Unintentional Lessons

[omorka]

Okay, so the workshop I went to today was called "Motivating Students Who Don't Care." That, by the way, is one of the two Big Problems of public education in a district like mine. If we can get the students to care about their own achievement, even somewhat, the vast majority of our full-time problems evaporate and we can worry about other important issues like language issues, gifted education, and the AP program. (The other Big Problem is the standardized testing system and the vast and stinking accumulation of cruft that comes with it. The two are complexly interrelated.)

The workshop, as previously mentioned, sucked. It was presented by one of the district's "Safe and Drug-Free Schools Initiative" administrators. This particular one is not insane - she's the only one who doesn't automatically list "sex" as one of the Grave Dangers To Our Youth along with gangs, violence, and crack - but I'm not impressed by her despite that. She reinforced my lack of being impressed by using her lifelong struggle with mathematics as one of her examples of the sorts of things that demotivate our students. (I asked her later why it is that people who present workshops always seem to think it's fine to admit struggling with or being bad at math, but I have yet to meet one who admits to struggling with reading or history. To her credit, she came up with an answer: the people who do presentations are those who are comfortable with public speaking, who would tend to be people who are word-people and therefore at least not bad at reading. This does not explain why it's socially okay, even a point of pride, to admit being bad at math, but at least she made a reasonable attempt.) I didn't learn anything at all new during the workshop, but I did end up drawing an analogy that I think I will use the next time someone tries to argue that gifted ed is a luxury, not a necessity:

Imagine, for a moment, a student entering first grade who has never been in school before and comes from a typical environment for our district - lots of TV, not a whole lot of individual parental attention, never been read to, probably doesn't have any books in the house other than the TV listings and a Bible.

A) This hypothetical student enters first grade excited to be going to school - it's a sign of becoming a "big kid," s/he's eager to learn more about the world, plus now s/her has hir own crayons and glue. So s/he is given hir first graded assignment, and s/he works and works and works at it, gives it hir best effort . . . only to have it marked with a U for "unsatisfactory." So s/he tries even harder on the next assignment - with the same results. For hir first two years of formal schooling, hir best efforts are met every time, or almost every time, with failure.

After a couple of years of this, Student A almost invariably stops putting any effort into hir schoolwork. Why should s/he? It's not producing results. If s/he doesn't try, at least the effort isn't invariably wasted in the end. It would be insane to keep on trying, really, since it simply doesn't produce any results.

Student A almost always responds by taking on a label: "I'm stupid. I don't get this. I never will get this. Why should I bother trying?" And thereafter s/he doesn't put forth any significant effort at all.


B) The hypothetical student enters first grade excited to be going to school, etc. So s/he is given hir first graded assignment, and s/he works and works and works at it, gives it hir best effort . . . and gets it marked S for "satisfactory." Well, that's not too bad, right? So s/he tries just as hard on the next assignment . . . and gets the dreaded U. And for the next few years, hir performance is such that on some assignments s/he passes, and on some s/he does not, with approximately equal numbers of successes and failures or slightly more failures.

Now, sometimes Student Bs are stubborn and keep fighting their way through. Bullheadedness can be a virtue. But the more common response is for a Student B to come to the conclusion that, since s/he keeps putting out the same effort each time, and is getting inconsistent results, that there is no causative effect between effort and academic success. S/he develops an entirely external locus of control for hir grades. "Oh, the teacher doesn't like me and she gave me an F." "I got lucky on that test and passed it." "God gave me a good grade on my paper!" Etc. The upshot of this is often that the student loses any motivation to put forth effort, not because it doesn't make any difference, but because that way the student has control over hir grades. S/he feels like s/he has no way to tell whether s/he will pass or not if s/he tries - but if s/he doesn't try, s/he knows that s/he will fail, and that certainty is more tolerable than the out-of-control uncertainty of investing effort. (And s/he will often still blame the teacher for the failure.)

Awful, huh? Now which situation is worse?

If you said B, you're right. It's almost impossible to give a student hir locus of control back once s/he's lost it. Student A may be recoverable, because at some point along the line, some teacher who is paying attention may refer Student A for disability testing. If it turns out that Student A has an identifiable problem, even a semi-bogus one like ADHD, you can change hir self-label from "I'm stupid" to "I have X problem." And if appropriate accommodations or therapy for the problem are offered, the student may finally experience success - and after a couple of years of failure, if the child is resilient, a string of successes can be enough to give hir hir motivation back. "I'm not stupid! If I can work around X problem, I can do this!"


