Twenty Years Ago: January 2004

I was surprised by all the ways that January 2004 was similar to January 2024. It was quite different, of course, but the similarities showed how things had not changed. While this reflection on twenty years ago has been a wide-eyed tour of the past, it also shows how my present is still connected to that long ago time. 

I laughed when I described our return from vacation as, “mildly overwhelming” because I was feeling the same thing after I got off the plane with my twenty-something children and my aging eighty-something parents. 

Similarly, the entire family spent a few days, “bubble headed” then and now. We got home and everyone went to sleep, even though it was 7am. Some of us took longer to get back on Central Time – the same someones as twenty years ago. 

We arrived home exhausted and, as I went to bed, “I was so tired last night that when I tried to read, the book kept slipping from my hands.” I had napped earlier but it didn’t matter at all. We were pooped! 

Twenty years ago, my daughter got a stomach bug as we got home from vacation. The same thing happened this year. However, this year, she had to suffer on a plane back to D.C! I felt guilty that I could not nurse her the way I did in 2004. 

Fortunately, unlike 2004, none of the rest of us caught that bug. In 2004, it went through the house like that nauseating montage in the movie version of The Secret Life of Dentists. In 2004, we also shared colds; not doing that this year.  

I laughed out loud when I referred to, “The ladies of the morning;” my mother, my wife’s sister, and my wife’s aunt, who would always call us before 8am. While that no longer happens, my wife and daughter have a morning call routine now. 

As it was in 2004, I returned home and I almost immediately planned the next trip. Then it was a spring break visiting my cousin in Florida back then, this year, it is little jaunts, local science fiction conventions, and a February escape. We no longer celebrate spring break. 

January remains a month of dental visits for most of us. While we no longer have a dog, my daughter’s dog had his dental visit, too. He is in much better health than our elderly ailing dog was in 2004. I was considering doggie diapers, the insulin was so ineffective. 

When my parents moved recently, I found a disc with old photos. My father took photos of the house in 2004 for insurance purposes. Most of the house looked pretty much as it did before they moved. 

That is where the similarities end. In 2004, we had some significant snowfalls, the water main broke and we had no water for a while. The furnace’s pilot light went out and we spent a very cold evening before we figured out the issue. We saw The Lion King with the folks and the kids. It was a little much for our younger child. 

As I have written about in the past, our school moved finals before winter break a few years ago. In 2004, we had two weeks of class then finals, and then the start of the new semester. That makes things more stressful. I do not miss all that grading! I would sit in my younger child’s room and try to get on the school network since the school was just over the fence. Sometimes it worked. 

I often told the story that my parents complained that their grandchildren always used “please” and “thank you” with them. I didn’t know my reply was exactly twenty years old, “At dinner, when my father made his please-thank you comment, I informed him that we were making a special rule just for him. Where the kids normally said, “please,” they would instead say, “now” or “darn it” and instead of “thank you,” they would say “finally” or “it’s about time.”

My daughter made the school spelling bee. I really don’t like spelling bees.  I rehearsed and then officiated a bat mitzvah since our congregation had not yet hired a rabbi. Like this year, the end of the month brought snow and brutal cold. 

Finally, “I was awakened at 1:55am by a  phone call telling me that the folks alarm had gone off and should they send the police? At that time of night, I thought it best to have the police go look around. However, if the problem was something inside, a burst pipe or other problem, they wouldn’t see it. I needed to go to the house. So I got dressed, bundled up and off I went.” Fortunately, that situation has not happened often. My parents just moved out of that house and now live only ten minutes north of me. 

If you ask me what were the highlights (or lowlights) of January (or February) of 2004, I probably could not have provided many specifics. When I read my old journals, it come back powerfully. Things have changed so much, mostly for the better, but I miss when my kids were little and my parents were younger. I do not miss the frenetic and stressful life we lived in 2004. 

