When kids begin the I-don’t-understand whine, I respond with, “Tell me what you do understand, so I can help you get the rest and not bore you explaining stuff you already know.” Usually they do understand but are just resisting the work, or in explaining it to me they see what they’re missing.

I’ve tried this, but I always get Sgt. Schultz Special: “I know NOTHING, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!

I generally get the best results when I ignore them. They then pull out a brain cell, and then another, rub together until warm, and the epiphanies start coming.

The worst and laziest in the class keep the brains in their backpacks.

Physics Teacher – to me Mr. Binkowski sounds like he was using formative assessment (if not Formative Assessment(TM)),

Yes.

Yep, he placed more of the onus on you to get it right than on the teacher, which seems to me to be appropriate in that time and place. You spent what, an hour, looking at the problem? At about age 16/17? Hardly seems extreme

I never said it was extreme. I liked it. The people who do think it’s extreme are the edu-gurus.

You don’t think an hour of thinking is extreme? My supervisor for student teaching, an arrogant windbag who retired after more than three decades as an assistant principal, seemed to think that between 15 seconds and 3 minutes of thinking was extreme and tantamount to abuse on my part.

For one of my student teaching lessons I had an activity which was pretty much completely brainless, except for the very end where some thought was required. Students typically said “Huh?”, scratched heads for 15 to about 180 seconds, said “Oh Yeah!”, and handed their product in.

TOO MUCH THINKING for the windbag, apparently. He observed that students “didn’t know what to do” (between “Huh?” and “Oh Yeah”) because, apparently, I hadn’t “modeled the behavior” before letting them have a go at it. Had I “modeled the behavior”, I would have let the cat out of the bag and the activity would have been completely mindless. In addition, while the kids were busy rubbing brain cells together I didn’t react and teach them what they didn’t know.

and doesn’t match up with the 8 weeks it takes a bone to heal.

Some things take longer. It seems to take forever for kids to grasp the idea of vectors, far longer than 8 weeks. If you have a better way to do it, I’m all ears. But I don’t want ignorant windbags in my face expecting it to happen in one lesson, which they do.

And I still don’t know what you realistically hope that your ordinary students will get out of your physics course.

When I first started teaching I was amazed at how little these kids were capable of. I graduated from a very average HS that would never make any list of good schools. I now teach in a district that is considered very good. I first thought that it was my imagination telling me that my HS classmates learned more in our physics classes. I went back and retrieved the Regents examinations from my era and, sure enough, we had to know so much more.

Before you say I’m a stinky teacher, I want you to know that I’ve had a number of students transfer into my class from other schools in the area and the school district. Invariably, they’re always behind what my kids are learning, and, they’re no more expert in the material that they’ve spent more time on. The exceptions are students from foreign countries. Not too long ago I had a student from China who hit the ground running and instantly became the best student in the class. Even more recently, a student from Bangladesh arrived and hit the ground running, if only because of an excellent work ethic, which is absent in most of my “native” students.

If I had given the bottom half of my classes F’s for the first quarter I’m sure I’d have more informed students now. And I probably wouldn’t have to give any F’s. The biggest impediment to learning that I’ve encountered is laziness. Just scream “I don’t understand” and the teacher will do your thinking for you. Why work if you don’t have to?

As to what I would like them to learn? I think everyone should learn how to deal with unit conversions since these come up in many professions, from nursing to fueling aircraft. Also, simply getting to recognize the significance of units in quantities is something everyone should know.

Many students will find something interesting somewhere. There are students who loathe mechanics but come alive when current electricity is covered. While their understanding will be superficial at least they’ll learn the proper way to use jumper cables and the reasons why. Other students come alive for thermal physics, others get into nuclear. And, there are usually one or two students planning to be scientists/engineers and who are genuinely interested in learning as much as they can. It isn’t fair, to this last group especially, to have the laziest, most uninterested, students slow the momentum to a crawl everytime they scream “I don’t understand!”

And I still don’t know what you realistically hope that your ordinary students will get out of your physics course.

Diana Senechal

I’ve seen this kind of thing when I worked in the IT industry. Metaphorically speaking, people may have used hammers for years but suddenly management comes along and invents The Hammer! (TM), and suddenly every thingy looks like a nail, even thingies with threads and phillips heads cut into them. The Hammer! (TM) usage is mandated from above, and in situation where its use may be inappropriate.

