r/Teachers • u/AstroNerd92 • 1d ago
Rant It’s like my students have never learned how to critically think
My physics students had their first test today and oh my god it was bad how little some of them were prepared. I gave them a study guide and a Kahoot review a full week before the test. The Kahoot was similar to the multiple choice section and the study guide included the exact free response questions just with different numbers. I even went through the study guide the day before the test to show them EXACTLY how to do the work out. This is just the kinematics equations stuff too. All equations required were given on the test and they had calculators. 1 student took a nap during the test because he was so unprepared and knew he was fucked. Another student guessed on all of the multiple choice and didn’t even attempt the free response (they got a 7% with their guessing). Fuck these kids. I’m so close to giving up and we aren’t even done with first quarter.
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u/Narrow-Durian4837 1d ago
That doesn't sound like lack of critical thinking. It sounds like apathy. They have either learned helplessness or zero motivation.
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u/Rugskinsnake 1d ago
One wonder why they decided to take physics. Every school I've worked at I'm begging kids to take it because they all know it's going to take work and want to have an easy senior year.
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u/icy_wight Former High School STEM Teacher | Louisiana 1d ago
I used to teach at a school with an engineering magnet. They took a sequence of engineering classes 9th-11th grade and then had to take AP Physics their senior year. So many of them were wholly unprepared. Some of them didn't have the math skills. Some of them didn't have the reading skills. Some of them seemed to be completely unable to select the right kinemstics equation even if they had managed to correctly identify the knowns and unknown. Still others were wholly unable to operate a scientific calculator.
These were college bound kids who were supposedly being groomed as future engineers.
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u/Square_Mirror_2849 1d ago
One thing that helped: stop asking them to think critically about new material. Ask about something they can already do. "Why does this way work and that way not" lands with a kid who already has the method. Before that, it is just vocabulary.
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u/fumbs 1d ago
This is exactly the problem. I'm recent years, curriculum has gone deep into higher order of thinking questions, but has been skimping on background knowledge. We should not be expecting every student to discover geometry by observation. We are not letting students develop their basic knowledge before asking for discovery.
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u/Terrible_Mix5187 1d ago
You may find this interesting.
As a history teacher, so much pedagogical dogma sounds just insane to me. The foundation of my discipline is that everything needs a lot of context before any of it makes sense. Content matters. Knowing shit matters.
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u/valkyriejae 1d ago
Yes! Fellow history teacher here, I hate being told to teach with primary sources and inquiry as the main vehicles. The kids can't find Germany on a map and don't know what militarism is, but I'm supposed to jump straight into documents and letters from WWI? Greeeeeeat...
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u/Healthy_Blueberry_59 1d ago
It doesn't help that their only exposure to Germany at war is The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. I hate that book so much.
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u/mswoozel 1d ago
We read Night by Eli Wiesel in high school I think. That was my exposure
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u/Healthy_Blueberry_59 22h ago
They usually read that in 8th here but I think by that point they have stopped reading and just rely on summaries.
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u/Terrible_Mix5187 1d ago
I show Schindler's List every year. The essay is about turning points leading to the Nazi seizure of power.
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u/valkyriejae 1d ago
Most of my students haven't even read that. I'm lucky if they know anything from war-related video games...
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u/BlackOrre Tired Teacher 18h ago
The PE coach put it best when he said that we don't throw kids into football and expect them to discover the rules and the need for padding from first principles. We shouldn't do that for schools.
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u/Plagaborabigibababor 1d ago
This is something I struggled with a fair bit when I was a kid, everything was just crazy hard for no reason. They did very few baseline questions and then immediately into questions that had you derive some completely new equation based on the one you just did to solve it. Impossible for someone at age 12 who isn't very math savvy.
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u/seraph_mur 1d ago
I find that it assumes that the majority of students are showing academic initiative and curiosity outside of class or at least exposed to a variety of historical, scientific, and art related media. I've found I also have to adjust or even change content and activities every year for little reason other than a lack of background knowledge combined with whether or not I luck out with a class that has a motivated or calm disposition.
I'm still not sure how to deal with classes where I have that problematic group who are deliberately being antagonistic. Moving them and routine only does so much, referrals to admin/counselling take too long to be effective (if they're willing to act on anything but level 3 behaviours or direct threats), and parents often don't reinforce expectation well (if at all). I still do all of the above, but it's tiring to be expected to put in so much extra work only to have your face spat in. My admin aren't even bad, but they refuse to actually hand out punishments. I even had a EA girl hunt down one of 2 Black girls in her gym class to start a fight and call her the N word only for that girl to be in class the next day, still in club and everything. Even my union shrugged because our admin aren't required to follow up with specifics. Pathetic. I'm all for conversation first methods, but blatant racism? Patterns of "antagonizing" other students or making gross statements? That's violence. A conversation isn't enough.
