Fall and Deals

I keep seeing picture of the big city of the autumn. I keep seeing lovely deciduous trees changing their colors from yellow to red. We don't have many deciduous trees here - they're mainly evergreens or trees with tiny leaves. Oh well, I can admire the picture I get on the TV.

My grade 10s are not doing their homework. I knew this but it took one kid to really point it out. It was after school and Brian came in to get help with his homework, like he usually does. I was trying to help him but he was super cranky: tired, headache etc. At one point he just sigh and blurted out, "Do I have to do this now? It's not like anyone else is going to do their homework and if I do it now, I'll just be sitting in class bored like I always do because you'll be going over this with everyone else in the class?"

My first reaction, in my head, was, "Yes, because it's homework. You have to do it." But then I thought about it. Brian was absolutely right. I felt like I had just been kicked in the head.

The kids were not doing their homework. Marks were not motivating them. Why weren't they doing their homework? How could I get them to do their homework? So for hours, I researched how to get the kids to do their homework.

Mainly what I found is to be honest with the kids and ask why. So today we had a class meeting. I explained the situation and asked them why they didn't do their homework. I explained to them my point of view of assigning it (so that they'd get practice). I also explained that I really wanted to know the answer because I'm not into assigning homework because it's "good for them" or because "it's fun" because those are just bullshit reasons.

We all had a good discussion. Mainly, it's that they didn't get it and the examples we did in class didn't seem to apply to the homework. This basically means that they really need a lot of baby steps to make the leap from the question to the answer. My work, now, is to give them the baby steps for now and then wean them off of it. Another thing is that I observe that they don't really pay attention until I either call on them in class or I hand them their homework and then they don't know what to do.

So we made a "deal". They need to pay attention in class and I'll try to make sure that they are fully equipped so they can do their homework. That means that sometimes we won't make it through a whole lesson in one class and they may not get homework. But their side is that they have to pay attention. I explained how I try to build the lesson and they were actually interested in how I try to teach them. They were quite attentive when we actually got down to work. They were more willing to actually look at what they had just written down. We'll see how this all works tomorrow.