Ever have trouble getting your students to do their homework over holiday? Today, we’re gonna share the magical secret to get EVERY STUDENT to do their homework over the holidays.

       Watch the YouTube video here >>> https://youtu.be/ItQBp7Jpvz0
        Whether you’re in Australia with 4 holidays (I love year round schedule) or Britain with 6 or the United States with a bunch of various length holidays, the holidays are coming and so is your decision … Do I give them homework over the break? And if I assign any, is there a snowman’s hope in hell of them actually doing it?
       We assign them projects. Essays. Reading assignments. Group projects. Bundles of practice work. So the question is … Why? Why do we assign them the homework?
       We feel guilty that we’re behind in our lesson plans and need them to catch up, so we feel better. And we might even be blaming them for our plans being behind.
       We want them to keep progressing along.
       We feel some unseen pressure from someone to keep our kids doing stuff all the time or we’re a bad teacher. Is this an imaginary pressure?
       We just know they’re going to waste all that time watching movies and playing video games, so we need to give them something worthwhile to do with their time.
       Whatever the reasons are, the day after we return from break has the same result every time. The smart, responsible kids did their homework. And they feel good about themselves because they know there’s a good 40% of the students who didn’t do anything and are feeling like failures, so they get to feel good. They also likely hate you, teacher, just a little bit for making them feel guilty enough over break to do their work so they wouldn’t have to feel like those losers over there.
       The reality for those responsible kids is that they are always responsible like that, so they needed a break. And with honors kids, we needed to force them to shut off and take a break because they won’t do it on their own.
       And for the usually “not responsible” kids, if we’re honest we knew they weren’t going to do their homework. They’re just not. And we’re either hoping they’ll do the right thing for once or that they’ll feel bad about not doing the right thing so they’ll do the right thing next time.
       Well, and then there are all the complexities of our students’ home lives, the possibilities are too many to list, but maybe the “not responsible” kids have enough stress to handle at home without homework being added. Often the students that struggle with or don’t understand homework, don’t have support at home that would make the homework valuable practice anyways. This isn’t said to shame the families, juggling family life responsibilities can just be chaotic.
       Now, as parents, we’ll be blunt, we don’t like the responsibility looming of making sure there is time for our kids to do their homework. We’re planning festivities, traveling to see family, trying to remember to do memorable traditions with the kids, juggling childcare and work, encouraging a heart of thinking of others, and practicing parenting shame resiliency . . . the last thing I want to do is make my kid complete homework.  
       So are you ready for the magical secret to get your every student to do their homework over the holidays? Here it is …
DON’T ASSIGN ANY HOMEWORK.
       Every kid will do it. They’ll survive. Heck, they might thrive. They’ll come back refreshed. They’ll come back not feeling guilty. They’ll come back loving you because other teachers gave them homework. You won’t have a pile of busy work to grade. You won’t have to dive right into project presentations. You won’t have to have those tough phone calls with parents about why their kid didn’t do homework over break.
       So we give you permission, in case no one has given you permission before or you’ve been feeling that unseen, unspoken pressure … You can assign ZERO homework over break and still be a good teacher! In fact, you should leave all your papers at school too. No homework for you either! Leave them all at school, and you’ll still be a good teacher. Make sure you’ve got things planned for those 1st two days back after holiday, then walk out with NOTHING.
       Or if you’re going to assign anything at all, maybe just a little reading. But even then we’re going to feel like we need to assign a whole book or 5 chapters of the novel we’re studying in class. Then we have to deal with the 40% of them who don’t read the chapters and now what do we do because we’re not all in the same spot in the novel.
       So we give you permission to fight the urge … don’t assign any homework … for the rest of your teaching career you can make sure your learners always do their homework over holiday.
Conversation of the Day: What is getting in your way from assigning ZERO homework over holidays?
       Hop on over to watch the video and share your thoughts in the conversation.

      Today, we’re gonna talk about When Your Student Yells, “Santa is Satan!” and Other Holiday Respect Conversations.

