Guest Blog­ger – A Col­lege Teacher Says, “We Hold Their Hands Too Much”

Today’s guest blog­ger, K, has been teach­ing sci­ence at a small inde­pen­dent col­lege for over a decade. She spends her leisure time learn­ing from her three young boys. You can read more of her ran­dom thoughts at her blog: rais­ingth­ewreck­ingcrew.

We Hold Their Hands Too Much
by K, a Col­lege Teacher

Hav­ing your teen carry a cell phone is a good idea for many rea­sons. But, I would argue, it is also a bad idea for those same rea­sons. If your teenager gets a flat tire, they should be able to fix it with­out call­ing daddy. If they find them­selves alone at home and hun­gry, they should be able to feed them­selves with­out call­ing a par­ent. This topic is cov­ered very nicely by Lenore Ske­nazy over at freerangekids.

You may think that I exag­ger­ate, but many col­lege stu­dents can scarcely sur­vive a day with­out hav­ing their par­ents run inter­fer­ence for them. For exam­ple, I teach a study abroad course in the Caribbean. The char­ter flights oper­ate on Caribbean time: Planes have been late, resched­uled, can­celled, and we were once told that our flight didn’t even exist. If you travel a lot, this prob­a­bly sounds famil­iar. When it hap­pens to you, you go into problem-solving mode, right? You stay calm and kind, but insis­tent. You fig­ure it out. What has been fas­ci­nat­ing is some of my stu­dents’ reac­tions. I have seen them cry, throw up their hands and say “we’ll never get to the beach”, and call mommy and daddy.

They also call mom and dad for fairly rou­tine sit­u­a­tions. When I had a van
break down on a trip, one stu­dents start­ing cry­ing, say­ing, “now we’ll never get home”, and, again, called mommy and daddy. By the time I had arranged to tow the bro­ken van and had ordered a rental replace­ment, I had sev­eral par­ents call my cell phone to make sure that lit­tle Jimmy or Jane was okay. In some cases, it isn’t even a prob­lem that prompts the need to call their par­ents. Recently, a stu­dent was on the verge of tears because there wasn’t cell phone cov­er­age at our remote loca­tion. She said, “I have to talk to my par­ents every day, oth­er­wise they worry.” Does a young adult really have to report to mom and dad that she has sur­vived another har­row­ing day in col­lege? Another child called mommy for an hour-long chat every sin­gle day of her year abroad in Japan.

Any­one who has fin­ished high school should know how to cook a meal, do their own laun­dry, read a map, and fix a flat. They should be able to cope with life’s rou­tine chal­lenges with­out requir­ing advice. I find it dis­con­cert­ing that a twenty year-old woman told me she was fright­ened about fly­ing a com­mer­cial air­line with­out a “grown-up” to help her find the gate (true story). How can they be expected to get a job, pay their bills and con­tribute to soci­ety if they can’t help them­selves through the air­port? Eigh­teen year-old “chil­dren” are serv­ing our coun­try in war zones: We should expect more of the ones who stay home — they can han­dle it.

As much as stu­dents are accus­tomed to mommy and daddy hold­ing their hands through every rou­tine bump and bruise in daily life, they are used to teach­ers hold­ing their hands through every aca­d­e­mic chal­lenge. Each assign­ment is expected to include a laun­dry list of expected con­tent, page lim­its, cita­tion expec­ta­tions (down to pre­cise num­bers and accept­able sources), and instruc­tions on how they should intro­duce and con­clude their work. Assign­ments that should be out­lets for cre­ative and inno­v­a­tive think­ing and prob­lem solv­ing become big fill-in-the-blank work­sheets. These assign­ments become hope­lessly tedious, but they are so easy that we can have stu­dents do more of them. More is bet­ter, right?

It wasn’t always this way. While we have need­lessly increased the vol­ume of writ­ten work, we have dumbed-down our expec­ta­tions. In lit­er­a­ture courses, my father (in the 1950’s) always had one weekly writ­ing assign­ment. The assign­ment never var­ied — he was to write an essay on “some facet of this week’s read­ing that you found inter­est­ing.” Noth­ing more needed to be said. By the time I was in school (in the 1980’s), the assign­ment had been fine-tuned to one broad ques­tion about the spe­cific work that we should address. Appar­ently, we have con­tin­ued to add speci­ficity to the assign­ments until they have become mean­ing­less. While I don’t really advo­cate leap­ing back to “write about some­thing inter­est­ing,” I pro­pose that we sup­port intel­lec­tual devel­op­ment by giv­ing fewer, but more mean­ing­ful, assign­ments. We should only assign work that has defined learn­ing goals and requires stu­dents to demon­strate mas­tery of con­tent or inde­pen­dent thought.

