Rethinking "Easy"

I remember a website that was popular with our students six or seven years ago called “Rate My Teacher.” Students could rate their teachers for future students, or anyone, really, to see. There were three categories: helpfulness, clarity, and easiness. There was a lot of discussion among my colleagues about whether a teacher should even acknowledge the site existed, whether or not we should ever click on it or read the comments, and the conventional wisdom seemed to be that we should ignore it completely. Ironically, teachers were clearly looking at the site, because I remember hearing complaints about their ratings on the site, and occasional grumblings that the teachers with highest ratings were logging on and pretending to be students to boost their own ratings. While I’m sure this is possible, I doubt it happened often. Who has the time with all of our teaching, grading, planning and extra duties!?

Of course I looked at the site, and was relieved to find that anonymous students of mine had given me the highest rankings for helpfulness and clarity. I enjoyed reading their comments, as affirmations of things I was trying to do in the classroom, and even revelations of things that were working that I didn’t know I was doing. But one part I remember that bothered me was the “level of easiness.” I had a high ranking for “easiness.” As a new teacher, I remember learning from other colleagues that being an easy teacher was not a good thing. I guess I had never thought about this before going into a career in education, but I imagine as a student, I would’ve thought a teacher who made learning easy was a good teacher. But a few years into my teaching career, I didn’t think like this, or probably even remember a time when I did think that an “easy” teacher (though the eyes of a student) was doing a great job. I had a few years of being told by veteran teachers that certain teaching strategies were “too easy” or not challenging enough, and constant refrains of “high rigor” and “high expectations for all” beaten into my impressionable young mind. There is a common belief that teachers who give too many As are doing something wrong, without regard for whether the students are earning those marks. I bought into it, at least enough to be a little disheartened that I was seen as an easy teacher.

I talked to the student who had first told me I was listed on this site about my concern that I was rated “easy.” The student said that it was a good thing. This was when I first remembered to look at it through the eyes of a student. A teacher who made the content appear easy was doing a good job. I told the student that I was a little embarrassed by the level of easiness, and joked that I would have to work a little harder at making sure more of my students fail.

I did not think about this website until several years later. It was two days ago, in fact, when a student approached me and said (with a level of surprise that I can only hope came from the fact that I have not been in the classroom for the past five years, and not that I have in fact become the old curmudgeon my younger teaching self aspired to be!), “You have a really high rating on RateMyTeachers.com.”

My memory of feeling slighted at being called easy came back to me, and I mentioned it to this student. “I remember that site!” I said, “I had good ratings, but they said I was easy!”

The student said the exact same thing the other student had told me years before, that making learning easy is a good thing.

What a simple concept – make learning easy. We all say we want to make lifelong learners out of our students, and inspire them to enjoy their experiences with education so they stay in school, stay motivated, and stay passionate about learning throughout their academic careers and after. We all want our students to feel like they can master the content that we have learned to master. We all want the content to be easy for our students when those final exams roll around. So why are so many of us afraid to be easy teachers? How hard do we work at putting those "distractors" in our multiple choice tests just to make a student get a wrong answer? And what IS the point of that? I know they have to learn to take those standardized tests, but… I can count on one hand with zero fingers the number of students who are going to enter the workplace and be given 4 intentionally confusing options to help a company, business or workplace.

I don’t know why it took me until the end of “the first trimester” of my career to realize this, but it is going to be a focus of mine next year to make learning easy. I know many methods for doing this, including providing opportunities for all students to demonstrate their knowledge on their own schedule (standards-based grading), and through their own methods (differentiation), utilizing 21st century skills (especially collaboration), and applying their learning to real-word problems (project-based).

I still like, “I don’t give grades, you earn them,” and I never liked, "Don't let them see you smile until Christmas," but it’s time to turn the OTHER old adage on its head. Instead of, “I didn’t fail the student, the student failed me,” I want to say, “I will not fail my students,” and take on the responsibility of finding the way to reach each student individually and show each one the paths that can make learning easy for him or her. I am going to work really hard to be an easy teacher.