I Come to Bury Packets…Not to Praise Them

With apologies to William Shakespeare*:

Parents, Teachers, and Curriculum Writers:

I come to bury packets, not to praise them.

The evil that packets do lives after them,

No good is offered when they are sent home.

So let’s be done with packets.

Say Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT)

Hath packets sold far beyond numerous.

If it were so, theirs is a grievous fault,

And grievously will students answer for it.

As under Google searches lies desperate belief

That instruction by purchase may be best.

(“Look, word banks, matching vocab…a question treasure chest!”)

Yea, packet writers may be an honorable group,

As all packet creators may be honor-intended. So teachers troop

Those stacks of packets to be collated, copied, stapled.

Lined answer blanks and fancy clip art that do the student backpacks fill.

Do these packets make instruction more auspicious?

What makes this form so expeditious?

Whilst parents cry, “It’s homework… fill in the packet!”

As students have wept.

Learning should be made of more curious stuff.

Yes, that weekly packet may be repetitious,

but their creators aren’t malicious.

You see how quiet students sit and fill in blanks?

No writing. they match columns up and down.

Yes, packets may be repetitious, and

Their creators aren’t malicious,

But might this form of learning be fictitious?

I write not to disprove a packet’s use by subs,

But here to speak what students should know:

Engaging teachers who build minds for learning

Without reaching for a preprinted form.

What cause you to think packets be for learning? I say

O judgment!

Thou art crazed! Grading page after page of worksheets

Buried under piles of preprinted forms as teachable moments

stapled to death,

Are stuffed in wastebins, a fill of recyclable defeat.

Real learning paused by a packet factory.

 

See Marc Anthony’s speech: Act III, scene ii