       Watch the YouTube video here >>> https://youtu.be/MBUodyYaCG0
       Christmas time! Yay!
       No … it’s Happy Holiday time.
       But what if it isn’t “happy” for me?
       What’s not happy about snow days?
       I grew up in California where there isn’t really “winter” and we never got any of your stupid snow days.”
       Oh, as teachers how do we handle this?! We are going to share some of our thoughts and experiences from holidays in the classroom. The hope with this is not to tell you what you should be doing in the classroom but to get you thinking about how you handle the holidays and the effect it has on your students and the classroom environment as a whole.
       This topic can get heated because there are some strong beliefs involved with the “Holiday Season” and when it comes down to it causes us to question our own personal truth about our existence. If we let it.
       Let’s not get that deep right now. Let’s just focus on some basics. We as teachers get to decide how we want to direct our classroom environment to be.
       The decision is affected by whether you teach at a public or private school. If you teach at a religious private school the decision may be easier for you. If you are at a public school that doesn’t have administrative restrictions, you get to decide if you are going to try to represent all holiday traditions in your classroom or are you going to avoid teaching about any holiday themes. 
       In elementary school we are often with the same group of kids so you might have time to integrate themes into your classroom more extensively.
       With secondary I had lots of students for a shorter periods of time.
       I’m the type of person that tends to be hyper-sensitive to the complexities of situations or possible complexities. So for my peace of mind and attempt to decrease my stress, I chose not to teach holiday traditions.
       So what complexities do you identify with the holiday season?
       Identifying all the holiday traditions that my students could possibly celebrate while not unintentionally offending anyone with how they are represented.
       I can think of: Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christian Christmas with Jesus, secular Christmas with Santa, a mixture of both, people that don’t celebrate anything, and people that don’t celebrate things, like Jehovah’s Witnesses.
       I avoided all that stress on myself and just kept my classroom winter-themed with snowmen and snowflakes. I like snowmen.
       Snowmen or snowpeople?
       Ok, snowpeople.

       Anyway, I taught first and second grade and even though I just integrated fun winter themes into our classroom activities, holiday always came up when kids talked about life. So during casual student discourse things always came up:

• there was always some variation of a conversation about Santa not being real, that is often debated in the lower grades,
• or even if a child believed in Santa, another student told them, “You’re going to Hell!” . . . yes, more than once that was said.
• Talks about Jesus being real
• Whatever the variation of the conversation, these were distressing to the students involved in the conversation.

       Usually I only needed to address it with the small group of students that were involved in the discussions. I think one year I needed to address it as a whole class because there was a particularly passionate and vocal student about their personal worldview being right.
       I would love to hear other teachers’ stories of how they handle these situations. I tried to model listening that showed people were heard and respected.
       Don’t take sides! You are the mediator.
       You are the teacher, you are neutral (unless you are at a private school where your beliefs are accepted as the dominant belief).
       In this world lots of people believe different things and celebrate differently. It’s interesting to learn about each other and how we live life. We want to remember to always show respect to each other. I would ask them if they wanted the other student to make them feel bad for what they believe, they would say no. So I reminded them to treat each other the way they wanted to be treated.
       The possibly more distressing example, “Santa is Satan!” (In secondary grades, this morphs to “Santa anagrams to Satan … they have all the same letters” to which I would answer, “Yes, and Britney Spears anagrams to Presbyterian! Is that supposed to mean something?”) To which they reply, “Who’s that?” “Wait, is she that crazy old mom lady who shaved her hair?”
       I’d leave the Santa is Satan situation to a one-on-one conversation with the student.
       When I was asked bluntly by students during school hours, I tried to switch to questions about their beliefs. I used redirection. Example: Is Santa real? Me: Do you celebrate Santa? Does Santa bring you gifts? Etc. Most students didn’t realize I didn’t answer. Or I would just say those are conversations they can have with their parents.

• Identify that they have different views or experiences.
• Tell them it is important to show kindness and respect.

       Basically I taught them to either respectfully ask each other about what they believe OR agree to disagree and change the subject.
       Always remember there are most likely parents or guardians represented by each of these students and imagine they are hearing what you are saying to their children and whether they will approve. I often told students to talk to their parents about whatever topic distressed the student.
       Can you defend your approach to how you addressed the disagreement in a way that will be acceptable to the parents and your administration?
       If you need a quick out, you can redirect students to what they should be focused on but log the disagreement in your mind because things can brew from strong feelings from opposing views that aren’t talked through.
Conversation of the Day: Share a funny or cute or difficult holiday story that you had to work through.
       Hop on over to watch the video and share your thoughts in the conversation.