This is my opinion of Formative Assessment! (TM)

Here’s a story about the best teacher I’ve ever had, high school or otherwise. He was Mr. Binkowski, AKA Bink, who taught 10th grade biology. He didn’t make biology interesting; he fed it to us raw. There were no movies, arts-and-crafts, coloring books, projects, or posters. We had dissections, activities like typing our own blood, and the textbook, which we subjected to a lot of wear and tear.

Bink had a standing rule (among a few): On lab day you must answer all questions correctly, or you can’t go home. Normally, this didn’t affect me, but there was one time where the tables were turned completely and I was the only one after school racking my brain on a single question.

A series of questions on the paper went something like this: “What happens to tea when you put lemon juice in it”, followed by “what is litmus paper made of”. For reasons I can’t fully explain, at the time I took for granted that manufactured products couldn’t possibly have any biological origin, so the second question completely stumped me.

Bink was in front of the room, apparently doing paperwork or grading something. After scratching my head I would go up to him and tell him that I didn’t get it. He would say something like “the answer is staring you in the face”. I would go back to my desk and the process would repeat itself. Over and over.

After what seemed like at least an hour I ran out of possibilities for the origin of litmus paper and began to ponder the possibility that “plants” just might be the answer. When I presented Bink with this answer he said “You can go home”.

I can just see the observation report if this happened today:

Mr. Binkowski was observed interacting with a student. The student would repeatedly approach Mr. Binkowski claiming not to understand the material, but Mr. Binkowski offered no further instruction beyond saying the the answer was staring the student in the face. Student had clearly not learned the material but Mr. Binkowski kept using only one learning strategy which wasn’t working.

Professional Development suggestions: Mr. Binkowski needs to adopt a set of formative assessments to ascertain whether students are learning the material and then to adopt a varying set of strategies to overcome student deficits. Mr. Binkowski was observed to do neither.

Recommendation for re-appointment Unless Mr. Binkowski addresses the concerns expressed in this document before the end of this school year it is recommended that he not be re-appointed

No one would observe, of course, that I’m relating this story 32 YEARS LATER and that I can describe it greater detail and context than many of my students can describe yesterday.

Was Bink completely ignorant of formative assessment, or is it possible that he knew exactly what he was doing, even if he didn’t do it within a time frame carved out by Formative Assessment! (TM) gurus?

BTW, I got only one wrong on the NYS Regents Biology exam that year, and I even knew which question I could have gotten wrong. He called me and told me about my exam and confirmed which question I got wrong. Also, I believe that no one from my class failed that exam, which was a rarity.

What I’m trying to say is that Formative Assessment! (TM) imposes an artificial constraint on someone who knows the material in question by someone who, usually, knows nothing.

I’ve given question to students like the following “A car goes from 0 to 60 in 4 seconds. What is the acceleration in meters per second squared”. I will invariably hear whining like “What’s the initial velocity”. What, exactly, am I to re-teach? If I ignore the whining very often I will hear “Duh. I’m so stupid. It’s ZERO!” a few minutes later. Of course, if I do this, I’m the bad guy for not reteaching and not responding to the “fact” that the student “hasn’t learned the material”.

This is why I jumped in on the topic to begin with. By continually removing failure from the path of every student we’ve actually taught them helplessness and ignorane.

Although she approaches the issue of failure and success from the seemingly mundane perspective of a parenting guide, Wendy Mogel’s Blessing of a Skinned Knee echoes your theme quite eloquently

In a world where outcomes are frequently distributed on a normal curve, Mogel argues that our children will fail as often as they succeed. (by definition 50% of us have to score below average). Since our children are unlikely to succeed equally at all things they try, to expect this of them is, ironically, to set them up for failure.

So she argues we need to teach our children to learn from their failures, how to adapt and move on, and overcome.

In their defense Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein don’t have kids at home any more. So the book probably wasn’t a hot topic of discussion in their peer group.

I usually aced math and science classes.  I finished my junior year of high school with a full year’s worth of AP credits for calculus and physics.  (There are essentially no factoids in math and physics.)  Yet “meaningful consequences” for failure under those standard methods used by history teachers would have flunked me out.

If I still cared about anything that happened in middle and high school, I would hate my history teachers to this day.  They produced the most pain of any teachers I ever had, and caused me to believe the subject totally worthless until long after I was out of school.  I would spare others that fate, and I hope you see my point.