Strategies for School Success – Educated and Free

Do Your Homework, Just Don’t Sweat It

Well, this is going to be my most hypocritical post to date. It was supposed to be done roughly five weeks ago. Instead, I’ve been buried under my actual job so I haven’t been here for you. For that, I apologize.

The good news is that your life doesn’t have to look like mine, and the reason for that is simple.

Most of the work you do in class will never be read.

That’s right, my chickadees, the vast majority of what you do will get a cursory glance to judge its completeness. That’s it.

Nobody is checking to see if your answers are correct.

Nobody is checking to see if your reasoning is sound.

No one cares whether or not you read the book.

What they do want to see, and what they are looking for is obedience: did you finish the work or not?

Some of you know this already, which is why “collaboration” on homework is so extensive. Sending pics of your completed homework via phone or “researching” answers on Google is the most efficient way to get those sweet, sweet homework points.

The problem is that you’re not getting any real practice. Here’s the rub: most of the time homework isn’t adequate practice either (except in math; if you’re blowing off math homework, you’re begging to fail the tests, which may or may not matter depending on the weight of your test grade.)

Here’s the thing you may not know, but which I’ve mentioned before. School isn’t really about learning. School is about getting points and the easiest way to get points is through compliance.

Bells tell you where to go and when you have to get there. Your classes are chosen for you based on your age; not on what’s best for you at your current level of learning. Your teachers are chosen for you based on numbers, not on who would be the best fit for your personality. You sit where we assign you. You eat when we tell you. You go to the bathroom when we let you. You answer when you’re called on. You are only allowed to relax when we decide you’ve earned it.

Your day is micromanaged in a way that would cause an uprising in many small countries.

We simultaneously tell you that you are responsible for making good choices (which really means choosing the thing whoever is in charge at the time wants you to choose) while also subtly implying that you are incapable of doing so by structuring your day in a way that gives you almost no agency.

L. O. L.

So here’s how to win: do everything the teacher tells you on paper, but spend little to no time on it, except in math, which I’ll give you a better structure for below.

Obey, but preserve your time and you will maximize your homework grade.

This strategy will work in almost every class unless, by some unfortunate stroke of luck, you find yourself in a class with a teacher who will actually assess whether or not you’re learning the material they’re asking you to master. You’ll know this by the weight of the tests.

Grade weighting generally refers to the practice of making a particular type of assignment or assignment category count for more of the course grade than another. This information should be found on a course syllabus, but if you can’t find it, ask your teacher if he uses weighted grades. He should be happy to explain it to you. Additionally, if the teacher uses a grading program, you should be able to see grade weight by accessing the gradebook information for that class.

Fortunately for you, a heavily-weighted test grade is rare outside of math classes.

Here’s the dirty secret about school: administration needs everyone to pass in order for the school to look good, score-wise. That means they subtly pressure teachers to make sure that very few students actually fail. They do this in many ways, but the most important way they do that is by creating an extensive list of requirements a teacher must meet before they can actually give a student an F in a class. Usually, a teacher will have to document the academic interventions they’ve tried, like moving your seat, adjusting your assignments, talking to you privately, and giving you extended time on assignments (i.e., accept your late work). While we make all those adjustments (and keep track of them) we’re supposed to communicate our concerns to you and hopefully talk you into doing what we want you to do. If you still don’t respond, we’re supposed to contact your parents. This can take many forms, but it generally starts with sending home progress reports, moves to contacting your parents by phone, and finally, having an after school meeting with you, your parents, and your counselor, sometimes with a principal present. Only then can we justify giving you that F.

Now, imagine you’re a tenured high school teacher. You have a choice in front of you: go through all that work, or just give you a 59.6% in the class.

I’ll never forget the first time Mike said in a department meeting, “Why don’t we all just make it an unspoken policy to give kids a D? You can’t really want to see these kids again, and there’s no upside to an F.”

I was shocked (shocked I tell you!) to hear this man I respected and had gone to for pedagogical advice say that out loud in his official capacity as team leader.

Boy was I ever naive.