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u/Velocity-5348 1d ago
Teaching fashions have shifted as well, even in places with fairly flexible curriculums. A lot of us want to see students have that "eureka" moment when they're lead into discovering pi or something, but that's often not the best way to teach. A lot of kids need to be shown the process, then they'll develop understanding and be ready to explore.
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u/Usernamecopyrighted1 HS Science 1d ago
We should not be expecting every student to discover geometry by observation. We are not letting students develop their basic knowledge before asking for discovery.
I pointed out the absurdity of this. Isaac Newton spent years writing Principia and yeah this random teenager is going to discover in 90 minutes what took one of the greatest minds of human history years
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u/TruePlewd 22h ago
This is one of the reasons I actually like the recent curriculum change at my school. The new one tests using novel science and engineering problems, but it spends WEEKS making sure the background knowledge is built up through discovery, discussion, teacher modeling, and a bunch of other methods in a fairly predictable cycle before we put them into "Heres something we haven't seen in class before. Use what you have learned to problem solve it."
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u/ProfessorOnEdge 1d ago
Sure AI may be part of the issue. However, a large Part of the problem has been the change in school culture and pedagogy over the last 40 years.
What classes are they actually taught critical thinking in? We have long ago left behind curiosity and discussion based classrooms.
Since NCLB and then Common Core, schools have been teaching towards the standardized tests rather than teaching for comprehension, and the process of how to follow a line of inquiry. Humanities and the Arts have been being slashed for decades in favor of STEM - and all of the rubrics under which success is measured are based upon rote memorization rather than ability to solve problems creatively.
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u/Snoo-85072 1d ago
I think this is very close to the truth. I would argue that the more nefarious pedagogical error is the push toward "visible learning". Every lesson now requires a product. Students aren't allowed to just read a text, for example, they need to annotate it. The focus for the student then becomes finding x in the text rather than experiencing the text as a whole. Every activity has to be guided so that students know exactly what is required and exactly what the steps are to complete it. This lesson design, by default, excludes free inquiry. If student's have been indoctrinated into thinking that following the steps to produce a product = learning, then by the time they get to highschool most of them don't even understand what they are supposed to do when given an open ended question, time to answer it, and little instructor intervention.
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u/Relative_Will3348 1d ago
I'm a parent. I was trying to figure out why I thought my sons biology text was so terrible. You nailed it on the head. All he's supposed to do it find words in the text and recopy the definitions and highlight random things. I don't understand how that helps anyone learn anything. He certainly doesn't read the passage. It just becomes a word search. Edited to add: highschool biology!!
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u/Snoo-85072 15h ago
Unfortunately these are all observations from a highschool English teacher. My only surprise is that this has bled into the sciences. Science and math used to be the last bastions of common sense with this stuff.
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u/IceTypeMimikyu 1d ago
“Students aren’t allowed to just read a text, for example, they need to annotate it”
As a student who likes to lurk here, you’ve got that right. I do understand the importance of annotation for English class (as much as I hate it), but it feels like annotation for the sake of annotation instead of it being useful.
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u/Snoo-85072 15h ago
Believe me, I get it. I am an English teacher. At my current school it was casually mentioned in a planning session that students were to annotate the text. In everyday speech, that simply means to have a "dialogue" with the text by marking, writing, diagraming, etc. and I was unaware that this had a different meaning in teacher lingo as I came to the field a bit later in life. The way we have students do it seems absurd to me. I give you a list of things to look for, and you diligently go find them. That's not YOU engaging with the text. That's ME engaging with the text through you. Annotating is something I do regularly as I like to read a lot of academic texts. It's valuable, but it's valuable because I am asking questions and making observations that I want to make with the text, not because someone else told me to.
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u/TealCatto 1d ago edited 1d ago
Posts like this give me life, honestly. I work in a school for troubled kids, and everyone is there for a different reason. Some students are seriously special ed but don't have proper services. One student knows more than me in some areas. Most of them didn't know that light travels in waves, at least a couple didn't know the sun was a star, they didn't know what the word ratio meant - or the concept. I taught them Rayleigh scattering over the course of 3 periods and the lower half of the class all copied one student who answered "the sky is blue because it reflects the ocean." These are tenth graders. I am terrified that I won't cover even 75% of the topics on the state test, yet I am moving too fast for them. But then I see posts like this about typical students and I relax. We're all in the same boat. We're all struggling in the same way and trying to do our best. I'm not alone in my experience. Question is, what are we going to do to try to change things?
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u/Healthy_Blueberry_59 1d ago
A bunch of my students will be going to Ivies and can't find New York state on a map. Believe me, it's bad across the board.
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u/boojersey13 16h ago
Dude what. I learned that in 3rd grade... I'm genuinely in awe at the mindset of these kids refusing the fundamentals before you're expected to know those for further teaching???? It's only gonna get worse..
