Student Feedback—Suggestion II

II. Regarding Homework
When I asked the students what they meant by this, they explained that sometimes too much emphasis on homework was bad, while too little was just as troubling. They felt that there should be some middle ground. Homework, to them, should be more practice on the things already learned in class, rather than on new concepts. Some students felt that (can you believe it) their teachers did not give enough practice homework and that some concepts that were taught once or twice were passed by and never touched on again. This could be due to a couple reasons. Reason One, that the teacher failed to use prior concepts throughout the school year; or Reason Two, that the teacher ran out of time and had other concepts to teach before the end of the semester/year. Reason Two could connect to the ever-shortening of the class time available for teaching. In my first full year of teaching, teachers taught five classes, six periods a day, about an hour per period. This meant that we saw our students on a regular basis and that we had around five hours of teaching time with each class per week. However, due to budget cuts and our bleeding hearts, we agreed to change to a block schedule, teaching six classes, three per day, for about an hour and a half a class. This does not include those weeks where a Monday or a Friday is a holiday. That would cut down the time with each student even more. Therefore, at the most, we would see one class three times a week for a total of four and a half hours. Not only did we then have more students to teach, but less time to teach them. The effects of such a crunching of our time together could be seen, possibly, through the amount of homework vs. classwork.
Teaching at a block schedule school isn’t all that bad, unless the valuable time is not used wisely. Every minute that teachers have in that classroom with students should be filled. My BTSA support provider used to tell me all the time to plan for more than what I thought I could cover, just in case I could actually get to it. This also helped with leaving lesson plans for substitutes. As a teacher and as a substitute, I cannot stand having the last ten or so minutes of class left to do nothing but stand, talk, and wait for that bell to release the students.