"you taught me everything i need to know, but you didn't teach me what to do"

I had a moment with a student the other day that has really had me thinking ever since.  I was working through a previous day’s test with a group of five or six students who hadn’t done well on it.  After explaining one of the items, a girl who was really intent on doing well was willing to speak up and say she still needed more help.  For the non-educators reading, a student admitting they need more help on Zoom is about as common as lightning striking a winning lottery ticket.  Thrilled with the feedback, I dug back in, explained further, and asked her if this new explanation made it more clear.  She shook her head ‘no.’  So I went piece by piece.  “Do you understand how this part works?”  “Yes.”  “Do you understand what happens here?”  Yes.  “Do you understand why that makes this other thing happen?”  “Yes.”  “Wonderful!  Sounds like you’ve got it!”  She replied, rightfully frustrated,

“I understand everything you’re saying.  I understood it before.  I get all of this.  But I still don’t know what I’m supposed to write.”

Translation: “You taught me everything I need to KNOW, but you didn’t teach me what to DO.”
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I have certain moments teaching where one little instance makes me wonder how many hundreds of times in how many hundreds of situations with how many hundreds of students have I made this mistake before.  This was one of those moments.

Just driving home that day, I was able to create an almost endless list of things I say to students that tell them what to know, but not what to do.  Let’s take an obvious example from this year.  Every day, on my students’ checklist, it starts with:

Our class begins on Zoom promptly at 2:10.

Pretty clear to me.  Yet I doubt I have ever had a single class period this year in which every student had logged in on time.  Not one.

Those instructions tell students what to know, not what to do.  As of tomorrow, I’ll be changing those instructions to:

Turn on your computer at 2:05 so that you leave time to boot up, log in, and open Zoom by 2:10.

Obvious to me, and obvious to 90% of my students.  There’s a fair chance, however, that it isn’t obvious to the other 10% how to be on time, and that’s why at least some of them are constantly 2-5 minutes late.

Here are some other instructions I give all the time that probably need some work:​

It probably isn’t fair to assume students know what to do in order to be successful learning from home.  I wish it hadn’t taken me this long to have this realization, but better that I had a student finally able to spell it out for me late than never.  I suspect I’ll be hearing my translation of her voice echo in my mind for the rest of my teaching career:

“You taught me everything I need to KNOW, but you didn’t teach me what to DO.”

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