Now consider this third student:

C) The hypothetical student enters first grade excited to be going to school, etc. So s/he is given hir first graded assignment, and s/he works and works and works at it, gives it hir best effort . . . and gets it marked E for "excellent." Yay! Child is happy, parents (if they care at all) are happy, everything is good. Then on some assignment down the line, s/he doesn't put forth hir full effort on an assignment, in fact completes it with an absolute minimum of effort to get it done and turns it in.

And gets the E anyway.

In fact, s/he discovers that s/he can get a very high grade on pretty much any assignment by doing minimal work, simply because hir minimal effort is better than the honest best efforts of much of the class. What does this child learn?

First, Student C gets a label just like Student A does. "I'm smart."

Secondly, and more importantly as far as motivation goes, Student C learns an operational definition of smartness: "I'm smart because I can get good grades without having to work. Therefore, anyone who has to work for hir grades is not smart."

This student is hardly any more motivated than the two students above, but no one notices because s/he's not failing. That's bad in its own right, but even worse is what happens when Child C finally hits a level where s/he is finally required to exert effort to be successful, whenever that happens (be it fourth grade, the beginning of middle school, their first Pre-AP class in high school, or even not until their freshman year at a selective university).

Then, suddenly, performing at only minimal effort isn't working anymore. The student has two options:

i) Student C can decide to buckle down and get to work. This is more difficult than it sounds, because by this point Student C has no idea what appropriate academic effort looks like. Hir grades are likely to dip even if s/he does start putting forth effort, because until s/he gains hir feet, that effort is likely to be poorly focused and not very effective. It's entirely likely that s/he doesn't know how to study, and so ends up cramming for every test because s/he has no other method. Worst of all, though, Student C now thinks "I can't get good grades without working for them anymore. Therefore, I must not be smart anymore." This can seriously fuck with a kid's self-image, especially if it happens in middle school, when most kids' self-images are being fucked to Hel and gone anyway.

ii) Student C can decide to hold onto hir self-image as "smart." S/he continues to not put forth effort, and flounders in the class. To maintain the self-image, now Student C must stop doing any work at all. This will cause hir to fail the class, and s/he knows this, but s/he justifies it with "Oh, I don't care about that class. I don't like the [subject/teacher/textbook/etc.]." It is easier for this version of Student C to choose to fail on hir own terms than it is for hir to hit the books, put forth the effort, and have to lose hir identity as a smart kid. It is better to be thought of as smart and lazy than to be thought of as diligent but not smart.

It so happens that a lot of gifted girls take route (i) and a lot of gifted boys take route (ii). Route (i) is often identified by teachers as "overachieving" - if Student C is having to work so hard, maybe s/he should take the next lower class instead? And route (ii) is almost always identified by teachers as "underachieving" - if Student C would just apply hirself a little bit, surely s/he'd have no trouble with the class, but s/he need to put forth that effort. It's far from a gender lock; some boys do take route (i) and some girls route (ii). But there is a gender correlation.


[Edit for clarification: There are, of course, many students who do not fall into any of these three categories, who may either remain motivated or lose their motivation for other reasons. These are just the three that I've seen most often.]

Anyway, this is one of the big reasons why gifted kids at any level need challenges that meet them at their level, things that are hard enough that they have to struggle and exert significant effort on them, even if they're not part of the regular curriculum. They have to learn that just doing work does not make one "not smart anymore." And for kids like poor Student A up there, the same idea applies - if they're consistently not successful with the regular curriculum, give them something simple enough that if they honestly work at it, they can be successful at it. This does not mean that the teacher has to certify that they've mastered the grade level and pass them on - in fact, I'd much rather they not. But the student has to at least meet with success on some academic tasks, or they'll never master the grade level material at all, because they'll shut down.

Of course, ideas of "appropriate challenge" for an individual student fly in the face of the neatly-boxed grade-level expectations of the standardized testing system . . . but that's another rant altogether.

