Fourth Grade Teacher: “I Did Away With Read­ing Logs”

A few posts ago, I wrote about the blog of Angela Bunyi, a fourth grade teacher from Murfrees­boro, Ten­nessee. Ms. Bunyi then write to me:

Thanks for shar­ing my arti­cle under Scholas­tic (Home­work: Apply­ing Research to Pol­icy) and my note from the home­work page on my class site. I wanted to add to your read­ers ongo­ing dis­cus­sion about read­ing logs. I did away with them this year. I also did away with a spe­cific read­ing time at home.

Why? First, I don’t want stu­dents read­ing to the clock. The thought of see­ing “30 min­utes” read for child after child in the daily read­ing log is really, really sad if you think about it. My goal is for stu­dents to get “lost” in their homework.

Sec­ond, I did away with read­ing logs because they were a pain for all involved. When I did use them, I found my best read­ers didn’t fill them out. Now I just meet with my kids dur­ing read­ing con­fer­ence time to talk about their read­ing habits at home. When a stu­dent was on page 35 the day before and they are on page 75 the next morn­ing, why push a log? I can do the math! The proof is with the pace of fin­ish­ing books in your room each week.

Posted in category Success Stories, Teachers Speak Out on March 20, 2009 at 8:37 am
| 144 Comments »

144 Comments on “Fourth Grade Teacher: “I Did Away With Read­ing Logs””

  1. PsychMom says:

    Thank you for see­ing the light on forced read­ing for young kids.. I can’t for the life of me under­stand why young chil­dren can’t pick out the books they want to read and read them. If some­one were to drop a 500 page physics book on my desk and tell me to read 10 pages a night because they’ve decided I need to learn about physics, I wouldn’t care if it was one page a night…I wouldn’t absorb a thing. And I would prob­a­bly learn to hate reading.

    I like the idea of dis­cus­sions in class about read­ing habits at home…

    March 23rd, 2009 at 8:07 am
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  2. Lenore Skenazy says:

    Oh, can you come teach at my son’s school? He got a bad grade in read­ing after read­ing all seven Harry Pot­ter books in one semes­ter. BUT he didn’t fill out the darn log! In New York, where I live, mid­dle schools pick their stu­dents the way col­leges do. They will look at my son’s report card and see, “What a ter­ri­ble reader!“
    Argh!
    No more read­ing logs!!
    Lenore “Free-Range Kids” Skenazy

    March 23rd, 2009 at 9:03 pm
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  3. Lenore Wilson says:

    I get ridiculed by my chil­drens teach­ers for them not doing thier home­work. I just feel that after spend­ing 7 – 8 hours in school they need some fun time. granted they do need to learn to read bet­ter but for my son that has a learn­ing dis­abil­ity its not worth the fight to make him sit there and do his home­work. My teenagers do thier home­work on thier own, ileave them alone about it and they bring home good grades. A’s.b’s and a few C’s. I have a total of 14 kids, 11 boys and 3 girls. 1 son is mar­ried liv­ing in Alabama and has a son. The other older son is 21 and has been in the mil­i­tary since he was 17. He grad­u­ated a year early and joined. He never did any home­work but made 100’s on all his tests. So i agree when they say stop home­work. If you stop home­work it stops alot of argu­ments. which makes for a hap­pier home which in turns makes for a hap­pier kid.

    March 23rd, 2009 at 9:26 pm
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  4. Barbara Radisavljevic says:

    I’m assum­ing you also talk about the books in these con­fer­ences so that the stu­dents can tell you about their responses to what they read and maybe sug­gest addi­tional books they might like to read accord­ing to what they think of the books they are read­ing or have read. I think dis­cussing one’s read­ing make it stick in the mind bet­ter and also makes it seem more impor­tant. It’s so much more fun than logs, book reports, and other writ­ten work, and it’s even bet­ter if it’s a two way con­ver­sa­tion and the teacher or adult also talks about their own read­ing experiences.

    March 23rd, 2009 at 11:53 pm
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  5. HomeworkBlues says:

    Lenore writes:

    Oh, can you come teach at my son’s school? He got a bad grade in read­ing after read­ing all seven Harry Pot­ter books in one semes­ter. BUT he didn’t fill out the darn log!

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»>

    It’s 3:17 am and I’m up with my daugh­ter as she bleary-eyingly (that’s not a word, but it is 3:17 so I’m allowed) attempts to fin­ish up an eight page Eng­lish research paper. How on earth did it come to this? I have to be out early tomor­row morn­ing and I have no idea how I’m going to man­age. That doesn’t even cover my anx­i­eties over how my poor child will be able to cope in school. I stayed up with her in the hopes she’d tighten it up bet­ter but she got six hours sleep last night too and is barely func­tion­ing. I can’t believe it’s come to this. I never allow this, yet here we are…

    But back to Lenore. Oh, can I relate. But on a dif­fer­ent angle. My daugh­ter lived, ate and slept Harry Pot­ter. She grew up with Harry, read­ing the first three books in sec­ond grade. She has read each book about twenty times.

    Just like the teacher wishes, my daugh­ter would get lost in her read­ing. In 5th grade, when we switched to pub­lic school, she’d get pun­ished the next day for read­ing at home and lose recess because the busy home­work was left undone.

    Shouldn’t we all be shak­ing our heads? Teach­ers pun­ish our chil­dren for what did and did not hap­pen, not at school under their domain, but at home, under ours! Can we penal­ize teach­ers when they fail to do what we expected them to do dur­ing the day? After all, unlike us, they do get paid.

    March 24th, 2009 at 3:16 am
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  6. Angela says:

    Bar­bara,

    Yes, you are cor­rect in what a read­ing con­fer­ence addresses. I meet with each stu­dent one-on-one to talk about their read­ing and their writ­ing each week. Dur­ing our read­ing con­fer­ence time the stu­dent dis­cusses what they are read­ing with me and any strate­gies they have been try­ing while read­ing, we infer what may hap­pen next, and then I lis­ten to the child read out loud for about a page before I give some feed­back on what they may need to focus on while read­ing out-loud (ex-be care­ful about replac­ing words…or review strate­gies to fig­ure out unknown words). I have been doing this for 9 years, so I am get­ting pretty good at rec­om­mended the next pos­si­ble book…although Scholas­tic has a link for a “BookA­like” search engine which gives you books that are like the one you are read­ing now (with an option to find a book that is harder or eas­ier). After a while though, you “know” your read­ers, mak­ing it an easy task.

    I kind of feel like I am sell­ing my blog, but if you are inter­ested in learn­ing more about how I con­duct read­ing con­fer­ences, home­work, and writ­ing, you can visit:

    http://​blogs​.scholas​tic​.com/​3_5

    Under “Quick Links” you can find a post titled “A Blended Approach to Read­ing and Writ­ing Con­fer­ences”. It is pretty detailed with a minute by minute account of a typ­i­cal conference.

