Tough Love

My students can choose to not believe me, but I really hate giving zeros. I hate taking points off for silly, easily fixed mistakes. I hate being picky.

But it's part of my job.

It can be rough. Students come into my classroom, I have expectations, I believe I have thoroughly explained myself, and then they still don't follow directions. And those directions have specific reasons. In my English classes the little, easy to lose points are for things like form and technique. Simple things like MLA headers, double-spacing papers, putting a title at the top of the page, and most recently, labeling electronically submitted documents. The last item was my hang up today. My students just finished projects that were submitted electronically. Last year we went to all Apple products. Unlike Word, which requires the writer to label a document when he or she saves it, Pages, the Apple word processing program, does not require users to do that. A person could have 50 numbered documents that have the word "Blank" in front of the number and never label the document. That has led to students turning in the wrong documents as well as lost documents when they weren't saved properly. I'm not just trying to teach them proper form because "they are going to need it in college" (a phrase I am much more careful about using since working as a college teaching assistant for two years). I'm trying to teach them that form is about consistency and clarity for their audience. Professionals need to follow specific forms in various fields and they need to be used to following those directions. As a teacher with delusions of becoming successful with writing in my field, I need to follow a specific form when I work on my own writing for submission. In the so-called "real world" people have to follow specific directions and students need to start learning that lesson in my classroom.

Teaching students how to follow form is about three things: instruction, reinforcement, and repetition. They need to be taught the forms, they need to be corrected when they don't follow that form (and yes, that does mean taking off points for not following form), and they need to practice it over and over again. Several years ago, when I was working with one of my sisters directing the spring musical, she frequently complained that students didn't have the music down as soon as she wanted them too She couldn't understand why they didn't get it as quickly as she wanted them to get it. I understood. I had been teaching some of those same kids for two or three years and they still couldn't get MLA headers correct no matter how many times I corrected them. They needed to practice it over and over again.

Unfortunately today I had to use tough love with my classes. I don't like doing it but I know it is necessary. Hopefully they will forgive me eventually. And if they don't, the least I can hope for is a double-spaced paper with a correct header. Sometimes it's the small victories.