JOANNE
PAYLING
Diary #21
I
Want Them to Learn
We're in This School Gig Together
What is my job as a teacher? I posed that question to my students this week after one girl complained because I wasn't collecting and grading a literature assignment. Several students felt like they had wasted their time doing the assignment once they discovered they weren't going to get a grade on it.
What is my job as a teacher? Many students have been trained to believe it is to make and grade assignments, thus determining for the student what they have learned. Trying to explain to a group of 8th graders that my job is to facilitate their growth as thinkers is like trying to explain calculus to kindergartners. Our educational system has spoon-fed grades as an assurance of knowledge gained for far too long. I tried to explain to the class that whether or not I collected and graded the assignment should not be important. Did answering the assigned questions help them to think? Did they look at the short story they had read in a deeper way and understand it more fully? Do they know more after answering the questions than before they started? If so, they should feel good about themselves and the fact that they are growing and expanding their knowledge base and their brain power. They are doing their job as a student, and I am doing my job as a teacher by facilitating this task. Do I ever collect and grade student work? Of course. Should I collect and grade every single piece of paper they produce? And if I don't, should I tell my students beforehand that I am not going to collect it? I don't think so. These students are still too accustomed to a quasi-adversarial relationship with a teacher. How little can they do and still fool the teacher into "giving" them a passing grade? They laugh when I tell them I don't "give" grades; they earn the grades they get. What I want so badly is to help students own their learning. It is so important for them to recognize that we are in this school gig together. It isn't us versus them. It is us and them working towards a common goal, the goal of preparing them to be thinking adults who can function successfully in their future world. They have to do the work for themselves, not for me. Until they do, they will remain firmly in childhood no matter how tall they grow or how many papers I grade.