    Best,

    Angela Bunyi

    March 24th, 2009 at 10:43 am
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  7. ThinkAboutIt says:

    Home­work Blues says penal­ize teach­ers for fail­ing to do what’s expected dur­ing the day? Fail­ing to do what? Keep kids safe? Teach them new con­cepts? Over­see the learn­ing of MANY stu­dents on a day-to-day basis? Assess who needs review of pre­vi­ously cov­ered skills and who is REALLY ready for the new les­son that must be cov­ered in order to keep up with pac­ing guides. Read and respond to par­ent cor­re­spon­dence? Plan for ways to present lessons that inte­grate the lat­est tech­nol­ogy and make stu­dents feel empow­ered about their own learn­ing? Make sure that EVERY stu­dent has lunch money, gets bath­room and water breaks through­out the day, and has appro­pri­ate mate­ri­als for class? Answer stu­dents’ ques­tions even though classtime is end­ing and half of the les­son still hasn’t been cov­ered? These are just a few exam­ples of what teach­ers go through EVERY day. Shouldn’t teach­ers AND par­ents be work­ing together to ensure the suc­cess of kids. Shouldn’t a par­ent be expected to mon­i­tor their ONE child’s prac­tice at home if requested by the teacher in order to allow the teacher to con­sis­tently build on pre­vi­ously cov­ered con­cepts in the classroom.

    Yes, teach­ers do get paid, but do they get RESPECTED for try­ing to meet all of the demands being placed on them, and with lit­tle parental sup­port in many instances? When was the last time you let your child’s teach­ers know that they’re APPRECIATED?

    March 26th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
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  8. HomeworkBlues says:

    When was the last time you let your child’s teach­ers know that they’re APPRECIATED?

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»»»

    All the time. I often don’t even get a response in kind. They’re busy, I understand.

    In pri­vate school, my daughter’s teach­ers often let me know how much they appre­ci­ated my kind remarks. And there at least, it was a partnership.

    March 26th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
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  9. Jeanie says:

    To ‘Think About It’: Thank you, Thank you, Thank you if you are kind while you check to make sure that stu­dent has lunch money. Thank you if you give a smile to the stu­dent that asks that ques­tion when you are feel­ing the pres­sure of com­plet­ing a les­son man­dated to you from higher up. It seems ‘Home­work Blues’ was just frus­trated with an aspect that is a very valid aspect. You seem frus­trated at being under appre­ci­ated. It strikes me as odd when peo­ple do what their job require­ments are and then feel like they have went above and beyond and shouldn’t really have to do that. A teacher’s job is not just to recite a les­son plan; surely you knew this when you first decided you wanted to teach. It includes all the above that you men­tioned. Now I am all for giv­ing praise when some­one does there job but I must say I heard a hint of resent­ment in your post from you that what you do is NOT really what you are sup­pose to do. That you do way more than what a teacher does. This con­fuses me.
    I believe are chil­dren are con­fined enough in the hours required to be in school. I strongly believe our chil­dren need to be able to sigh when the final school bell rings, not be all uptight about what they still are requested to do by their teacher before the next day begins.
    Be frus­trated at the par­ent, be frus­trated at the teacher, nei­ther is at fault as it is the way the sys­tem is designed that is the fault

    April 2nd, 2009 at 12:00 pm
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  10. HomeworkBlues says:

    Think About It asks:

    Shouldn’t teach­ers AND par­ents be work­ing together to ensure the suc­cess of kids.

    »»»»»»»»>

    But that’s what we’re try­ing to do here! Many of us started out writ­ing thought­ful, care­fully crafted, respect­ful let­ters. I did that with a new teacher when we switched from pri­vate to pub­lic, I took into con­sid­er­a­tion the new ter­rain, the larger class size and still the teacher’s response was dis­mis­sive, dis­re­spect­ful, defen­sive and angry.

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»

    Shouldn’t a par­ent be expected to mon­i­tor their ONE child’s prac­tice at home if requested by the teacher in order to allow the teacher to con­sis­tently build on pre­vi­ously cov­ered con­cepts in the classroom.

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»»

    Here’s what you are really say­ing. Shouldn’t we mon­i­tor our ONE child’s progress, i.e, home­school him at home after he’s just spent an entire day at school to make up for all the defi­cien­cies of school?

    If requested by the teacher. Because we only have ONE child. Teacher has 32. She couldn’t cover it in school for what­ever rea­son so if requested by you, we are to shut up and do what you tell us. We need to prac­tice at home because your hands are full.

    Well, at least you’re hon­est. I was on to you long before, though. We are your unpaid teacher’s aides. You just admit­ted as such your­self. We only have ONE child and we should be expected to do any­thing you request because you are over­whelmed, You can’t do it your­self, we need to make up the slack.

    We are sorry you have over­crowded class­rooms. Believe me, our chil­dren suf­fer far more for it than you do, it’s their life, their edu­ca­tion on the line.

    Fine. I’ll do your job for you as long as you pay me and allow it to be my choice.

    April 2nd, 2009 at 1:41 pm
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  11. Short Essay About Reading Logs « Skuldbomb’s Weblog says:

    […] http://​stophome​work​.com/​f​o​u​r​t​h​-​g​r​a​d​e​-​t​e​a​c​h​e​r​-​i​-​d​i​d​-​a​w​a​y​-​w​i​t​h​-​r​e​a​d​i​n​g​-​l​o​g​s​/​1​108   Com­ments (0) […]

    April 27th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
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  12. Anonymous says:

    As I was read­ing this post, it has fur­ther con­vinced me to home school my daugh­ter. She can learn at her pace, read all she wants, and play all she wants (after her assigned tasks are com­pleted of course). She wouldn’t miss out on basic social­iza­tion because she would be enrolled in her cho­sen activ­i­ties as well as attend var­i­ous tutor­ing groups for spe­cial sub­jects such as lan­guages.
    I went to col­lege to study edu­ca­tion, and after my first term and my first edu­ca­tion class, I dropped that major and switched to Art. I aced the class and my professor/advisor was shocked that I didn’t want to teach after tak­ing that class. My point is, Some peo­ple have it in them to be a teach and some do not. I dropped edu­ca­tion because from what I saw in the class, the state expects the teacher to babysit the stu­dents, rather than teach them, the state deter­mines what a child should learn, and the state has in turn taken respon­si­bil­ity from the par­ent. Being a teacher is like being a doc­tor, and work­ing for the state is never an easy job. I want to say kudos to those teach­ers who do care and those par­ents who work with the teach­ers. And also to those par­ents who let their kids play after school.You rock! Home­work really is just busy work…and I’m sorry to those teach­ers who didn’t get a chance to teach every­thing in their les­son plans for that day.

