Following Directions

I made it through my first week back to school! So far things are going great. I've almost learned all of my new students names and we (my students and I) have learned a lot about each other. Now it's time to jump into the math!

When I first started using Carnegie one thing I noticed was that students do not read the directions (or the whole problem) given to them. Sometimes they are being lazy and do not write their answer in a complete sentence or explain how they got the answer. But I find that often when I show a student that they didn't finish the problem they say, "Oh, I didn't see that".

To try to convince students that reading is important (without me lecturing about it) I gave my students a quiz on following directions. When they walked into class on Friday and saw QUIZ on the agenda some of them freaked out. "You didn't tell us we were having a quiz" was the reaction I got every hour. I told them that they were taking the easiest quiz ever and that I would explain more after our warm up activity. Before passing out the quiz I stressed that this was testing their ability to follow directions. I passed out the 19 question quiz face down and set a timer for 5 minutes. Once I said go they started racing through the questions that had them do things such as write their name on the paper, punch a whole in the top with a pencil, write the name of the first president on the back side, etc. No one was able to finish in the five minutes and they all begged for more time. I gave in and reset the timer for another two minutes.

By the time the timer went off a second time, a few students had reached problem 19 and had figured out my trick. You see even though I stressed that the quiz was testing how well they could follow the directions no one bothered to actually read the directions. The directions read "This is a timed test. You will have 5 minutes to complete all parts. You may write directly on this sheet. Read all parts carefully before doing anything". Once they reached problem 19 the question read "Now that you have read everything without actually doing any of the work, do number 1 only and turn your paper over". Of course all they had to do for number 1 was write their name on their paper, so students were not happy when they realized they did a lot of silly work for no reason.

Some students did not get to the last problem even with the extra time. So I asked a student to read the directions and then another student to read problem 19. Afterwards we discussed why reading the directions is important and why they thought I might give them this kind of quiz.

Now my students do not know this, but I continue with this theme through out the year by putting extra credit opportunities in the directions of some of my tests and quizzes. For example on the first test the last part of the directions will tell them to put a star by their name to get 1 point extra credit. One point won't make a huge difference in their grade, but it rewards those who read the directions. I do not do it on every test or quiz and the extra credit is always something different.

I'm sure I'm still going to have to fight the battle of having students writing sentences and explaining their answers. But at least I made my point in a fun way.