Teach­ing requires putting stu­dents into sit­u­a­tions that they can only escape by think­ing. This is true whether we are teach­ing life lessons or aca­d­e­mic ones.

15 Comments on “Guest Blog­ger – A Col­lege Teacher Says, “We Hold Their Hands Too Much””

  1. HomeworkBlues says:

    K, I loved your post and com­pletely agree with you. I have a lot to say on his sub­ject (my daughter’s eigh­teen year old friend told us she is not per­mit­ted to ride the metro bus to our house, a ten minute trip!) but I am con­sumed by work and have made a vow to stay off my favorite blogs and mes­sage boards today. So far, the inter­net lure is win­ning. Kids, don’t read that! We want to set a good exam­ple! After this, I’m going to employ strong dis­ci­pline and tackle my stack of work.

    K, wanted to com­ment on just this today and the rest later: “Each assign­ment is expected to include a laun­dry list of expected con­tent, page lim­its, cita­tion expec­ta­tions (down to pre­cise num­bers and accept­able sources), and instruc­tions on how they should intro­duce and con­clude their work. Assign­ments that should be out­lets for cre­ative and inno­v­a­tive think­ing and prob­lem solv­ing become big fill-in-the-blank worksheets.”

    K, I will tell you this over-direction dri­ves my daugh­ter crazy. She’s visual spa­tial and if any­one has a right brain dom­i­nant kid, you’ll know what I mean. They thrive on com­plex, fig­ur­ing it out them­selves, mate­r­ial and every Eng­lish project and report reduced her to tears this year.

    My daugh­ter attends a math/science/technology mag­net. She was torn about whether to take AP His­tory or not. She wanted the chal­lenge but didn’t want to be even more overwhelmed.

    Because all courses at this school are either hon­ors, AP or post AP, the course was guar­an­teed to still be chal­leng­ing. The teacher over-directed and all I could sur­mise is she thought (cor­rectly) that this class would attract more of the science/math/tech nerdy boys (how stereo­typ­i­cal, huh? My daugh­ter is that tech nerd) who wouldn’t call Eng­lish their favorite sub­ject, although my daugh­ter is very strong in English.

    Yes, we know that many math/science whizzes are com­pletely lost when it comes to writ­ing but why can’t these assign­ments be tai­lored? And yes, I know, teach­ers have enough to do, but obvi­ously not all kids in that class are the same. Just just needed an AP respite. She’d spo­ken to the teacher about her dif­fi­culty when there are too many direc­tions but the teacher brushed off her concerns.

    We think the teacher must have thought the kids would be lost with­out step by step direc­tions. My daugh­ter, though, found the end­less direc­tions sti­fling and con­strain­ing. She would tell us she fret­ted she wouldn’t include all the points so that her writ­ing could not flow freely. When she tried the free flow with vivid descrip­tive imagery and allit­er­a­tion, she got a reduced grade becuase she had not fol­lowed all the directions.

    At least those “fill in the blank work­sheets’ were held to a min­i­mum. Those are even more the kiss of death for a visual spa­tial learner who likes to tackle the big pic­ture, not pro­ceed sequen­tially. She is a whole to part learner.

    But a his­tory writ­ing project (it’s a com­bined English/history team) got reduced to a set of dreary fill in the blank work­sheets and my heart sunk because she loves to write. And that’s always the conun­drum. I don’t want her tak­ing all APs (we are very judi­cious about APs, and she takes less than her peers because cram­ming till 3am is not my idea of a solid edu­ca­tion) and I still won­der because when I was young, we did high school in high school and col­lege in col­lege. We don’t want her over­loaded but we also don’t want her sweat­ing through tedium. I hate the school choices we are con­fronted with.