Comments

[quantumduck.livejournal.com]

Wow. I can't figure out where in all those examples I fit in. I think, depending on the subject, I had a mix of A and C. In both cases I think I decided to put forth minimal effort, and I told myself the system was totally arbitrary anyway. Of course, I had parents who RENFORCED the idea that the system was arbitrary, and that my intelligence had nothing to do with performance. They did not get around to talking about taking on challenges and learning to cope with tougher problems.

As an adult I am completely incapable of performing challenging tsks with confidence, precisely because I never had to do it and suceed. Failure without effort looked a lot like an honest attempt to suceed to most outside observers. It wasn;t until HSPVA that I had teachers who caught on and labelled me a slacker. What's funny is that I've never been a slacker, I just avoid doing the toughest jobs. If I pick my challenges I can always look smart! That's what I learned from non accelerated classes!

[omorka.livejournal.com]

From what I know of your educational issues, I would say you're probably a C(ii) by my definition, with some A-like aspects caused by minor English-language-arts relative deficits and semi-serious attention-focus issues. But it's possible you don't fit any of the categories at all. They're not meant to be comprehensive. Some kids lose their academic motivation due to totally non-academic factors, like the death of a parent or pressures at their 28-hour-a-week job. Some kids manage to stay motivated despite all sorts of pressures.

While I believe my parents did a lot of things wrong with me and Brother #1, they did always make sure that we were set tasks that we found challenging even when our schoolwork was a breeze. That's probably why I didn't collapse when I hit MSMS, when suddenly things were honestly hard.

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

Chalk me under (C), definitely. My approach to challenge, though, was entirely different; I got confrontational. If I thought an assignment was pointless, useless, or without merit, I'd invariably do badly at it, and openly (and loudly) blame the teacher for wasting my time with make-work.

My two bugbears were "projects" and notebooks. By "projects" I refer to things like science fairs (mandatory for all students, regardless of enrollment in any science class, every year of high school) and the like. Not only were projects make-work (what science fair project ever discovered anything new?), they were expensive and entailed a lot of physical assembly work which I could expect no parental help for whatever. No project I ever worked on did better than a B, more usually a C, and I learned nothing whatever from the projects I undertook.

Notebooks... well, those were worse. Notebooks, every time I had to keep them, consisted not of taking notes and keeping them, which might actually have been useful, but in keeping old graded assignments in precise chronological order, neat in an expensive multi-pocket binder, and getting a grade based on how complete and how neat the thing was (rather than how useful it was, which was absolutely nil). All my failing 6-week grades (two) in my schoolastic career can be directly linked to notebook requirements.

I found diagramming sentences both absurdly easy and absurdly pointless, but since I was good at that I didn't fail those.

Anything which I felt actually attempted to teach something with a point I fought for- sometimes at the top of my lungs with teachers who didn't or couldn't explain the lesson. (In honors Algebra and Trigonometry this was a regular occurence- the teacher would spend ten minutes talking over the heads of the class, I'd spend ten minutes thrashing out some sense from her, then I'd spend twenty minutes re-teaching the material to the handful of other people in the class... and I'd end up getting the lowest grade, with everyone I re-taught doing significantly better than I did.)

As you might guess, one of my major problems in my one year of college was an utter lack of discipline...

science fair; make work

[teegarden.livejournal.com]

in all of my experiences, the one science fair project i ever learned about that came up with something new was this:
http://www.sltrib.com/utah/ci_2841984

when in elementary school, i didn't think of science fairs as bothersome, but just incomprehensible. i did not understand what the adults wanted. i would create projects showing what i liked in science (i was a Radio Shack junkie from ages 8 to 16) but did not do well in them because (as i was to learn later) i was neither flashy nor novel in my approaches. my projects would demonstrate, nothing more.

i too disliked the notebooks. that, i think, is one of the reasons why i have always been lukewarm to, and have difficulty with now, professional portfolios. i know the difference and the importance, but my emotions are still back when.

diagramming sentences to me was easy but pointless, too. however, when i became a linguistics major, suddenly i discovered real diagramming, and the real purpose of it. this is something i will teach my students in english classes, intead of that nonsense. and my plans for live action sentence diagramming via the tree method should be entertaining, at least to me. :)

Re: science fair; make work

[omorka.livejournal.com]

One of the most depressing experiences I had this last year was serving as a judge for this year's science fair. Most of the projects were awful - unclear concepts, poor organization, glitzy presentation without substance. There were a few good ones scattered here and there; identifying which ones were my students (we were grading them with the names covered up) was absurdly easy, because at least their charts and graphs were clear and correctly labeled. Each one had to be graded on ten scales with a score of 1 to 10 for each scale, and then at the end you added all the scores together for a final score on the usual 1 to 100 grading scale. Of the six I scored, I had one 88 (I'm pretty sure that one was JV's), one 81 (another former student), and four scores in the forties to sixties (one of which was a student of mine at the time).

