Bio
All songs, art and photographs are the property of Roger Young and family.
Contact email: roger.gregory.young@gmail.com
3/21/2020
So Its been a week and one day since being sent home for the pandemic. Working from home as a teacher pretty much sucks. Which is probably the same you could say for every job meant to be done in person. In a school you can prepare for a lesson, teach it, work with the kids on any problems and then send them out the door at the end of class. Even if it goes terrible it ends when the bell rings. Online school is different. It has no bell and no end time. Questions trickle in and answers trickle out. Emails come in all hours of the day from several different classes at once. And hours of preparation only seem to yield minutes worth of learning. Exhausting. Then some of the tedious parts of teaching like data entry seem to multiply with a greater amount of online content. In class I can just see if kids are working and assess on the fly. Online the only proof you can get is what they turn in. More exhausting.
If there is a pro perhaps some of students will learn a little more independence and start to read instructions more carefully. Independence seems to become a diminishing quantity in the students of my career. I have a few students who just copy and paste the questions from an assignment right into an email. Its a pretty good strategy actually. You wear your teacher down with the most helpless useless questions until they just give up and give you the answers. Unfortunately, it works on me pretty well. So I have to respond to the emails with things like "watch the video from 1:15 to 2:35" or "read the the first page second paragraph". Just as much work for me to look up right where they should go as it is to just tell them the answer. I haven't given in yet. But online school is turning out to be pretty exhausting and I may be breaking down.
2/13/2020
This isn't intended to be read. I'm just looking for a place the put my frustrations and observations about the my career in the field of education. Kind of like a blog. And, technically this is a blog. Although its meant to be an archive of my musical creations. No reason I can't put other stuff on it. Right? I pay for it.
So in my latest teaching job I have encountered student cheating on a near institutional level. I'm not the type of teacher that is terribly bothered by cheating. I realize that cheating has existed as long as school has. And I even need to admit that in my youth I cheated on occasion in high school. In high school English class. I didn't do it to get good grades. I didn't really get good grades. I did it because it was institutionalized into the class. It was almost an expectation? Or, at the very least the very kind teacher was not adverse to students collaborating on tests.
I have encountered cheating in many forms in almost 20 years of teaching. Usually I don't make it an issue of punishment. I figure that students that are cheating at least want to do well, right incentive with wrong means. So I have come up with a few ways to deal with it. One is to "accidentally" lose the assignment that is suspect. Ask the students to come back in and redo it. Usually they don't know the stuff so then I use that time to teach them what they should have learned in the first place. Once they have work redone I count it as good enough since the objective is for them to learn something.
More extreme cases may involve confrontation, throwing out a paper in dramatic fashion and insisting on it being redone. This is like a level two strategy if the cheating becomes egregious. But both of these strategies I've used in my career don't work well against institutionalized cheating.
By institutionalized I mean that it is done almost universally from the lowest to the highest student. It is done on such a level that it is hard to address, because it isn't just individual cases I'm dealing with. I let my students work together a lot and only really balk at cheating when it comes to formal assessments. The way I find out if they are really learning what I'm teaching.
I have found some extreme forms of cheating that involve going through my stuff to find answers. But usually it is just collaborative test taking. In other words, kids talk and look at each others work during a test. More collaboration.
So I can make tests that are uncheatable. Like making the same questions with a blank where I can change a number so that each student will need to come up with unique work. Or, put all the questions into a google assignment and shuffle the questions. And, sometimes I do. But all of this represents more work for me. I personally feel that I already have enough work and could use my times on better things.
I've started making test study guides and allowing students to make notes. The study guide is essentially the exact things they will encounter on the test. The notes should be all that they need to succeed. When I actually get students to make notes this works pretty well. Rather than looking at other tests they look at their notes. Unfortunately, there is always those that wont do the notes and will turn to classic cheating methods. But it is a little easier to catch and deal with.
Now I guess I need to start some kind of 'morality' campaign about how cheating is wrong. You will never succeed in life. Look at me, I cheated in high school and now I'm cursed to teach high school all of my days, Monday through Friday, September to June, excluding holidays. It'll be a tough sell.
