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Why

Douglas PerkinsLeave a comment

Why do you do your job? More specifically, what are the motivating factors for this job, other than convenience, finance, and logistics?

Many years ago the university president asked me, Where do you see your students going? The vice principal later asked, What kind of students do you want to produce?

The other day, the principal mentioned Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle, which is another way of getting to the same question. Sinek said, Every single person, every single organization on the planet knows what they do. 100%. Some know how they do it, whether you call it your differentiating value proposition or your proprietary process or your USP, but very very few people or organizations know why they do what they do.

The “what” for a language teacher is easy. Language classes should mostly be some kind of four skills practice that is around 95% review. If your students are doing that, they’re probably learning.

The “how” is a big question, and there are many teaching styles. Much has been said on the topic. If you’re a contract teacher, this is where you spend most of your prep time. You take an activity that’s OK, tweak it slightly, and get 5% more value from it. You take a complicated explanation and find a few simple examples that illustrate the rule clearly. You find some new technology and smoothly integrate it into your lessons. If you have pride in your work and try to improve, over time you will. Training seminars target this.

Training seminars can’t tell you why it matters. They can’t tell you why you should care, and why you would want to keep doing the job for a long time. That’s something everyone has to figure out for themselves. You can talk with others, read blog entries, and watch TED Talks, but then you still have to find your own answer. Here’s mine…

Studying foreign language is always interesting if you want it to be. I’ve studied Japanese since 2001, speak it reasonably well now, and sometimes people ask me how I learned. I tell them, In many ways. There are many ways to practice a language, so if you’re bored with one, dozens of other study methods are waiting for your attention. This goes hand-in-hand with life-long learning.

Learning a language makes you learn about yourself. When you start learning a foreign language, you can’t speak with subtlety, so when you have to talk about yourself, it’s natural to speak plainly and simply. Simple language encourages us to be honest with others and ourselves. Also, many people speak less aggressively in their non-native languages, which can help avoid pointless conflict, and it also lets us reflect on how we speak in our mother tongue.

Learn forever. You can’t learn everything, but you can learn forever. Basic information and global skills are necessary, but you can’t learn it all. Therefore, if we want our classes to provide long-term benefit to students, we should help them learn about themselves, how and why they might want to learn and keep learning things, and give them some specific skills for acquiring new knowledge in the future.

Understanding discrimination is hard. For example, I didn’t really understand the difference between racism and xenophobia until my early 30s. Even if you personally have witnessed or experienced discrimination, it can be hard to recognize and decipher. The issues are complicated and often we feel things strongly but don’t know exactly why or what to do. If we expose students to examples of historical discrimination, or contemporary discrimination elsewhere, the barriers to entry are low. They can learn about things like stereotypes and systemic discrimination without being forced to judge their own society, at least not yet.

War is bad. When you live abroad or make strong international friendships, you realize that nationality isn’t or shouldn’t be important. Let’s care about the whole world, not just one country.

We need critical thinkers. We have the power to solve or mitigate many major societal problems, if we work smart and work together. But large-scale problem solving is complicated and time-consuming, and many people don’t like that. If we can get students to appreciate the value of critical thinking when they’re younger, maybe they’ll keep using it later in life.

We need dreamers. Critical thinking and problem solving help you get places, but you need somewhere to go. That’s where dreamers come into play. There are so many good questions that involve dreaming. Where do you see yourself in ten years? Is there a place you really want to visit once in your life? If you had to change jobs, what would your new field be? How can you make your community better? What kind of household do you want to live in? What is your perfect day? Where do you want to live? Who do you want to be? Why?

That’s a long enough answer for now. What’s yours?

Learn Their Names

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Learn your students’ names. Really. It’s one of the simplest ways to make your classes go better, one of the most important things for any teacher to do, and all it takes is some time and energy.

Why should you learn their names? They’re people, and it’s basic respect to learn who they are. Also, these days there’s so much great online learning. MOOCs are amazing. You can learn a ton from YouTube. What is the school adding, one might ask? Part of the answer is personalization. As we learn about our students, we help them develop general learning skills, and we also find out their interests and tailor our lessons in ways that keep students engaged.

