By Brett Pollock  

Many Grady teachers are sending their students home every day with multiple PowerPoint’s to read over and adding an additional 30 or more problems that are all due next class. When the next class comes around, students are turning in almost a full packet of work. At the beginning of class you only notice that no more than half of the class completes and turns in the assignment by the deadline.

Teachers have a specified time of over an hour and a half to teach their students the curriculum and cover all the material they are supposed to. Instead, students, along with myself, find that teachers are loading on lessons for the students to teach themselves at home because the class time is not used for learning the material, as it is expected to be used for. Also, a lot of the time students are sent home with this abundant amount of problems that they don’t fully understand how to solve but are still told to complete them before the next class.

This is similar to a new method called flip the classroom. Flip the classroom requires student to watch lectures, videos and participate in online discussions with classmates and teachers outside of class, while in class they are practicing the concept. This method isn’t only easily misinterpreted but also leads to students losing face-to-face learning. When the flip the classroom method is in place students are required to spend down time watching videos that may not thoroughly go over their specific needs. While students are participating in this learning method they may not have enough time to review the lesson as much as they need, especially students with countless extracurricular activities. Students are required to take multiple tests to record how much they’ve learned and flip the classroom isn’t very well known to be the best when it comes to test-prep. Also another issue is that in the long run it may cause students to lose some of their people skills.

The teachers that run their classrooms in this manner are basing their lesson plans on several PowerPoint’s that they didn’t write themselves, which contain 20 or more slides. When these PowerPoint’s are opened at home to be looked over, they are filled with densely worded slides that are hard to pull information from. The class, along with myself, almost always has the need to search for other resources for better comprehension of the lesson. Students shouldn’t be expected to try to conquer a concept without guidance because they might lead themselves astray. Almost every student who has been learning this way throughout the year said they didn’t feel like they are fully mastering the subject as much as they should.

Students that complete every assignment in the class spend one or more hours specifically on the class while at home, and the work that they are overcoming was never taught in class, or learning it by reading through heavy PowerPoint’s. When we are assigned homework assignments like this daily and I’m attempting to complete the assignments I find myself almost giving up due to frustration from lack of understanding or boredom from the large amount of problems. Also, once you add on the additional work from 7 or so classes with one or more extracurricular activities students often began to feel very stressed. It’s teaching styles like these that make students lose confidence in their academic abilities.