1. Read the Instructions
I walked over to their desk when they raised their hands.
“Mr. Hasan,” one of them asked, “can we just write our work for problems 2 and 3 over here?” They pointed to the right of problem 1.
“No,” I said.
“What!? We can write small!”
“Did you read the instructions?”
They had guilty looks on their faces.
“For shame,” I joked. “Read the first two sentences out loud.”
They looked at the top of the paper and started to read out loud.
I have not left you any room on this sheet for your work on problems 2 and 3. To get credit for this assignment, you must do all your work for those problems on separate sheets of paper, closely following the steps we did in the notes.
“Oh,” they said.
2. Why Would I Do this?
You might ask why I do this. Am I just mean-spirited? After all, if they can write their work anywhere, doesn’t that demonstrate mastery of the core underlying skill?
Well, that is sufficient only if you have an incomplete notion of what the core underlying skills really are. There are in fact two.
You see, what I’m doing in this lesson is preparing them for the next. Tomorrow, the problems will be more confusing and the technical steps involve many more details than today. If they squeeze their work into an arbitrary block of white space they’ll “lose lock” on what the heck they’re supposed to be doing.
In tomorrow’s problems, being organized will be a necessary precondition for getting the math right. Without that, the whole process will be a dizzying blur. (I know this from personal experience as a student many years ago.)
So no, I do not do this to be mean. I am intentionally teaching (1) organizational skills and (2) mathematical skills together to prepare them for what’s next.
Because without mastering both, they’ll be toast on the next test.