I went back later and looked at everyone else's scores. Projects that I would have given scores in the forties to were getting eighties and nineties from most of my colleagues. Their grades seemed to correlate, not with the strength of the science or even the coolness of the idea, but with the neatness of the presentation and the glitziness of the backdrop board. I was just about sick.

Fortunately, the judges at the next level up beyond the school saw through the glittercrud and awarded the high scores to two students who had done actual research. One had tested the heat insulation of different materials, some storebought, some novel; the other had tested the sized of turtles in various local creeks, ponds, and waterways, and then tested the water for common pollutants to see if there was a correlation. Both obvious, and neither earth-shattering, but I have no doubt that both those students actually learned something from the project. I have no such confidence in any of the six I graded.

[omorka.livejournal.com]

I've never been particularly good at keeping "graded notebooks," either, but in my case it's because good notetaking for me is merely the act of outputing the inputs to seal the lock on them. I usually don't ever refer to them again; the fact that I heard it and wrote it means I remember it. The teachers I had who graded notebooks invariably wanted us to do t-charts or some other "formal" note strategy. This actually works very well for some types of students; their only error was assuming that if it works for one, it works for all, and that therefore they should force everyone to do it. What you're describing is more a portfolio than a notebook in proper teacher jargon, as teegarden already said, and in general if a teacher is going to grade a portfolio s/he should keep it in a file folder instead of forcing a student to keep it in a binder.

I disagree with you on projects as a teaching/assesment tool in general, although certainly there are many teachers who assign really bad projects. Making all of one's students do independent research is absolutely crucial, and if you only ever require them to write about it instead of present it you're favoring your language-arts learners over your visual and interpersonal ones. Moreover, it's much easier for a teacher to set each student an appropriate level of challenge on a project than it is to do it on a test, and much easier to give a student partial control over the topic and form.

My only comment on your advanced math class there is to wonder whether that teacher is still in the profession, and if so, can I go kick the living shit out of her for despoiling my subject. But that's just me.

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

"I disagree with you on projects as a teaching/assesment tool in general, although certainly there are many teachers who assign really bad projects. Making all of one's students do independent research is absolutely crucial, and if you only ever require them to write about it instead of present it you're favoring your language-arts learners over your visual and interpersonal ones. Moreover, it's much easier for a teacher to set each student an appropriate level of challenge on a project than it is to do it on a test, and much easier to give a student partial control over the topic and form."

Virtually every project I was ever assigned (as opposed to reports) consisted of, essentially, these instructions:

"Okay, go make a project. Whatever, we don't care. A typewritten report must accompany it, but you get no class time for research and no computer lab time or access for typing. You have to use this three-fold backboard sold by this outfit that makes money off of captive buyers in schools. Everything is at your expense, on your time, with no help from a teacher who wouldn't have time to do anything for you even if he/she were so inclined. Oh, and we hope you passed your English requirement for writing bibliographies. And if all you can access is the one book the school library might or might not have on your subject, sucks to be you."

Said projects were static; students were absolutely not required to do live presentations.

"My only comment on your advanced math class there is to wonder whether that teacher is still in the profession, and if so, can I go kick the living shit out of her for despoiling my subject. But that's just me."

She was one of the BETTER math teachers I ever had, actually. Better than the one in fourth grade who would assign 100 multiplication questions to be done in 60 seconds, with automatic 0 grades for any paper which did not have every single problem answered. (And there was one I managed to miss in junior high maths, Mattingly, whose teaching method consisted solely of rote reading from the textbook with no support and extremely strict grading. She had extreme high flunk rates... and then she moved on to freshman HS English, where my grades consisted of one B, four Cs, and a D/F one six-week period. USELESS...)

Anyway, Juanita Gregory was supposed to have retired (being past 65 my senior year), but was brought back part-time because no replacement could be found for her (at least none willing to relocate anywhere near Warren, TX). That was thirteen years ago; she's certainly not teaching anymore, and I don't even know if she's -alive- anymore.

