and label our students, we need to see our students as the individuals they are.

I also liked that she commented on homework loads. Homework is an issue we argued about in EPS390 with our prof. Some educators disagree with giving homeework, but I think most give it. When teachers assign homework, I think they have to know their students and how much they can handle. From my pre-internship experience, it seems to me that their are some students who could not mentally or physically handle homework, but many students lack the responsability to even atempt to complete homework. This is where I have an issue. While I was teaching in an average middle class school in Regina, I assigned homework only once. The students knew when it was due and what my expectations were, yet only about 5 out of 28 were complete on presentation day.

Now you might be thinking, maybe the assignment was too difficult. Well I was in a grade 6/7 split and the assignment was to design a poster about themselves and where their families came from. I gave 2 or more hours of class time to work on the posters and then it was homework. The fact that only 5 students were able to present on time seemed to me like a lack of responsability and a lack of caring. Once the posters were complete, they looked great and I posted them up in the hallway, but getting them done was a real challenge. There must be a way to make our students more accountable. Docking late marks didn’t seem to help. Any advice for the future?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 9:33 pm and is filed under Technology & Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.