My latest at Edutopia stems from a conversation I had with National Teacher of the Year Sean McComb and Maryland Teacher of the Year Jody Zepp last month at the Maryland State House for the Maryland State Education Association (MSEA). We talked about everything under the sun, but one of the things that made people shift in their chairs was my proclamation that we need to cut teacher time in half. Check the flow:
However, in countries that have done away with those arguments, they’ve learned that teachers do much better by having less classes, less students, and more time for the mounds of paperwork they’re obligated to grade. McComb agreed as well, stating that, if we do the math based on the number of students he has compared to the time he gets in school to grade, he has about 20 seconds per student to grade their papers and give feedback. Of course, he would have to work at home and work extra (unpaid) time to finish his grading, but it seems wholly inefficient to make teachers do work at home when they could just get the time right there in school.
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When I was in social services I used to joke that I could get my paperwork done just fine if only I could get rid of those darn clients. Of course, what obviously needed to go was an awful lot of that darn paperwork.
I realize that teachers are heaped with mounds of paperwork having to do with all this “data collection” they’re expected to do these days, but as far as grading assignments, it’s completely within a teacher’s control how much to assign in the first place. I think there’s some kind of assumption that more is better or at least that every teacher should assign so much per night, and often I think very little thought is put into the quality rather than the quantity of the assignments. In math particularly, I’ve never understood assigning more than a small handful of problems each night. Either the students are getting it, in which case what’s the point of doing dozens and dozens of the same types of problems over and over again (unless your goal is actually to get them to hate math), or else they’re not, in which case what’s the point of making them founder through dozens of problems because either they’ll do it wrong and learn bad habits or they’ll give up and feel like failures. The small handful of problems assigned can be gone over the next morning in class and – voila! – you’ve cut your grading down by 75%.
I realize subjects like English and History can be a bit more challenging since they’re so writing intense, but there too, fewer, smarter assignments are far better than hours of grammar drills every night (unless, again, your goal is to get kids to hate English). I highly recommend Alfie Kohn’s THE HOMEWORK MYTH. There is no evidence that homework in the early grades has any benefit at all, and it’s even questionable at the high school level.
Been saying for years: Teach a period, plan. Teach a period, plan. If on a block schedule, you teach maybe twice a day; traditional schedule, maybe 3 times a day.