Thoughts on Homework

I’m rethinking homework this semester. Alfie Kohn keeps popping up, whispering in my ear in that daily homework may not be the most effective way to help students learn.

I was sitting in a faculty meeting this week, half-watching, half-listening to the PowerPoint presentation on various school housekeeping items: dress code enforcement, improving state test scores, grant information, when up pops “Homework Committee.” Our district is establishing a committee to assess whether or not there should be a district-wide policy on homework. Our principal diplomatically attempted to moderate comments about whether or not homework is necessary. So now Alfie Kohn and his latest book The Homework Myth pops up in faculty meetings.


I have an entire collection of Kohn’s essays and books on grading littering my bookcases. As an honors English teacher, I am particularly intrigued by his work on grades and how they function in the classroom. Do letter grades actually help students understand and reflect on their learning process? Kohn argues that letter grades are merely a form of external motivation - bribes - which work for the short run, but ultimately do not help to motivate a student’s individual desire and drive to learn. Similarly, Kohn’s latest work on homework contends that most homework does not really help to reinforce or practice the skills of a particular teacher’s lesson. Instead, most homework is another form of competition for grades. Homework is used as a grade collection tool instead of truly assessing whether or not a student has mastered a particular skill. Students struggle through new material at home, potentially mislearning it, in order to earn a good grade. Kohn argues that such homework only motivates students for the short term, teaching them that education is about jumping through the appropriate hoops. Homework, Kohn argues, deters real learning.

So what is an English teacher to do? I agree with most of Kohn’s contentions. The day I return essays or quizzes, students want to sit and compare percentages and letter grades. They do not spend much time reviewing and correcting items they missed. In honors English, it’s all about the grade. As a result, I’ve started to change some of my grading practices: not giving grades on initial drafts, preferring to use comment-only grading; giving students multiple opportunities to re-take quizzes to show that they can master the concepts; and having students complete self-reflection and goal writing activities for each writing assignment. I’ve also been rethinking homework. I generally do not give daily homework in the form of worksheets. However, my students usually have reading assignments. If not, they are working on revising the draft of an essay. I’m curious what other English teachers do. What are your thoughts on homework? What are your homework practices?

Crying in Class

Every day is different. It’s what I love about teaching. Even though I’ve taught the same tenth grade World Literatures course for the last four years, it’s different each semester. It’s different each class period. It keeps me on my toes, always thinking about the content, the curriculum, anticipating student questions and concerns.

It was a conversation that started last year in one of my classes that prompted me to make some changes in my curriculum. When a student emphatically declared in class that one person can never really make a difference, one person cannot change the world, I knew I had to rethink my curriculum. How could someone so young feel so disempowered? So this fall instead of immediately jumping into didactic grammar lessons, I decided to begin on the very first day with an essay. I began a few short weeks ago by having students brainstorm and later draft essays on the theme of belief, taking inspiration from the weekly National Public Radio’s broadcasts of “This I Believe,” a program where listeners write and share short, personal narratives about a core belief. I knew adding in another essay would mean rethinking how I structured my course, but what I never anticipated was how much my students’ writing would change me.

I didn’t anticipate tearing up in class as my students began to brainstorm ideas together on the board. I believe in taking inspiration from those around you. I believe in the power of a pet. I believe that what you put into the world comes back to you. I believe loss teaches you to live. I never anticipated choking up at Back to School Night as I explained to parents their students’ progress on the essays. Having read initial drafts, watched students peer revise, and commented on good drafts of essays, I saw how students took a vague prompt – what do you believe? – and crafted responses that were meaningful, but I did not anticipate wiping away tears as students presented their essays to the class last week. I believe in the power of kindness. I believe in learning to love myself. I believe in everyday heroes. I was awe-struck by how much students were willing to share of themselves so early in the class. I have been carrying their essays around with me for the last week, their words echoing in my head.

I am impressed by the student who could stand up and so eloquently share her fears about being the only black face in a sea of white peers. What will they think? I am touched by the student who shared how she takes inspiration from her mother who chose not to let a medical condition tell her what she couldn’t do. I am humbled by the essay from a student who rediscovered the gift of happiness while sharing a meal with her mother in the food court at the mall.

During the first few days of class, I asked a group of 15 and 16 year olds to let down their guard and share their inner-most beliefs with their peers and with their teacher. I never anticipated that they would earnestly take up this request. I should have. I am ashamed of myself for expecting less. And I am saddened that I do not think most adults could have completed this same assignment with the heart, integrity, and honesty that my students did. I believe age does not equal wisdom, and for that reason, I believe students must be heard. When they are, they change the world, one person at a time. As their teacher, I am proof.