    Oh, Wash­ing­ton Post’s Jay Math­ews’ dreaded “Chal­lenge Index” will be hit­ting the news­stands any day now (Newsweek). His new shtick is laud­ing low-scoring schools that are now requir­ing every sin­gle stu­dent to take at least one AP. Math­ews says it will pre­pare them for the tor­ture of col­lege later. Yes, he said that. My daugh­ter read his pre­view in the Post yes­ter­day and I has­tened to tell her that we don’t think of higher edu­ca­tion as “tor­ture” in our family.

    These schools are push­ing every sin­gle kid to take an AP, whether they are ready or not, whether they can han­dle it or not. They’re doing it to really chal­lenge and moti­vate their stu­dents, right? Jay Math­ews says so. If enough stu­dents take the AP exams, the school, no mat­ter how “low achiev­ing,” no mat­ter how many kids fail those exams, will make Math­ews’ top high school list. You don’t think get­ting on that list is behind this push, do you now?

    June 9th, 2009 at 10:49 am
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  2. HomeworkBlues says:

    Cor­rec­tion: I wrote “And yes, I know, teach­ers have enough to do, but obvi­ously not all kids in that class are the same. Just just needed an AP respite.”

    Remove that first Just. Meant to write, SOME just needed an AP respite.

    You think I’d catch these mis­takes. I just read a humor­ous com­ment on another blog where the writer says, I could proof it 42 times and STILL find a mis­take. I only proofed once.

    June 9th, 2009 at 10:51 am
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  3. Ashley says:

    I largely agree with you, but like with many things talk­ing about gen­eral trends in older chil­dren and par­ent­ing, there’s no con­sid­er­a­tion for the abused teen.

    My mom got a cell phone when I was 10 and I got one when I was 16, and both made my life eas­ier. At 10 a friend’s mom took us to the wrong movie the­ater and I had no way of telling my mother this until we’d been wait­ing for her for over an hour. Because my mother is insane, I was grounded for a week over that and prob­a­bly burned with a cig­a­rette a few times. She was VERY VERY angry at me for not con­tact­ing her, when I had no way to do so.

    At 16 I and some friends went to a teacher’s house and on the way back we got lost. I was able to call my mother to say “hey, we took a wrong turn, I’ll be home asap” and avoided another scream­ing fest at home.

    As a teen, in gen­eral, not being in con­tact with my mother was very very dis­tress­ing because I knew that if I didn’t keep her posted about every 2 minute delay (lit­er­ally) I’d be in seri­ous trou­ble. I was sleep deprived, under­fed, depressed, and extremely stressed, so yes I would cry. I’m sure my teach­ers thought I was a bas­ket case (not that a sin­gle one helped) and that I was too attached to my mother; who I haven’t seen since 3 days before I grad­u­ated high school (7 years now).

    While not all heli­copter par­ents are abu­sive, abu­sive par­ents can appear like heli­copter ones.

    And some col­lege pro­grams still avoid speci­ficity. I grad­u­ated with a degree in his­tory from a big 10 school 2 years ago, and my aver­age assign­ment was, lit­er­ally, “write a paper x-y pages long, use Chicago cita­tion style.” That’s it. I came up with some great work that way, some class­mates used it as an easy way out, but over­all my pro­fes­sors avoided speci­ficity as much as possible.

    June 9th, 2009 at 11:16 am
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  4. HomeworkBlues says:

    Ash­ley, I’m so so sorry about your dif­fi­cult teen years with such a con­trol­ling angry mother. I’m hop­ing you can recon­nect with her at some later point and get some answers but I respect and sup­port your deci­sion to keep your dis­tance now while you try to build a life for yourself.

    Con­grat­u­la­tions for get­ting into a good col­lege and doing well despite your tough upbring­ing. I wish you all the best.

    June 9th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
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  5. HomeworkBlues says:

    While not all heli­copter par­ents are abu­sive, abu­sive par­ents can appear like heli­copter ones.

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»»»>

    Oh, I have seen this. I’m not going to give details because I might be read­ily inden­ti­fi­able. Suf­fice it to say I know a mom who appears on the out­side to be a very devoted involved mother. Truth­fully, she is unbear­ably con­trol­ling and pushes her chil­dren to unre­al­is­tic heights. She ignores their stress, depres­sion, anx­i­ety and sleep depri­va­tion and is obsessed with grades, acco­lades, awards, tro­phies. Her chil­dren always have be Numero Uno. No mat­ter how great the cost.