    April 28th, 2009 at 11:30 am
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  13. Amy says:

    I hate home­work. My son is very smart. I know this by the deci­sions he makes, the way he talks to peo­ple, the way he can fig­ure out how some­thing works or fix some­thing that is bro­ken. How­ever, I have strugged with him since 1st grade (he is in 9th) with turn­ing in home­work. He gets ter­ri­ble grades and it is always because he doesn’t do home­work. His test grades are good. His in class stuff is good…but miss­ing home­work drops the grade to below aver­age. His teach­ers scowl at par­ent teacher con­fer­ences because of his “not turn­ing in work!”. Here is the prob­lem. At night when we get home, they each have a lit­tle chore they have to do, then play, then din­ner, then fam­ily hang out and talk time, or church, then bed. They are in school for over 7 hours and I think after that it’s MY time with them. OUR fam­ily time. There is no proof home­work helps. Isn’t there any­thing we can do?

    May 7th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
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  14. PsychMom says:

    To Amy:

    Read Sarah’s book …and this blog and there are loads of ideas of things you can do as a parent.

    May 8th, 2009 at 10:40 am
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  15. Canadianteen says:

    I am in grade 12 and one of my teach­ers has a check­mark sys­tem. If you do cer­tain assign­ments you get points for the test but only seven are used on one test each time. He does not penal­ize us for not doing home­work. I don’t know how well it would work in the younger grades though.

    May 11th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
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  16. megamama says:

    I have chil­dren (more than ONE by the way) and I work full time. I don’t expect a teacher to come into my office in the evening and fin­ish up the work I wasn’t able to accom­plish dur­ing the day, why do they expect me to do their jobs, unpaid dur­ing my evening fam­ily time? I have to come home from work, get din­ner on, make sure the kids are doing/have done their home­work, eat, dishes, bath, get them to bed at a decent time.

    I’d really like the hour or so a night I spend going over home­work, assist­ing, TEACHING back. Then maybe, just maybe I’d have time to play, snug­gle, talk to, read with, bond with, and spend time with my chil­dren. Instead of the con­stant rush of get this done, get that done that most work­ing fam­i­lies go through every night.

    May 13th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
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  17. Kathleen says:

    It’s good to hear from oth­ers in the same place as we are! My son loves to read, he read on his own– Sher­lock Holmes, Robin­son Cur­soe, Trea­sure Island and many other “classics”…he loves them! Last year in 6th grade he refused to read the books they handed out. They had 4 books– ALL FOUR were basi­cally the same book…a 12 – 13 year old girls per­spec­tive on life dur­ing WW II.. really? What 12 year old boy wants to read that once– never mind 4 times! We met with his teach­ing “team” and were basi­cally told that our son was a hor­ri­ble child! This is a kid who gets a smile from EVERYONE — other par­ents always tell us how sweet and kind he is. He sits for hours doing his home­work– it’s not unusual for him to take 4 – 5 hours to get it all done. It is absurd, and I, for one am fed up and refuse to get on his case about it any more! His sis­ter– in all Hon­ors level courses doesn’t have this much home­work. He can ace his tests with­out doing the home­work– and isn’t that what home­work is about? Isn’t it sup­posed to “rein­force” what they learn in school? I would love to home­school my kids, but we need 2 incomes so it isn’t possible.

    May 20th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
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  18. High School Sophomore says:

    About what Think­AboutIt and Home­work­Blues were say­ing about teach­ers and par­ents, I agree that the par­ents shouldn’t have to do the teach­ers’ jobs for them. How­ever, I also agree with what I thought Think­AboutIt was say­ing about “in order to allow the teacher to con­sis­tently build on pre­vi­ously cov­ered con­cepts in the class­room.” I agree that a teacher prob­a­bly shouldn’t be teach­ing the same thing over and over again, shouldn’t have to (if doing job right) retread ‘pre­vi­ously cov­ered con­cepts.’ Usu­ally in my expe­ri­ence, with your aver­age teacher your aver­age kid under­stands what­ever con­cept was taught in class at the end of the class, most of the time. If they don’t, it seems rea­son­able to me for them to take it upon them­selves to go up to the teacher after class and ask for clar­i­fi­ca­tion, and/or at home that night do a few prac­tice prob­lems until they feel like they under­stand it (NOT lots and lots of drilling or gra­tu­itous prac­tice, only as much prac­tice as you think you need to feel con­fi­dent in what­ever skill.) This kind of prac­tice I think makes sense at home because you mostly don’t need to ask the teacher ques­tions and all the kids would be prac­tic­ing for dif­fer­ent amounts of time – some might feel they under­stood it fine from the class and choose not to do any prac­tice at all, some might need like 30 min­utes to feel com­fort­able with some­thing they really didn’t get before – so to do that in class would take up time the teacher to be actu­ally teach­ing and the kids to be learn­ing new things. That’s what we do in our math class right now (we just have a quiz or a test every week and every­one stud­ies as much as they feel like they need to), and I think it really works.

    May 20th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
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  19. Elizabeth says:

    I am a lit­tle con­cerned by some of these posts.

    When I think back to cal­cu­lus, there is NO WAY I could have learned cal­cu­lus — or any math, per­haps — with­out homework.

    The point of home­work is to PRACTICE.

    There is not enough time in a seven hour school day for all kids to PRACTICE what they are learn­ing. That is not the teacher’s fault — that is the “fault” of chil­dren being both human and individuals.

    It takes SOME indi­vid­u­als more prac­tice than oth­ers to learn cer­tain things.

    May 22nd, 2009 at 11:01 am
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  20. FedUpMom says:

    Eliz­a­beth — if you need to prac­tice in order to learn math, go for it! No one here will stop you.

    Imag­ine a sys­tem where stu­dents prac­ticed only when they needed to. What would that be like?

    May 22nd, 2009 at 1:54 pm
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  21. High School Sophomore says:

    That’s what I was try­ing to say with my post as well, Eliz­a­beth, and why I per­son­ally think home­work should exist but be totally optional. It DOES take some indi­vid­u­als more prac­tice than oth­ers to learn the same things, like you said – For the kid who feels they under­stand what was taught in class with­out more prac­tice, home­work would be a waste of time, so they could do some­thing else, prac­tice their chem­istry or play piano or draw. (if it turns out they didn’t actu­ally know what they thought they did, they’d prob­a­bly find out the next class or the next quiz and learn some­thing impor­tant about them­selves – like the tod­dler learn­ing to walk who needs to fall down before they can totally get the hang of stay­ing upright). For the kid who feels like they DO need more prac­tice, the teacher would have some sheets avail­able or some sug­gested prob­lems in the text­book or what­ever, and they could do as much as they needed to until they felt con­fi­dent. There wouldn’t be a set required amount, because each kid might need more or less prac­tice to get to where they felt com­fort­able. To me, this seems like a bet­ter sys­tem then com­pletely manda­tory home­work. The empha­sis would be more on under­stand­ing the mate­r­ial rather than doing a task to hand in the next day.

