 |
| [a] Forest...trees RF |
This is one part of a multi-post introduction. Click below for the other posts:
Whoa, cowboy (I hear you cry). You have started Round and Square topics dealing with course syllabuses (look it up) and even assignments. We have hung with you—ridden those intellectual broncos just about as far as we can. We have even read primary sources that really are elementary school texts from Taiwan...twenty-seven years ago. But now you are going to start posting little quizzes? Heck, even the correct spelling of those zzs looks suspect. Quizzes? What are you thinking? You can't be serious (I hear you cry).Oh, yes, dear cowperson, I am serious. Yes I am.
 |
| [b] Quizzes RF |
Quizzes. Every day. This is the very definition of the word "quotidian," is it not? And that is the very reality of every course I teach, every day of every term...since 2010. It took a long time to get to that point. You see, I had always thought about quizzes as a peculiarly irritating form of prodding. I saw them, basically, as invasive. I thought that quizzes were meant to catch students not doing their work. They were traps planted by petty little minds who knew nothing about how learning really occurred. They combined all of the flaws of the nineteenth century one-room schoolhouse on the prairie (and none of its advantages) with a mean sort of disposition (and I mean that in at least two senses of the term). I would have been embarrassed even to be associated with something as petty as quizzes.
I was a product of old thinking. And I was wrong.
I was badly in need of a paradigm shift. I had to learn to think in a new way about this whole daily testing thing. Wasn't it intrusive? Wasn't it just the thing that made students nervous and raised the pressure level to the crisis point? Yup, that is exactly what I thought, because that is exactly what quizzes were in my own educational experience, all of the way back to first grade. Quizzes meant supercilious teachers, with their knowing smiles, just waiting for you to fail...right in front of their eyes. Then they would look at you from their haughty little hierarchical perches and feign compassion. "You'll do better next time; just work harder!"
 |
| [c] Maze RF |
Boy, I hated that.
And for that very personal mnemonic reason, I chose never to give my students quizzes. I thought that it would hurt them, and felt that I would lose credibility in my far more serious pursuit of truly important pedagogical goals. I thought of quizzes as small thinking, and generally worthy of contempt in a school master-ish sort of way. It seemed to me that the best "big-thinking" method would be for students to study, come to class, participate—talking and discussing—and engage the materials. Then they would reflect, eventually writing searching and analytical papers that broadened and deepened their educations.
From there, I thought that the syllabus would take care of itself, and that students would make it cohere through the very force of their learning desires (and the class requirements). And I was right. It worked in many ways, and the motivated students thrived. They maneuvered through the challenging syllabus, participated in class, took notes, sometimes wrote them up after class (I love that), and then wrote good papers.
This was water music to my pedagogical ears.
 |
| [d] Messy RF |
It filtered down to about fifty, sixty, or sometimes seventy percent of students in the class. The problem was that the somewhat less motivated ones tanked. It was as though, for them, I had created a free-form school, and they were lost in the open-endedness of it all. Motivate yourself, they seemed to hear, no matter what I thought I was saying. This frustrated me, and made them really quite miserable. I thought about it, went back-and-forth with my plans, plotted out class time, and thought some more. I took long bike rides and pondered the pros and cons of the system I had thought worked quite well. I scratched out notes on paper. I brooded.
Then, back in 2008, I gave my first quiz. Ever.*
Those were the old days, like the early Peanuts cartoons or Simpsons episodes. Those quizzes were just rough sketches, and often a little out-of-proportion. If anything, they were far too easy, since I was paralyzed by the concern that I would ask "unfair" questions. They took up just on side of one page, but even then I had—at the time unbeknownst to me—drawn a deep line in the educational sand. I had no idea, but it slowly seeped in as I started to go through the quizzes, week-after-week, over the course of that first term. I began to see that there were real possibilities with the form. Before that, it had never occurred to me that a quiz question could actually be an intellectual pivot, and that students could start to see the course materials in new ways, even before we had spent a single minute of seminar time discussing what they had read for the week.
 |
| [e] High stakes RF |
I saw startlingly positive results from the most motivated students.
I saw something else, though. I noticed that students who might have skipped class to play Frisbee golf or Madden NFL 10 (at the time)...actually began showing up on quiz days. These were Thursdays, the second of two class periods back in the prehistory of my quizzes. A half-dozen or more people might miss class on a Tuesday, no matter what my attendance policy stated about the importance of being in class. Funny thing, though. Thursdays almost always saw a full house. People would risk doing poorly just to get a score on those little tests.
This, too, began to work on my imagination.
What a combination, I thought. Students actually read the course materials a little more carefully, and I started to see a difference in class discussions. That combined with the phenomenon of everyone showing up to create real excitement in the room as we delved ever more deeply into the material. Then it was back to Tuesday, no quiz, and relative backsliding. I watched this pattern develop over the course of several semesters, and then I made a decision.
In the fall of 2010, I went to my current system. I started to give a quiz every single day.
See you tomorrow. At least for my students (it is a Thursday, after all), there will be a quiz.
*Upon reflection, I realize that there was a brief period ten years earlier (FYIers of 1999 and 2000, you will remember this) when I experimented with a minimalist prehistory of quizzes. These were the equivalent of the Paleolithic to the Neolithic 2008 "prehistory" in the account above.
This is one part of a multi-post introduction. Click below for the other posts:
 |
| [f] Goal RF |