The Power of a Book

A book can hold our heart within its pages; words weaved in such beautiful and sincere patterns that we carry them with us long after we’ve closed the back cover. Books shape us. They have power.

After reading Bridget Fernandes’ most recent blog entry at Books for Tanzania, I spent some time reminiscing about the first books that I remember reading, not those that were read to me, but the ones I first learned to read on my own. My husband recalls that at an early age his favorite color was purple because the first book he remembers reading was The Adventures of Harold and the Purple Crayon. Personally, I was obsessed with feet after learning to read Dr. Seuss’ Foot Book to my younger sister. I grew up in a reading household. Sunday afternoons were spent lying on my belly with the Record Eagle sprawled across the living room floor, trying to read words that I had no understanding of because I wanted to read the newspaper like my father. I would beg my mother to take my sister and me to the library because I had devoured the five books that I had just checked out three days earlier. While my classmates got money for good report cards, I knew I had the better deal because my good grades got me a new book from the Scholastic book order forms that were sent home with us every other month in elementary school. I loved the days that we got those order forms. I would wait until I got home to slowly pour over the pages, circling the books that I would either ask to order or later check out from the library. I was a book eater. When my mom showed me her collection of old Nancy Drew books, their bindings gathering dust on the shelves in my grandparents' home, I started reading them to be like her. I read every Nancy Drew book I could get my hands on. When the new series started, I couldn’t wait for the day that our local library got the latest copy. I was usually the first one to check it out. I was a bibliophile. One of my favorite memories is of the day that I received my first bookcase because it meant that I had books to fill it. I still have that bookcase.

Today, my home is filled with books. I have more books than my bookcases can hold. New and used, hard copies and paperbacks spill from nearly every shelf in nearly every room in my home. In fact, after moving just a few short weeks ago, my friends cursed this very fact, having helped move heavy box after box of books up and down flights of stairs. Most of books were picked up at various used bookstores but have yet to be read. I have a personal library of untouched novels, memoirs, and poetry books. But like Ms. Fernandes mentions in her blog entry, I take this luxury for granted. Where I used to devour three or more books a week throughout my school days, today I find I read less than 10 novels a year. Instead, I let myself be distracted by the routines of daily living. I forget how fortunate I am to have grown up with books.

Because I learned to read early, because reading my valued in my household, I grew up valuing education. I never questioned if I would go to college, only where. Although this is also true for many of the students I currently have in class, we are the exceptions. Over 9 million people in the world cannot read. If you own a book, you are richer than over three-quarters of the world’s population. We are the fortune few. Therefore, we bear a responsibility to help those who do not have access to books. When a person learns to read, he or she gains access to the shared stories of this world. Books grant access to the history of cultures and the stories of people. There is power in reading. A book is perhaps the most powerful and meaningful gift that can be shared. And unfortunately, our society seems to take this gift for granted.

So, this fall my students will have an opportunity to give back. There’s a book drop off box in my classroom for any students, parents, staff, and community members that would like to help Ms. Fernandes in her efforts to send books to Tanzania. One small book, the one that has been sitting on your shelf for the past three years untouched, could open up the world for a young person.

This I Believe

I scrapped the generic getting-to-know-you games this year. I’ll talk about the syllabus and classroom rules in a few days. Instead, I started my first day of classes prepping students for their first essay. Yes, I’m that English teacher that assigns students homework on the first day.

It dawned on me not long ago that so much of what I teach in the World Literatures curriculum revolves around belief – what do others believe and why, what do I believe and why, what do my students believe and why. It is our beliefs that often separate us. Pick up any newspaper or scroll through the headlines on the BBC News site and you will find it riddled with international strife, civil wars, and conflict. Whether it is over land rights, religious convictions, or attitudes about women, children, marriage, what have you – our world seems to be unraveling over differences between various belief systems. Unfortunately, if this is all students learn from a World Literatures class, they walk out of the classroom as global observers not participants, their us versus them attitude intact. Isn’t it interesting what people in India believe, but what does that have to do with me? So this year, I wanted to find a way to start out my classes by presenting students with an idea we come back to throughout the course - although our beliefs may be different, we are all connected regardless of culture by the same basic desires, fears, and needs. It’s all a matter of perspective. I wanted students to begin to question what it is that makes us human. Yes, a tall order for the first day of class. Luckily, National Public Radio came to my rescue.