    May 25th, 2009 at 1:19 am
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  22. PsychMom says:

    To Eliz­a­beth

    Cal­cu­lus is a topic I took only after Grade 11 when I went to high school, pos­si­bly not even until Grade 12. Some home­work is prob­a­bly appro­pri­ate at that level. I don’t know when they start it now but it’s prob­a­bly too early!

    Any­way the issue is that math is not the only sub­ject chil­dren get home­work in and if you are a full time high school stu­dent with 6 or 7 classes a day, each class likely amounts to half to an hour’s worth of home­work each night…amounting to hours and hours of home­work. SO in addi­tion to the 7 hours at school there’s another 3 hours at home to do…that’s a gru­elling life. Even if a child makes the deci­sion that they want to do it, their health and well­be­ing seri­ously come into ques­tion after a cou­ple of months of that kind of schedule.

    It’s never an issue of prac­tic­ing a few math prob­lems after school. It’s about night after night of sit­ting with nose in books for 3 to 4 hours a night when you’re 15.

    May 25th, 2009 at 8:15 am
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  23. HomeworkBlues says:

    Psy­ch­Mom, well said. But it’s not three to four hours of high school home­work any­more, that’s pie in the sky now. It’s seven. And we aren’t just talk­ing the kids with ADD. At Back to School Night, the physics teacher said two hours a night. And this wasn’t even an AP course! The cal­cu­lus teacher said two hours a night. Okay, we’re up to four hours here and we’ve just cov­ered two out of seven sub­jects. You do the math. At this rate, you have to seri­ously ask your­self, if she’s putting in eight hours of hoem­work after a long day at school, what are they doing at school? Why am I send­ing her? This isn’t home­work, this is homeschooling.

    And then there’s week­end home­work. Many stu­dents at my daughter’s school tell me they work all week­end long. By this stage of the game, no mat­ter how hard she works, my daugh­ter is slip­ping. Who can keep up this gru­el­ing schedule?

    Eliz­a­beth, it’s not a few math prob­lems a night to prac­tice. It’s relent­less grind­ing home­work that keeps stu­dents up way past their bed­time and puts them at risk. What­ever ben­e­fit you could argue with math prac­tice prob­lems is com­pletely oblit­er­ated by sleep depri­va­tion and decreased focus the next day.

    In other words, as a teacher, I’d rather have my stu­dents com­pletely rested and alert than prac­ticed and so tired, they stare at me blankly for an entire class block.

    There is no cred­i­ble sleep research to sug­gest that high achiev­ing kids don’t need sleep. They are sim­ply bet­ter at fak­ing the effects. It comes out in other ways. Yes, they might still pull good grades, leav­ing their par­ents and edu­ca­tors to believe they can pull it off, they can do any­thing and every­thing. They can’t. It comes out in other ways. These kids will still duti­fully do what is expected of them, get excel­lent grades and shoot for a top college.

    But it comes out in other ways. Depres­sion, anx­i­ety, sleep dis­or­ders, chronic fatigue syn­drome, apa­thy, cut­ting, bulimia, anorexia, risk tak­ing behav­ior, and yes, even sui­cide. Don’t be fooled.

    May 26th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
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  24. HomeworkBlues says:

    Eliz­a­beth says, “The point of home­work is to PRACTICE.”

    Eliz­a­beth, that may have been the case once, that was clearly the orig­i­nal intent. School is seven hours long, you learn the con­cepts and skills dur­ing that time and then you go home to prac­tice and rein­force that new information.

    Aside from the fact that “prac­tice” doesn’t have to mean home­work (doesn’t my daugh­ter prac­tice her read­ing when she reads all after­noon, prac­tice her writ­ing when she works on her novel at home, prac­tice her spa­tial skills when she erects struc­tures out of k’nex and leg­gos, prac­tice her sci­ence when I take her to a nature cen­ter, prac­tice art when she drags out all her mark­ers and clay, prac­tice speak­ing, lis­ten­ing and nego­ti­at­ing when she plays at the play­ground, prac­tice math as a five year old when we walk a mile to the super­mar­ket to weigh fruits and veg­eta­bles, prac­tice count­ing when we play math word games, prac­tice spelling when we play scrab­ble, prac­tice geog­ra­phy when we play map board games, prac­tice fine motor skills when she draws and sews, practice.…you get the pic­ture now, don’t you?), it sim­ply is not PRACTICE anymore.

    My daugh­ter does all her research papers, essays and projects at home. That’s not prac­tice, that’s cur­ricu­lum. Today’s home­work is every­thing that didn’t get done at school. It’s shunted home as an exten­sion of the school day, often not to rein­force what was learned that day in school but to learn it for the first time at home. And heaven help us if mom doesn’t know cal­cu­lus or dad can’t remem­ber all his physics.

    Home­work, as it stands now, is sim­ply extend­ing the cur­ricu­lum. Yes, school can’t do every­thing in those seven and a half hours. But they can do more, a lot more. As long as home­work is forced home under the guise of respon­si­bil­ity, prac­tice and my favorite buzz phrase, “school home part­ner­ship,” there will be no incen­tive to change. I repeat, they get paid, we do the work, who is greater fool?

    May 26th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
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  25. MaeMae says:

    Kath­leen — It is pos­si­ble to work and home­school. I have been doing it for 5 years. It takes a lit­tle more work but the goal of home­school­ing is to get your chil­dren to “self-learn.” That is what makes it pos­si­ble. There are books at the library that could help you decide if this is some­thing that could work for your family.

    June 18th, 2009 at 7:14 am
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  26. Anonymous says:

    I see that sev­eral on this blog have a mis­con­cep­tion of the home/school con­nec­tion. It sad­dens me to read par­ents spew­ing forth venom against their child’s teacher and declar­ing it is not their job to over­see their child’s edu­ca­tion in the evening. Wow. I won­der if these same par­ents are equally out­raged at their child’s pedi­a­tri­cian who does not per­son­ally admin­is­ter antibi­otics to the child three times a day once they deter­mine a need for such. If the doc­tor rec­om­mended surgery or a spe­cial­ist for a par­tic­u­lar ill­ness, would the par­ent stomp and fume and declare that the doc­tor is a quack because he does not pos­sess knowl­edge about EVERY prob­lem that might affect your child? Would the par­ent cross her arms defi­antly and tell the nurse inquir­ing about health his­tory and habits that she refuses to do the nurse’s job? Yes, what I am sug­gest­ing is an anal­ogy, but one that pos­sesses viable sim­i­lar­i­ties. The energy you spent resist­ing your child’s teacher is affect­ing your child whether you see it or not. I, for one, can­not imag­ine watch­ing my child floun­der in his edu­ca­tion and refus­ing to offer my own assis­tance and insight toward improve­ment. You can fight against the sys­tem if you so choose, but your child is the one who loses in the end.…whether you have a good teacher or a bad teacher. Rethink your posi­tion while you can still be a pos­i­tive influ­ence in your child’s pub­lic edu­ca­tion. If you can’t be part­ners with the school, then take your child out to home school or pri­vate edu­ca­tion. If you can’t afford to do that, then real­ize YOUR finan­cial lim­i­ta­tions are sim­i­lar to the bud­get restraints of the school sys­tem. It is absolutely ludi­crous to expect such. The only ones who think a teacher’s job is “super­man” are the par­ents. The employer, the state, the coun­try, the col­leges who cer­tify teach­ers, and the com­mu­nity all rec­og­nize a teacher’s job has human lim­i­ta­tions. Again, if you can’t be a part­ner, play a dif­fer­ent game.

