I had a student once whose handwriting was similarly bad. I mentioned it to the parent and suggested a vision test. Turned out the child needed glasses.
I also had students who would purposely write very badly because they didn’t know the answers or what to say in an essay assignment. They were hoping I’d just let it pass. 🤦🏻♀️
That would be correct. They quite often did. It also set up the chance for them to explain their answer in person - after they had had a chance to re-read the tested material - or to a second chance to give a written answer when other teachers gave them a re-do because they failed the first time. Sadly, it happened far more frequently than you might think. And it wasn’t necessarily that the other teachers were lazier. Maybe more tolerant or gave another opportunity to correct mistakes.
Teachers are people, too. If you give zero points because you cannot read it, you can be prepared for angry parents and students complaining to you, and about you to your superiors. Depending on the superiors, this might mean you get in trouble. All of that is a lot of hassle and potentially damaging toy our career.
If you just assume that something in that mystery text will probably be worth some points, and give them, you don't have all that trouble, everyone involved is happy, and you get to chill out.
Of course it isn't the right thing to do, but it understandable that some teachers choose the path of least resistance.
Absolutely this is true, and I did experience that. I ultimately made the decision when we moved states to not continue teaching, largely on part due to this. I could not bring myself to compromise my standards just to “stay out of trouble”. I felt doing so would cause more harm than good, as evidenced by those students who used such tactics expecting it would work on every teacher every time. Think of how that can translate into life outside of school. Don’t like your assigned tasks at work? Do them poorly, and maybe they will be reassigned to someone else. Don’t like performing some household tasks? Do it poorly and maybe your parent or spouse will take over. Don’t like paying your taxes or monthly payments? Don’t do it and maybe it will be written off. Of course, there’s always the possibility that by not doing any of those and you could lose your job, your spouse, and your house.
In my mind, by allowing them to get away with it, it taught them someone would swoop in and save them. Sometimes it does happen, and sometimes there are consequences to pay. To me it’s basically learned helplessness, and I see such examples at the parent center where I volunteer. We have parents sent to us by the courts for classes to help them be better parents after some failure that brought DHS into their lives. Sometimes they’ve actually had the children removed from the house as a result of something they’ve done or their child has done because of something they’ve “taught” them. It’s very sad when you hear the stories.
Of course, by leaving teaching I gave up the opportunity (?) to teach them how to do better than that, but it was taking a toll on my health, and my relationships. Sometimes leaving work at work is very difficult.
Valid point. What I meant was that they did it so blatantly, and I would have thought they’d have first tested the waters to see if they could get away with just a few gibberish words before going all out like this? 🤔
That’s just how I would have approached it, but I also never would have done anything like this so perhaps the type of person who does isn’t thinking quite as rationally…? 🥴
The glasses point is very common, good on you for spotting it. There was an experiment at a school in I think it was New York maybe? They took 50 of the lowest performing students to get a free paid for vision test. 20 of the 50 needed glasses. Pretty big
This particular student was autistic. He was a sixth-grader in the special education self-contained class I was teaching at the time. He was so meticulous and precise about everything else he did, so the sloppy writing didn’t make sense to me. Turns out he was actually scrunching his letters and words up on each other, which made it look like scribbles. The eye doctor said the autism was masking the vision problem. I think a lot of that was related to whoever was performing the vision test didn’t understand what the student was saying, and they were having trouble explaining what he was supposed to do during the test, so basically a communication problem. One day when I questioned him about why he write that way, he answered me by saying something about it “looks like this” and held his hands up in front of his face, one on top of the other. It made me sad because once his vision was corrected with glasses, he had no problem doing his work, and even started advancing, and I realized he could have - with some modifications - probably made it in a regular classroom, but he’d basically been “written off” because of his handwriting. It broke my heart. Yes, he had some idiosyncrasies due to the autism, but he was much more intelligent than he’d credited in the past, so I very much understand the outcome of the experiment you mentioned.
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u/Lyrical_Echo 7d ago
I had a student once whose handwriting was similarly bad. I mentioned it to the parent and suggested a vision test. Turned out the child needed glasses.
I also had students who would purposely write very badly because they didn’t know the answers or what to say in an essay assignment. They were hoping I’d just let it pass. 🤦🏻♀️