Finals Before Broken

After not enough debate, my school has decided to move final exams to the end of December, before the winter break. However, unlike many schools in our area, we are not altering the start or end of our school year. Instead, our semesters will be uneven. The second semester, starting in January, will be two weeks longer than first semester.

I am concerned that we have not fully explored the ramifications of this decision.

I fully endorse that school breaks should be homework free. They should be real breaks. That is clearly why so many members of our community supported this change. However, as I have written before if the problem is studying for finals over break, the answer is not to change the timing of finals, but the nature of finals. Finals are the issue, moving them doesn’t change the problem.

Nonetheless, here we are. We are going down this path and our map is incomplete. I have some concerns and questions about what will happen at the end of December.

Since the first semester will be two weeks shorter than in past years, students will have less time to master the content and become proficient in the skills. The end of the semester assessment will catch them earlier than it has in the past, meaning their grades may be lower.

In addition, the tests themselves may be different. I have already heard talk about changing the nature of first semester tests so that they are easier to grade. Teachers don’t want work over winter break either. While some areas already give a great deal of objective, multiple choice, and scantron based tests, we may see more of this. So, instead of a written exam allowing students to actively demonstrate their understanding, we may see more tests that are quicker and easier to grade, but more difficult for students.

Another option may be that we’ll see more finals due before the actual finals week. This has been happening more and more with our old calendar. This gives students more stress and work and teachers more time to grade. Currently, many students have final “projects” that must be turned in as early as two weeks before the scheduled exam date. I am willing to bet we’ll see many more of these.

Of course, with almost two additional weeks in second semester, we might see more content being taught after winter break. This might mean that second-semester finals are longer and include more material. Instead of an even split between semesters, first semester exams might be easier on teachers and harder on students and second-semester exams might just include more material.

The main reason for this shift was that teachers gave homework over break. Some students also used winter break as a time to get ready for finals and start studying. I have not seen this happen often. My experience is that students do very little or no work over the holiday. Finals used to be scheduled the third week of January, and I have not seen many students work on them before January. While I have seen students deal with homework over break, the solution is one that Lane Tech High School in Chicago recently implemented: make a rule that there is no homework over break!

If students are starting to study for tests over winter break, which used to begin four weeks before the start of the testing week, won’t they do this regardless of the calendar? Finals are now the third week of December. Four weeks before that is Thanksgiving! If students are stressed about finals and homework over winter break, that stress will now move to Thanksgiving, a shorter time off from school.

Finals are scheduled as three periods a day for three days. Each test is seventy-five minutes with a seventy-five-minute break between tests. Most students only come to school for one or two tests a day. The Friday is a day when students do not attend. I’ll bet that airline tickets to nice locations are cheaper if one leaves before the crowded winter break rush. They are probably even cheaper the earlier one leaves. What will we do with the students whose parents decide to pull them out of all or part of finals week to get out of town more quickly and less expensively? Will we have more students missing final exams with this calendar?

Is the rest of the world changing for finals? We will still have sports events, holidays, and everything that comes at the end of December. The school will move our events. We are moving one of the largest, our school charity drive to just before Thanksgiving! However, the outside world’s calendar will remain the same. For example, the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah will end exactly one week before finals.

So we may have lower grades, harder tests, stress over Thanksgiving, more absences (and thus even more stress) and the regular stressors that come with this time of year.

Can we talk about finals?

Because College!

While it is final exam season again, this is not my regular rant against finals. Rather, it is an argument that we should not let imagined expectations of college drive high school practices, especially ones like finals, when they are poorly executed, that are not beneficial to students.

Why do we need to keep giving finals in high school? Because students will encounter them in college? Why are multiple choice tests important? Because students will take them in college? Why do students have to memorize useless facts, listen to teachers lecture, and suffer through hours of AP everything? College! College! College!

Let’s examine this rationale (or rationalization). Even putting aside the fact that not all students are going to attend college, do we need to replicate college in high school to prepare students? We are not replicating the college schedule. We do not have many teachers with PhDs. In fact, much of what we do and how we do it is quite different than college. Thankfully, many important aspects of the college experience are very different than what happens in high school. The photo attached to this post was a bulletin board in a college dorm. Can you imagine it at a high school? Perhaps our cherry picking of college practices serves another purpose.

