Keeping kids busy

Recently, I've been giving a very informal class to my host cousin, three of her friends, and two other host cousins. I focus on pronunciation and basic sentence formation-two things that get overlooked within the high school English program. The other day, I handed out some homework that I had prepared for them, as I was going to be gone on vacation and we'd be missing some classes. I said it wouldn't take too long (which is true) but one of them commented that it was like a test. In being three full pages of questions and exercises, she was right, it was almost as many pages, and certainly had more questions than any of the tests the students were used to. (Lots of instructions and poor usage of space cause the less content tests to take more space.) This comment reminded me of something I had been thinking about a fair amount recently. If you read my recent post on education and incentives, you'll note that many things here are very regulated-homework is one of them. Teachers are only allowed to give two assignments per trimester and are limited in how much weight can be assigned to the homework portion of the grade. I'm certain high schoolers in the US are jealous. And even some teachers might say the absence of busy work is a good thing. Yet, my experience here has made me reluctant to agree. 

 Learning occurs through a variety of ways, and different people learn differently-but I think there are two things that most teachers and people that know a lot more than me about learning would agree on. First, learning something in a variety of ways helps retention. A student just seeing a word might recall it, but a student seeing, saying, writing, and hearing the word has a much better chance. This is because this allows different style learners to all be touched, and because the different experiences with the word get imprinted on different parts of our brain. The second thing is that repetition helps retention. It's why one practices dribbling a basketball, playing a song on a trumpet, or typing on a keyboard. Doing something over and over trains our bodies(controlled by the brain)-and reading or writing or saying or hearing something over and over trains our brains directly. To a certain extent, language learning is a lot of brute memorization. There are creative and fun ways to memorize words-but they still need to be memorized. 

My time working with students and teachers in Costa Rica has really shown me the value of repetition-due to its almost complete absence. Sadly, what happens all too often, is that students are 'taught' a bunch of words, memorize them quickly, take the test, and then never again have to use the words. Actually, that's just a few students, most don't ever 'memorize quickly' most of the material. This is because they aren't forced to do so. 'Busy' work as it is pejoratively called, if well designed, should keep students busy learning new material. A student can be taught that "am" goes with "I" and "is" with "he, she, it", but they can forget it just as easily. But, if made to do 15 or 20 exercises demonstrating this, they'll have a much better chance of learning. A few weeks later, (even after the test), another 15 or 20 exercises will do a great job to help them remember (or re-learn) the skill. Many teachers here might say, 'but the student is just doing exercises, she's not learning' because the student isn't writing down or reading new material. This attitude is that learning is a one time, one step process is holding so many kids back from learning, and is really frustrating. Some teachers I've talked to balked at the thought of giving a worksheet with 15 or 20 questions. Granted, I don't know the perfect number for every skill-but I'd rather error on the side of caution-and have a good sample that the student has mastered the skill. 

The homework issue I briefly discussed above certainly inhibits the ability of teachers to keep students busy learning outside the classroom. Yet, I can't even begin to imagine the number of classes I've seen let go early because the students finished writing the three questions the teacher assigned or had completed the four sentences the teacher asked for. Call me old fashioned and a brute, but I'd much rather see the students staying in class doing 'busy' work (aka busy learning) than outside writing graffiti and throwing pebbles at their girlfriend in another class. Even crazier than the comment that the homework assignment was bigger than a test was that two of the students immediately set to work on the worksheet-maybe because the information was fresh in their minds, maybe because they're excited about learning, or maybe to show off to the other students that they could complete the exercises. It certainly has caught a bad name-but I'd much rather a teenager is busy practicing the foreign language they've learned than a whole host of other things.