When you look at it honestly, his response is the rational one. His way means less work for teachers, love from administration, and limited time nagging kids who don’t want to be there.

It’s so much easier just to keep everyone “at C level”, the cringeworthy pun invented by one of our Assistant Superintendents. Yes, he has ~~a Ph.D.~~ an Ed.D.

Still, it is possible that you will occasionally have a true believer (or a teacher who’s a really good actor) who expects you to learn something from the homework and will test you on it.

If that does happen, the best thing I can teach you is workload management.

The best tool for workload management is the Pomodoro technique. A Pomodoro is a focused period of time, usually 25 minutes, where you put your phone on Do Not Disturb or on Airplane Mode (or if you really want to be held accountable, give your phone to your mom to hide until the alarm goes off) to shut down notifications so you can work without distractions. 25 minutes on, 5-minute break, then back to another 25-minute Pomodoro. After 4 repetitions, you take a longer 20 minute break.

Do Pomodoros until you finish the assignment. If you get stuck, review your notes. If reviewing your notes doesn’t help you, formulate a specific question to email to your teacher. That way, if you hit a wall and can’t go further in the homework, you can email them before the assignment is due to ask the question you’ve formulated and request an extension, while continuing to work on any problems you can make it through.

In general, if you are making an honest effort to complete the homework and really trying to understand it, a teacher is willing to offer you an extension on the homework. Just remember it’s on you to follow up and turn in the work once you get some help with the assignment or problem you couldn’t sort out.

Most importantly, actually doing the work should result in high test scores. Just remember, you should know the category weighting for each class; if homework is worth half your grade, you really don’t have to score all that well on tests to get high grades.

TL;DR: Most teachers value compliance over learning; it’s easier to measure.

STUDENTS: Your homework probably won’t be looked at, so do the bare minimum unless the teacher actually will test you on what you do on the homework. Ask for this information upfront, and pay attention to tests/quizzes at the beginning of the semester to ascertain whether or not your attention to homework (e.g., reading, notes, worksheets, etc.) matters in terms of your grade. If it does matter, prioritize those assignment and use the Pomodoro technique to focus, learn more, and get your homework done faster.

PARENTS: Do not sweat every piece of homework; all zeroes are not created equal. Have an open conversation with your student about her observations regarding her teachers’ grading policies. Get on the same team with your kid and help her set priorities with her work (as well as her cell phone.)

TEACHERS: if you’re not going to assess it, don’t assign it. Feedback is necessary when working with important topics, but not every worksheet has to be do or die. If it is do or die, you need to actually read it (or formatively assess while students are working on it) and reteach/enrich where necessary. Otherwise, you’re setting the majority of your students up to fail.

The Easiest Way to Get High Grades

The first step to winning a game is to show up.

You probably already know this, but secondary school isn’t about learning and/or personal growth; it’s a game. Some students hate it and refuse to play while others achieve Super Saiyan level. If you’re here, you likely recognize that you’re not maximizing your potential. So let’s see if we can’t sort you out.

First, we’ve got to identify the goal of the game. What is it?

Points.

You’re currently thinking about all the teachers you’ve just met and how they really seem to care and are all using the My-classroom-is-different-I-really-want-you-to-learn-the-material! syllabus presentation. I’ll admit that some of them are telling the truth. They really do care if you learn. If you’ve got a burnout who should be retired (and I might be talking about a 32-year-old here), you’ll know, so your job with him is easier. All he really wants is to get through the year with minimum hassle. That’s VERY good news for points-players since all you have to do is demonstrate that you (and hopefully your parents too, if you can get them on board) will be deeply concerned and very engaged if you get too many scores lower than 90%.

But the deluded teachers who think they’re actually teaching you something? They are the ones you need help with. Vaya con dios, mijo if you have a true believer in the power of public education.

Those people will change your life – usually for the worse – because they deny reality: that school is a game where the only thing that’s measurably incentivized are high GPAs themselves. What is not incentivized is internalizing knowledge and processes to support the analysis of complex problems in order to facilitate methodical, nuanced evaluation of the best answers and eventual application thereof.

