Stop Homework

Torri Chap­pell, a teacher and mother from San Anselmo, Cal­i­for­nia, has writ­ten here before about her expe­ri­ences advo­cat­ing for home­work reform. When some­thing strikes Torri as being wrong, she doesn’t hes­i­tate to speak up, either in let­ter or in person.

Recently, when her School Dis­trict had a meet­ing to talk about the school facil­ity, Torri was on hand to talk about the impor­tance of not only where chil­dren learn, but also what they learn.

What and How our Chil­dren Learn is More Impor­tant than Where They Learn
by Torri Chappell

We have two facil­ity issues in Ross Val­ley result­ing from abundance…an abun­dance of chil­dren and an abun­dance of assessments.

The first facil­ity issue is regard­ing the facil­i­ties WHERE our chil­dren will learn. We have an abun­dance of students.

The sec­ond facil­ity issue is regard­ing the district’s facil­ity in mak­ing unin­formed deci­sions about WHAT and HOW our chil­dren learn.
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This is the sixth post by FedUp Mom, the mother of a fifth grader. FedUp Mom’s daugh­ter used to attend a pub­lic school in sub­ur­ban Philadel­phia, but this year FedUp Mom moved her to a pri­vate Quaker school, hop­ing for a more relaxed envi­ron­ment. You can read her other posts here, here, here, here and here.

(If you want to write about your expe­ri­ences for Stop Home­work, please drop me a line.)

Gifted, schmifted
by FedUp Mom

Look­ing back at my daughter’s expe­ri­ence in the pub­lic school, I think her prob­lems began when she got high scores on the stan­dard­ized tests and was labelled “gifted”. I have become increas­ingly skep­ti­cal of the fol­low­ing oft-repeated slogans:

1.) “Gifted kids are bored because the work is too easy.” Not nec­es­sar­ily. Some­times gifted kids are bored because the work is just too boring.

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Today’s guest blog­ger, Rick Pos­ner, was the assis­tant prin­ci­pal at the Open School in Jef­fer­son County, Col­orado, from 1999 – 2001, where he taught for 30 years. His new book, Lives of Pas­sion, School of Hope: How One Pub­lic School Ignites a Life­long Love of Learn­ing, describes the school, which unlike most oth­ers, has no set cur­ricu­lum or course of study and allows stu­dents to set their own goals and be self-directed learn­ers. Pos­ner looks at what hap­pened to Open School alumni and shows how the grad­u­ates of this 39-year-old school went on to lead pro­duc­tive, inter­est­ing lives. The book is well worth read­ing; those of us who don’t live in Jef­fer­son County, Col­orado, are left to won­der why this type of school doesn’t exist in every com­mu­nity in the coun­try. Be sure to visit Posner’s web­site.

Free At Last: Liv­ing With­out Grades
By Rick Pos­ner Ph.D.

Believe it or not, there is a pub­lic pre K-12 school in a very con­ser­v­a­tive school dis­trict in Col­orado that has thrived with­out grades or cred­its for almost 40 years. Yes, it’s true. There are hun­dreds of alumni from the Jef­fer­son County Open School (a pub­lic school that is open to any­one who lives in Colorado’s largest school dis­trict) who have become happy, well-rounded, pro­duc­tive adults with­out one sin­gle A, F or 12.5 unit des­ig­na­tion on their school records. It may serve as a fur­ther sur­prise to learn that most of them have gone to col­lege and done quite well in con­ven­tional, graded sys­tems, and that, more star­tling, their col­lege com­ple­tion level is twice that of the national average.

Here’s what they say about the inhibit­ing aspects of grades and credits:

Grades and cred­its kill the inher­ent love and joy of learn­ing that we are born with by mak­ing the process of learn­ing com­pet­i­tive and imper­sonal. With grades there are always win­ners and losers, and the stan­dards are

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Today’s guest blog­ger, Tracy Stevens, is a for­mer high school Span­ish teacher who infre­quently gave project-based home­work to her stu­dents. She wrote here last year about her son’s dif­fi­cult expe­ri­ence in first grade in a pub­lic school and her deci­sion to have him repeat the year at a Wal­dorf school. This year, she decided to home­school her two boys, and today she writes about that expe­ri­ence. You can also fol­low her on her blog, abet­tere­d­u­ca­tion, which is full of inter­est­ing inter­views (includ­ing one with Daniel Pink) as well as reports on her expe­ri­ences with homeschooling.

Expe­ri­ences in Home­school­ing
by Tracy Stevens

I got laid off in July of this year and after not find­ing any jobs that could keep our two kids in pri­vate school, I decided to home­school. My older son is 8 and he did first grade at a pub­lic school two years ago. It was a very dif­fi­cult year as he, one of the youngest boys in the class, strug­gled to learn to read at the pace they set for him. To “help” him learn to read, they kept him from recess to do more work­sheets. This was in addi­tion to the tutor­ing and the ridicu­lous load of homework.

So we decided to repeat fist grade, but this time in a pri­vate Wal­dorf school. The year went much bet­ter. There was no home­work, plenty of art and nature, and the expec­ta­tions of read­ing come much later in a Wal­dorf school.

I knew when I lost the abil­ity to pay for a Wal­dorf edu­ca­tion that he would be even worse off in a pub­lic school than the pre­vi­ous year, because now we were on the Wal­dorf read­ing sched­ule, mak­ing him even fur­ther behind the pub­lic school read­ing demands. This lead to my deci­sion to home­school my four and eight year old sons this year and sur­pris­ingly it has been an out­stand­ing expe­ri­ence so far.