College students are eighteen to twenty two years old. Their developmental needs are significantly different than a fourteen-year old’s – or even a sixteen year old. Why do we insist that one size fits all? Should our students who want to go into business wear suits and bring briefcases to school? Why not? They’ll have to do it later.

How do we know that whatever practice we are justifying happens in college? Most teachers are more than a few years out of college. Many of our AP and upper-level teachers haven’t been college students for decades. And while old school practices are certainly alive and well in many areas of academia, like the rest of the world, colleges have changed since we graduated in the 80s or 90s. 

Every college is not the same. Many colleges are moving away from the traditional lecture class because research has found that active learning is more effective. While some college classes still give final exam tests, many are using alternative forms of assessment – just like in high school!

College professors are not often trained to be teachers. Their primary focus is research; teaching is secondary. Thus we may run across professors who may be experts in their fields, but have difficulty communicating with students. In recent years, some colleges have put an emphasis both on training professors to be effective educators and to create awards and other programs that encourage good teaching. Why are they doing this? Because college is not the place to look for great educational practice.

Lecturing is simple and focused on the teacher. It is what many teachers have experienced. Multiple-choice tests are quick to grade and make the life of the teacher easier. We must be honest with ourselves and ask if the reason we rationalize our practices by saying that students will need them in college serves the students or the teachers?

The choices that high school teachers and administrators make certainly should take into account their students’ possible future activities. However, the main consideration should be what is best for students now. We cannot look to colleges to be educational role models. We cannot simply superimpose college practices on younger students.

As with all practices, we must ask ourselves, what are we teaching and why are we teaching it? We must look at the practice’s effect on our students and ask if it supports their academic, emotional, and social growth regardless of their college prospects.

If we teach students well, and make sure that our practices match their developmental needs, they will have the skills for what follows. If our students are our partners in learning and not merely audience, we will be better able to tailor the educational process to their specific needs. If we leap over the present and force them to relive our ancient college experiences, we will be doing them a disservice that traps them in our past instead of empowering them for their own futures. 

Don’t Move Final Exams – Remove Them

When I asked my son how his first final exam went, he shook his head and told me, “I am done with it. I don’t remember anything.” While I hope this is not entirely true; he will have the second semester of that class to deal with, it is true that the trivia on final exams leaves kids’ brains as rapidly as they leave the room.

I just finished reading Most Likely To Succeed, which makes the argument that our content-based educational system is obsolete. The authors, Tony Wager and Ted Dintersmith, describe an experiment run by the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, “When students returned after summer vacation, they were asked to retake the final exam they had completed three months earlier. Actually, it was a simplified version of the final, as the faculty eliminated any detailed questions that students shouldn’t be expected to remember a few months later. The results were stunning. When students took the final in June, the average grade was a B+ (87%); when the simplified test was taken in September, the average grade was an F (58%)” (Wagner and Dintersmith).

If the material in finals often doesn’t stick with students and is often irrelevant to anything they will do in the future, why do we make them memorize this minutia and regurgitate it back?

As I greeted students in the hall after my first final this year, and I asked them how they felt about their first test, many told me that their teacher had already graded it! The finals session had ended less than twenty minutes ago. It would take me a week to finish grading all the writing my students did! If a teacher doesn’t have to think to grade the test, how important can it be?  While there are ways to make multiple-choice tests meaningful, students are studying facts, words, and other bits of information that they could easily look up on the supercomputers in their pockets!

Many teachers finish the quarter with large unit or chapter tests the week before finals and then test on the same content on the final exam. Why test twice? Why beat up a kid with a ton of material on Thursday only to test again for even higher stakes the following Tuesday? How much learning happened in those four days? Did they go over the first test in the meantime? It is double jeopardy.