    On the other hand, this describes a whole bunch of moms in my high octane, afflu­ent, speeded up county. Just that one takes it to unusual extremes.

    Even sane par­ents are caught in the shuf­fle. It’s not like we are rais­ing our chil­dren to be slack­ers, we want to inspire them, we like their moti­va­tion and zeal. But bal­ance is key.I love this title of a lec­ture in my area: “How to Reach with­out Strain­ing.” I like to say, how to reach with­out pulling a muscle.

    June 9th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
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  6. Anonymous says:

    I agree that teach­ing resiliency and over­com­ing obsta­cles is impor­tant to
    build­ing healthy self esteem in kids, but K seems to think that every­one
    comes to the table with equal abil­i­ties. For exam­ple,
    “Does a young adult really have to report to mom and dad that she has
    sur­vived another har­row­ing day in col­lege? Another child called mommy for an
    hour-long chat every sin­gle day of her year abroad in Japan.”

    Per­haps that young adult does need that. Do we really need to judge it?
    What is inher­ently wrong with it? If you were the par­ent of that child
    would you really say, “don’t call”. There are plenty of cul­tures where
    this sort of con­nec­tion would be highly cherished.

    Another exam­ple,
    “Each assign­ment is expected to include a laun­dry list of expected con­tent,
    page lim­its, cita­tion expec­ta­tions (down to pre­cise num­bers and accept­able
    sources), and instruc­tions on how they should intro­duce and con­clude their
    work. Assign­ments that should be out­lets for cre­ative and inno­v­a­tive
    think­ing and prob­lem solv­ing become big fill-in-the-blank worksheets.”

    Well com­ing from a work­ing class back­ground where dis­cussing the topic of
    the day was not part of din­ner con­ver­sa­tion, as a young adult I would have
    found this laun­dry list extremely help­ful. It took me a long time to
    fig­ure out that just opin­ing about some­thing is not really schol­arly. So
    much of my work in the begin­ning was either not backed up or sim­ply pla­gia­rized because that was con­sid­ered accept­able in my work­ing class high school. At least we were writ­ing. I also agree that for some type of learn­ers this list of expec­ta­tions is use­ful. There are mul­ti­ple
    intel­li­gences and some kids have an eas­ier time with some things while oth­ers need more scaffolding.….

    June 9th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
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  7. High School Soph--oh wait I'm a junior now I guess says:

    Maybe the ‘laun­dry list’ guide­lines could be optional – pick them up on your way out the door if you feel like you need more direc­tion, if you’re good with just “x-y pages, Chicago cita­tion,” don’t bother. Then let the teacher know which kind you wrote when you turn in your essay/reflection/project. That way kids like yours, Home­work­blues, might not feel con­strained and forced to jump through lots of speci­ficity hoops, and kids like you were, Anony­mous, might have access to the scaf­fold­ing they need…
    Just a thought?

    June 9th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
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  8. HomeworkBlues says:

    Soph­more, junior, pre­cisely! That is exactly the point I made. Again, we sus­pect the teacher thinks most of the class is made up of math/science whizzes who are com­pletely lost in Eng­lish, hence the over-direction. But this is the first year the English/history seg­ment offered a non-AP his­tory ver­sion and stu­dents were encour­aged not to over­load on APs. There are also kids in that class who are extremely tal­ented in read­ing, writ­ing and vocab­u­lary, they just needed an AP respite.

    Dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion is hard for a teacher but couldn’t it be done with a min­i­mum of has­sle? Why not? These are bright kids. Have two assign­ments and give them a choice. Absolutely, the direc­tions should be for the kids who really need that hand hold­ing with an alter­nate assign­ment that has a greater overview tai­lored to those visual spa­tial learn­ers who are more con­cep­tual than sequential.

    But as told, my daugh­ter tried to talk to the teacher, politely, about her con­cerns and she walked away feel­ing as if she was a round hole being forced to squeeze into that square peg. One size fits all.