I take an eclec­tic approach, with influ­ences from Wal­dorf and Demo­c­ra­tic schools. We work on read­ing through art, sto­ries, and manip­u­la­tives like mag­net let­ters, in addi­tion to old fash­ioned paper and pen­cil. We do math

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Today’s guest blog­ger, is FedUp Mom, the mother of a sixth grader who used to attend a pub­lic school in sub­ur­ban Philadel­phia and now attends a pri­vate Quaker school. FedUp Mom’s sixth post, I Hate Read­ing Logs has received more com­ments than any other on this blog. You can read her other five posts here, here, here, here and here.

Home­work Is an Elab­o­rate Cha­rade – Lots of Quan­tity and No Qual­ity
by FedUp Mom

Peo­ple gen­er­ally talk about home­work in terms of quan­tity, and it is shock­ing to see how much time kids are spend­ing on it. But I would like to step back and con­sider the ques­tion of quality.

First of all, if we plan to assign a cer­tain amount of home­work every night, we’re already in trou­ble. This is prac­ti­cally the def­i­n­i­tion of busy­work. “We don’t know what school­work would be use­ful for kids to do every night, but we’ll make sure and assign 10 min­utes per grade level of this stuff, what­ever it might be.” The the­ory is that 10 min­utes per grade level per night will cre­ate “good study habits”, but it’s crazy to expect kids to learn good study habits in the absence of any­thing worth studying.

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A few days ago, Pres­i­dent Obama talked about increas­ing the length of the school day and school year. Before I even had a chance to fash­ion a response in my head, I received this piece from K, who has been teach­ing sci­ence at a small inde­pen­dent col­lege for over a decade and has writ­ten for this blog before here. She spends her leisure time learn­ing from her three young boys. You can read more of her ran­dom thoughts at her blog, rais­ingth­ewreck­ingcrew

A Col­lege Teacher’s Response to Pres­i­dent Obama’s Idea of Length­en­ing the School Day
by K, A Col­lege Teacher

Pres­i­dent Obama advo­cates increas­ing the length of the school day and the length of the school year. More School: Obama Would Cur­tail Sum­mer Vaca­tion.

There are many prob­lems with this.

Pres­i­dent Obama seems to be argu­ing: if some­thing isn’t work­ing, what we really need is more of it. It just plain doesn’t make sense. While some coun­tries pro­vide more learn­ing in more time, there are other nations that make bet­ter use of less time and have bet­ter stu­dent outcomes.

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I received the fol­low­ing email from a former-graduate student:

A For­mer Grad­u­ate Stu­dent Speaks Out

I admire your mis­sion. The sub­ject of how I spent my life doing home­work and what turned out to be worth­less school­ing is a sub­ject I often cry and get angry about, but a past sit­u­a­tion I would for one like to make up for, and also a sit­u­a­tion that I would like to help oth­ers on. I am turn­ing 30 now, and have a lot of liv­ing to catch up on and have wasted many of my best years.

Actu­ally my grade school, mid­dle school, and high school were mostly fairly run and had oppor­tu­ni­ties for the smart and dri­ven stu­dents, but they forced stu­dents to do work whether they liked it or not. The harder courses were taught by effi­cient, inspired, and help­ful teach­ers. The dumber courses were run like pen­i­ten­tiaries. I myself was a very smart and dri­ven stu­dent, eager to get work done early.

The prob­lem that I and most stu­dents faced was that doing our work bet­ter and faster only led to get­ting placed into harder courses that assigned even more work. There was no incen­tive to reach com­ple­tion since we were like ham­sters caught in a wheel. The faster we ran, the more the wheel turned. The dumber courses did not teach any­thing, but just wasted time, and assigned about the same amount of work– just dumber and more repet­i­tive. Stu­dents who were non-compliant or who failed cer­tain manda­tory tests were forced into yet more school­ing, sum­mer classes, and force-fed education- – which we all feared.
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Today’s guest blog­ger, K, has been teach­ing sci­ence at a small inde­pen­dent col­lege for over a decade. She spends her leisure time learn­ing from her three young boys. You can read more of her ran­dom thoughts at her blog: rais­ingth­ewreck­ingcrew.

We Hold Their Hands Too Much
by K, a Col­lege Teacher

Hav­ing your teen carry a cell phone is a good idea for many rea­sons. But, I would argue, it is also a bad idea for those same rea­sons. If your teenager gets a flat tire, they should be able to fix it with­out call­ing daddy. If they find them­selves alone at home and hun­gry, they should be able to feed them­selves with­out call­ing a par­ent. This topic is cov­ered very nicely by Lenore Ske­nazy over at freerangekids.

You may think that I exag­ger­ate, but many col­lege stu­dents can scarcely sur­vive a day with­out hav­ing their par­ents run inter­fer­ence for them. For exam­ple, I teach a study abroad course in the Caribbean. The char­ter flights oper­ate on Caribbean time: Planes have been late, resched­uled, can­celled, and we were once told that our flight didn’t even exist. If you travel a lot, this prob­a­bly sounds famil­iar. When it hap­pens to you, you go into problem-solving mode, right? You stay calm and kind, but insis­tent. You fig­ure it out. What has been fas­ci­nat­ing is some of my stu­dents’ reac­tions. I have seen them cry, throw up their hands and say “we’ll never get to the beach”, and call mommy and daddy.

They also call mom and dad for fairly rou­tine sit­u­a­tions. When I had a van
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