Many teachers are still using a percentage based grading system which makes the cost of making mistakes high. In our school, almost all finals count for twenty percent of the semester grade. In my experience as a parent and a teacher, finals don’t help students’ grades at all. Either the final simply strengthens what they were already earning, or it hurts their grades – and for kids on the grade bubble, finals frequently push their grades down. One test! One big long test (that will not stick with them) is what makes the difference!  

Should one seventy-five-minute test be equal to four weeks of class experience? Should it count as much? Can we put what is really important, relevant, and meaningful into it and then grade it in five minutes?

My finals are skill based. My freshmen read a story and then write about it. They demonstrate the skills we have been working on all year long. Although I call it a “final,” it doesn’t count for any more than any other assignment. I use a standard based evaluation system in which students’ grades are based on their ability to demonstrate specific skills. I look at their most recent work in each skill area to determine their proficiency and to guide what we need to study together.

Recently, my department chair asked what we thought about moving finals before winter break. Many schools are doing this so kids do not have homework over the vacation. My response was that moving finals solves nothing. It gives the appearance that we are addressing issues of student stress and meaningful assessment, but we are in fact shuffling shells.

We need to change what we teach and how we teach it. We need to make assessment (and school) meaningful and relevant. Finals are an archaic and problematic practice. Simply stating that colleges do them and we must prepare our students is inadequate justification. If colleges are doing something that is not pedagogically sound, that doesn’t mean we should follow. High schools and colleges need to get out of the nineteenth century. The well-being of our children depends on it!  

Final Exam Questions – and Answers

I am not a fan of high school final exams. Given the way finals are administered at my school, I am not sure what function they serve. I have lots of questions about finals and their effect on students.

Why are we giving final exams? Is it because colleges give them? Our classes don’t meet twice a week or in large lectures. Our kids are subjected to plenty of tests. We are constantly testing (and that is another issue). Why are final exams so important? Large scale, high stakes tests are not a regular feature of adult life. What is our rationale for having them twice a year?

If the rationale for giving finals is college preparation, why do we excuse second semester seniors from finals when they are the students in most need of the preparation? Why do we give the same type of tests to our first semester freshman, who are months out of middle school and years away from college?

Why should all courses give finals at the same time? Clearly not all teachers are ready for finals since students regularly report that the pace of instruction nears warp speed as finals approach in many classes. Wouldn’t our assessments be more authentic if we didn’t give them in three days?

Is one seventy-five minute test the best indicator of eighteen weeks of learning? Can we get an accurate and fair picture of a student’s achievement through a single sampling?

Frequently, students’ performance on finals does not match their performance on other assessments. What does this mean? Do teachers question the effectiveness of their finals?  Some courses regularly curve the finals because students score poorly. Is a curve the best solution? What does it mean when many students don’t do well on a final?  Does moving the grade markers solve the real problem?

Here is my answer key:

Objective tests are easy to grade. They are easy to quantify. They are quick and dirty ways to measure what can be measured in numbers. Unfortunately, learning is messy. When all we look at is the statistics, we may miss the relationships, the growth, and the joy of learning.

Even when finals are more authentic, the weight and delivery of the test create significant issues. Why should one seventy-five minute experience or a single assignment be worth as much as four and half weeks of class time? Many teachers have decided that it shouldn’t. So their finals involve a project, paper, test, speech, blood sample, journey to Katmandu, and a pound of flesh! What a wonderful solution! I am not exaggerating when I tell you that one my children had a final that had so many pieces it lasted more than five weeks and threatened to eat her winter break!

For my freshmen, finals do one thing: ruin their grades. Students who have been earning A’s and B’s all semester long find that, thanks to one assessment, they have C’s. It is demoralizing. One of my colleagues suggested that we are coddling students with “effort” points and extra credit. She said that their quarter grades are artificially inflated and we need finals to measure their “real” ability. So finals are bait and switch; you thought you were doing well in class: surprise!  

