Troubling Students

My classes are easy to pass, hard to do really well in. I’m a pushover for a D, but think three or four times about giving out an A. I didn’t fail a single kid last year. Save for Year Two, All Algebra All the Time, I’ve failed fewer than six kids a year, and even Year Two I had the second lowest fail rate of the math teachers.

I teach mostly math at a comprehensive high school, and the previous paragraph is very near heresy. Some math teachers cheer me on as a brave, admirable soul, but I spot them making the Mano Pantea while they walk away, just in case the Overlord is Watching. Others think I’m What’s Wrong With Education Today. These teachers hold as gospel that math standards could be upheld if we teachers were just willing to fail 60-70% of our students. In contrast to Checker Finn, who thinks teachers like me are spreading out two years of math content over three years of instruction because we can’t be bothered, these folks don’t think I’m lazy. They think I’m soft. They think I’m damaging their ability to cover all the course content they could get through if there weren’t all these kids who shouldn’t be there.

I became a lot less conflicted about my high pass rate–not that I ever lost sleep over it–after teaching precalc and discovering that a third of the kids had forgotten how to graph a linear equation and half couldn’t graph a parabola. These were kids that those other teachers had, teachers who had covered everything. Meanwhile, my kids do well in subsequent classes, so I’m not doing any harm.

But I digress. The students who trouble me aren’t the strugglers. I can take a kid who hates math, doesn’t want to be in class, and get him (it’s usually a him) to try. I can get that kid to attack a projectile motion problem and, even while making multiple small mistakes, beam with pride because by god, he kind of gets this and who ever would have thought? Kids like that, I can pass with nary a qualm.

The worrisome ones pretend they understand, but don’t have a clue. They cheat whenever they can, and not just on tests. They copy classwork in the guise of “working together” or “getting help”, and do their best to sit next to strong students. I group students by ability and, unless they can cheat on my assessment test, they are outed and placed up front, where I can keep an eye on then. They will then ask if they can sit next to John, or Sally, or Patel, their friend, because “they explain it so well”. I say no.

But if they cheated on the test, they can sometimes escape notice for a while. I circle constantly, watching kids work, changing seating when I see too much “consulting” with little discussion. Still others are more clever, and it takes a while before I realize they’ve been cheating not only in classwork, but on the tests–even when I create multiple tests. As a new teacher, I would sometimes miss these kids through the first semester. My success rate at pegging them early has improved.

This isn’t a big group, thank god. I might run into one or two a year. They have a telltale bipolar profile: for example, failing English entirely one year, and passing it the next year with Bs. Passing algebra with straight As, failing geometry completely–and failing the mostly pre-algebra and algebra state graduation test with a spectacularly low score. They aren’t fooling all of the teachers all of the time.

These kids are not your Stuyvesant cheaters, conspiring with others to satisfy demanding parents and create a fraudulent resume to get into a good school. Nor are these the low achievers who just want to get a passing grade in these time units called classes organized into a larger time period called school that others apparently view as a place of learning but they see as little more than a community network in which they have invested considerable social capital.

In fact, they’re almost worse than identified low incentive low achievers, cheating or otherwise. These kids almost seem incapable of learning. I can’t get them to slow down. They often resist help from me. Typical conversation:

Me, stopping by: “Okay, let’s start this again. You’ve plotted these points….”

Student: “Oh, yeah, I see.” Frantically erases.

Me: “Well, hang on, I want to be sure…”

Student: “I got it I got it I got it.” Starts to plot a point, then pauses.

I realize the student is waiting for me to say where to plot it in order to say “Yes, I know, I know.” So I wait. The student takes a deep breath and plots the point then lifts his pencil. “No, that’s not right, duh…”

Me: “You aren’t sure how to plot points.”

Student: “Yes, I am.”

Me: “Great. Plot (7,-7).”

Student plots (-7, -7).

