Shane Trotter was an eager beaver when he began teaching high school 10 years ago. He was working in what was considered the best school in a “destination district.” But his students were unprepared to take notes or write short responses on tests, he writes in Quillette.
I’d spend entire classes explaining what I wanted to see in the short answer responses. We’d practice writing the “who, what, where, when, and why this concept is important.” But little changed.
. . . Over half of my students would have failed if I gave them the grade they earned. But the unwritten, yet well-communicated, rule was that teachers should never fail a student if it could be helped. The onus was on the teacher to hound students for late assignments and find a way to bump them to a C.
Students had no incentive to work hard because they knew they’d pass, Trotter writes. “In most on-level classes, any student can get a B without the inconvenience of learning anything.”
Under pressure, he “eliminated homework, allowed test retakes, gave fill-in-the-blank notes, graded essays at a 5th grade level, gave test reviews that were basically the test, and intentionally made tests easy,” he writes. “Students might have learned more if they’d been allowed to fail.”
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