Your Kids Aren't Learning: Study Guides Make Studying Unnecessary

Teachers hand the kids the key to the test, undermining the necessity of reading, practice, and review. In other words, we've created a system in which students never learn how to learn.

This series explores the most compelling reasons you have to declare independence from the peculiar institution of American schooling and make significant life changes to ensure your kids get a real education, something public schools no longer provide, if they ever did. These essays are based on my observations and thousands of conversations with students aged 13-18 and their families over the span of my 20-year career teaching in state-run schools in California.

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A funny thing happened when I began teaching AP Economics. About halfway through our first unit, I told my students they should have already begun preparing for the exam. Several hands shot up. “When will you give us the study guide?”

I probably made a confused face before I said, “There is no study guide. The notes you took, the readings you annotated, and the practice you completed are what you need to review.”

The air left the room; I might as well have slapped a kid across the face. The class didn’t erupt, because they’d heard I’d come from a “ghetto” school and wouldn’t brook their soft, spoiled-kid nonsense, but you could feel their hearts pounding.

At base, I care about my students. I know panic is not conducive to learning and could see they were distressed, so I promised to prepare a study guide for them.

And I did. It covered exactly what I’d said it would, so now they had a point-by-point guide that would focus their review of what we’d already done in the unit.

Fast forward to a couple days before the exam. My students asked when we’d be going over the study guide. I must have made the same confused/annoyed face at them. “If you think you’ve missed something that’s on the study guide, you should look it up in your text or review the notes you took on the subject. If you have a more specific question or aren’t sure you fully understand a concept, come see me at snack or lunch or after school. I’m always here.”

They exchanged nervous glances. I could see this was going to be another point of contention, so I told them that we could take a day out of class that week and they could bring all their questions to me.

When that day came, few kids asked for clarification on anything.

Then the test.

Oh, the test.

These are AP kids. They’ve learned to buck up and shut up because AP teachers tend to be demanding. But by the third unit test, there was a visibly frustrated subgroup of kids who consistently earned Cs and Ds on exams. If you looked at their GPAs, this would seem anomalous.

After every test, we reviewed grade distributions, which were always normal. During this process, one kid exploded. She cried, “Your study guides are NOTHING like the test!”

I understood exactly why she was upset, all too clearly.

I listed concepts and ideas on the study guide, but memorizing the formulas and definitions wasn’t enough to succeed on exams. Nope. A kid had to be able not just to remember them and apply them when asked, sometimes she had to decide WHICH formulas and concepts were relevant, then apply them appropriately.

If you hadn’t practiced enough, there was no way you were going to get it.

And in the age of smart phones and Google Suite for Education, practice is optional.

All kids are playing a game at school, and their strategy rarely includes disciplined nightly study and practice. (My best students weren’t always the smartest in the class, but they absolutely were the most disciplined; Jocko Willink is 100% right.) They are playing a points game. They know the rules of this game. Come to class. Be attentive. Take notes. Complete the homework — but copying it from someone else is a norm in the digital age (File > Make a Copy > submit to Google Classroom is so easy). Get the study guide. Dutifully fill it out. Ace the test.

But then I showed up and refused to do what most other teachers had done for them. I did not use the study guide to clearly outline exactly what would be on the test. I used assessments to help them diagnose areas of weakness and prescribe additional practice so they could ace the AP exam, hopefully to help them skip a year or two of college.

I have no filter, so when I figured out what was going so terribly wrong for these kids, I addressed my classes. I clearly told them that they would continue to fail my class if they kept cheating the process, whether they were actually committing acts of academic dishonesty or just rushing through the work without attempting to learn from it. I reminded them that while we reviewed homework the following day, almost none of them ever asked a question about any of the problems, some of which are really challenging. When that happens, a teacher assumes students understand the work and moves on, whereas if they bring substantive questions, she knows they need more support and maybe even re-teaching. I told them they needed to do the problems, take note of where they were getting stuck, review notes and practice problems completed with me in class to see if they could sort it out and, if not, come to class the next day with specific questions.

I also told them, quite honestly, that there was no way I could tell if they were copying answers from friends or online resources and that I couldn’t investigate every homework assignment. The test would reveal if they were reverse engineering from answer keys they found online — falling into what Barbara Oakley calls einstellung, i.e., thinking you can do the work because you see how someone else got the answer.

These AP kids were mostly great once they figured out I wasn’t playing, and they learned to respond, or they took the L of having a C on their transcript. However, the school’s AP Econ enrollment numbers dropped because of me. A concerned colleague told me that if I wanted to keep all my sections, I needed to change my reputation of being a “hard” teacher. What she didn’t know was that my students’ pass rate was over 80% on the AP exam. I was willing to lose sections if it meant the kids who took the class were serious and left well-prepared for the rigors of a real discipline at the university level.

Once I stumbled onto Barbara Oakley’s epic book A Mind for Numbers and connected all the dots at my school, I started to realize that what she detailed was what I’d seen in all three of the school districts where I’d worked. Based on teacher anecdotes across social media and on explicit state education policy, it was a good bet this was happening across the state. I started asking questions of my old colleagues at previous schools and paying closer attention to what kids in my social circles were saying about their schools. I realized my colleagues had made the rational decision to respond to the incentives in the system and do what I wouldn’t: use study guides as a way to ensure (nearly) every kid passed tests, in the process rendering 90% of the teacher’s labor moot.

Here’s the process:

1. Teacher presents information. If kids have 1:1 devices, they are probably doing something else. If cell phones aren’t policed, they have them on their desks. If they are policed, they have them under their desks on their laps. Someone asks if the presentation will be posted to Google Classroom later.

2. Teacher assigns review/reflection activity. Students pretend to process information in order to get homework points, but many of them find answers online if it’s a worksheet-type assignment or copy from the small minority of kids who are still doing work honestly if it’s not. If it’s a Google-suite assignment, they share the file and use the “Make a Copy” function.

3. Teacher gives credit for work turned in without actually looking at it because she sees it’s perfect every time. She knows cheating/sharing is impossible to police, so grading and giving feedback is pointless since the assignment wasn’t an honest effort on the students’ part.

4. Teacher hands out study guide and gives students multiple days in class to complete it, but tells them she will go over the whole thing the day before the exam.

5. Students do nothing for several days, waiting for teacher to go over answers.

6. Teacher goes over answers. Some kids write them all down; others ask a friend to text them over later.

7. Students study the answers on the study guide desultorily while totally distracted by their phones for a few hours before the test; this process may include performance-enhancing drugs like ritalin and adderall.

8. Test the next day closely mirrors study guide. Some kids still fail, but that’s okay because the school has an equitable grading policy and they’ll make it up either by retaking the test as many times as it takes to pass or later by “demonstrating competence” on an end-of-semester project.

What it boils down to is that if your kid knows when the teacher will go over the study guide, he could just show up on Review Day and his grade would be a-okay. Oh, and this doesn’t even account for the teachers who give the kids all the answers and let them use the study guide during the test. (Seriously, how much worse can it be?)

This process wastes 90% of your kid’s year in school.

Is that really what you’re trading away the best years of his childhood for?

Sorry. I’m not letting that happen to my boys. And you know what? You don’t have to either.