Wait, what? Do people do that in school?

Sure, but it’s iridium-rare.

You know what’s not rare though?

Participation points, worksheets, and multiple choice tests. Those, my friends, are your moneymakers.

There are more or less three ways to get points with these teachers:

Show up.
Work.
Test.

We’ll deal with #1 this week. Over the next three weeks as I cover #2 and #3, you’ll get an overview of a strategy to help you make it through this year with optimal grades.

1. Show Up.

Many teachers will not give you points just for coming, but some do. What will affect your grade, attendance-wise, is walking into class late. Teachers often subtract points for that. The savviest ones will do that by having a quiz or Do-Now activity on the board that they will tell you can’t be made up if you’re not in class.

Sidenote: that’s not technically legal, at least not in Cali, so you could challenge them on it, BUT if you do that, you’re more than likely going to receive make-up work that’s ten times harder than the original quiz/Do-Now, so here’s ProTip #1:

If you’re hunting points, get to class on time.

I already gave you one reason, but here’s the Big Chungus: walking in late makes you look disrespectful.

Look, you and I both know that it’s not really disrespectful, it’s just that you have different priorities and, for whatever reason, on days you come late, the value of getting to class on time is less than the value you place on whatever made you tardy.

The problem is this: teachers take it personally. If you read my first post, you’ll understand this, but if you didn’t, the TL;DR is that teachers often suspect they’re ineffective. Sure, they’re good at lots of quantifiable things: worksheets graded in an hour; emails written over lunch; letters of recommendation finished in an evening, documents word processed cleanly. What they can’t quantify is how well you learned from them. (Grades do not accurately reflect learning: change my mind.)

So imagine the thing you’re getting paid a princely sum to do (and by princely I mean that, in general, teachers earn more than the average worker in any geographical area and work 66% of the time that average worker does) is something you have no idea if you’re good at because there is no tangible evidence to prove it..

You might get the odd, anecdotal You’re-my-favorite-teacher-ever-I’m-learning-so-much-in-your-class from a student, but as you Super Saiyans know, compliments like that aren’t always sincere, especially near the end of a grading period.

Teachers know that too.

Grades are a terrible measure of learning. Every single one of you can recount a class where you never cracked the textbook, did little to no work (or had Google do it for you), pseudo-studied with friends for a couple of hours the night before the final exam and still managed a B or an A. If you tell me you learned anything in that class other than how misaligned the rewards are to the stated goal, you’re a lying liar who lies.

Some teachers like to point to exam scores. Unfortunately, any idiot can teach to a four-option multiple choice test, especially when he has the test in his hand from day one.

I’ll give the AP/IB teachers some credit here, just because they can’t be exactly sure what will be on the test. After a few years though, they should have a pretty good idea of what their students need to know so they’re definitely teaching to a test rather than looking for opportunities to measure students higher-level thinking and problem-solving skills. And that’s because the College Board can’t measure those either; it would eviscerate their sky-high profit margins.

I prefer using essays as assessments, but we all know that essay grading is arbitrary and essay writing usually consists of repeating what the teacher told you in lecture while furiously overcomplicating your sentences and throwing in [often poorly-chosen] SAT-vocab synonyms for shorter words to meet the length requirement. And let’s just skip the conversation about manipulating margins, kerning, and punctuation font sizes.

The problem with all of the aforementioned is that none of these methods can accurately gauge learning; they usually only measure recall. They can’t account for nuance. They can’t address individual interest. They can’t bring the best out in you. Any analysis used in a paper is, more often than not, parroted from lecture or, even worse, stolen from the internet or, still worse, paid to some likely much harder-working citizen of a developing nation.

And every teacher knows that. That’s why when those stupid Hero Teacher movies come out, it’s always some anecdotal, Hollywood-massaged poppycock about how the students developed as people, often using test scores (see above) or college acceptances (don’t get me started) or personal development (how do you quantify that?) as proof positive of effective teaching.

