Teaching Science IRL

Freshmen. You either love them or you hate them right? If you have taught freshmen, you know that they can be frustrating and tiring to teach. For example, I give my freshmen a quiz every Friday and I remind them pretty much every single day. Yet, if I had a quarter for every time a student came into my class on a Friday and said, “What? We have a quiz??? What’s on it?” I would be able to take a nice vacation to Aruba.

Sound familiar? Ever since my first year of teaching I have taught mostly freshmen and those years have helped me to better anticipate the freshmen problems that frustrate me and I’ve developed better procedures to help my freshmen succeed throughout the year (and keep me sane!).

 

For some background, I teach in a private school and about one third of our freshmen class come from our middle school, a third from public school, and a third from other private middle schools. I also teach in a densely populated area where there is wide variety of public, private, and charter schools. All that’s to say that my freshmen are coming from all sorts of places with different procedures and expectations and it can make the transition to high school difficult. My freshmen students typically have a very large range of academic abilities and helping them all be successful can be challenging. If you feel like you might teaching similar students or daily feel frustrated by your freshmen, the following tips might be helpful to you!

 

1. Be patient.

 

Many freshmen are still like middle schoolers when they start high school. They zone out, they day dream, they don’t listen to the directions you are giving them and it’s extremely frustrating. We’ve all been there. My biggest advice for teaching freshmen is to anticipate that freshmen need a lot of help and patience transitioning to a high school environment. When you can anticipate this instead of expecting freshmen to remember everything single thing on your syllabus you can avoid some of the frustration. Anticipate that you will need to repeat directions. Anticipate that you will need to remind them of procedures and due dates several times. Anticipate that they won’t get everything right the first time and be patient with them. It takes time for kids to transition to a new school and a new schedule. Obviously at some time during the year freshmen need to start being accountable for hearing and remembering information in class without being reminded of it a million times, but at the beginning year I find that I am able to build better relationships with students when I patiently repeat things (even if it is the 10^thtime I have to repeat myself) rather than getting annoyed showing them how frustrated I am with them for not listening or forgetting.

 

2. Start out the year with easier assessments to build confidence.

 

Sometimes I get kids who have been “bad” at school their whole lives. Sometimes I get kids who are way below reading and math benchmarks for their grade. While there are certain classes in which I give challenging quizzes and homework right off the bat, I find that with freshmen, I have had better success getting kids to “buy into” the class by making homework and assessments a little easier and then build them up to be more challenging as we go throughout the year. Imagine yourself as a student at a new school with new teachers who don’t know you teaching you a subject you don’t understand. At the beginning of the year you bomb all the quizzes and the homework and you start to feel like you can’t do well in this class so you give up before you’ve even really started. I see this happen every year. In my experience I find that giving freshmen some slow pitches at the beginning of the year builds their confidence before we get to anything too challenging. When my students feel like they can succeed in class, they are more likely to be engaged.

 

3. Consider short attention spans.

 

Every year I feel like my freshmen have shorter and shorter attention spans. When I sit my students down to a short lecture at the beginning of the year, you would think that I was torturing them! 14 year olds have brains that are still developing and a lot of them have an attention span of 15 minutes max. I truly believe that high schoolers need to be able to sit down and successful listen to a lecture and take good notes, but many freshmen are not at that level yet. Just like beginning runners don’t start off running 10Ks, many freshmen are not ready to sit and listen to a 40 minute lecture. Beginning runners start with short distances and gradually build their endurance as their muscles and cardiovascular systems get stronger until they can run 6.2 miles. At the beginning of the year I try to break up my lecture into 10-15 minute chunks. As we go throughout the year, we get into a routine, and we can build up to being able to lecture for longer. But at the beginning of the year I keep my lectures short.

 

4. Consider adopting a gracious late work policy

 

Late work policies can be a controversial topic and many of us have late work policies chosen for us by our administrators, however if you are able, consider adopting a gracious late work policy for your freshmen. When I first started teaching, I had the standard late work is accepted one day late for half credit policy. However, I was finding that many of my students, were not used to doing homework or studying, and they were getting overwhelmed by the work that was getting thrown at them. I also found that kids just stopped doing homework if they knew they couldn’t get better than a 50% or if they did turn it in late, their homework grades weren’t reflecting what they actually scored on the assignment. Their grade was simply reflecting that it was late. While I don’t give freshmen very much homework, I currently use a system that I got from refusetoreinventthewheel.com for late work. I accept late work up until the day of the unit test for full credit. However, for every late assignment they turn in, I take 2 points away from a separate “On Time Homework” grade that resets each quarter. This has been a game changer for me. For me, more students end up completing the assignments and their grades are more reflective of what they are actually doing while still showing how many times they turn late work in.

 

5. Remember that freshmen are not done growing and changing.

 

My mom once told me that we shouldn’t think of middle or high schoolers as complete adults and she is completely right. I think sometimes we as teachers get really frustrated with freshmen because we are expecting them to be more mature and developed than they physically are. And that’s not their fault. We can’t expect our freshmen to be college ready or act like little, mature adults because they are only 14! I feel like we do so much hand wringing about “kids these days” and how they won’t be ready for college or the real world. But freshmen have so much growing and changing and learning to do before that! That’s what these 4 years of high school are for. Yes, freshmen are immature and forget everything and are frustrating but most of them won’t be like this forever. On my most frustrating days when the immaturity of my freshmen is really wearing me down I to remember that they are still growing. In the mean time I can give them my patience and a fresh start each day.

We all teach in different places and with different students so I would love to hear what you do with your freshmen! What are your best tips for working with this crazy and special age group?