Farewell Korea, jambo Kenya with @pzaich

The age old debate over homework

Recently I stumbled upon an article from the New Yorker called Louis Menand: The End of Homework. As a teacher, the philosophical battle over assigning homework versus not is continuously pumping through my veins. Most of us know the obvious however that worksheets and filler homework is a waste of everyone’s time. I agree with that for sure and I also agree that kids need to be kids and therefore have time to play and to relax. 

That being said, I don’t know if abolishing all homework is the right answer either. In my opinion, the work that I assign students is purposeful and is used to review concepts or give them individual time to write without their classmates in the same room. Three items that I find valuable as homework are reading, math, and 20 minutes of writing. While I will raise my hand and admit guilt, that I do assign more homework than those three items, this article made me think twice about that avenue. 

Each night I get an email saying a student forgot this at school or his or her computer would not work to do their blog post. If students had an hour in class to complete their work, then these questions would not arise. That said, with so much material to cover as a teacher, some times it seems impossible to give students that luxury.

But, would it be the worst thing to get through less in order to give students a break at home? Teaching is South Korea, I see first hand the stress that my 10 to 11 year olds are under due to the pressure from home and society. To allow students to take a break (not overload them with work), would be ideal. 

Heading to break, I think that I will come back and try out sticking to my word about only have students practice math, reading and writing at home for a limited amount of time. Looking forward to posting about my success and failures in thinking through my own philosophy on homework. 

Netiquette essential to teach

With winter break only four days away, I wanted to find a lesson on online etiquette or as it is now deemed—netiquette. I am motivated to be sure that my students are operating as good digital citizens since I know that they are respectful, kind ones in person. That being said, the difficulties with online interactions are heightened by the anonymity of interacting online. It is hard for kids to see the human side to texting, chatting, or emailing when they can’t see the person’s face. I am going to be starting to use the commonsense media lessons for grades 3-5 beginning in January as a way to build into my tech innovation the importance of digital literacy and common sense. 

Let it snow let it snow let it snow

Pumpkin spice pancakes joythebaker.com

Skype=success

Today it was such a joy to officially have our novel study groups Skype with Springer School in Los Altos. Each group had one computer, and about 30 minutes to discuss their novels. Overall I would call it a succes as we only had a few technical hiccups where video dropped out and we had to go to imessaging back and forth instead. While I don’t think there was intense intellectual discussion, it made my heart soar to watch my students interacting with 12 year olds in another country.

The power of technology at our finger tips is incredible. To be able to work with people you’ve never met as an adult is useful and as a kid it is like magic. I am incredibly proud of my students and how they adapt and and run with lessons I give. At times I forget how young they are and today I was just so proud of their ability to adapt to technology. See here for links on our class website to their blogs where they discuss their own reactions to the Skype session today.

 

All this being said, today we had our first snow in Korea. At the end of the day, I noticed all of us were more excited about snow than math so we put aside our computers, pencils and paper and took time to just be kids. Playing in the white powder snow was an incredible feeling! We were all kids without any cares in the world. 

Group work evaluations

It is always hard as teachers, for us to judge how well our students work in groups. As we meet with various teams, inevitably we miss what occurs in the others. So, rather than evaluate the groups myself, for our novel studies, I asked my students to work together to evaluate each other. 

Last week, students filled out an online Google Form where they self evaluated as well as evaluated their group members. Then I took the data and created an excel sheet with the names of the students and their evaluations next to them (see below). 

Students were then given a handout with the following questions: 

•   With your group, look over the evaluations of your members. Please remember this does not include your self-evaluation.


•  As a group, what areas are you struggling in?


• This week, how could your ENTIRE group work together to improve these areas?


•  If your group has 100 points to divide up amongst members based on their work, respect for others, on task behavior etc., how would your group divide up the points? Note, everyone does NOT have to earn the same number of points. You must come to an agreed upon decision as a group and be able to justify why you divided the points up as you did.

• As an individual, what areas do your group members wish you could improve in?


• This week, how could you individually improve in those areas?

In their group, they worked together to answer the above questions. Listening to the conversations of the students I noticed the following both positive and negative: 

• Dividing up the points between group members was difficult and a bit confusing at first


• Some groups chose to use math to figure out how to divide up the points


• Students conversed heavily and had some difficulty in being open to say that 


• Explaining what to actually do was tough as students need more time to work on understanding how to give specific ways to improve