    June 20th, 2009 at 9:50 am
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  27. Anonymous says:

    I can’t believe what I read here! Amer­i­can chil­dren do not learn even half of what we did learn in Rus­sia, in ten– not twelve!- years. I have to get my kids to spe­cial Russ­ian math school AFTER school because they do not learn ANYTHING! Whole year for mul­ti­pli­ca­tion table??? No alge­bra till high school? No physics, chem­istry, etc ?? And on top of learn­ing NOTHING– no home­work to make it even worse?

    July 3rd, 2009 at 10:30 pm
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  28. 1st Grade Teacher says:

    A few things that I would like to point out:

    I grad­u­ated from HS in ’03, so I am still fairly young (at least I like to think so) and I took AP classes as well as some that weren’t and I can­not recall every hav­ing 3 hours + of home­work (let alone 7?!)

    As a first grade teacher, I assign home­work as well as a read­ing log. My read­ing log only requires the book title and whether it was read by the stu­dent, the par­ent, or together. It isn’t timed or a cer­tain num­ber of pages aren’t required. The most I am ask­ing for from my stu­dents to com­plete their home­work and read­ing is 45 min­utes, but most likely 30 min­utes is all that’s needed.

    One rea­son we teach­ers assign home­work (at least in the pri­mary grades) is to teach respon­si­bil­ity. Chil­dren that con­sis­tently don’t turn in home­work in my room are usu­ally very unor­ga­nized and are much less respon­si­ble than their class­mates. Home­work helps both these areas.

    I also assign home­work to get the par­ents involved in their child’s edu­ca­tion. In first grade most stu­dents need help com­plet­ing their home­work because they can’t read flu­ently. I teach in an urban dis­trict and I know a lot of my student’s don’t get much one-on-one atten­tion from the adult fig­ure in their life. They also need some­one read­ing to them to model how read­ing is done.

    Another point I would like to address is that we do not address home­work “because we didn’t get to it at school”. If the gen­eral pub­lic knew how much time was invested (or bet­ter yet– lost) to assess­ing (as in state test­ing, dis­trict test­ing, school test­ing, etc) they would see that the 7 hours their child is in school is not com­pletely devoted to instruction.

    Let’s see…30 min­utes for lunch, 30 min­utes for recess, 30 — 45 min­utes for spe­cial class (art, gym, etc), 20 min­utes for restroom breaks (trust me, lit­tle ones can­not wait nor are they quick!), that’s a lot of time not spent in the classroom.

    Just my side of the coin :)

    July 9th, 2009 at 1:47 am
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  29. PsychMom says:

    To #26 Anonymous

    A part­ner­ship implies a shared respon­si­bil­ity and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. How is it a part­ner­ship when one side dic­tates to the other what is expected? Teach­ers sel­dom send a note say­ing, “This is what I pro­pose for your child to do…let’s dis­cuss it.“
    What comes home from school is…“Here’s what I want you to do, par­ents: This is how long you are to do it each night, these are the things you must buy to do it with, and I want to see it by Tues­day with your name on it”

    That doesn’t sound like a part­ner­ship to me.

    And I don’t under­stand the anal­ogy to the med­ical pro­fes­sion at all. How is a 10 min­utes con­sult with a physi­cian the same as 10 months with a teacher? Physi­cians are deal­ing with “problems”…a teacher is sup­posed to be deal­ing with edu­ca­tion. I would never expect a teacher to treat a child’s learn­ing problem.….lord know he/she’s got enough to deal with.

    July 23rd, 2009 at 10:09 am
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  30. PeggyinMA says:

    With all due respect to 1st grade teacher (and some oth­ers who have posted here) please read Sarah’s book “The Case Against Home­work” before com­ment­ing. All of your argu­ments are dis­cussed in there. “Teach­ing respon­si­bil­ity” and “get­ting par­ents involved” are fre­quently raised as home­work goals, but the effect of home­work loads can be very, very dif­fer­ent, espe­cially at such a young age.
    For physi­cians and teach­ers alike, “first do no harm.”

    July 23rd, 2009 at 2:16 pm
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  31. Readingisfun says:

    How dis­ap­point­ing it is to read these com­ments that par­ents are mak­ing regard­ing their child’s teacher. I agree with the com­ments about work­ing together as a part­ner­ship. No won­der the schools have so many behav­ioral prob­lems with stu­dents, look at the par­ents atti­tude towards their schools. Also, many par­ents do not pre­pare their chil­dren for school, which means they start school behind other class­mates. Some par­ents, unfor­tu­nately, do not have their chil­dren read at all and have lit­tle inter­ac­tion with the child’s teacher. It is because of these par­ents that teach­ers and schools find it nec­es­sary to assign home­work for stu­dents to prac­tice the essen­tial skills. For all those respon­si­ble par­ents out there, could you imag­ine not read­ing to your child or hav­ing them read to you or not mak­ing an effort to know what is going on with your child at school. These par­ents do exist, teach­ers want every child to suc­ceed, but in order to do so, some stu­dents need addi­tional prac­tice and many times these stu­dents come from fam­i­lies that are less than help­ful in pro­vid­ing this help. I think in an ideal class­room, where all the par­ents are involved with their children’s well being and have their stu­dents read at home then yes, home­work should be optional, but for those schools where par­ent involved is silm to none, home­work is nec­es­sary 100% of the time.

    September 2nd, 2009 at 7:33 pm
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  32. HomeworkBlues says:

    Reading­is­fun, I am con­fused by your com­ments. First you say you are dis­ap­pointed in us par­ents who blog here often, sug­gest that kids have behav­ior prob­lems because of par­ents like us and then you pro­ceed to lament how such chil­dren don’t read.

    If any­one needs to read, it is you. Read our com­ments. I am begin­ning to feel that key com­menters on this blog (myself included) should post posi­tion papers. We are not the par­ents you lambaste!

    My child reads. That’s the whole point! She reads inces­santly. I want less home­work so she has time to read!

    I’m tired now. I don’t have the energy to repeat every­thing I wrote. Please take the time to read it. How can you form an opin­ion half baked?

    We don’t idly blast any­one. I know I think my posi­tions through very care­fully, honed after years of frus­tra­tion. We are an intel­lec­tual fam­ily. I cul­ti­vated a child who loves to learn, in a home where I have to hide books so she’ll do her homework.

