“Do you think he’ll get mad if I do them all this way?”  A student was holding up a folded sheet of notebook paper for her friend to see.  I was walking by the table outside my office area that they were using for homework.  My first thought was to snatch the paper from her hand, study it at arm’s length for a second as you would a snake that you had just caught, then look at her and say “Yea, probably, if you did them ALL like this.”  I did not know her, and she did not know me, so she probably would have missed the humor I intended.  I kept walking without indicating that I noticed the perplexed looks that these two students were giving each other as they took turns looking at the paper.

I am not sure if the homework I assign is met with the same confusion.  The homework is challenging for some, most I hope, and some submissions are a tangled abstract of thoughts and equations that sometimes lead nowhere.  Some are even artistic in the spirals of notes and arrows that point to words like “here is where I got lost.”  It is not my intent to confuse them with the correct or incorrect presentation of the homework.  I am hoping that it is the content that is the challenge, and not the format that I expect to see when they solve physics, electronics, or photonics problems.

I made it a point of the next lesson in all my classes to take a few minutes to repeat what I expected to see when they turned in their homework.  I got the feedback from the looks that I was being ridiculous in telling them that I was not expecting research paper formats and theme binder submissions for the chapter problems.  It was a quick five-minutes spent that may have been a waste, since I have yet to see a homework submission that a student was proud of that I thought was failing.   There are always the comments in the student evaluations that say I gave too much homework, or that the homework did not relate to the tests, or that it was just too hard.  In retrospect, I have been either lucky or oblivious in not seeing a comment that a student thought I would get mad at them for turning in what they thought was good work.