[omorka.livejournal.com]

Said projects were static; students were absolutely not required to do live presentations.

Erk. What's the point of doing the backboard if you're not presenting? I would say someone slept through their pedagogy course, but if this was endemic, it sounds like a building principal (or two, or three) decided "we need more projects" and failed to give the teachers any direction.

I give class time for research papers/projects, but not for problem-solving ones; my assumption is that students will access our school lab and library computers before or after school for just typing time. Having said that, I probably wouldn't do that in a rural district, where students don't have community centers with computer labs, and can't take Metro home if they stay past the time the school buses run. (I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a high school student to cite sources, and I always give them the format I want the sources cited in, as it's usually a different style from the one their English teacher uses.)

[cifarelli]

(Sorry, comment deleted and reposted due to a rather important mistyping.)

I am Student C. High school was easy. College wasn't. I did a combination of i) and ii) in my math and science classes, and then eventually switched to being an English major because that came more easily to me. I knew I wasn't motivated, but no one else was able to recognize that. And it was far too hard to say "I'm not sure what I'm in college FOR and I might be better off doing something else right now" when I was the high school valedictorian and college was what was always expected of me -- I didn't view myself as having any other options. I did eventually find my motivation near the end of my junior year, once I'd decided I wanted to be a librarian and had mapped out a path to get there.

However, to this day I regret not having tried harder in my math and science courses in college. I don't think I'd enjoy being a biologist (which was my goal going in), but I think I would enjoy something in the field of computer science, or possibly engineering, depending on the kind. I KNOW I'm capable of doing high-level math and science, but at the time I was in college I wasn't willing to put forth the effort. I sometimes wonder if it would be worth it to go back and try to do some of it now, or at some point down the road.

[memeslayer.livejournal.com]

I'm definitely C, probably C(ii)...but I never hit the point where minimum effort wasn't enough. My problem has been motivating myself to *do* the minimum effort...

I am the uber-lazy. :-(

[omorka.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you totally went to the wrong college. Too late to fix that now, though. You'll just have to pick someplace tougher for grad school.

[memeslayer.livejournal.com]

Nah, I'm just that good. :-p

[teegarden.livejournal.com]

damn. big thing i've worried about since getting into the certification program was "how to movitate students." and class after class has squat about it. textbooks have a paragraph (each) about it. nothing useful nowhere. i try some experiments, get creative a bit, and get no feedback from instructors and professors. it seems to be the topic no one talks about, no one cares about, or everyone wants to hide from.

(dangle them participles, baby!)

[omorka.livejournal.com]

The reason no one talks about it is that no one really knows how to do it. There are techniques that work for individual students, but what works wonderfully on one student (say, a socially adept but intellectually average one) fails miserably on another (an introverted and arrogant intellectual prodigy, say). Moreover, how well each technique works also depends heavily on who is using it; I am miserably bad at the touchy-feely techniques, but with a certain type of student, an "I'm disappointed in you" from me works wonders for lighting a fire under them.

You'll just have to boldly go where we've all stumbled before (and split infinitives while you're at it).

[teegarden.livejournal.com]

"math = hard" is a common trait of our collective culture in the country. not all subcultures have it, but most do. announcing with pride and humor how bad one is at math = accepted as a social lubricant, like being polite. it's an attempt to cohese us, to draw us together. amongst people who are not educators or engineers or the like, i would say it would work best. amongst educators and/or engineers, i would find it insulting and in opposition to the professional workplace. :/

"reading = hard" is not as common in our culture, but still there. our television and movies and mainstream literature (including this here int-ar-net thingie) have us reading all the time, about all sorts of stuff. yet, if you pressed someone on "critical reading" and the like, i betcha you'd get a lot of "reading = hard." i see it as a left-brain / right-brain dichotomy in our culture.

also, i think that math itself has more prestige than (mere, ordinary, simple) reading. "i've got a math degree" is thought of as being more prestige-worthy, more edumacated, than "i've got a literature degree". math is _harder_ than reading (than the type of reading most people understand as "reading"). therefore, we say "i'm not so good at the hard stuff" and voila, others agree with you. it's the education presentation person's alternative to cracking a joke at the beginning of the presentation. this is elementary public speaking stuff.

this here is my best shot at "why it's socially okay." :)