TTLF Tonight Show

            Hello and welcome you’re tuning into Teacher: The Last Frontier. I’m your host Dalton Blackmon and I’m joined today by my colleague Augustus Phluareo. Last week on TTLF we reported on the future of teaching and technology this week we will be reviewing the last two hours of today’s debate in Class 250.

DB: Now Augustus we heard today from Mrs. Johnson about her views on grading in class. She says that maybe we should do away with participation grades.

AP: You know I couldn’t agree more

DB: Why’s that?
AP: Teacher’s today, thanks to government bureaucracy, no longer care if their students actually retain the information. As long as students just show up to class they will get an A, it doesn’t even matter if they are actually paying attention in class. You get an A for just being alive and sitting in a seat!

DB: Can you blame them? The state and federal government require these teachers to prove that their students are learning and the easiest way to do that is show them that they are passing the class. And while we’re in the generation of short attention spans the teachers are having a hard time getting these students to pay attention. And there are quotas they have to fill in order for the school to get a paycheck. I’m not saying its right but can you blame them?

AP: I’ll admit that it’s also the duty of the parents to discipline their kids to do their homework and study and pay attention in class. But some of the blame lies on the teachers. Many of these teachers are using outdated teaching techniques to teach their students. The techniques they’re trying to teacher these students is thirty years old! This generation of kids doesn’t learn the same way you and I learned back in the day! These teachers need to adapt to the needs of their students! Make what they’re learning interesting and relevant!

DB: Like allowing students to use iPads and laptops to do class work and turn in homework?

AP: Exactly. You know I had a friend of mine’s son went to a psychology class and one of the things his teacher made the class do is wear a blind fold the next day. From the moment the students entered school in the morning till they got to his class, whether it was their first class or their last class. Every student had a friend guide them from class to class all day and stumbled around the halls. The whole thing was for the students to get into the mind of a blind person and feel what it was like to be blind. Then they wrote a paper on their experiences and explain what they had learned. That right there is making the learning experience interesting and relevant.

DB: I wish I had that teacher mine just made us read a textbook and complete some multiple choice questions. Alright moving on to our next subject. Mr. Peterson went even farther with this in saying that we should reconsider putting in homework into the student’s overall final class grade. Your thoughts?

AP: I don’t know if I agree with him on this. Homework is a way to test to see where a student is in their learning.

DB: I agree with him in part. A lot of students as soon as they leave the class will get together and will give each other the answers. The whole point of homework is to challenge the students to study, know, and comprehend the information. If these students are all cheating off of each other’s paper it has destroyed the whole point of having homework.

AP: Well what the alternative?

DB: Okay let me detour here so I can explain it more clearly. There are some teachers that will give their students points on tests for putting their names on the paper.

AP: What? No, that’s absurd I’ve never heard of that before.

DB: Well it’s true.

AP: I don’t believe that.

DB: Nonetheless it happens. Back to what I was saying; I think, as I think most people will agree with me, it should not add points to their grade. Most schools will not add points to the student’s grade but they will subtract it from their grade. Because its common place it’s expected of you, you shouldn’t get points for just writing your name down. I think in the same way doing your homework should also be commonplace. I don’t think students should get points added to their final grade for doing their homework but the students should get points off their final grade for not doing the homework.

AP: Well that’s not going to stop people from cheating. It would only remove the reward for cheating but not the incentive. By cheating they would only escape punishment for not doing the work themselves. To escape punishment is still an incentive.

DB: Well that’s where we would have to redefine what homework is for. Today homework is just another tool used by the school or some politician to brag about their program. It would be like saying that the school has ninety seven percent of its students passing and graduating but the percentage of students who actually learned something and retained the information for years later the percentage would be more like thirty percent. Homework is for their, the students, benefit. The homework is supposed to be a tool for the teacher to see what information the student has retained and how the student learns. It’s like a survey; you fill out the questionnaire and give it back to the person who gave it to you. The surveyor then reads over the questionnaires and the answers everyone put and he gets a general idea of the consensus among the population. In a similar way the teacher gets a consensus of how the class as a whole is progressing but also how the individual is progressing. It is meant to inform the teacher of how the individual students learn so that the teacher can adapt and or help the student to understand better.

AP: That’s not the only thing that would have to change. Many of these students get very easy A, B, C style questions on their homework. It’s a cookie cutter style of homework.

DB: One size does not sit all.

AP: Exactly, every one of these students is different when it comes to learning. These students aren’t being trained to think critically; they’re being trained how to “memorize” some stuff for their tests and when it comes to take the test they just spit out whatever the teacher told them. After that they won’t be tested on it again and they won’t remember any of it.

DB: I agree, my friend a few years back was in college and had a chemistry class at Kennesaw State and on the first day the professor told his class that even if they got hundreds on all their tests that would only account for sixty percent of their final grade. The other forty percent was the final where they were given a list of scenarios where they would have to apply their knowledge of all the content they had studied and think critically to pass the exam. The professor did not count the homework as part of the final grade but counted it as preparation for the final.

AP: I don’t think that would fly in almost any school.

DB: I know but it is an interesting concept.

AP: Well it looks like that’s all we’ve got time to talk about. We’ll be back after the break but first a word from of sponsor.