subtitled: Evidence of Student Work is Necessary in Effective Classrooms

Since I retired from full time teaching, I have donned quite a number of new “hats.” I’ve worked as a butcher, as an adult language instructor, as a educational product creator, as an Uber Eats driver for a few minutes, as a Whole Foods Deli Clerk. I like to work, clearly. It is especially great when I am not obligated to every day or full time OR early hours. The most consistently decent job I’ve had is tutoring, and most of it has been online for the past few years.

I’ve worked for several companies who rip the tutors off royally, and I’ve also had a good number of private students who have been sent to me through recommendations. I am a terrible self-promoter and therefore haven’t been able to start my own tutoring business or company. Currently, the company I work for is based in China, and I am appreciative of the value they place in their tutors as well as the fair pay rate they provide, unlike American tutoring companies. One interesting item is that I was about to send a YouTube review video for one of my students living in China when my supervisor reminded me that they “don’t have YouTube” in China. Wow. I mean, just wow. No wonder this kid is so damn smart.

I become pretty invested in the success of my tu-tees. Their successes ( or otherwise) are directly connected to my methodologies, so there is no guessing about whether I am accomplishing the goals of the students and their parents. Clearly, they would sack me if the kid doesn’t make marked improvements.

One key pathway for improvement is to locate patterns of errors and to fix them. Currently, I have a dedicated student who is having heaps of trouble in her ninth grade English class at a private school. I am having difficulties helping her overcome her problems because, for some strange reason, she is not allowed to bring any of her work or tests or essays home to show me.

When I taught full time, every one of my students kept an up-to-date class folder in my file cabinets with EVERY SINGLE assignment they had done in my class from day one. In addition, the students were allowed, even encouraged to bring work out of their folders home so that they could go over it, write things over, study from them, etc. They had to sign those items out and return them within a certain amount of time so their work didn’t just disappear, or so that they didn’t give papers to other kids for nefarious cheating reasons.

Now, this fear of having a test leak out of the classroom, or having an assignment scrutinized by the outside world is apparently limiting and even stopping students’ ability to make corrections or do rewrites. Also, since everything the students in that class write down is directly onto the computer, the work is in The Cloud, I suppose. My tutoring student is very industrious and devoted, but she can barely spell the simplest of words when writing anything on paper. She explained to me that this is because everything she writes in class is autocorrected, so she doesn’t need to learn how to spell.

I wrote this teacher an email (with my tu-tee’s parents permission) to ask if the student could bring certain items home so that we could work on them. I asked very politely, non-accusatory, nothing that was challenging, just an ask.

The teacher said something about the school policy prohibiting any student work from leaving the classrooms. If this is so, how is a student supposed to learn? What kind of policy is this? It seems to me to be against every goal in education.

My students loved having their folders to look at, to examine their errors, to brag about their successes, to have memories of past assignments they might have enjoyed, or they might have hated, to study for tests. Their folders were evidence of progress. What or where is the evidence now, at this particular private school? In the ether? Does the teacher keep these assignments somewhere and look at them ever? Or are they in some vast repository of something like the equivalent of a garbage can in “The Cloud?”

I have a few students now who have told me their current school is barring phones and computers from almost everything in their school. I say “Hallelujah!!!” This specific plan may be the sole salvation of education in America. Otherwise, we are most likely to find the majority of student brains also residing in The Cloud.

BAN PHONES AND COMPUTERS IN CLASSROOMS! (unless it is a computer class)