How can you learn your students’ names?

  • Ask them. Even if you’ve asked them before, ask them again. It’s embarrassing if you forgot, but people can tell if you’re glossing over their identity, and in the end that’s far more embarrassing.
  • Use their names. If you remember a student’s name, say it out loud when you’re talking to them. This reinforces your memory.
  • Take attendance out loud at the beginning of each class.
  • Use name cards or name tags. If the school doesn’t already have them, make them just for your class.
  • Look at the seating chart before and after class.
  • Look at the photo roster before and after class. Most schools have a photo roster for each class, so go find it and make a color photocopy of it.
  • Make digital flashcards from the photo roster.
  • Learn some facts about your students. If you know a bit of information, such as their club, or if their big brother or sister is a student at the school, it’s easier to remember their name.

It doesn’t really matter how long it takes for you to learn everyone’s name. Here in Japan with an April start, it’s my goal to learn all the names by June, but in some years it’s taken me until September. Students are quite forgiving at the start of the year, so long as you keep working to learn who they are by the end of the year.

Perhaps you’re a new ALT and you can’t read much Japanese yet. You might think to yourself, Hey, you know, I’ll never learn to read their names. Fortunately, you’d be wrong. There’s hope! Choose one of your classes and make physical or digital flashcards for the family names. Study the flashcards for five minutes a day twice a day for a week, and you should be able to memorize them all. A month later, start on another class. In Japanese, family names are fairly standard, but first names have all kinds of strange readings, so focus on the family names first. If you want to learn to read kanji, you have to start somewhere, and why not start with the people around you?

While you’re at it, learn all of the teachers’ names too.

Homework Objectives

Douglas PerkinsLeave a comment

What is the point of homework? I was chatting with my coworkers the other day and learned they were spending long hours grading homework. I asked them why, and we had a fascinating conversation. It turns out they were spending ten times as long on it as I was, because they felt like it was somehow proper or necessary, but on later reflection we agreed that oftentimes it isn’t.

Practice

The first and most common objective of homework is to practice something. Students studied it in class, and you want them to get some reinforcement, so they do some drills at home. Suppose they are learning to spell some words, and their homework is to write each word five times. The next class, you show up, and collect the homework. Here’s an important question: Should you carefully check that they spelled each word correctly? In my view, no. Most of the time you don’t need to check so carefully. If you’re smart, you’ll have a spelling test in class, and tests are the place to find out exactly how good their spelling is. When you’re grading their homework, you can take a quick look, see that they did it mostly correctly, and give them an A. Remember, if they were supposed to practice by doing their homework, and they did, even if they were wrong in certain places, then they did what you asked, so give them the A already.

I sometimes feel weird writing “100” or “A” on something that might have errors, so I instead draw a star or use a “Good Work!” stamp to indicate it was done well. Conversely, if students skip sections, copy, or are obviously careless, I write “0” or “25” or “50” and a note explaining why.

Preview

In college you were probably assigned to read some pages before coming to class. It’s possible to use homework as a way to preview a topic, or to get students’ minds primed so you can jump into it quickly in class, either for a project or a discussion. In many junior and senior high schools, this is probably less effective than in college, because some students don’t care about your class. You can give it a try, but have a backup plan in case things fizzle out.

Fun

Sometimes we assign homework mostly because it’s fun, or at least we hope students will feel that it’s fun. If you ask students to make an exciting video about something, you’ll be surprised how much energy they might put into it.

Pace

I don’t assign much homework, and most of what I do assign is stuff that we started doing in class and we ran out of time. By making it homework, I’m encouraging students to use class time efficiently. If Jane was focused and finished the paper in class, but Jimmy was sleeping, then Jimmy has to finish up at home. Jane feels happy because she can take it easy later, and Jimmy still learns whatever I wanted him to learn.

Check Answers in Class

Suppose your students do a homework assignment with three parts: a true/false section, a spelling section, and a paragraph writing section. In class, before you collect it, ask them to correct the first two sections themselves. You can say the answers aloud or write them on the board, and students can see what they did right or wrong much faster than if they had to wait until you graded it. Also, if they have questions about why something is what it is, they have a good chance to ask you. Since they can’t reasonably check their own paragraph writing, you’ll have to handle that later.