    My hus­band and I spend time with our child. Lots of it. Not nearly enough. Home­work eats the fam­ily. And it breaks my heart. This isn’t funny, this isn’t idle whin­ing, this isn’t grip­ing, this is seri­ous. We are talk­ing about the health and well being of a child. We are talk­ing home­work over­load that reaches the point of utter absur­dity. That cuts into sleep and play and causes anx­i­ety and depres­sion. This is seri­ous stuff. Surely you must think I have bet­ter things to do than pick on teach­ers. It’s about fam­ily. It’s about our life. It’s about our san­ity. It’s about our child.

    My posi­tion began sim­ply. No home­work in ele­men­tary, cred­i­ble research bears that out. All my daugh­ter ever wanted to do in ele­men­tary was read and write a novel. What’s wrong with that? High school home­work should never be more than two hours. Beyond that yields noth­ing but dimin­ish­ing returns. But we here feel no one is lis­ten­ing to us, giv­ing us the impres­sion the fam­ily comes last. The mother espe­cially is the most vil­i­fied and dis­re­garded stake­holder in the pub­lic school sys­tem. Unless we acknowl­edge those deep seated but closely guarded secrets, we can­not progress.

    My child is a respect­ful, well behaved, kind, con­sid­er­ate, eth­i­cal young per­son. We have a respect and pas­sion for learn­ing in my house­hold. We are nowhere near rich, not even com­fort­able in some respects. What we have is the will and desire to edu­cate and edu­cate well. We try hard. We are there. We are com­mit­ted. Why would you pick on that?

    September 2nd, 2009 at 9:47 pm
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  33. HomeworkBlues says:

    Reading­is­fun writes: “I think in an ideal class­room, where all the par­ents are involved with their children’s well being and have their stu­dents read at home then yes, home­work should be optional, but for those schools where par­ent involved is silm to none, home­work is nec­es­sary 100% of the time”

    I keep hear­ing this argu­ment. Over and over. It’s a valid one but I’ve answered it every time. Here goes again.

    If home­work is designed for those chil­dren who receive no enrich­ment at home, no books, no par­ents to read to them, then how do you explain the expo­nen­tial increase of home­work in gifted pro­grams? My daugh­ter has been in gifted and/or pri­vate pro­grams her entire school life. Most of the par­ents are involved, some in ways I would take umbrage with. But the fact remains, they are involved. These kids are mostly reading.

    By your cal­cu­la­tion, home­work for self moti­vated chil­dren should be optional. A teacher could wink and whis­per, okay, your daugh­ter can just read and write that novel. Show it to me when it’s done. Good enough for me!

    But that’s not what hap­pens. When I tried to talk to her pub­lic school teacher years ago, said teacher pursed her lips dis­ap­prov­ingly and clucked, “she still has to do her home­work.” She was talk­ing past me and chose not to hear a sin­gle word I said.

    I see the exact reverse of what you describe. Gifted pro­grams fry the kids and the non-gifted ones leave them to their own devices.

    September 2nd, 2009 at 11:30 pm
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  34. PsychMom says:

    To Reading­is­fun

    I too am really tired of the peo­ple like you who com­ment who haven’t read all the post­ings. I’m the most involved par­ent on the planet in my child’s learn­ing and in her school­ing. But I worry about all chil­dren being pushed into WORK and pushed into grow­ing up because adults fear they will some­how be less suc­cess­ful if there isn’t some­one hound­ing them from behind. I want my child to be a child for as long as I can man­age it. My con­cerns goes way beyond home­work (as it does for many par­ents here) but this forum helps to get the word out there that there are bet­ter ways to treat chil­dren.
    Home­work pre­pares young chil­dren for absolutely noth­ing but a life long hatred of books and school. And read­ing to one’s child and talk­ing to them every evening over the din­ner table is more than a rea­son­able substitute.

    September 3rd, 2009 at 8:23 am
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  35. FedUpMom says:

    Home­work­Blues, read­ing the recent com­ments gives me a new the­ory about G/T classes. I think the pub­lic schools have decided that “gifted/talented” means “par­ents want the kid to go to Har­vard.” Then they fry the kids with tons of home­work and pres­sure in the mis­guided belief that this is what the par­ents want because it will pave that golden path to the Ivy League.

    At this point they might as well just rename “G/T” and “AP” and “accel­er­ated” classes “pressure-cooker classes” and be done with it. We’d have truth in adver­tis­ing and par­ents like you and me (and, appar­ently, Matthew) would know to keep our kids away. And instead of entry to G/T being decided by IQ tests, which is not really the rel­e­vant point, entry could be decided by an inter­view with the par­ents. Just ask the par­ents, “Would you rather get your kid into Har­vard than give them a happy child­hood?” If the answer is yes, go ahead and enroll the kid in G/T.

    Of course, the ques­tion of how to edu­cate a bright, curi­ous, cre­ative child would remain to be answered. But we could all save a great deal of time and heartache if we weren’t under the com­pletely false impres­sion that the pub­lic schools actu­ally care about bright, curi­ous, cre­ative kids.

    September 3rd, 2009 at 10:48 am
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  36. FedUpMom says:

    To 1st Grade Teacher — home­work in the first grade has noth­ing to do with teach­ing a child to be respon­si­ble. It’s all about Mom. The kids who turn in their home­work are the ones whose moth­ers nagged, cajoled, bribed or threat­ened their kids into doing the home­work, day after day. I have never met a first-grade child who could remem­ber, and com­plete, home­work every day with­out instruc­tion from his par­ents (and if that child exists, I’m not sure I want to meet him!)

    A lot of Moms just do the home­work for their child. It’s a lot eas­ier than fight­ing with an exhausted child every day, and it makes no dif­fer­ence what­so­ever to the child’s edu­ca­tion. Take a closer look at the home­work that gets handed in. Do you see some with unusu­ally mature handwriting?

    Home­work should never be given in first grade. Even Har­ris Cooper doesn’t think there should be more than 10 min­utes. You rou­tinely assign 45 min­utes, which is way too much. (By the way, how do you assess how much time it will take?)

    As for “get­ting the par­ents involved”, do you hear how patron­iz­ing that is? If your stu­dents don’t get much atten­tion from adults, believe me, the kind of atten­tion they get while being frog-marched through home­work is not going to improve their lives.

    Home­work was the worst thing that ever hap­pened to my rela­tion­ship with my daugh­ter. I’m deter­mined to put my daughter’s needs first from now on.