Anywayyyyyyzzzzz, what I’m saying is that your teachers know, whether it’s a conscious thought after much observation and analysis or at a more primal level, that they have no idea how good they are or even if they are.

But your attendance? That they can control through punishment. More importantly for our purposes here, this perceived dis biases them against you. No matter how fair-minded a teacher prides himself on being, he will notice if you are frequently late or missing, and he will consider it an act of defiance on your part, whether or not that is actually the case. He will take it personally.

How do you think that’s going to affect you when you end up with an 89.4 in a class?

So don’t be late.

And this should honestly go without saying, but, just in case it doesn’t: don’t ditch class.

If you care about your grades, these are literally the easiest adjustments you can make to achieve your overarching goals: get that GPA to bust out while simultaneously having one of the best years of your life.

TL;DR Advice for stakeholders

Students:

Don’t ditch.
Be on time.
Let burned out teachers know that you really, really care about your grade. Be subtle, but consistent over time in things like asking for help after class, seeking him out during office hours, and emailing.

Parents/Guardians:

Don’t be the reason your kid is late.
If you’re going to come down on your kid for anything school-related, make it attendance. In most cases, you have next to no influence over a tenured teacher. However, your child can control how respectful he seems by showing up consistently and on-time. That’s often enough to help smooth over less-than-stellar academic performance.
If your kid has a teacher who should’ve retired years ago, encourage your child to ask lots of clarifying questions, come in for office hours or for help after school, and email frequently with polite concerns about the class, instructions, and your child’s performance; if your emails are ignored, CC an assistant principal on future emails. That teacher will want you to go away, so grade issues may also magically disappear.

Teachers:

Stop taking student lateness personally. It likely has nothing to do with you.
However, if the numbers of tardy students are significant, seek help to figure out what you can do to get students invested without using force, i.e punishment. If you’re at a functional school and large numbers of students are unconcerned about being late, they don’t see the value in your class. With mandatory K-12 schooling, unfortunately, it’s your job to convince them of its relevance.
Pay attention to what students say about and how they prepare for your tests. If they can cram, or don’t have to study at all, all of you have wasted your time. What a low down dirty shame that is. You’re the one getting paid, so figure out how to make assessments meaningful to them. In other words, your assessments should build student confidence because they are demonstrating their skills and the application of their knowledge, not just choosing the right answer on a multiple choice test or repeating what you told them in a lecture.
You can do this.

The Right Introduction Will Raise Your GPA

Start your school year right by letting your teachers know that what matters to them also matters to you.

You’re about to start school. Other than actively dreading having to get up before noon, and maybe having picked out just the right clothes to set the tone for the school year, what’s your plan?

Because you need a plan.

If you’re here, my guess is you’re looking for more than the basic listen, participate, work hard and study line.

So here it is: send your teachers an email.

I’m not advocating subterfuge or manipulation or sucking up. I’m advocating reflection, humility, and communication.

You need to understand something about teachers. We have a lot of power over you. We can make your life easy or hard. We can make it interesting or tedious. We can literally waste hours of it.

But mostly what you have to remember about us: we are insecure.

Wait? That tyrant who yells at us is nervous? That lady who cries every time she reads a poem isn’t confident? The hot young teacher who passes out detentions like candy on Halloween is scared?

Yup. They are. We all are. And it’s because deep down, none of us can be sure we know what we’re doing because we have no way to accurately measure the quality of our work.

Spend some time in r/teachers and you’ll quickly see that teachers love it when they run into a student and that kid says, “Hey, Mr. So-and-so!” and is actually excited to see him. They will literally write an essay on Reddit to tell other teachers that the job isn’t hopeless and that, yes, in fact, some kids actually don’t hate them and that, maybe, just maybe, a teacher can make a difference in a kid’s life.

You’re sitting here, thinking, Well, yeah, of course. I mean, my 3rd grade teacher really helped me with my printing. And in 7th grade I had an art teacher that showed me no one is really born with talent; it’s cultivated over time. And there was that coach that was always there to listen to me and tell me the hard things I didn’t want to hear, but I knew that guy really cared about me.

