Sept. 2009: In response to Rubinstein on High Expectations

This year, I have three preps of regular English II, and three preps of APAC/accelerated (honors) students. The latter are my DREAM classes. I get to teach stuff I really like; it’s like an escape from the constraint implicit in teaching SATP (state tested subject area). I have discovered that I often kick into overdrive with my honors classes, assigning simply too much homework. What I’ve come to realize, after discussing low midterm progress report grades with the APAC program director, is that there are definite patterns in assignments students do really well on and have a high turn-in rates, and those that sink their grades with a deluge of zeros. The assignments I hype up over time, and that students expect to be worth a lot, they hit the nail on the head. On assignments that I do not explain but simply pack in, students do not do them, do them half-way, or I neglect to even go over them, period. So my new goal is, don’t overdo the homework. Quality, not quantity. I am currently, as Rubinstein says, “Try[ing] to learn what sorts of things are realistic.”

This over-doing it is what Rubinstein is talking about with “high expectations” that backfire. Definitely, I see the potential of this mistake to make students lose confidence in themselves. An attitude of “even if I try, I am not likely to pass anyway” is apt to set in. I want to gain my students’ trust that I am competent to weed out what is excess and busy work and instead to strengthen them with the most significant and essential part of the material. I want them to see work for my class as meaningful and worthwhile – and a student is not going to feel this way about his work if that work carries expectations he cannot meet. My class becomes a stresser instead of a potent learning environment. 

I think part of the challenge for over-eager teachers is in pausing, moving slowly through the incipient stages of basic mastery, and in having faith enough that that point in the year when “eventually you will get to [teach, use and expect] the harder stuff” WILL come. Teachers must pace themselves, because they have dependents. Without the right rhythm and pace, development is stunted.