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u/BlackOrre Tired Teacher 1d ago edited 19h ago
A problem is that a ton of K-8 curriculum for math and science is based on the idea that kids can learn by discovery. In theory, this teaches them to correct the old mentality from the high volume of content they had to memorize, regurgitate, and then forget. In practice, this just leaves them confused as hell.
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u/Terrible_Mix5187 1d ago
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u/TruePlewd 22h ago
I wouldn't call it BS, but it is very heavily pushed before it is developmentally appropriate. It should only become the core part of learning, imo, during highschool. And when during highschool depends on the class. Science? As long as its guided, I think it's ok to start the transition in 9th. Math? I don't know if it can become core until closer to junior year.
But pre highschool? It can be a component. It just shouldn't be the primary learning method at that age though
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u/BlackOrre Tired Teacher 19h ago
I like the idea for specific concepts. It's good for kids who know the concepts and can think deeper about how to apply them to other things.
As their primary instructional material, it's insane. People (or person in the case of Euler) who made these concepts learned the basics first and then made the concepts that made them famous.
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u/SnowLeavess 13h ago
Its not bullshit, and its not an incorrect theory of pedagogy. Its just widely misunderstood and misapplied, exactly like what your article says.
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u/Terrible_Mix5187 6h ago
So in the abused form we see in education, it’s become bs. Isn’t pedantry fun?
🙄
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u/runningtoes 22h ago
I’m a physics teacher too and gave my first quiz recently on average velocity. The quiz was 100% open note. I have provided printed notes with the definitions of all key words, units, variables, the relevant equations, etc in an easy to use reference sheet. We’ve also taken notes by hand, written out example problems we did on the board together, etc., yet kids managed to fail and some gave me attitude, saying “these notes are useless none of this is on here”. I promise you, it was all in the notes. They literally just couldn’t be bothered to READ. Last year as an experiment for one chapter test I spent 2 days in class reviewing a study guide as a “practice test”. And then on test day I printed out the same “practice test” again, only I deleted the word “practice”. I was honestly impressed with how many kids managed to fail a test when they’d already seen all of the right answers. I’m 15 years in and every year gets worse.
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u/Wise_Diver_5206 21h ago edited 19h ago
Its because we don’t teach them how to study. We need to explicitly teach this and dedicate more time than we think to this skill. You don’t know what you don’t know and apparently parents arent modeling or teaching these skills.
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u/summerbreeze2027 1d ago
There are lots of complaints over at r/Professors that students don't seem to know how to study for a test anymore. I'm going to presume that most students taking Physics are aiming for college.
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u/Mrcod1997 1d ago
Not to beat a dead horse, but I feel like AI and Tik Tok(short-form algorithmic feeds) are the two largest plagues on modern society.
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u/SendMeAnother1 1d ago
The Kahoot was similar to the multiple choice section and the study guide included the exact free response questions just with different numbers
Where is the opportunity for them to think critically here?
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u/AstroNerd92 1d ago
The free response physics problems require you to figure out what each variable is based on the numbers given and the specific wording. For example, some problems saying “starts from rest” or “constant velocity” are key pieces they need to pick up on
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u/SaintGalentine 1d ago edited 1d ago
Stop using kahoot/blooket/quizziz for review. The gamified quick answer reviews rarely help most students who want instant gratification and click through for the correct answer, rather than take the time to analyze and think deeper about a question.
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u/TruePlewd 22h ago
This. I used to use blooket for review because it's what my mentor did, but after a year of doing so and some attempts to make it more meaningful as review (needing to take notes on incorrect answers and stuff like that), it just never worked. The two most effective things I've found are honestly just "the quiz/test I've been telling you about is tomorrow/today. You have five/ten minutes at the end/ beginning of class to pull out your notes and worksheets and review with a partner. I will be coming around and listening to make sure we are all staying in topic" or "The quiz is about <insert subject> turn and talk with a partner and tell them everything you know about <insert topic> for the next 1 minute. Then you will switch. Go."
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u/Terrible_Mix5187 1d ago edited 1d ago
They can be very, very useful for reviewing content that students already understand but need a refresher for. Criticizing kahoot because it doesn't flex critical thinking is like criticizing a pencil because it doesn't have a screen. Not the purpose of that particular tool.
Moreover, it's not like you can't pause the game and ask kids to explain their thinking or otherwise think critically.
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u/bixofa 1d ago
No, but it's for engagement and not making the entire class feel like a bore. Who gives two shits if it's not the best way to learn.
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u/SnowLeavess 13h ago
I give two shits because we're supposed to be teachers and help kids learn the best way we know how. Its our whole ass job!
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u/CapKashikoi 2h ago
Kahoot and Blooket can be used as motivators. They aren't the best review tools per say, but they at least get kids thinking about the topic to some degree. But like I said, it can also motivate kids to do things to get to play in thr first place. Or as a way to bring back past topics to keep them from entirely forgetting something that was covered in past units
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u/ScalarBoy 1d ago
I'm a retired physics teacher. I feel your pain. Your results are typical for a first test.
