CLEAN WORDLE, MESSY TEACHING

Teaching Can Be Messy

And we should be willing to lean into it.

Image by Matthew from Pixabay

We often tell our students that the goal of their work is “the answer” to whatever problem has been presented to them. Not only the answer, but a clean solution. We reinforce those ideas on tests, especially standardized ones, so we shouldn’t be surprised when students get anxious about going through a messy process to get there.

But the messy process is where learning happens. It’s okay to go through part of the process and to realize that it’s not going the way you want. It’s okay to backtrack. It’s good for learning to go backward a few steps and to see where your mistake started, or even to plow forward to see if you can work your way back to where you think you should be.

Sometimes we try to force this by making students show work. But that is often just asking them to parrot the steps that the teacher just showed with a different set of numbers. I’m not discounting this as a teaching method, it helps reinforce the methodology and the steps to doing something. Especially something with defined rules and pathways like Algebra.

But, it’s also okay to let students fail at doing something. It’s okay if they get to the entirely wrong answer just because of an inverted sign at the…