When I was maybe 18 - 19, I participated in a NAMI program called "Parents and Teachers as Allies." As part of a panel including a parent and an educator, I got to tell my story of growing up with mental illness to a room full of teachers, and try to impress on them things like "Please send a kid to the nurse/counselor if they're nearly starving to death one semester." The main educational point I stressed? "Never just verbally give or alter a homework session!"
This stuff should be written prominently and reliably in the same place on the board every day. Much better, it should be available online. And even better, to really stop disadvantaged kids from falling through the cracks? Move to a flipped classroom.
In a flipped classroom, the only work assigned for "home" are short video lectures. Instead of giving lectures in class, the students do activities (including traditional homework-style exercises) and the teacher works individually with students who are having trouble, on the things they're having trouble with. (They can email that or post on a discussion forum.) Kids find it easier to watch videos at home, so some who didn't do homework (I was definitely one of them) start watching the videos. The ones who don't? Well, it's a lot better to miss a video but do the activities and get help one-on-one than it is to watch a lecture in class, probably not absorbing much of it, go home to an environment where there is no help, and never do the exercises (I'm paraphrasing something I read in a NYT article in this sentence).
This is the most exciting (on a personal level) educational innovation I have ever heard of. YEARS of my life were spent feeling worthless and behaving accordingly because I couldn't do homework and supposedly that was about "work ethic" and therefore I would not be able to support myself as an adult and would either die on the streets or be a burden to whatever relative had to grudgingly support me.
(Why couldn't I do homework? Academic anxiety, poor executive function, lack of self-efficacy, lack of parental help, depression, an inability to follow what was going on in the classroom and therefore hear these assignments, losing track of what was do when, internet/media addiction--I felt like I was drowning and like even basic control over what I did when I got home from school slipped away from me every time I tried grasping for it.)
To get back to the point of this article: If you give homework assignments by speaking, you are disabling students with attention or auditory processing problems. (Attention doesn't mean ADHD: It can be anything from hunger to depression to worries about an unstable home life.) If you write homework down only in the classroom, you're disabling students who will have a hard time remembering to write it down and then not losing the paper you wrote it on. If you assign homework online (and all your students have internet access at home or stay after school to do homework), you're re-enabling a huge group of students but still disabling those who lack the executive function, self-confidence, stable home-life, and/or parental support to do the homework. Flipping your classroom re-enables a huge group of students to learn, and I would recommend it. But at least post your assignments online.
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