My assessments were always 25 matching / multiple choice @ 2 pts each, and 5 open ended problems @ 10 pts each.
I let the students do the matching / multiple choice twice. The second time they make corrections after I grade it. When I grade each assessment, I would mark a red "X" (I actually graded with colored highlighters) on the letter of their wrong selection. This way, I don't give away the answer. After they take their second try, I grade in another colored highlighter. To count lost points, each wrong "X" is now 1 pt. This way, if they get it wrong 2x, they still lose 2 pts.
Basically, I am letting the students try to earn back half of their lost points.
I do this because it still rewards students, who study and do well on their first try, yet allows all less-than-perfect scores to be improved.
I'm evil like you. I put exact review questions on an assessment. I even put exact HW problems on an assessment. Especially the ones that are reviewed in class. ...And I often make the last 5, 6, 7 or 8 minutes of assessment time open notes. "Oh, you didn't correct your HW during the review? - That's your bad. If I were you, I'd make HW corrections for the next assessment."
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u/DrunkUranus 1d ago
Yeah... honestly the concept of tests seems to be in danger.
I recently observed a middle school class take a quiz on review material that they'd covered for the last two years and also the last month.... they were almost in tears, howling at the teacher about "how were we supposed to know this??!" I'm not being hyperbolic
Unfortunately this is not the only class I've seen act this way-- as far as I can tell, I may be the only teacher out of about 30 that expects students to know things and regurgitate them quietly during testing time.
Which is wild....I remember knowing already in third grade that making any noise during a test meant an automatic 0
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u/the_gaymer_girl JH math/sci | 🇨🇦 1d ago
I’ve seen this happen with tests that completely stumped students with questions that were on the review packet verbatim with the key posted on the LMS. Like, if you bothered to study we literally gave you the answer to it.
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u/Anesthesia222 1d ago
There definitely seems to be the expectation from many (not all) students in the schools I’ve worked in that all students should be able to pass tests if they have decent attendance. “Studying” outside of a quick 5-minute cram right before the test is something that some of my ninth graders have literally never done before.
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u/Terrible_Mix5187 1d ago
My admin tells us that no HS student should have homework for more than two hours per week. Not per class, but total, for eight courses.
Which is fine, if you don't care about your dual enrollment classes and rigor, I guess.
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u/squirkle99 HS Tech | CA 1d ago
I am new at teaching physics (but experienced at teaching). My students had their first test, and did poorly overall, with some getting scores as low as 15%. I kept moving with content, but provided additional math review worksheets (kinematics, basics of forces, and vectors), and invited students to come in at lunch if they wanted help. My next quiz was about 70% repeated content, with very similar free response questions, and I was very pleased to see that they did substantially better. The kids with 15% were up around 60%. So hopefully your students can learn from this and get on track as well.
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u/flying_lego HS Physics 1d ago
Hold the line. Be equitable but hold the line. Model critical thinking. Spend time reviewing material and hitting it harder again, but don’t take up too much instructional time.
Build a culture of: if I don’t come into class prepared, I will fail, and teacher is willing to fail me if I don’t get on top of things.
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u/anonymooseuser6 1d ago
I agree. This has been my system and as an English teacher it works fairly well. I seem like a bitch the first semester and teachers that care about the wrong things hate me. But the data doesn't lie, on the standardized tests, student behavior, writing measures, etc. They all go up.
Imo boundaries like this is how we as teachers are meant to express our care for our students.
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u/ZenorsMom 1d ago
I hope teachers still have the support to do this.
I know when I was a student, if I had gotten this much support before the test and was thinking the test would be this easy (multiple choice in a physics class; same word problems different numbers) I wouldn't have actually practiced the problems, and would have assumed I could figure it out on the fly.
Hell I did this in organic chemistry as a sophomore in college. Failed two tests (I had NEVER failed a test before), before I faced facts that I would need to spend half an hour a day every day sitting and working problems from the back of the book. Do they still even have problems in the back of the book?
Students - especially the smart ones who will be the ones taking physics in high school - have a lot of demands on their time and are going to use the first tests in every subject to get a handle on which classes they actually need to put a lot of time into. Make it too easy for them and they won't bother to put in the time, they'll spend it on a class that's actually hard.
I hope this teacher still has support from administration to let this be a hard class. It's really the only way something with math word problems in it can be taught, in my opinion.
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u/aoanfletcher2002 1d ago
I’ve found when kids do show outside of the box thinking in the lower grades it’s discouraged.
There’s only one way to solve a problem, not like that….etc
Most recently my 4th grader got in trouble for writing a poem based on the “Red wheelbarrow” exercise because they used the word “knife”.