Me: “Stop there.” I go grab a handout I have specifically for these situations, a simple handout that explains plotting points with some amusing activities to drive the point home.

Student: “I don’t need this. I know how to do it!”

Me: “Great. Then it should just take you a few minutes.”

At this point, I get a variety of reactions. Some students become furious. Others get sulky. Still others do the handout, making many mistakes, all the while assuring me that this is easy. I obligingly correct the mistakes, make them do it correctly. The ones that get furious, I shrug and let them continue.

Regardless, within a day, they are making the same mistakes. Nothing sinks in. Don’t get overly focused on plotting points; the problem could be anything–factoring, solving multi-step equations, working with negatives, exponential properties, fractions, whatever. Or a new concept. They have absolutely no clue, and can’t do much of anything.

Yet they don’t have the profile of a low ability student. Test scores, yes. Profile, no. They often have As, win praise from teachers for their teamwork and effort. They are heavily invested in appearing “normal”. Serious control freaks. Sometimes, but not always, with parents who expect success. More often, but not always, Asian. All races. Both genders.

I haven’t taught freshmen since oh, lord, fall 2012.¹ I teach relatively few sophomores these days, running into them only in Algebra 2.

That matters because when I taught freshmen and sophomores, I would go full-scale intervention. I might talk to a counselor to see if they should be assessed for a learning disability. I would insist that they stop lying to me and themselves. I had no small success at getting some of them to acknowledge their desperate attempts at fraud, get them to work at their actual level, deal with the discomfort. They didn’t make much progress, but it was real progress, and they had skills to move forward. I ran into some of them again the next year, and we could start on an honest basis and make additional progress. Those who didn’t acknowledge their issues were among the few students I failed.

But that’s a lot harder to do when dealing with juniors taking trigonometry or, god forbid, precalc. Should I fail them? They will probably do better in a class with teachers who give “practice tests”, study guides that have exactly the same questions as the eventual real test but with different numbers. They will definitely do better with teachers who actually grade homework and count it as 25% of the overall.

A small problem. This approach turns my grading policy into: work hard and honestly acknowledge your ignorance and I’ll pass you. Lie and do your best to cheat with similar ignorance and I’ll fail you. I’m comfortable with holistic grading at the bottom of the scale, but I don’t like morality plays.

Then I remember that kids who honestly acknowledge their inability in a trig or pre-calc class are usually seniors, off to junior college and a placement test that will accurately put them in remedial math. I’m only ensuring they are learning as much as possible for free before paying. If they are juniors, I always have a talk with them about their next steps, telling them not to take the next course in the sequence but maybe stats or something else that will keep them working math, but not out of their league.

The kids who cheat and fake it in trig and precalc are usually juniors, and they will be going onto another course. They will not listen to me when I tell them under no circumstances should they continue into pre-calc or, god forbid, calculus. I might be teaching that course, which just gives me the same problem again. Or they’ll be cheating their way through with another teacher–or, that teacher will do what I should have done and flunked them.

This quandary doesn’t make any sense unless you realize that in my view, these kids are pathologically terrified of facing reality, the sort of thing that some of them, forced to face up, might not survive in good form. These aren’t blithe liars gaming the system to look good. Then I remind myself that they’ve been caught before, they’ve flunked other classes, they’ll survive. But I still don’t like the quandary, because these are kids who literally can’t learn. (And remember, I’ve seen them in my non-math classes, too). By junior year, given their denial and fear, does it do any good to make them aware of this? They’re going to be able to point to any number of teachers who disagree with my assessment, and have all sorts of excuses for why they got those Fs. Besides, they just don’t test well. It’s always been a problem.

At times like this, I envy my colleagues who never notice the cheating, or who focus purely on achievement and aren’t interested in the distinctions I’m making.

But these are the students who trouble me.

************************************
¹Holy Crap. That’s an amazing realization. New math teachers doing your time in the algebra/geometry trenches, take heed. If you want variety, it will come.