After teaching physics for a year, I had a general sense of the pacing and frustration with not figuring out students’ misconceptions early. An incorrect assumption in math and science travels with you and makes further understanding more and more difficult.

I tried giving more homework, but grading would backlog and I still had the same problem. Only now, the information to solve that problem had been sitting in my backpack for days. It didn’t do much be increase my feelings of guilt.

By the Spring of that year, I did figure something out. In that schedule, we would always have a short class period on Friday. On those days, students would have a quiz, every week. To receive their quiz, they had to hand me their homework notebook (this would have been so much easier with things like oneNote). I would only grade a few of their homework problems (to get a sampling) and I would get through all the HW grading before time was over for the quiz.

The quiz itself was also written in a way that it could be quickly graded (something I had learned about at a beginning teacher training I had just been to). I would then not leave for the weekend until all those quizzes were graded and put back in student boxes (yes, we had to put paper into student mailboxes to return work).

I also would give their homework grade and their quiz grade on the quiz attempting to demonstrate the correlation between solid hw and solid quizzes.

We had about a month of these Friday quizzes before the end of the year and it was fantastic. I went into summer feeling quite successful.

The following year, class started up in September and after a month I was getting frustrated that I couldn’t get work back on time, students had misconceptions that I wasn’t catching early enough, and so on. These familiar feelings washed over me and I realized that I had already solved this problem last Spring.

It was amazing to me that I had found something that worked and then forgot about it. Those students could have begun the year with a system that was just in-place and I would have been ahead on addressing misconceptions. It was a missed opportunity.

This moment put me on a path of thinking about the next time I would teach the same content and writing notes to my future self. Sometimes as simple as creating a folder for the following year and editing the directions to the assessment that you just finished grading so you’ll run into fewer issues (or fewer typos) the next time around.

It is also why the Evolution of Instruction theme for May is Capture, Carry, Reflect