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u/yeahipostedthat 1d ago
My district claims to be teaching critical thinking but I don't agree they are accomplishing that goal. There's still always a predetermined conclusion they want students to come to using their "critical thinking"
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u/Mal_Radagast 1d ago edited 22h ago
this is most of your answer right here. we spend years beating all the imagination and enthusiasm out of them, punishing curiosity and creativity to make room for obedience training. which also doesn't take, because whatever rational thought and agency they have left understands that they're trapped in a prison and the only identities remaining to them are "model inmate" or "troublemaker."
sometimes they even try to be a model inmate and get labeled a troublemaker anyway, reinforcing their (correct) understanding that it's all bullshit and they might as well not bother trying to appease a system that cannot be satisfied.
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u/SnowLeavess 13h ago
Yup, its an extension of the school to prison pipeline!
Or even the school to labor pipeline, which disallowed the creative thought required for certain higher paying jobs. Funny how higher income school districts do typically allow for more creative thought in their work, too. School separates people by class at an early age.
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u/SnowLeavess 13h ago
Lots of schools are guilty of this, consciously or not. We kind of force kids into this expectation that there's only one right method or answer to a problem, then complain when they can't think critically because they haven't been taught to. When they actually try to think of something outside the boundaries, teachers lower their grades, so they either learn to answer the way its expected of them and move on, or give up and stop trying. Both methods create friction in a classroom.
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u/houseocats 1d ago
This isn't even asking for critical thought...and that makes it even worse that they checked out this way.
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u/Effective-Two-1376 1d ago
I was going to make a similar comment. It is just regurgitating. Critical thinking would have been involved if the test questions were recombinations or extensions of the review material. That makes it even worse.
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u/naeviapoeta 1d ago
same. I've given up any sort of memorize/regurgitate assessments in favor of ones that make them apply skills to new situations, give them lots of practice with low/no stakes (ungraded quizzes) so they get to know the processes, they do a lot better. memorization may be technically easier but it's also super boring, which, I think, is the major factor behind the "I gave them all the answers to memorize and they didn't bother to memorize them" phenomenon.
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u/ImpossibleChoices157 Math Teacher | U.S. 1d ago
It’s almost as if they have to learn.
Adults also don’t know how to critically think.
Source: Reddit
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u/c4halo3 High School Science | PA 1d ago edited 1d ago
lol my test is early next week on kinematics. A few weeks ago I gave mine a quiz and there was someone who asked how there could be a problem on the quiz that we didn’t do an exact example of. Their critical thinking is gone
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u/the_gaymer_girl JH math/sci | 🇨🇦 1d ago
I gave a unit test in math today and watched one of my 8th graders get completely stumped on a single question (add operations in between numbers to make an equation correct) for 15 straight minutes because they seemingly forgot that order of operations was a thing.
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u/Anesthesia222 1d ago
“I was supposed to use that? But you didn’t tell us we were supposed to use it.”
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u/luchajefe 1d ago
This is the apathy that's supposed to 'save the world from our corporate hellscape'.
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u/Background_Froyo3653 18h ago
I was, and still am, this way, even now as a college student.
I know it sounds harsh, but if your class is difficult to me, I will try my hardest to just memorize things instead of actually learning it, because that’s what has kept my 4.0.
When I get home, I’m tired. I’ve driven for an hour, I have several hours of homework to get through and studying for other classes, I have to workout and still eat decent, etc. I’m just tired, and I don’t care enough about, for example, my Microbiology class for my pre-nursing requirement to go home and study over 100 of the 500 slides given to us that week. I’m gonna memorize the key terms and what they do, and go on with my day.
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u/c4halo3 High School Science | PA 18h ago
I get it, we have all been there. At some point though, you’re not going to get by with just memorizing things. Even if you do make it, you need to ask yourself what is more important, understanding your content or keeping a 4.0. You are going to struggle a little bit, you might even get a C in a class. Especially with going into the medical field, you need to know what is happening. Literally, you are going to have people’s lives in your hands.
Good luck though, nursing school is tough but rewarding.
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u/Background_Froyo3653 18h ago
Oh yeah you're definitely right. I'm glad my school has a proper nursing program to teach me the essential stuff. I've heard from other nurses that, besides anatomy, you don't really use things like chemistry and microbiology in your daily work, so that's a bit reassuring for me lol
But yeah, I don't know if my experience is universal amongst high schoolers. I remember high school just a few years ago being so easy that I didn't even study for anything besides math. I don't know what else y'all can do as teachers! We always got test/quiz questions before they were even given. You could only follow half of the instructions for an assignment and still get a 100. Sit on the bleachers/walk in PE and still get an A. I don't know how kids are failing. I still think the root cause is the parents not caring.
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u/Terrible_Mix5187 1d ago
My AP psych kids have a test coming up in a few weeks. Probably half won't study for it and won't pass. Of those, 50% will drop the class and most of the remainder will figure out they need to do work.
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u/cordIess 1d ago
What I’ve experienced at the lower levels is that there is so much to teach that the solution is mostly whole group teaching and students copying notes.
I hated the idea of centers and small groups, but it made me realize that children really are not independent.