Back to Reddit though. Search the posts and you should quickly see how rarely we hear things like that.

We have no idea if you’re listening politely because you’re worried that we’ll grade you harshly if you don’t or if you’re genuinely interested. We don’t know if you think what we’re saying is important or if you’re furiously taking notes because it’s a requirement for your AVID class. Our tests are rarely useful metrics of your learning because so many of us use multiple choice, for which we all know most kids will just cram the night before and promptly forget the period after.

The only legitimate method to measure what you’ve learned is to have a conversation with you, which should happen in class but doesn’t because (A) there’s not enough time for a one-on-one with each kid in a classroom and (B) there’s very little measurable upside to talking for you because teachers don’t track how often you speak, let alone the quality of your comments and some of your peers will attempt to destroy you for asking a question. It’s logical for you to avoid participation since the risk outweighs the possible return.

So you want to get off on the right foot this year?

Step 1: Scour each course syllabus to find something that reveals your teacher’s values. Is it organization? Kindness? Thoughtful participation? Curiosity? Discipline? (The best place to find this is in any classroom rules or guidelines the teacher created. If all the teacher does is repeat school policy, you’re going to have to look harder to figure out what he believes in.)

Step 2: Send a brief, individualized email to each teacher introducing yourself and letting him/her know that you read the syllabus and that you’re interested in developing your organization/kindness/participation/curiosity/discipline. We all have room to grow, so this should not be a disingenuous statement. Let each instructor know that you’re looking forward to working on that trait this year in the classroom and explicitly state that if he/she has any advice about how you can grow as a student this year, you’d value it.

That’s it.

Now, what does opening yourself up like this do?

You show that you care enough about your own success to take the time to read what the course will cover.
You demonstrate that you are both able to find the underlying importance of the course to the teacher and care enough to apply it to your real life.
You show humility in admitting that there are places where you need work.
You have shown respect by deferring to the teacher and asking him to help you wherever he can without being overly demanding of his time.

In one brief email, you’ve turned yourself into a mentee rather than just another member of a disinterested crowd. You haven’t asked specifically for more time or attention, but you have demonstrated that you care and want to be actively engaged in the class to improve your habits, your education, and/or yourself as a human being.

Now, for all of you afraid of doing this because you think it will focus more attention on you, it shouldn’t. Unless you have the most tone-deaf teacher on the planet (which, I admit, is a risk, if a minor one), he’s not going to call you out in front of class. He may just come talk to you briefly while you’re working. If you were honest about what you’d like to gain in the class, you may receive some valuable feedback on your performance and/or useful tips for future success in the class. Even if you weren’t 100% sure that you hit the right note with your email, you may still benefit.

Either way, you’ve done something in about two minutes that it will take some students all semester to do: create a favorable impression.

Teachers are human, thus, we carry the prejudices inherent to humanity. Your teacher may believe himself to be the most judicious evaluator in the history of the American education system, but I can tell you right now that if you humbly ask for help, are gracious when you receive it, and try to apply it, you will create a huge bias in your favor.

In other words, you will be graded more favorably than your unknown-to-the-teacher peers.

And for all of you who will criticize this post, claiming that it’s manipulative to influence a teacher’s opinion in this way, I leave you with this 150-year-old piece of wisdom: The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

TL;DR: Create a favorable impression with your teachers by showing them what they care about matters to you too.

STUDENTS: Suss out your teacher’s values by reviewing his syllabus and listening to what he/she says in the first week of school and find some common ground. In a concise email, ask him for help developing a skill or attribute that he values. A favorable impression should help your grade as the year drags on.

PARENTS: Be on your kid’s side, always, but try to help them understand that in the Art of War (and business and love), appealing to a teacher’s better nature early in the year before anyone is struggling often pays dividends.

TEACHERS: Make an attempt to talk to all of your students. Be human. Make mistakes and admit to them. They won’t say it, but they’ll respect you for it, and if they respect you, they won’t question your judgment, e.g., their grade in your class. And, more importantly, if they know you’re human and you recognize their humanity, they’ll learn more in your class.