People tell me my job is easy.

You get summers off.

You only work nine months of the year.

You’re done at 3 pm.

You get paid to babysit.

Students at that school won’t succeed anyway, so you don’t have to do much.

Students at that school will succeed anyway, so you don’t have to do much.

Teaching advanced courses is easy. My students don’t even know the basics.

It must be easy to teach those students. Mine can’t handle that kind of work.

I wish I got to teach those students. Mine aren’t that engaged.

You just walk around asking questions. Your students are the ones doing everything.

Everywhere I’ve taught there have been teachers who brag about how hard their tests are. It’s always a central part of their identity as a teacher, of how they see themselves, and how they want to be seen. They proudly consider themselves more rigorous than their colleagues.

But nothing could be easier than making a test hard. You can just put more questions on it than can be reasonably handled in the allotted time. Or put problems on that haven’t been emphasized in class or practiced enough. Or problems that test edge cases and not core ideas. Or problems from the next unit. Or problems you simply haven’t prepared all students to handle.

I’ve seen teachers do all these things. It’s not rigorous. It’s lazy. You know what’s truly difficult? Writing a test that is fair, representative of core ideas, and appropriately challenging.

I’m currently reading “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman and it’s interesting to think about what the theory of product design has to say about instructional design.

For example, the author discusses how “learned helplessness” can result from poor design. A product whose functionality isn’t discoverable, and that doesn’t provide good feedback, will be frustrating to use, so users will likely give up after trying and failing a few times.

Just as I was making the connection to teaching math in my mind, the author himself brought up math instruction as a common example of “taught helplessness”: When math is presented as unintuitive, and poor or misguided feedback is given, students are likely to just give up. The problem is amplified by the linear way in math is usually taught. In many classrooms, if you don’t understand what happened yesterday, you will probably struggle to understand what is happening today.

Originally posted on Mastodon.