    June 9th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
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  9. Shelley says:

    The issue of heli­copter par­ents (exclud­ing abu­sive par­ents) is a frus­tra­tion uni­ver­si­ties deal with on a daily basis. While I would never fault a stu­dent for want­ing daily con­tact with her or his par­ents, I fail to see any legit­i­mate rea­son why any stu­dent would need a par­ent to fill out appli­ca­tion forms. When I first went to enroll in col­lege at the age of 17, my mother went with me, but insisted I do all the ques­tion ask­ing and all the fill­ing out of forms. She was there for sup­port and assis­tance if I truly needed it, but she made me do it. And I am for­ever grate­ful to her for that. If you can’t fill out your own form, you aren’t going to pass basic Eng­lish com­po­si­tion courses. Beyond that, FERPA for­bids us to release or even dis­cuss cer­tain infor­ma­tion, such as grades, tran­scripts etc, to any par­ent with­out writ­ten con­sent of the stu­dent. (We didn’t make that law, so please don’t yell while you insist that since you are pay­ing your child’s tuition you are there­fore enti­tled to their records.)

    “laun­dry list of expected con­tent“
    I’m a fan of rubrics myself. They serve a dual pur­pose of pro­tect­ing both the stu­dent and instruc­tor. As a stu­dent (with a math and sci­ence back­ground) I pre­fer know­ing exactly what is expected of me. Sub­jec­tive assign­ments add stress for me. As an instruc­tor, rubrics make assign­ments eas­ier to grade. It also pro­tects me from being accused of pref­er­en­tial treat­ment when being sub­jec­tive. Rubrics show that I required the same from each stu­dent. I real­ize this can and does sti­fle cre­ativ­ity but you can build cre­ativ­ity and crit­i­cal thought into your rubric (which experts in the edu­ca­tion field encour­age) but this leads to sub­jec­tiv­ity. This is dif­fi­cult to grade/assess/judge. If you make the rubric optional, then how do you grade? You can’t grade each stu­dent dif­fer­ently, they must all be held to the same stan­dards. If I give an option to forgo the rubric, and write “cre­atively”, what hap­pens if the stu­dent believes he or she was cre­ative but I dis­agree? The stu­dent has no recourse. The instruc­tors opin­ion (because that’s what sub­jec­tiv­ity is, an opin­ion) is what mat­ters. Rubrics can and should pro­tect stu­dents from this. (Don’t let me get started on the issue of using tests or even grades them­selves to assess learn­ing — this could go on forever.)

    Is it a per­fect sys­tem? Cer­tainly not. Unfor­tu­nately, it never will be. Every instruc­tor could ben­e­fit from tak­ing a grad­u­ate level instruc­tional eval­u­a­tion course (which I just hap­pen to have com­pleted recently.) Cur­ricu­lum should be eval­u­ated and improved upon as much as possible.

    I’m a big believer in Gardner’s the­ory of mul­ti­ple intel­li­gences. Do we, as instruc­tors, need to be able to teach to dif­fer­ent learn­ing styles and intel­li­gence types? Absolutely. Is this easy to do? Not even a lit­tle bit. How­ever, it is also the student’s respon­si­bil­ity to adapt as well as pos­si­ble to dif­fer­ent teach­ing styles, espe­cially at the col­le­giate level.

    June 10th, 2009 at 11:52 am
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  10. HomeworkBlues says:

    Shel­ley writes: I’m a fan of rubrics myself. They serve a dual pur­pose of pro­tect­ing both the stu­dent and instruc­tor. As an instruc­tor, rubrics make assign­ments eas­ier to grade.

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»>

    I’m not. At first glance, rubrics give the illu­sion of feed­back. But think again. Do they really tell your child or you all that much? Read Alfie Kohn’s “The Trou­ble with Rubrics.”

    http://​www​.alfiekohn​.org/​t​e​a​c​h​i​n​g​/​r​u​b​r​i​c​s​/​.​htm

    June 10th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
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  11. HomeworkBlues says:

    Okay, that link didn’t work, it’s not tak­ing you directly to the arti­cle. Instead, you’ll have to click twice. Click here on the Arti­cles by Sub­ject and then scroll down, way down, to RUBRICS, just after REWARDS AND PRAISE.

    http://​alfiekohn​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​s​_​s​u​b​j​e​c​t​.​h​t​m​#​n​ull

    June 10th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
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  12. Kerry Dickinson says:

    K, I totally agree with your post espe­cially after watch­ing my 9th grade son do a “fun” Eng­lish project for 9 hours last Sun­day. It was a totally pre­scripted assign­ment, even though there was some choice involved. At the end of it he said, “I made a vow to not read another book until I have to next year for school.” How sad. This is what hap­pens when stu­dents don’t get to make real choices in the classroom.

