Which principles of Material Design are most important for you? Why?

Which principles of Material Design are most important for you? Why?


Dear All,

In response to this week's question, I would like to share a reflection on something that happened in my kids' English language school some years ago.

The owner of that institution did not pay enough attention to the quality of the worksheets they gave to the students. Characteristically, I remember one of those days when my daughter got a grammar worksheet for homework and she told me she didn't know what to write in some of the exercises. I asked her to bring the worksheet for me to have a look. It was a compilation of exercises copied from the internet. Not even retyped. They looked more like a collage :) I'm not sure who the instructions had been typed by, but probably by someone who didn't know good English. All I know is that they contained quite a few typos and were difficult to understand. The highlight was the content of the exercises and how the content corresponded (or rather didn't correspond) with the instructions. The instructions asked Ss to fill the gaps with verbs in various tenses listed there, but my daughter and her classmates had not studied one of those tenses yet. So the teacher had simply crossed that tense off the list in the rubric, but did not care to check which sentences were not relevant anymore, because they DID require that specific tense. As a result, no matter how hard she tried, my daughter was not able to fill all the gaps.
I remember carrying that worksheet in my car with me for some time, not sure what I should do with it. Eventually, I didn't do anything, but my kids did not continue in that school.

Conclusion: I can see at least two major problems here - lack of clarity of instructions and lack of relevance. But the most important problem for me was how this whole situation made me feel - I felt that my children and their classmates were not given the attention they deserved. Didn't they and their classmates deserve a little bit of the teacher's of the administrators' time and effort? I believe that the materials we prepare should be made with care, love and respect for our students. They should be tailored to their needs. Not everything available on the internet is fit for everyone.

On a more practical note, I would like to mention an important principle I learned from Katherine some time ago: the grandma test. Ask your grandma to read the instructions to your materials. If they know what to do, your instructions are clear enough and your students will most probably know what to do, too :)

See you on Sunday!

M.