I look forward to the Monday broadcasts of All Things Considered because that’s when I hear the weekly essay segment “This I Believe,” a portion of the program where listeners both famous and not are invited to share their essays on a core belief. I find myself in tears most Monday afternoons, either because the essays are so clearly from the heart or because the essayist has me laughing a bit too hard for my Monday afternoon drive home. I’ve been listening to the essays since they began broadcasting them a few years ago, so I’m not really sure why it took me so long to make the connection. To help students explore the beliefs of others, they must first explore their own beliefs! And that’s where I started today.


As the students came in, I had a line of yellow tape dividing the room in half, a seeming separation mark. I handed out a questionnaire asking students to consider a whether they agreed or disagreed with 15 statements. People can change. Life is fair. It is always better to tell the truth. And then I clicked on my overhead projector to show a copy of Martha Collins’ poem “Lines,” at first only showing the title and asked the students –what do lines do? They separate. They divide. They box us in and segregate us. And then I read them the poem…

"Lines" By Martha Collins
Draw a line. Write a line. There.
Stay in line, hold the line, a glance
between the lines is fine but don't
turn corners, cross, cut in, go over
or out, between two points of no
return's a line of flight, between
two points of view's a line of vision.
But a line of thought is rarely
straight, an open line's no party
line, however fine your point.
A line of fire communicates, but drop
your weapons and drop your line,
consider the shortest distance from x
to y, let x be me, let y be you.

What else do lines do? They connect us. Although our beliefs may be different, they come from a similar place. Beliefs are like lines. If we take just our first impression of the line, it divides us. But when we take the time to examine the line, our beliefs and the beliefs of those around us, we will see that they also connect us.

Each student took a place on that taped line on my classroom floor. If they disagreed with the statement, they took a step back. If they agreed, they took a step forward. We spent the first day of class talking about our beliefs. Tomorrow, they will begin writing their own essays for the “This I Believe” program.

Just Like Students

The first morning back following summer break, the floors still slippery with wax, the smell of cleaning agent clinging to everything, is the morning that we jokingly dread. As soon as it turns August first, we commiserate with our teacher friends that it’s almost time to go back, that we’re not ready, and the summer went too fast. But we’ve all been anticipating this day, the day when the teachers first come back. We’re like our students on this day. We file into the auditorium slowly, more interested in catching up with the colleagues and friends that we haven’t seen during the summer months than with the comments of the morning’s speaker. High school teachers in particular are just like those students that linger, the last to go into the assembly, jockeying for a seat near the rear of the room so they can whisper to friends.

This morning was no different. I stood outside the doors to the high school auditorium with teachers from all the district’s schools gathered to hear the superintendent kick off our year and introduce the morning’s guest speaker, Tony Rotondo, author of Scratch Where it Itches: Confessions of a Public School Teacher. I must admit, I was a little skeptical. Oh no, another speaker. I hope he doesn’t have a PowerPoint presentation about the district’s goals and expectations, our annual yearly progress, and aligning the curriculum with state standards. He didn’t. Instead, Tony infused his message with humor all teachers could relate to – the absurdity of educational acronoyms, shushing strangers in movie theaters, and the everyday irony spilled from the mouths of students. Ultimately, his message of reaching out to the staff and students in our lives was a wonderful start to the new school year. So, you can imagine how surprised I was when he started to read from my entry titled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” to the entire teaching staff in my district.

At the point in his speech where Tony was talking about Alfie Kohn’s work, I was nodding along. I have read a great deal on Kohn’s work – from the power and pitfalls of the letter grade to the myth of homework. So imagine my surprise when shortly after talking about Kohn, the morning’s speaker segues into discussing creativity and standards in the classroom and from his mouth booms my name through the microphone. Suddenly, I was a student again. Hey, that’s me he’s taking about! I was being singled out for something I wrote. My words have power. That feeling soon turned to panic as I realized – hey, that’s me he’s talking about. I felt my spine curve as I attempted to sink into the green fabric of the auditorium seat when he started to read part of my blog for the staff of the entire district. Called to the front of the auditorium, I don’t think my eyes left the carpet. Don’t trip. I was a student again. The speaker presented me with a gift (thanks for the portfolio, Mr. Rotondo!) and whispered, “Good luck with Etcetera.” And just like my students, I didn’t really hear what he had to say immediately following the recognition. I was that awkward student all over again, giddy from the recognition and anxious all at once.

The moment reinforced something for me. I need to make sure that my students have this experience, that their words, written or spoken, are recognized and honored for their power. I write today in part because a high school teacher took notice of something I had written and entered me in a local poetry competition (thanks Mr. Dik!). Would I have continued writing essays, poetry, taking creative writing classes had that teacher not recognized my interest in writing? Probably. But without that one teacher’s recognition, I might not have found my confidence or courage to take risks in my writing until much later. Moments like these have meaning and power for students - for everyone. When we are recognized for what we think, what we say, what we write or create, our world changes. We realize a new world of possibilities and understand that what we have created has power. Every student should have that moment. Every student should feel that world of possibility.