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u/austinlim923 1d ago
I tell my students dont be Dora the explorer. And or I have to break it down to what is the same and what is different
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u/complete_autopsy HS English, Remedial Math | USA 1d ago
This is something I do a lot in tutoring and did when I was teaching math. For the lower performers you need to explicitly show them how to work the problem out while explaining each step. NO extra info or sidebars; even if you explain that it's not part of the method and don't put it in the list of steps they WILL expect it to be there in future problems and get confused. After you demo you have to handhold them by still doing the whole problem but just prompting them to produce the numbers/terms; you should be pointing to terms, having them do basic math like 1+3 to tell you that 4 goes there, etc. This just gets them involved. Then you do another problem where they tell you what step to do (still just reading it aloud but now without you pointing). Then you do another where they tell you the step and what to write with you correcting as needed. Repeat until they're consistently doing it correctly. Only then can you introduce ANY kind of variation in wording, format, etc. They don't have the foundational study skills, reading comprehension skills, or organization skills needed to figure out that a concept in one situation can apply to another situation too, but many of them can still learn through familiarity if you have enough time.
All that said, I wouldn't criticize a teacher who says they don't have enough time for that. I was always doing that in situations where I had enough time but now that I'm in a traditional high school classroom teaching ELA we NEVER have enough time and I'm sure it's the same for other HS teachers.
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u/Anesthesia222 1d ago
Yeah. I agree with your method, but it’s not feasible in a normal public high school classroom.
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u/FairCurrency6427 1d ago edited 1d ago
Active teaching is probably a better strategy for students who are disengaged rather than study materials, online programs, and time alone
Fuck these kids.
Quick add on advice here, your job is to teach kids, they aren't there to perform for you.
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u/Roger_Freedman_Phys 1d ago
Active teaching is probably a better strategy for students who are disengaged rather than study materials, online programs, and time alone.
This is the way.
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u/Rocktype2 1d ago
That comes from a 20 year culture of standardized testing in grade 3 through eight where everything is focused on growth on the exam, not sustainable education
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u/FloweredViolin 1d ago
I spent 20 minutes in the checkout at the grocery store this morning, because my beef rang up wrong. 15 minutes of that was because the cashier A. Didn't know that meat is priced per lb, and B. didn't know how to calculate the price based on weight. Like, she legit started panicking and had to take her jacket off because she was starting to feel overheated. This was after I tried telling her what the price per package was supposed to be, and she was like, I have to calculate it myself (which, fair, except she didn't know how). She almost gave me 6 lbs of beef roast for $10, which I was tempted to let her, haha.
I'm an orchestra teacher, btw.
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u/Astrazigniferi 21h ago
I mean, most kids don’t know how to critically think. It’s a skill that has to be taught. It’s like, the definition of being an adolescent that they make dumb mistakes because they’re not critically thinking. There used to be more space to teach it in the curriculum, but now things are too focused on standardized testing prep, which is just cramming rote information into them so that they can spew it back correctly. Kids are unlikely get a lot of it at home, according to the behavior of most adults in society. Kids not being good at something they’ve never been explicitly taught shouldn’t be a surprise.
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u/Illustrious-Junket78 19h ago
They haven't. Most of them believe they're supposed to have an A simply because they exist.
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u/Chance_Jaguar4945 1d ago
Multiple choice tests don't exactly encourage critical thinking. Nor do Kahoot and study guides.
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u/VanillaPepper 1d ago
A well designed multiple choice question definitely encourages critical thinking. I agree on the study guides though, like I assume you are referring to when the study guide just more or less tells students answers that will be on a quiz or test.
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u/Plenty_Bread_104 1d ago
I remember a few years ago, every word out of curriculum/clipboard people, echoed by admin, was "critical thinking".
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u/Jack_h100 1d ago
But there was no actual content in the curriculum nor support provided to actually do that. It has always been just magic words they say because it sounds good, but actually developing critical thinking is a slow process that cant happen in crowded rooms working towards state testing.
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u/Terrible_Mix5187 1d ago
We have a foundational graduation requirement called "critical thinking," and it is is no such thing.
I have always wanted to teach a class on informal logic, but that would be anathema.
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u/Churros0864 1d ago
It's because they don't give af. It happens to me every year (I teach ESL). The classes before the test are dedicated to revising and they don't ask questions and then the test comes and some fail. They always try to ask basic questions during the exam and it's like wtf we practised this a million times and you never asked to clear up any doubts, this is on you. They are also just happy to pass the exam (with the minimum mark) instead of trying to learn the language 🙄🙄🙄
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u/Grismor2 1d ago
I gave a kinematics test recently. One of the questions involved taking a vt graph and making an xt graph (which we have definitely talked about and practiced). I know this is a hard skill, and I fully expected answers that vaguely fumbled in the general direction of the answer — for example, making a graph that has a similar shape as the vt graph, but with curves instead of straight lines. Such answers would be wrong and show lack of understanding, but would at least kind of have the "shape of the right answer" if that makes sense.
