By Craig Lubner
I am guilty as charged. Spring is in full swing, and there is still an untouched pile of summer assignments sitting on my desk. Luckily (or perhaps not) my students have never once asked about them, what grade they earned, or whether they would be returned. Evidently, something is wrong with the model; no value, significance or meaning has been dispensed to the summer work. While the assignment was certainly conceived with the best intentions, it clearly did not have enough value post facto for it to be graded in a timely way, to be the source of useful initial feedback to the students or to be used as a starting instructional tool. It also seemed to hold little significance to the students, from whom it never got a subsequent passing thought.
What went wrong? I believe that the missing component was authenticity. A quick gloss through some of the classic meanings of the word yields a humbling reality. “Not false or copied, genuine and real”—mostly culled from others’ work sourced on the Internet. “Representing one’s true nature or beliefs; true to oneself, or to the person identified”—no, I don’t believe in busy work and try to be a practitioner of intentional, thoughtful practice and expect the same of my students. “Executed with all due formalities”—well, yes and no. Yes, I created an assignment, even defined a few goals for it, distributed it and answered questions about it. And yes, there was a due date and submission instructions, and the students did turn it in. It appears all “due formalities” were completed. But no, I missed the most essential formality: I did not question the true authenticity of the assignment.
What makes a summer assignment authentic? In my mind, there are three fundamental questions that help decipher authenticity.
Is there enough intrinsic educational value to this assignment to warrant distracting students from their summer activities, or creating this pressure/burden for them during their break?—Why am I giving this assignment?
Are there clear instructional goals for the assignment—both as an independent unit and as a segue into the new year of learning?—What do I want students to learn?
How is this assignment going to be assessed?—How will I know whether the students learned anything from it?
While these questions are formulated specifically for summer homework assignments, they can be easily adjusted for any homework assignment.
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