Non-teachers: do you expect teachers to work during off-hours?

[Dangerosa]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

I’d suggest that you ask him to do his Algebra, and while he does it, pretend you’ve got two other kids arguing over whose pencil it is, and a third kid who is asking you for a bathroom break even though you’ve explained procedures for bathroom breaks two dozen times already and they don’t need to ask, and a fourth kid who’s crying for some mysterious reason, and a fifth and sixth kid who are raising their hand because they “don’t get it,” not having attempted the assignment yet. Then when he turns in his paper, make 20 copies of it and grade each one of them while the crier continues crying and won’t tell you what’s going on, and the pencil-arguers are now hissing insults at each other, and the bathroom kid hasn’t come back yet, and oh yeah, fourteen other kids have finished the assignment and are waiting on your feedback.

Dangerosa, I fully agree with you that immediate feedback is an ideal. I do try to give it to students when I can, but it’s almost always during classtime, when a parent won’t necessarily see it (e.g., I walk around looking at classwork, maybe point out an error to one student, suggest another way of solving a problem to a second student, stop the class and re-explain directions if a bunch of folks seem unclear, or pull a small group aside to help them if I’m seeing a few kids who are confused). But it’s a numbers game: the kind of feedback you give to your son is really, really hard to do when there are a whole bunch of kids who may or may not be behaving appropriately.

I know, their is no way a teacher can do what a functionally private tutor can - nor do I expect it. But its been a huge help to my son to have that immediate feedback. And my son has seldom had GOOD math teachers. They don’t correct work - it isn’t that he hasn’t gotten immediate feedback - its that he’s gotten no feedback.

When I was in school, Algebra went like this - you sat down and pulled your homework out. The teacher had everyone pass their paper one back, the person behind you graded the paper. A tally was taken on who got what wrong. If lots of people got #26 wrong, #26 was reworked on the board. The next lesson was reviewed and we got time to work on it in class.

My son’s math classes have worked like this - you sit down. You are responsible for putting your homework into the basket at the front of the room as you walk in. You get five points for turning it in complete, 3 if it isn’t complete. It is never graded nor returned. There is a thirty minute lecture covering the material and the rest of the hour for working on the assignment. Which, if you are my son, you do as fast as you can (because right answers don’t make any difference) and put it in the basket as you leave. Eventually you take the test. Oh, and there aren’t enough books to take home, so you can’t do your homework at home anyway, unless you make arrangements to check out a book. That’s “we’ve given up on providing feedback.”

This isn’t the teachers fault - not enough Algebra books so that homework has to be able to be completed in the forty minutes of classroom time or worksheets - with no examples - are sent home to parents in a district where the majority of families are blue collar and there is a heavy component of immigrants. Which means no time to review the previous days homework. That isn’t the teacher. That’s funding.

My daughter has now been in school five weeks. There have been no gradable events showing up in Science or Band or PE as of today - after five weeks, I don’t know if in PE she is getting dressed and participating or not (I’d guess she is, she is the type). Her Algebra teacher has lost three assignments - that he found when I called him to say “can you check through your pile, she tells me she turned them in” and the Spanish teacher has lost two - both graded to someone else in the gradebook. I’m not worried about her like I am about him, she is flightly - but she is bright.