    June 10th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
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  13. HomeworkBlues says:

    Yup, Kerry. Ten hour projects in high school. At least in ele­men­tary, they got choose their assignment.

    June 10th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
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  14. Virgina says:

    K., you seem to be con­flat­ing a lot of issues into one big “we cod­dle our chil­dren.” I gen­er­ally agree with you in dis­lik­ing overly pre­scribed school assign­ments. And I think many kids would ben­e­fit from learn­ing to han­dle new sit­u­a­tions inde­pen­dently. But why would you expect a young adult — who may be trav­el­ing alone for the first time — to know exactly how to han­dle a delayed, resched­uled, or can­celed char­ter flight? Deal­ing with travel dif­fi­cul­ties is a skill the devel­ops with expe­ri­ence. Back in 1982, when I was a recent col­lege grad­u­ate, I was stuck in an air­port in Europe for almost 24 hours when the air con­trollers’ strike hit. Believe me, if I’d had a cell phone, I’d have been sob­bing on the phone to my par­ents for a good part of that time! Of course, I did make it home with­out parental super­vi­sion, and I gained a lot of con­fi­dence from the expe­ri­ence. But I hardly think my abil­ity to func­tion inde­pen­dently would have been com­pro­mised for­ever if I’d been able to get a few calm words of reas­sur­ance from my mother.

    I now have kids of 10 and 12, and I’ve recently started point­ing out air­port signs and ask­ing them to help find our gates when we travel. I hope that by the time they’re young adults, they’ll be con­fi­dent about trav­el­ing alone. But we’re priv­i­leged to travel fairly fre­quently. Not every kid has that expe­ri­ence, and some who do have par­ents who are them­selves ner­vous trav­el­ers. You seem to imply that young adult trav­el­ers should have the same level of con­fi­dence and matu­rity as older, more expe­ri­enced trav­el­ers. That strikes me as unfair and unre­al­is­tic, since, more or less by def­i­n­i­tion, young adults are not as mature or expe­ri­enced as older folks!

    June 12th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
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  15. High School Soph--oh wait I'm a junior says:

    Just a quick thought about rubrics–
    In my K-8th school we didn’t have grades and instead got long ‘eval­u­a­tions’ instead. There was the nar­ra­tive por­tion, 1 – 3 para­graphs by the teacher about the kid along with 1 – 3 para­graphs by the kid about them­selves, and then the ‘check­boxes.’ I think we must have got­ten rubrics for an indi­vid­ual assign­ment at least once or twice dur­ing my career there, but the ‘check­boxes’ as they were called were only given at the end of the semes­ters. They had three columns, no num­ber val­ues attached, labeled ‘devel­op­ing under­stand­ing,’ some­thing like ‘general/working under­stand­ing’ and some­thing with the gist of ‘utter mastery/above and beyond under­stand­ing,’ and the stu­dent would go through and put an X in the appro­pri­ate col­umn for each of the dif­fer­ent top­ics listed. (Might I just say I love the phrase ‘devel­op­ing under­stand­ing’? Not bad/failed/low quality/lesser under­stand­ing, but ‘devel­op­ing,’ i.e. we’re in the process of improv­ing.) By top­ics I mean, for exam­ple, in math there might be a 2-variable alge­bra col­umn, a qua­drat­ics col­umn, a par­al­lel­o­gram geom­e­try col­umn, a graph­ing cal­cu­la­tor pro­gram­ming col­umn, and so forth. Once the stu­dent had X’ed where they thought appro­pri­ate, the teacher would go through and put a check mark in the appro­pri­ate col­umn where they dis­agreed with the stu­dent. Per­son­ally, I thought these worked very well, but they seem to be a dif­fer­ent sort of rubrics than the kind Alfie Kohn was talk­ing about in his arti­cle…
    ???

    June 13th, 2009 at 2:03 am
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