Guidelines for “Regular Homework” Write-ups

DOC file PDF file One thing I struggle with is getting students to write papers that make sense to them a month (or a week, or a few hours) after they were written.  Students are so used to math class being only about answers that they don’t include statements about the problem, information about their thinking, etc.  I use a lot of writing assignments to help with these issues, but still on the every day assignments; it’s hard to get them to even summarize the problem.  Then when it’s time to do portfolios, their daily work is useless as a reflection of their understanding.  So, I started randomly collecting homework and grading just for clarity of presentation.    Students would slip if I hadn’t collected papers in a while, but they did improve.