Do Schools Kill Creativity?

Sir Ken Robinson argues that we are currently a part of an educational system that perpetuates the stigmatization of mistakes. With the prominence that high stakes tests have in our classrooms, students are less willing to take risks, to go out on a limb and make a mistake. But as Robinson states, “If you are not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”

It’s only twenty minutes long. Give it a watch: Sir Ken Robinson talks on “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”

Are we are educating people out of their creativity?

I have a contradictory classroom. The first thing I hand students when they walk into my class is a syllabus that touts the need for creative and critical thinking. We talk about the need to think “outside the box,” to question what they see, what they hear, what they read; students must question how they are educated. One of the lessons I return to throughout the year is the ability to recognize shades of grey, to get out of the dichotomous black vs. white line of thinking. Especially when studying the cultures and literatures of the world, there are no easy answers when it comes to cultural beliefs, values, and ethics.

And then I have to teach them how to take a bubble test, to eliminate the wrong answer and find the right one. It is an important skill for passing the standardized state proficiency tests and achieving a high score on the SATs, which will in turn get them into a better university and potential scholarships. The way our current system is set up, students who know how take objective tests are the ones who succeed.

It is a strange contradiction. Each year I attend multiple meetings, trainings, and conferences on rethinking education to include the whole child. Current educational philosophy is predicated on Gardner’s research on multiple intelligences, that people have a variety of ways of expressing their intelligence whether it is artistically, kinesthetically, musically, logically, etc. Each year we learn about ways to incorporate and highlight these different styles of intelligence in the classroom. Teachers are using differentiated instruction techniques to help children of varying talents and intelligences demonstrate their skills. Educational specialists throw around words like formative assessment, authentic assessment, alternative assessment – all of which are at odds with the objective forms of assessment (state tests and college entrance exams) that students (and teachers) are judged on. As teachers, our educational philosophies are at odds with our nation’s educational mandates.

And our students are caught in between.

As Robinson states, “We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children.” At the very least, our schools are inconsistent – current educational philosophy and practice is at odds with the directives of the No Child Left Behind bill. Is Robinson right, do our schools kill creativity?

Thanks to Eric at Sicheii Yazhi for pointing me to the piece by Sir Ken Robinson.

The Art of Revision

Revision is perhaps the most difficult part of writing. Not long ago, I head author James McBride talk about crafting his memoir The Color of Water, and he said it rather eloquently: "Writing is rewriting." It is not necessarily getting the ideas first onto the blank white page, although there are days that I struggle with that as well, but the letting go of words, phrases, and images. Revising is a process of not simply refining one's ideas, but also letting some ideas go.

The process of writing is different for everyone. With the blank page staring me down, daring me to write, I usually find it very easy to get my initial ideas onto the page. It is a sort of purging. But once that momentum slows to a molasses drip, I deliberate over every word, the placement of every piece of punctuation. I start the process of revision midway through my writing as a way to figure out what it is that I am trying to say. My poetry course a few weeks ago highlighted how painful the revision process can be.

Each day we were given a prompt and about an hour and a half to craft a poem. There were mornings when the ideas came spilling out. On the first day when we were told to write a piece about family, my pen was to the paper before the teacher had finished explaining the prompt. As I scribbled my ideas on the blank page, I would periodically stop to scratch out unnecessary prepositions and articles, draw arrows to move lines to different stanzas. Each time I got to what I thought was the end of the poem, I would start over by recopying the poem onto a clean page, beginning the process all over again, scratching out and moving some more. I went through about eight revisions before I got the poem to a working first draft. Each line scratched out of the poem about a family member, my grandma, was hard to let go. Especially in poetry, where each word counts, revision can be a painful process of letting go.

As my professor conferenced with me over my poetry, suggesting revision ideas and lines to get rid of, I was able to empathize with my students. For emerging writers, especially when they are writing about something personally significant, it can be difficult to revise and scratch out clunky sentences and phrases if those words have emotional weight for the student. Students are much more comfortable, as all writers are, with editing their work. Editing the misplaced commas and misspelled words is easy. If we think of writing like building a house, when we edit the mechanical and grammatical problems of a piece, we change the curtains to make sure they match the décor. When we revise, we change the foundation, a much more labor intensive project. Editing is not the real work of writing. As James McBride said, “Writing is rewriting.” So I must find better ways to engage my students in the work of writing.