Saving

Something different from the last time I taught in high school six years ago is that the kids are savvier with technology. It makes sense since their lives have been more saturated with it than the kids I taught back then. And schools have gotten better at leveraging technologies toward student learning.

An example: My kids are constantly checking their grades. The data management system our district uses has an app, and they are on it.

Thought experiment: Kids check their grades like adults check their bank accounts. When their grades are high, it’s like they’ve got money saved up in their account. When they get a low grade on an assignment and their grade drops, it feels like the teacher has taken money out of their account.

That’s why they get mad and accuse us teachers of “giving them” bad grades.

Say you’re a kid who’s not a great writer. You work on an essay for an English class but it’s not meeting standards. It feels like your hard work is being rewarded with… money being taken from you.

What if instead of giving papers back graded, we give them back with a note about what the as-is grade is and how to improve it. Then, say the as-is grade is a D, we let them know how it will change their course grade if they leave it as is. The kid can choose whether or not they want to “spend” the “money” and let their grade drop accordingly. Or they can choose to rewrite and thereby “save” their money. Doing so would give kids an added layer of information about how much they could be “spending” before they decide how much effort to put into a rewrite.

It’s about stacking points the way we think about stacking money. It’s also about developing discipline — academic and financial.

No?