You might worry that students will cheat, and either they’ll write down the correct answers when you say them and pretend they finished it at home, or they’ll pretend an answer is correct even when it’s wrong. In my experience, this doesn’t happen very often. You can easily see if they are holding a red pen or pencil, and even if they grade their homework erroneously, that won’t help them when similar questions appears on the test later. Ideally, your tests look similar to your homework, and you can tell your students this, which should help them focus on properly identifying and understanding mistakes.

Don’t Fix Everything

Suppose your students did the above homework, and in the writing section they each wrote a paragraph about their favorite breakfast and why it is or isn’t healthy. You’re now grading the writing section. Many teachers have a strong urge to fix all the mistakes. This is wrong. It’s wrong, and the reasons it’s wrong are cool to think about.

First of all, you’re a teacher and you’re busy with many tasks. If you want to provide detailed writing feedback with lengthy corrections for hundreds of students on a regular basis, you probably can’t do that in your working hours. So then you’re taking things home and working overtime, for which you almost certainly don’t get paid. That makes your life suck, so don’t do it. But you might object, and you might say something like, No, no, I agree my life sucks right now, but it’s for the good of the students! I have to help out the students, so I’ll do it anyway. OK, it’s good that you care, but if you really believe that, then it’s your duty to go to the bosses and tell them you need fewer classes or an assistant so you can handle all of the writing. Don’t overwork yourself on a regular basis when the problem is the lack of adequate staff. After all, whoever replaces you in the future might not put in those hours, and if you can fix the problem properly now, future students will benefit too.

Even if we ignore that, and you’re OK with doing a ton of unpaid overtime, it’s still bad to correct all the mistakes, because it destroys motivation. Imagine Joe writes his paragraph, hands it in, and gets it back with 28 mistakes noted in red pen. What will Joe feel? I imagine he’ll feel pretty damn awful, like maybe he sucks at doing English, like maybe writing is pointless because he’ll never get rid of all of those errors. Also, if he has 28 mistakes and you corrected all 28 of them, it really doesn’t help anyone, because he’s not going to read all of it. Understanding why something is wrong takes some time, and Joe might look at the homework for a minute or two, but that’s it. So don’t correct everything. Choose some mistakes that you think are the easiest to fix or the most important and correct those, and you’ll help Joe focus that minute or two on something small and comprehensible.

Sometimes you don’t want to correct mistakes at all, because you could just underline them instead. If you find five relatively simple mistakes and underline them, you can ask the student to figure it out on their own. If they already studied that spelling or grammar point, and they can do error correction themselves, it’s a great learning opportunity and a useful life skill to develop.

Depending on the circumstances, you could respond to the content and not the delivery. If students are writing about their healthy breakfasts, you could correct the spelling and grammar as described above. But instead you might want to focus solely on the content. You could read their paragraph and put a comment at the bottom such as, The example you gave of bananas with high vitamin value was great. Nice job! and be done with it. This would show the student that you really care about their thoughts, which would raise their motivation for that type of work. It turns out that writing things, even if nobody corrects the mistakes, helps people get better at writing. So although sometimes you definitely want to proofread and mark things up in detail, you certainly don’t have to do it all the time, and some of the time you don’t have to do it at all.

End at the Term End

Suppose you collect some homework in the last class of the term, right before winter vacation. You could mark it up, grade it, and hand it back in January, but why? If the term test is done, the odds of students caring much about homework they finished a month prior are relatively low. In a situation where you can’t return the homework in a prompt fashion, you don’t have to return it at all. If it’s something special, hold onto it until January, but if it’s a fairly standard assignment, just enter the grade in your grade book, drop the paper in the shredder, and enjoy the holidays.

Goals

In summary, when you’re grading, decide what you think is important. Once you know what the main objective is, you’ll get a good idea of what to look for on students’ papers. This will allow you to quickly focus on a few key areas, give students suitable feedback, and finish everything in a professional fashion.

