Death by Worksheet

This blog post makes a great deal of sense.

I used to watch my step-daughter come home with a ton of worksheets: crossword puzzles, fill in the blank, word finds, and so on as 'homework.'  But the problem was this: she didn't see it as homework.  By 'homework' I mean valuable work that is an extension of the class that actually enhances the key ideas that she is supposed to master.  I have my doubts if any worksheets really help to accomplish that.  And let me say this - I am as guilty of handing out worksheets as anyone.  Or at least I was until we had a speaker about four years ago who talked about how - for the most part - they were simply busy work and then when I read this article by Alfie Kohn called "It's Not What We Teach; It's What They Learn."

Still, when I saw KoKo with those stacks of worksheets, I knew she didn't see them as an extension of the valuable classroom lessons.  She saw them as I think most students see them: busy work.  They became so many sheets she had to 'get done with' before going on Facebook or watching Degrassi.

When we send work like that home, what is our real goal?  Is it to extend an important lesson into the home so students can better understand what we want them to learn?  Or is it just what we do in order to follow our 'curriculum'?  Is it just so we keep the students busy (as opposed to engaged)?  Or maybe we don't even think about it because it's all that we've ever known.

As students we completed the same type of worksheets, with the same type of apathy that our students complete the worksheets.  Yet, we often dole out the same irrelevant work to ur students.

Why?

Well, I don't think there is one right answer.

I think, though, that the mother in the blog post makes an excellent point when she observes -


I write this as a frustrated parent watching her child shift between two entirely different worlds as if one bares no resemblance to the other.  Those two worlds are home and school.


At home my son will build and play with lego, play make believe games with his sister, draw, ride his bike, play his PS3, play games on the internet and play intuitively with a plethora of different apps on mobile devices. When he doesn’t know a word he is reading or when he wants new words to use in his writing, he heads to the iPad dictionary and thesaurus apps without a second thought.


When he enters the school gates each day however, access to such interactive tools and activities, to which he is so familiar, are limited. In most cases they are replaced with worksheets and huge, heavy text books. Information is static and they are passive recipients.


This is not a personal gripe about the school he presently attends; great inroads are being made into using more technology in the classroom to enhance the great teaching and learning they already do. I am thankful for all their hard work but as an advocate for a 21st Century Education for today’s children, and of course an advocate for my own children and how they learn best, I cannot help but notice the discrepancy between his two worlds and wish that it wasn’t so. Understanding why it is so and arguments for change are a much bigger conversation for another time.


Last night as I was doing yard work, I was listening to a podcast featuring Ed Hirsch Jr.  He was denouncing the ineffectiveness of teaching reading.

Now, this is a shock to me.  Our district, especially our elementary school, pours tons of time into reading.  But is it working?  At the high school we have more remedial reading classes than ever.  Nation wide our reading scores have stagnated.  The whole Read First (if I recall the name of the initiative correctly) program failed miserably despite millions of dollars pumped into it.

As I now teach a remedial reading class, I'm very conscious of the worksheets I give.  Are they busy work?  Or do students find relevance in them?  (This is what Kohn gets at in the article I mentioned previously).

He focuses on a couple issues that I think lead in to the worksheet debacle.

First, reading is an activity.  Not a subject (other than an early elementary subject when the skill of word acquisition is gained).  When you isolate it as a subject, you do it a great disservice.  I dare ANY teacher, parent, or administrator to sit through the curriculum of any reading class full of worksheets, KLW guides, fix up strategies, fact vs. fiction guides, vocab work and not be so bored that they consider peeling the flesh from their eyes the same way one peels an onion.

That was exactly how I felt when I bombarded my summer school kids with MCA strategy worksheets.  Yet, I was 'teaching' reading.  Not.

Second, simply teaching the skill of decoding words does nothing for students.  Readers don't think about decoding.  They read.  Moreover, any true reader devours what they read . . . given that they can find an area they are interested in.

Now, here it seems to me is the painful part of our problem.  If students aren't taught to read correctly early on - or more aptly, if they don't learn (after all, I don't believe the entire blame can be placed solely on the teacher) how to read early on in elementary school, it might be too damned late.  Regardless of the interventions that occur later.

To compound things, our current culture doesn't exactly encourage deep reading skills.  TV, the internet, social media . . . they all encourage viewing over reading.  That's not going to change.  Can teachers in early elementary school combat that?

Third, we do students a grave disservice by teaching vocab in isolation.  Hirsch shares some examples of the effects of this - "I meticulously fell off the cliff."  "My parents radiated the menu." and so on.  That's not how real people learn real words.  Yet, we teach them in such an awkward way that the definition of the word is ingrained in their minds yet the context and true meaning never is.

Finally, Hirsch argues that children learn to read by reading a lot of real books.  I think of the crap I had my summer school kids read.  Passages taken out of context (one painful example was trying to make sense of a passage from The Red Badge of Courage that was damn near indecipherable taken out of context).  Another example was a story about a diver diving to the bottom of the ocean.  The only catch was it was taken out of order and students had to number the out of order sentences in the right sequence of events!  No one in the class - including me - could make any damn sense out of it.  Now, where in the real world do real readers do anything like this?  Where in the workforce will this ever happen?  Can you imagine a supervisor at Digi Key giving an employ a list of parts - out of order - and then telling them to number them in the correct sequential order?  Or a manager at a farm implement dealership giving the new manual to a salesman out of order and having him put it back in the proper order?    Where is the real reading of real books?

Now this ties in to the follow of worksheets because they tend to remove students from real learning.  Think of our lives.  When do you fill out a worksheet when you are going to insulate your house for the winter (as I attempted to do yesterday)?  I never got a nice little worksheet on how to change a diaper when I brought Kenzie home.  I didn't get a nice KWL sheet when I had to rake the billions of leaves in my yard up and get them to the berm in order for the city workers to suck them up.  Had to figure that one out on my own.

Yet, why do we subject kids to this?

I think one solution to the worksheet insanity is having students produce products or presentations (now you tell me how often will students have to do that in the real world?).

But designing an effective assignment that allows for students to develop and then produce something is not easy.  Certainly not as easy as simply photocopying the numerous worksheets provided with our curriculum.