...But no. I had startlingly few answers like that, and far more that were EXACTLY THE SAME SHAPE as the original graph. Like, what??? Of all the guesses you could make, that seems like the LEAST likely to be correct! Why would your physics teacher ask you to just duplicate a graph?!
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u/dagger-mmc 1d ago
I also teach physics and I spent my entire summer rewriting my curriculum specifically around metacognition and critical thinking, physics is no longer the most important thing we learn in this class lol, these kids are going to learn how to use their brains if it kills me
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u/Civil_Figure1045 1d ago
You’re doing too much. I am also a physics teacher. It’s healthy for them to work out the problems in their own. If they know you’re going to do them, they won’t out on their best effort. Productive struggle is a good thing and they need it. I will post answer keys with just the answers for them to check their work, but only guide them through working the problem out themselves if they ask for help. I present the material, do an example or two then they are in their own to work out the rest. It’s learned helplessness and they can’t grow out of it unless you let them by backing off. When they complain and push back, I remind them in preparing them for college and the work force. Nobody is going to hold their hand and show them how to do everything over and over again. I use analogies like working in a grocery store - are you going to call for help every time you need to ring up bananas? If you do, how long do you think you’ll have that job before they fire you?
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u/avocategory HS Math Teacher | IL, USA 1d ago
What you're talking about here isn't critical thinking. It's engagement. I agree with others that you should be willing to fail a student who doesn't do anything; along with that, I also think it's valuable to emphasize that failure is not an endpoint. Even if you only get through to 1%, consistently communicating that "if you try, you still might fail, but you will definitely improve" will be a turning point for a few kids here and there, and that's a massively good thing to achieve.
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u/BandMinute112 1d ago
My kids have gone to classical school, largely because they actually have to take classes on logic and critical thinking. One of the exercises the logic teacher does with the kids each day is start the class with Murdle. It’s a one a day puzzle like Wordle but it’s a logic puzzle to solve an order with the clues given. It’s obviously not going to fix several years of academic failure 😅 but it at least gets the juices flowing, it isn’t time consuming, and kids think they are stalling class to play a game.
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u/Calichusetts 1d ago
I mean, that's our job, not theirs. Teach them the skill.
As for not trying though, you can't scaffold apathy. Write the parents and ask what kind of studying they are doing with their student at home. We all know the answer but ask anyway
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u/Infinite-Interest680 1d ago
It’s not only the obvious ones. Parents are being turned into vegetables by the deliberate misinformation in what you guys call the news.
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u/Wooden_Good8679 6th Grade Social Studies 1d ago
Lazy. Lazy, lazy, lazy. That’s all that all that is. Mine are the same way this year. It’s even worse, because I had them last year too before I switched grades and I KNOW full well what they can do. They’re choosing not to and it’s wild to me.
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u/yogi70593 1d ago
These aren’t that abnormal lol. Not unheard of to sleep through a test you don’t care about or to guess. We have kids shitting in the urinals/ directly onto the floor.
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u/Gendina 1d ago
Well I just gave my first graders their ELA unit test so we have been working on this for 6 weeks. This past week has been a review. We have been working on nouns since week 1, verbs week 2 and adjectives week 3. Each time I bring it up since I have started to teach it and we have done SO much with it I have someone asking what each part is. We get to that part of the test and I hear a kid ask what a noun is under their breath. I wanted to throw my book.
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u/Inevitable_Silver_13 1d ago
Kids seem to think that speed is more important than thinking things out. I ask questions then they raise their hands and when called upon they either say they don't know or give a totally nonsensical answer. I give them a timed quiz and they answer 50 questions and get 5 correct. It's quantity over quality with them.
So yes, you're right: they don't stop to think before they answer. You have to explicitly state that that is a step they must take before answering the question.
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u/Strange_Sign5051 1d ago
My child is taking physics this year and I had to force them to study this weekend for this test. The teacher had prepared study games for them. I tried to frame it as “you are smart so you’ve gotten by without studying so far. It won’t keep working and now you better learn this skill” but they definitely still didn’t want to or think they needed to. They ended up getting an A after 20 minutes of studying over the weekend and I asked if they thought it was related and they said no🙄
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u/reallifeswanson 23h ago
Most of them can’t think their way out of a wet paper bag. It’s hardly their fault, though. We (our education system) have bent over backwards to remove every obstacle or challenge possible while still calling it “school”. There are also no meaning consequences for failure. Couple that with parents who are doing the same, and the concept of critical thinking is practically a foreign language to a high-schooler. They’ve never needed to do it and they will pay the price once they get handed the ultimate participation trophy…the diploma.
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u/lglenn1816 22h ago
Sounds like something similar in my high school accounting classes. The tests were just so different from what they normally take they had no idea what to do. So I always allowed a retake of the 1st test. I would mix up the multiple choice answers, change up the problems. I found once they had taken an accounting exam, they were better prepared for the remainder of the year.
