My Homework is Burning

My students don't like homework. Not only do they not like homework, even though I work hard trying to make every exercise interesting or at least relevant to their overall goals and skills in the class, they don't do their homework.

Sigh.

I spent weeks feeling irritated about this problem. I mean, it is their education. And I cannot count the number of times I have said "your choice" in response to the dreaded questions about whether or not something would count toward their grade. "Your grade," I always scoff, "What about what you are here for?" Sigh, again. Oh, god, the learning.

But the learning is the big difficult part. No matter what we're teaching, I think we all have our moments where we wax nostalgic. Where we somehow convince ourselves that when we were students (yawn) we actually cared about our educations. We respected our professors. And we wanted to learn . . . no, wait, we were eager to learn, nay, dying to do it. We did our assignments without having to be asked and never complained (deep breath).

You get the picture.

And much like our students, we lull ourselves into a false sense of reality. If we were honest, we'd remember that we hated some assignments. That we did complain and try to get by with minimal work when we could. That we weren't always impressed with our professor's lesson plans or lectures. That we had trouble asking questions and, sometimes, even, wanted someone to tell us 'what the right answer is.' We might remember, that we are, in fact, human too.

Rather than work against the students (and against myself), I have been working on alternatives that make sense to address the 'we didn't know what we were supposed to do' for homework phenomenon. I have a schedule document hosted on the course website that outlines every homework assignment, among other constant reminders. But these traditional methods were not working. They still seemed to never know about and never do their homework.

So, I sat down and thought about how my students interact with the world. They do not, probably, spend a lot of time reading schedules or working from documents like the one I created. Instead, they look at feeds and digests and tumblers. They get text messages and post things to one another on Facebook. So, I sat down and thought, why don't I just feed them their homework?

The texts I create should be more like the texts that I teach.

This is your homework.