As part of this week’s blended-learning lesson, I had students do something that they complained about. Their complaints, however, are the type that teachers like hearing.
As they learn about World War I, I had students read the Wikipedia article on the Zimmerman Telegram, and then summarize it in three and only three sentences:
Their complaints about the activity were things like “it was hard to boil all that down to just three sentences,” “being so concise took a lot of thought,” and “it would’ve been easier if I could’ve written a lot more.” All of that tells me that I should be assigning summarizing more often.