Editing

Organizing Files

Douglas PerkinsLeave a comment

As teachers, we have a lot of data, and how we organize our files impacts whether we can easily share them with other teachers in the future. Here are some organizational tips I’ve learned over the past decade that I think will help you keep your data organized so you can work smoothly with other teachers to develop excellent educational materials. Let’s assume you have a shared drive, such as a local network folder, Google Drive, or Dropbox.

Network

If you think it’s useful, and you only have a paper copy, scan it. Some people have physical folders with copies of all the great worksheets they’ve made or received, but generally speaking, digital is better. Here’s why.

  1. You can email it to a friend or coworker.
  2. Your shelf won’t fill up.
  3. You can search for it quickly by name.
  4. You can copy/paste good parts and use them in new materials.
  5. You can easily take it with you when changing jobs.

Our school has a photocopier/scanner combo machine with a feeder. It scans stacks of papers and makes PDFs. If you have that kind of device on hand, scanning things is quick, and surely it will benefit you later.

Let’s suppose you have a bunch of documents. You might keep them on your computer in folders like this.

Homework
├ 2016
├ 2017
├ 2018
├─ Amazing Plants (2).odt
├─ Copy of Amazing Animals.odt
New
├ Letter to Parents (New).odt
Notes
├ Eighth Grade
├ Ninth Grade
├─ Letter to Parents.odt
├ Seventh Grade
├─ Grades (2017).ods
├─ Grades (2018).ods
Oral Communication
├ 2012
├ 2013
Pictures
├ Summer Slides.ppt
├ Summer Slides PDF.ppt.pdf
Tests
├ Seventh Grade Term 1 Test.odt
├ Seventh Grade Term 1 Test (Old).odt
Worksheets

When we start creating and organizing data, something like this seems like it’ll work. But over time, issues creep up. Here are some tips that help things stay sorted.

  1. Make the year folders top-level. If you have file names like Grades (2017).xls and Grades (2018).xls, you’re mixing last year’s data with this year’s. It makes more sense to have a folder called 2017 and another called 2018. Put grades inside those folders.
  2. Don’t use parentheses. In the above example, consider these two files.

    Tests
    ├ Seventh Grade Term 1 Test.odt
    ├ Seventh Grade Term 1 Test (Old).odt

    The bottom file is apparently old, but next year, both files will be old. What should your file names be then? I don’t know! But if you sort the data by year at top level, you can avoid this whole problem.

  3. Remove pointless words. Here’s a directory worth cleaning up.

    Homework
    ├ 2018
    ├─ Copy of Amazing Animals.odt
    ├─ Amazing Plants (2).odt

    They probably got those names because the user was copy/pasting files, and the system automatically added Copy of and (2). To make the data easy to read, we should go through and rename files, removing the extra text as appropriate. It would be much prettier if it looked like this.

    Homework
    ├ 2018
    ├─ Amazing Animals.odt
    ├─ Amazing Plants.odt

  4. Use numbers instead of words. The example has notes for Seventh Grade, Eighth Grade, and Ninth Grade. If you sort the directory alphabetically, it shows up like this.

    Notes
    ├ Eighth Grade
    ├ Ninth Grade
    ├ Seventh Grade

    That’s awkward because seventh grade comes last. If you use numerals instead, it looks much more sensible.

    Notes
    ├ 7
    ├ 8
    ├ 9

  5. Don’t repeat extension information. In the above example, there’s a file, Summer Slides PDF.ppt.pdf. The file type is expressed by the end of the file name, so it should simply be called Summer Slides.pdf. Duplicate information about the format makes things hard to read, and it’s not needed.
  6. Preserve the original file. In the above example, there are two related files.

    Pictures
    ├ Summer Slides.ppt
    ├ Summer Slides PDF.ppt.pdf

    It looks like the user made a PowerPoint file and then generated a PDF of it. There are good reasons to do that — for example, I often copy data onto my tablet, but my tablet doesn’t support PowerPoint. As a temporary measure, it’s reasonable to make PDFs, but for archiving, it’s unnecessary. When you or another teacher is looking at the data next year, the original file is by far the most useful, because it can easily be modified to fit new situations. The PDF doesn’t help, so delete it and be happy.