Contact email: roger.gregory.young@gmail.com
3/21/2020
So Its been a week and one day since being sent home for the pandemic. Working from home as a teacher pretty much sucks. Which is probably the same you could say for every job meant to be done in person. In a school you can prepare for a lesson, teach it, work with the kids on any problems and then send them out the door at the end of class. Even if it goes terrible it ends when the bell rings. Online school is different. It has no bell and no end time. Questions trickle in and answers trickle out. Emails come in all hours of the day from several different classes at once. And hours of preparation only seem to yield minutes worth of learning. Exhausting. Then some of the tedious parts of teaching like data entry seem to multiply with a greater amount of online content. In class I can just see if kids are working and assess on the fly. Online the only proof you can get is what they turn in. More exhausting.
If there is a pro perhaps some of students will learn a little more independence and start to read instructions more carefully. Independence seems to become a diminishing quantity in the students of my career. I have a few students who just copy and paste the questions from an assignment right into an email. Its a pretty good strategy actually. You wear your teacher down with the most helpless useless questions until they just give up and give you the answers. Unfortunately, it works on me pretty well. So I have to respond to the emails with things like "watch the video from 1:15 to 2:35" or "read the the first page second paragraph". Just as much work for me to look up right where they should go as it is to just tell them the answer. I haven't given in yet. But online school is turning out to be pretty exhausting and I may be breaking down.
2/13/2020
This isn't intended to be read. I'm just looking for a place the put my frustrations and observations about the my career in the field of education. Kind of like a blog. And, technically this is a blog. Although its meant to be an archive of my musical creations. No reason I can't put other stuff on it. Right? I pay for it.
So in my latest teaching job I have encountered student cheating on a near institutional level. I'm not the type of teacher that is terribly bothered by cheating. I realize that cheating has existed as long as school has. And I even need to admit that in my youth I cheated on occasion in high school. In high school English class. I didn't do it to get good grades. I didn't really get good grades. I did it because it was institutionalized into the class. It was almost an expectation? Or, at the very least the very kind teacher was not adverse to students collaborating on tests.
I have encountered cheating in many forms in almost 20 years of teaching. Usually I don't make it an issue of punishment. I figure that students that are cheating at least want to do well, right incentive with wrong means. So I have come up with a few ways to deal with it. One is to "accidentally" lose the assignment that is suspect. Ask the students to come back in and redo it. Usually they don't know the stuff so then I use that time to teach them what they should have learned in the first place. Once they have work redone I count it as good enough since the objective is for them to learn something.
More extreme cases may involve confrontation, throwing out a paper in dramatic fashion and insisting on it being redone. This is like a level two strategy if the cheating becomes egregious. But both of these strategies I've used in my career don't work well against institutionalized cheating.
By institutionalized I mean that it is done almost universally from the lowest to the highest student. It is done on such a level that it is hard to address, because it isn't just individual cases I'm dealing with. I let my students work together a lot and only really balk at cheating when it comes to formal assessments. The way I find out if they are really learning what I'm teaching.
I have found some extreme forms of cheating that involve going through my stuff to find answers. But usually it is just collaborative test taking. In other words, kids talk and look at each others work during a test. More collaboration.
So I can make tests that are uncheatable. Like making the same questions with a blank where I can change a number so that each student will need to come up with unique work. Or, put all the questions into a google assignment and shuffle the questions. And, sometimes I do. But all of this represents more work for me. I personally feel that I already have enough work and could use my times on better things.
I've started making test study guides and allowing students to make notes. The study guide is essentially the exact things they will encounter on the test. The notes should be all that they need to succeed. When I actually get students to make notes this works pretty well. Rather than looking at other tests they look at their notes. Unfortunately, there is always those that wont do the notes and will turn to classic cheating methods. But it is a little easier to catch and deal with.
Now I guess I need to start some kind of 'morality' campaign about how cheating is wrong. You will never succeed in life. Look at me, I cheated in high school and now I'm cursed to teach high school all of my days, Monday through Friday, September to June, excluding holidays. It'll be a tough sell.