Comments on: Contest: Dismaying class assignments

By: Sylvia Martinez

Sylvia Martinez — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

With 3 kids, I’ve seen them all! My top 3:

1. Endless variations of “Create a family crest of a character.”
2. Make a coat hanger mobile that represents a book. (With specific instructions about the hangers and how the cardboard is supposed to hang down off them.)
3. Write 6 “temporal” sentences for each vocabulary word. Then the words are things like “umbrella” so it’s either inane or impossible.

PS – These were all high school assignments.

By: Terry Shay

Terry Shay — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

Do you think a better assignment would have been to memorize the the states and interesting things about them? Sure, this assignment is a bit over the top, but I would prefer it to the mind-numbing memorization of things the kids could look up on their phones.

OK, I will also play along. See a lot of kids reading books with ‘study guides.’ Great pieces of literature, like “To Kill a Mockingbird” reduced down to “________” was the neighbor to the Finch family.” I understand making kids accountable for the reading assignment. I don’t understand the drumming of the joy of reading OUT of every book. How about big themes?

By: teacherninja

teacherninja — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

Thank you! I think teachers do that every year because other teachers do that ever year. Same thing with the stupid planet models. And weekly spelling lists. Don’t get me started…

By: Scott Meech

Scott Meech — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

Students were assigned the book “Freak the Mighty” ” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freak_the_Mighty ” were asked to create their own “SLANG” dictionary. They had to come up with terms for the letters A to Z that are commonly used today by teenagers. I wish I had a copy of the rubric as it is awesome.

Here is the best part… the “slang” dictionaries were used as part of the student’s semester portfolio for student led conferences… It was a hard sell to parents… I freely admit that I might have missed the importance of this assignment somewhere along the line!

By: Heather Voran

Heather Voran — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

My daughter’s beginning band was learning musical notation. The assignment was to cut out the Xeroxed pictures of notes on a staff, glue it to a 3X5 notecard, then label the note’s correct name on the back to make flash cards. Once the assignment was finished, they would play games with a partner using the flash cards.

My daughter freehanded the lines, spaces, and notes herself in various colors, adding some simple decorations to each card. She also labeled the note names correctly on the back.

The teacher made her do the assignment over and did not allow her to “play games” with the cards until she had completed it according to the original directions.

By: Rick Tanski

Rick Tanski — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

Bring in tissues, paper, classroom supplies, cookies, [insert item here] for a grade/extra credit.

By: Rick Tanski

Rick Tanski — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

Writing in cursive.

By: Rick Tanski

Rick Tanski — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

Any assignment that can be excused with a no homework pass.

By: A. Mercer

A. Mercer — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

Cursive: Not a big fan. Wasted my entire sixth grade learning nothing except that I finally mastered cursive. Have a son with an IEP that forgoes learning it, BUT there is more than a generation that still writes in cursive, and this other generation growing up that can’t, but more importantly, cannot read it. It’s working up to be a big generational schism.

Example of state floats was mediocre, NOT dismaying. It’s not even close to writing out number 100 – 1000. Also, it’s the type of assignment that is a little blah (recall oriented), that can be pretty easily ramped up to something better. As Terry Shay points out there are even worse examples of this.

The worst I’ve run across is letting kids print out web pages, and tape/glue them to a poster for a report. Hey, at least make them summarize! It’s a rookie mistake I’ve noticed a lot, so I try to point out ways to make it a little better.

Here is a pic from my son’s open house of projects from one of the teacher’s he will have next year
http://picasaweb.google.com/mizmercer/Classboards/photo#5206319534502632642
The picture was for state reports. They have pics, etc. but note they are asking why, how, and where questions (and answering them). They also had charts and visuals to show their comparative population and industry resources in some interesting ways that I hadn’t seen before. It looks like your son’s float, but there is analysis going on.

In a sense I’m glad you have a project that has the potential of rehabilitation, because I think it is a better discussion to talk about how things can be improved, rather than stuff that just needs to be killed off.

By: Louise Maine

Louise Maine — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

HeHe…cursive! Ugh! I just had a “discussion” with my grandma the other day (okay – she lectured me for 10 minutes) on what are teachers thinking not teaching penmanship. She is 96. I waited until she was done and calmly told her that it was irrelevant and not needed today – today we need kids who can think and produce – after all not enough of the generations can. We would not be in many of the dire straits we are in today if they could.

How about: My son learned the different biomes in our region by coloring the pictures of them – oh, he is in 8th grade.

How about: diagramming sentences.