I always wondered if the teachers understood how much effort people put in. Especially in something like math, where you can't just waffle.
I got the feeling as a kid that a lot of my classmates would just give up. I mean they're sitting there acting like they're concentrating on math, but they aren't. In other classes intermittent attention is enough, you pick up social cues and repeated stories that you've heard, and poof you have a history essay. With math there's a need to have all the steps.
How do you control for that as a teacher observing the kids? How do you know whether a kid has actually tried to learn stuff at home?
I still remember my brother was baffled at how I got top grades in math when he never saw me studying. Of course I tended to do that when he wasn't around.
> How do you control for that as a teacher observing the kids?
The only solution I ever found was not having more than 3 students at a time, not an option for most teachers; I spent most of my career working with 1-3 students as a result. With that few students you can carefully observe the mistakes students are making and ask individual questions about their mental state. Experience will eventually tell you to differentiate students not putting in effort from students who are so lost that they're just flailing and hoping something sticks.
With more students, my experience was that both my attention became too split to give students the kind of careful diagnosis to control for effort.
I got the feeling as a kid that a lot of my classmates would just give up. I mean they're sitting there acting like they're concentrating on math, but they aren't. In other classes intermittent attention is enough, you pick up social cues and repeated stories that you've heard, and poof you have a history essay. With math there's a need to have all the steps.
How do you control for that as a teacher observing the kids? How do you know whether a kid has actually tried to learn stuff at home?
I still remember my brother was baffled at how I got top grades in math when he never saw me studying. Of course I tended to do that when he wasn't around.