My Spies Are Watching

In my gen-ed class, I allow my students to be exempted from a 25% of the homework if they participate in a Service Learning project in a local elementary school. My students spend about 10 hours volunteering in an elementary school classroom, helping out the teacher or doing one-on-one work with kids who need extra attention. At the end of the semester my students turn in a log of what they did each visit and a paper that summarizes their experiences.

Here is an entry from one student's log book:

...the children took a math test provided by [the] County. The children did good on the addition and subtraction part but had a difficult time with estimating and word problems. [The teacher] and I walked around the classroom and helped the kids. [The teacher] said we could help them as much as we needed to without telling them the answer. By the time the test was over, I had the feeling that the kids never understood the problems well enough to do them on their own.