  7. Use the date if really needed. In the above example, there are two related files.

    New
    ├ Letter to Parents (New).odt
    Notes
    ├ Ninth Grade
    ├ Letter to Parents.odt

    Most of the time, you don’t need both files, so you should just replace the bottom file with the top one. However, sometimes you really want a record of something. Perhaps you sent a letter, realized there was a typo, fixed it, and sent a new version. In that case, you could put the date in the file names, like this.

    Notes
    ├ Ninth Grade
    ├ 2018-09-01 Letter to Parents.odt
    ├ 2018-09-05 Letter to Parents.odt

    This works well because the two files are in the same folder, and the file names tell us which was sent when. Always use the format YYYY-MM-DD or YYYYMMDD. This is unambiguous — you don’t wonder whether 9/3 means September 3rd or March 9th — and it automatically sorts in chronological order.

  8. Don’t assume course names will stay the same. The example has a top-level folder, Oral Communication. That class used to be offered in Japanese high schools, but several years ago the national curriculum was revised, and it no longer exists. Instead, there are two related classes, English Communication and English Expression. If I want to organize everything by course name, what do I do? Should I leave Oral Communication there, knowing that new teachers will never look at it? Should I rename it to English Communication, because the two courses are similar? It’s unclear what to do, but if the data were sorted by year at top level, we wouldn’t even be asking the question.
  9. Don’t assume event names will stay the same. This is similar to the previous point. My school has an event called “International Day”, but it used to be called “MECC”, and from time to time it’s called “Board Game Day”. If file organization depends on the name staying the same from year to year, it’s going fail.
  10. Video files might need special treatment. If you have lots of very large video files, perhaps you can’t just copy them to a new folder each year, because it might fill up your hard drive. You might need a separate top-level folder just for videos. In my experience, only video files are large enough where this is a concern.If I’m using large videos that are on YouTube, I like to keep the URLs in a notes file, and I can download the videos again in the future.I always take videos of students’ presentations. This lets me grade the presentations at a leisurely speed, and when students have questions about why they got a particular grade, we can watch the video together. A month or two after the term ends, I delete most of those files, saving a few of my favorite ones to be used as examples in future years.

If we apply the above rules to the initial example, we get a directory structure that’s much easier to navigate. It would look something like this.

2012
├ Oral Communication
2013
├ Oral Communication
2016
├ 7
├─ Homework
├ 8
├ 9
2017
├ 7
├─ Homework
├─ Worksheets
├─ Grades.ods
├─ Term 1 Test.odt
├ 8
├ 9
2018
├ 7
├─ Homework
├── Amazing Animals.odt
├── Amazing Plants.odt
├─ Grades.ods
├─ Term 1 Test.odt
├ 8
├─ Summer Slides.ppt
├ 9
├─ 2018-09-01 Letter to Parents.odt
├─ 2018-09-05 Letter to Parents.odt

Share

I like to create materials for classroom use, and I enjoy sharing those materials with others. This is particularly important for a school like mine, where we have several native teachers on staff. Every few years, some teachers go, others come, and there’s a decent chance that we teach different grades or courses than what we taught previously.

When you’re planning for a class you haven’t taught before, or haven’t taught for several years, the first step is to ask last year’s teacher for their data. If that data is organized well, you’ll definitely appreciate the work they did to get it that way.

Some teachers are self-conscious about sharing their materials. They might refuse to upload files, or they might upload them but leave everything in a horrible mess where we can’t really tell how things were meant to be used. Perhaps they lack confidence, and they are worried that if other teachers see the low-quality materials, their poor teaching practices will be revealed. This type of concern is understandable, but if you’re feeling it, here are some things to keep in mind. First, we all make mediocre materials from time to time, and yours won’t be the worst. Even if some of your materials are mediocre, there are probably some gems that will excite your coworkers. Second, materials are only one aspect of teaching, and looking at them doesn’t give other people enough information to judge your general effectiveness as a teacher. Third, if you’re going to continue teaching in the future, then sharing your materials with others is a great way to get their feedback. If they find typos, they’ll tell you, and if they make an updated version, just ask them to send you a copy.

Be positive, share your data with other teachers, get their feedback and their data, and work together to create cool stuff.