    September 3rd, 2009 at 11:24 am
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  37. MomToFour says:

    Here I sit (bliss­fully unin­ter­rupted) at the com­puter, enjoy­ing the peace and quiet of the first day of school. I am the mother of four beau­ti­ful daugh­ters (yes, more than ONE child … how rare), rang­ing in ages from 9 to 17. I have looked to this day with glee and dread all mixed into one. The glee refers to the peace and quiet of a child­less home while the ‘dread’ refers to the yearly home­work bat­tles with the teach­ers … not my kids.
    I have scanned all 36 com­ments in this won­der­fully, deli­cious debate about home­work. Each year at the first parent-teacher inter­view in the fall, my hus­band and I make it known that home­work is sec­ondary to fam­ily. Many times I have writ­ten in agen­das that it was too nice out­side to do home­work only to find out that my child was teth­ered to a desk the fol­low­ing recess to com­plete the required ‘busy work’ of the day.
    My hus­band and I are try­ing to take a stand for what we believe in, which is fam­ily time and ‘get your butt off the couch and be active’ time. In this day and age of tech­nol­ogy, chil­dren will remain glued to a com­puter, video game or tele­vi­son if left alone to their own devices. In our area, gym class is becom­ing a thing of the past or it has become such a joke that it’s laugh­able at times. (“Oh, poor lit­tle Jimmy can’t run? Just sit on the bench and take a break if you need to, dear”) For us, phys­i­cal activ­ity is just as impor­tant as men­tal activ­ity.
    I shud­der when my child brings home an I.R.P. (Inde­pen­dent Read­ing Pro­gram), which gen­er­ally means lots of home­work for Mom and Dad. Last year, grade 3 exam­ple:
    1. Read a book
    2. Write a sum­mary of the book
    3. Write down 20 new vocab­u­lary words, mean­ings and make new sen­tences for each
    4. Write an alter­nate end­ing to the book
    5. Pick 3 char­ac­ters and describe them. Do you know any­one like them?
    6. Do a project about the book. (It can­not be the same as the pre­vi­ous I.R.P. project.)
    How to suck the enjoy­ment out of read­ing in two sec­onds flat? BUSY WORK!!! I am insulted when my par­ent­ing skills are ques­tioned when I reject the ben­e­fits of time spent with my child doing home­work. My hus­band and I both work full time, shift work for me, and any time I have with my kids is a trea­sure. The last thing I want to do is mon­i­tor use­less busy work!

    September 8th, 2009 at 11:35 am
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  38. PsychMom says:

    Hi MomTo­Four:

    My child went back last Wednesday…to 3rd grade. It’s the year “they” all say is a killer for the start of seri­ous home­work. The note from the teacher said that Home­work won’t start until this week. Notes in pre­vi­ous years have said I can expect 30 min­utes of read­ing per night plus 20 min­utes of “other” work, vary­ing depend­ing on the whim of the teacher basi­cally. I’m tak­ing the approach of not say­ing any­thing until a prob­lem appears at home, but the inde­pen­dent read­ing projects of which you speak, are what I’m dread­ing. They did them last year too and it was an unmit­i­gated fail­ure for my vora­cious reader who couldn’t stand the books selected. And as for sign­ing off on homework…it won’t be happening.

    The teacher and I are on good terms but def­i­nitely have dif­fer­ent ideas about homework.…if you see bright lights in the east­ern hori­zon this fall, it’ll be fire­works over Halifax.

    September 8th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
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  39. FedUpMom says:

    To every­one — argh! The school year has barely begun and I’m already get­ting into home­work debates at school. I was just talk­ing to my younger daughter’s kinder­garten teacher about the “sound of the week” home­work and she remarked, “most of the kids chose to par­tic­i­pate in that.” Whad­daya mean, the kids chose to par­tic­i­pate? The *Moms* chose to par­tic­i­pate! 5-year-old kids don’t spon­ta­neously remem­ber to bring in a “sound-of-the-week” object from home. And this is actu­ally a teacher I like! I think my head just exploded.

    September 8th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
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  40. PsychMom says:

    Have I got a sound of the week for you.….….?!

    I laughed so hard when I read your post…do teach­ers not get how absolutely silly they sound?

    Give your kid an airhorn to take to school. Or a whooppee cushion…I’m still giggling..

    September 8th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
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  41. FedUpMom says:

    Psy­ch­Mom — maybe I should explain — “sound of the week” is actu­ally about learn­ing the alpha­bet. You’re sup­posed to bring in an object whose name begins with the sound rep­re­sented by the let­ter. I think it’s called “sound of the week” to empha­size phon­ics (so you don’t, for instance, send in a sugar cube to rep­re­sent “s”.)

    I like your idea of the air horn and the whoopee cush­ion, though — I’ll keep it in mind!

    September 8th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
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  42. PsychMom says:

    Oohh­hhh…

    I like my inter­pre­ta­tion bet­ter. But I’m sure I could also come up with cre­ative words for each sound of the alpha­bet too.

    I love hav­ing projects to work on.

    September 8th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
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  43. ryan says:

    i am in 7th grade and i have at least 4 hours of home­work a night– i am in a mag­net school so i expect it to be a lot but i am out­raged at what the teach­ers say

    “home­work is good and will improve your grades and study­ing is learn­ing which is NOT review”

    they even agree with me that if it was review then i should not have to do it unless i need to.

    i have read some of the other com­ments say­ing we do not respect teach­ers and that is wrong we usu­ally try to its that teach­ers do not respect us and i do not see why we should have to keep on respect­ing them when they dont and as some­one men­tioned ear­lier THEY get paid not us.

    also i believe that all home­work is review and that only kids who need to review the sub­ject should do the home­work. i think it is ridicu­lous how there is now forced study­ing for sub­jects that we could be doing per­fectly well on and learned in class. i do not think teach­ers need to review every­one to see if they have got the con­cept, they should use IN-SCHOOL work to review and test the kids in question.

    September 8th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
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  44. FedUpMom says:

    Psy­ch­Mom — you gave me my best laugh of the day. I keep think­ing of the air horn and whoopie cush­ion — eeeeeep FBLLATT! Excellent.

    September 8th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
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  45. HomeworkBlues says:

    To 7th grader above: This was my daugh­ter too. This child illus­trates how destruc­tive home­work over­load is. I have yet to meet a bright 7th grader at a mag­net school who is enthralled with home­work over­load and who ben­e­fits from it.

    Detrac­tors will counter that we can’t always give kids what they want. That misses the entire point of this mid­dle schooler’s plea. This child is mis­er­able, becom­ing dis­il­lu­sioned and is los­ing faith in the very adults he/she should be look­ing up to. Why take the chance? I see no ben­e­fit here at all. Some­times a lit­tle goes a long way. Less is more.

    My daugh­ter was given an incred­i­bly huge amount of lan­guage home­work over the sum­mer. She saw the sheer vol­ume, gasped and shut down, com­pletely over­whelmed and despair­ing. To her relief, some other stu­dents reported the same thing today. She told me, had it been ten pages instead of fifty, she would have tack­led it.

    September 9th, 2009 at 12:47 am
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  46. FedUpMom says:

    To 7th grader — 4 hours a night is twice as much as the 2 hour max­i­mum that Har­ris Cooper rec­om­mends for high school!