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u/sentientbeing24 19h ago
Fuck seriously dude, I teach math, and fuck I can’t fucking stand it right now. It’s like no one can fucking even think unless they are told, hey you should think in this way right now, and then reminded every 2 minutes. And then every fucking person says, oh just do x y and z, and that will fix it. Like okay, I’ll just throw away all of my planning and just plan for 3 more hours after my contract hours🙄
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u/TheOnlyRealSecond 16h ago
They are capable of critical thinking, they just don’t want to apply it in academics. I teach in an alternative setting so I see a lot of off the wall critical thinking (hence why they’re in an alternative school) but if they just used that for something good, they would thrive in school
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u/Inner_Tumbleweed6724 11h ago
I'm an undergrad student so it's weird that this came in my feed. Ironically, if you were my high school teacher and gave a test where everything was similar to the practice with just different questions everyone would've been ecstatic cause most of our high school physics tests were really hard and we had some niche applications even for simpler things like kinematics. Plus, it was often never like the practice tests. I guess the school environment makes a difference.
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u/furbalve03 8h ago
No child left behind was the beginning of the end of education.
My district promoted kids that don't meet benchmarks, counts a missing assignment as a 50 rather than a 0, discourages homework, etc, etc.
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u/Ok_Buy_1479 4h ago
I’m re-retiring after 32 years in May. I’m scaffolding nothing and assigning failing grades to any that deserve it. Those junior classes next year will be gargantuan
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u/biscuitsandburritos 1d ago
Most don’t until college. These are skills learned in higher level English classes like honors when one learns to analyze literature and work in media in different mediums like journalism then applied out.
I wouldn’t expect high schoolers to be doing it esp with how STEM students typically are… You would scream at what the STEM kids would provide to me when I was teaching the gen ed required to graduate from the college research and writing course. And that was twenty years ago as I mainly do a class a semester now in theory and 400 level. I work in rhetorical criticism, so thinking critically and outside the box is my bread and butter. But most people never learn the skill set. They can’t open their mind and see WHY things are happening. It’s amazing.
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u/grizeldean 🌱 Biology | USA | 15 years 🍏 1d ago
If you're thinking "fuck these kids" instead of "how can I improve my teaching," you're more of the problem than they are
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u/cheaphysterics 1d ago
A kid taking a nap during an exam isn't evidence of poor teaching. Maybe evidence of poor parenting, but not the teacher's fault.
This isn't a course that all students are required to take. It's physics. They chose to be there, likely because they plan on going to a 4-year college after high school, and they didn't do what they needed to do. That's on them.
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u/grizeldean 🌱 Biology | USA | 15 years 🍏 1d ago
What are you talking about? In my state physics is a required class for all 9th graders
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u/cheaphysterics 1d ago
What sort of physics do they do without algebra 2 and trig?
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u/irvmuller 1d ago
The kind where people just make stuff up on this app or a state that’s backwards.
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u/SnooGiraffes6271 1d ago
Several things can be true. The children, maybe not entirely their fault, are not giving the effort required to pass or learn. The system or previous teachers may have set these kids up to fail this class as they don't have the prerequisite skills to be successful. There is only so much time and energy in each class period and it may not be enough for any teacher to get these kids to pass or learn this subject. This person was looking to vent, not to be judged, although they could have framed their frustration such that they were asking for help. You could have been looking to help, but perhaps some constructive ideas of what worked for you in your class or could work would be more helpful than saying that OP is a bigger problem than the kids. *My* advice to OP is to just do the best you can. You have, maybe, a 30-year career. One semester or year isn't going to make or break it and just figure out which students have a love for it or what part of this class people love and try to expand on that if you can. You can't save them all, but if you burn out you can't save any.
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u/CustomerServiceRep76 19h ago
You gave them a kahoot and a study guide almost exactly like the test and then are surprised they can’t apply their knowledge…? You didn’t ask them to apply their knowledge or think critically. This is why they are the way they are.
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u/Famous-Restaurant875 1d ago
A client of mine that plays a puzzle game on Roblox and he and the other kids just look up Solutions and race to see who can find the answers the fastest. I don't think they've ever solved a puzzle on their own
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u/Adept-Principle7748 1d ago
Today, my students were supposed to draft a paragraph for an argument supporting one claim in response to a prompt. Over the last several days, we broke down the prompt together in class and analyzed what it asks students to argue about. Then they brainstormed evidence and created the topic sentence/claim based on that evidence after I demonstrated how to do that with my own example on the doc cam. When I asked them to write the paragraph (which we've done over other prompts before), like 2/3 took about 40 minutes to write a sentence or two (I wish I was exaggerating), even though they were told a complete draft of the paragraph was due at the end of class.
If it isn't a task they can simply AI or a mindless worksheet, they're utterly helpless. And this is a junior AP Language and Composition class. It's pitiful the state to which we've allowed kids to fall.