Friday, October 23, 2015

Busy Work to Grade?

I have left this blog to the side while I rearrange some priorities in my life and made some significant changes. I wanted to put up a quick post and assure anyone who does follow this I am working on a series of posts about some of my thoughts on the differences in education I've noticed in working in 4 different states professionally and two more if you include student teaching. For now my post is short and poses a question I'm not sure many teachers ask themselves.



Picture yourself overwhelmed with work, say for example grading. You go home at night and you have your family to tend to. You mange to get dinner on the table and the kids aren't throwing a fit. In fact you found a way to keep them busy by letting them watch TV (or insert of activity designed to keep kids occupied and out of your hair). Now you finally have a chance to sit down and do that grading (or what ever other work you brought home). What a relief to be able to accomplish it and your family is perfectly happy. It feels great to be so productive.

Turn this around ... You are in your classroom and found an activity that keeps all of your students occupied, on task, and happy.  Great, now you can go sit down and grade papers.  Wait? Is that what is defined as quality teaching? Yet as teachers we can define that same practice as quality parenting? What would you do give your students busy work so you could grade? Or give your own children busy work so you could grade?

My personal response is that I more often do things to keep my son busy so I can sneak off to "do business" as he puts it. Mainly because it is so frowned upon professionally to keeps kids busy during class time allowing us to do work that can be done outside of class time. I know one priority I have in my head, but don't enforce much, is that my own children are higher on the list than my students. If I were to give students busy work and grade papers it would be doing work at work, so it's not like I'm getting paid to do nothing. Then I'm freeing myself up to spend more time mentally and physically invested in my family.

It's like in education it is frowned upon to try and accomplish any work that can be done when students aren't there while students are there. Doing this may leave us with large burdens to take care of outside of work hours. Which then makes us practice the exact same thing with our own families. Why do educators do this?