The most correct answer is that finals are a hold over from the distant past. Like lecturing, rote memorization, and corporal punishment, we have found better ways to help kids learn. As more than thirty years of state achievement testing continues to teach us, these assessments do not improve children’s education. 

Could we create twenty first century finals? Maybe. It would far better to help kids actively apply and demonstrate their learning every day. Learning is never final. 

Formula For Finals

In college, final exams are a part of the academic formula. Put in a few papers, a midterm and a final and a grade pops out. Final exams in high school are a different mix. Students are often taking more courses and the nature of each final may vary widely. It is very easy to mess up the final exam recipe in high school.

In my twenty-five years as a high school teacher and my more recent experience as a high school parent, I have found that some practices make the final exam process beneficial and others create unnecessary stress and pain.

While both the students and teacher contribute to a positive final experience, most of the control is with the teacher. There is a straightforward formula that will help make the final not only a summative assessment but a good learning experience as well.

The teacher should start by providing students with detailed information about the nature of the final at least one week in advance. This information should include the form of the test (multiple choice, short answer, essay, etc), what the test will cover (the entire semester, the most recent unit), materials students may bring to the test (books, notes, old work), and some guidance on how to prepare.

Students frequently complain that the pace of teaching speeds up before finals. It should be the reverse. The pace should slow down as finals approach. There should not be any more quizzes, tests, papers, or assignments in the weeks before the end of the semester than there have been throughout the term. If a teacher has not made it to the finish line, the kids should not pay for that by having to run twice as fast to get there.

Spend several days, maybe even the last week of the semester, reviewing with students. Instruct them how to study for the final. If there must be homework at this time, connect it directly to the final studying process.

Have a unified final. Do not splinter a final into several pieces. The final exam should be a single paper, project or test that is due at the assigned final exam period. While it may be tempting to ask students to create another assessment, even if it is complementary or good preparation for the final, this practice amplifies students’ anxiety and stress and steals energy from their preparations for other exams. In my school, we call this double dipping. While there are a few exceptions to this rule (if the course involves pubic speaking, the speeches will never fit into a single testing period), double or triple dipping is really a sign that a teacher may be uncomfortable with the grade weight of the final itself. If one assessment experience should not be worth that much of the grade, that is the real issue.

Speaking of the weight of the final: one size doesn’t fit all. Should a first semester freshman final look like the final for seniors about to go to college? Should they be weighted the same? Finals should be tailored to the course, content, and students who are being assessed. If the grade weight of the final feels too much to the teacher, imagine how it might intimidate the students!

Make sure that the final is consistent with the assessments that students have already experienced. If you are going to collaborate with colleagues or use a departmental final, students should have already experienced unit, chapter, or other assessments that were created this way. If you have never given students an in-class writing test, for example, the final should not include one either.

Carefully time your final. Too many of my students’ and children’s finals are too long. Teachers then rationalize this by allowing students to take extra time. This is an insensitive and selfish solution. The time in-between finals belongs to the student, not the teacher. Many students use that time to prepare for the next final. Is it healthy for a student to go from one long and challenging final to another with barely enough time to go to the bathroom or review? If your final is consistent with earlier assessments, these should give you a good idea of how long students will need. Err on the side of shorter, rather than longer.

Examine the final grades closely. If the students and teacher have done their jobs well, grades on the final will resemble the grades from the rest of the semester. If a student who has earned A’s or B’s on the quarter does poorly on the final, it could be that she didn’t study well. If several students who did well struggle on the final, their preparations are probably not the cause.

Think twice before posting any grades where all students can see them. Of course, you would never post grades with student names, but ID numbers are not much better. In addition, giving students access to the whole class’s (or course’s) results is a set up for bullying, humiliation, and unhealthy academic competition.

The final exam of a course should represent the key skills and content that a student should take away from the learning experience. The final is the destination: the time when the teacher’s and student’s work is demonstrated and celebrated. Done well, they are a formula for successful learning. Done poorly, they are a stressful game of grade roulette.