    I com­pletely agree with you that home­work should be only for kids who need the review. If you don’t need it, what’s the point?

    Have you talked to your par­ents about this? I know the school will tell you to “self-advocate”, but I think that’s school code for “we don’t want to deal with parents.”

    September 9th, 2009 at 9:39 am
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  47. HomeworkBlues says:

    You bet, FedUp. The sad thing is, that’s the norm for 7th grade these days. Espe­cially in gifted pro­grams. No won­der kids are tuned out and apathetic.

    As for “self advo­cat­ing,” my daughter’s school repeated that mantra too. So my child screwed up the courage to ask for an exten­sion on a large report, as she was going off to an impor­tant con­ven­tion. We are talk­ing about request­ing a dis­pen­sa­tion for *week­end* home­work! She would miss no school but would not have much of the week­end to do her homework.

    Teacher shot her down and scolded her like this: You must work many many hours. You can­not just have fun all the time.” Does this kid look like she is hav­ing fun all the time?

    Reminder to self: Go back and ask teacher. What do you do on your week­ends? Heaven for­fend, might you be hav­ing a lit­tle fun yourself?

    The next ques­tion is, so what are par­ents going to do about home­work over­load that is so beyond any rec­om­mended guide­lines? The most amaz­ing thing here is this entire prob­lem could go away quickly if par­ernts gal­va­nized en masse. That’s all it takes. But what will it take to get there?

    September 10th, 2009 at 12:54 am
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  48. HomeworkBlues says:

    First grade teacher writes: “Another point I would like to address is that we do not address home­work “because we didn’t get to it at school”. If the gen­eral pub­lic knew how much time was invested (or bet­ter yet– lost) to assess­ing (as in state test­ing, dis­trict test­ing, school test­ing, etc) they would see that the 7 hours their child is in school is not com­pletely devoted to instruction.”

    You think we, the gen­eral pub­lic, is not aware of how much pre­cious instruc­tional time is wasted on test­ing? We are aware, we real­ize, we know and we are furious.

    We know it’s not all your fault. But shunt­ing the work to the home because school had bet­ter things to do than actu­ally teach is a dread­ful solu­tion. The school is pun­ish­ing the very lit­tle per­son they are sup­posed to be helping.

    It’s an awful sit­u­a­tion. But please don’t assume for a moment that many of us are clue­less. We know how much time is wasted at school. There’s an adage in home­school­ing I love to keep repeat­ing: We do twice as much in half the time.

    September 10th, 2009 at 12:59 am
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  49. HomeworkBlues says:

    Cor­rec­tion: We ARE not aware. Not is. Typo. Ooops.

    September 10th, 2009 at 1:00 am
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  50. HomeworkBlues says:

    Anony­mous writes: “And on top of learn­ing NOTHING– no home­work to make it even worse?”

    Anony­mous, you never ever use home­work to make up for bad instruc­tion, ever. That is what so many of us are fight­ing for here. It’s not about not work­ing hard. It’s not about not learn­ing. It’s not about dumb­ing down the cur­ricu­lum. It’s about using every pre­cious minute in school wisely. Trust me. If schools elim­i­nated the fluff and used the time to teach, home­work could be minimal.

    It’s about nur­tur­ing and inspir­ing chil­dren. It’s about cre­at­ing a home of learn­ing and books and intel­lec­tual din­ner dis­cus­sions that are allowed to go on unin­ter­rupted. Where the teach­ers call the shots from 9 – 4 and you take over the the rest of the time. Where your home is your cas­tle. Or your library.

    I don’t know about you but a lot of learn­ing hap­pens in our house­hold. We’ve done the school thing, the home­work thing, and I am here to tell you my daugh­ter would have learned far more with­out home­work than with it. That’s because in order to “make” her do home­work, we were always tak­ing away The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wuther­ing Heights, Shake­speare, and a novel she was writ­ing. Home­work lim­ited learn­ing, not enhanced it, espe­cially in elementary.

    Not all par­ents may want to spend all after­noon and evening with their kids. That’s okay, everyone’s dif­fer­ent. But don’t pre­tend home­work pro­motes learn­ing. If you need it as a babysit­ting ser­vice or think your kids will never ever do a sin­gle respon­si­ble self directed edu­ca­tional pur­suit with­out it, go ahead, clamor for more home­work. But please make it optional. I judge you not. You live your home life the way you want and I want the free­dom to do likewise.

    Writ­ten at 1:15 am. My high schooler is still up and doing home­work for…I don’t even want to tell you how many hours. And it’s only Day Two.

    September 10th, 2009 at 1:10 am
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  51. Jen098 says:

    As a 4th grade teacher I have to say I find it amus­ing there are adults who think I “assign” home­work to make par­ents teach their children.

    First, after teach­ing sub­ject mat­ter my stu­dents are given time to prac­tice skills in class. If they do not fin­ish the prac­tice, then it is home­work. Some stu­dents waste all sorts of time, even with prompts, rewards, pun­ish­ments, recesses in, extra help etc. If the par­ents put stu­dents aca­d­e­mics first, the stu­dents value their aca­d­e­mics, and often those are the kids who appre­ci­ate their edu­ca­tion, even if they are 9 years old.

    Par­ents who reward their kid with a sunny day, but who also sup­port their child as a stu­dent are the par­ents of those stu­dents can spend an after­noon out­side. But the par­ents who meet with me and say “Oh well, I didn’ t do well in math” or “I didn’t like school” or “We had soc­cer­bal­let­foot­ball­dancelacrosse­horse­back­rid­ing­sun­ny­day­busyrun­ninger­rand­sra­nout­of­time” those stu­dents think of their edu­ca­tion as sec­ondary and it always shows. The kids don’t know the mate­r­ial, are frus­trated, tired, and my favorite “are bored”. You actu­ally have to have a grasp of the basics before you get to be “bored”. No one wants to say it but many of the “bored” kids aren’t gifted. They are lazy. That’s right. They want to be spoon fed infor­ma­tion like a mind­less video game. They can’t use a dic­tio­nary. They think every­thing should be cov­ered under “spellcheck”. No won­der other coun­tries are kick­ing our asses in edu­ca­tion. Those kids aren’t sit­ting at home play­ing 2 hours of “Grand Theft Auto” and watch­ing who knows what the rest of the night.

    I have had stu­dents involved in many dif­fer­ent activ­i­ties after school who NEVER turned in any assign­ments late and whose par­ents never com­plain. They under­stand that their child’s most impor­tant job is their edu­ca­tion. No excuses. I love those parents.

    As for review­ing time tables at home or read­ing with your kids, fine, don’t. If your child isn’t keep­ing up with the pace which is set for the aver­age child, then I don’t know if it mat­ters who you blame when he or she is work­ing at McDonald’s and still can’t count back change. I know I did my part to cover the mate­r­ial using var­i­ous meth­ods and in cre­ative ways, and in between pro­vid­ing every­thing from basic man­ners to basic life skills to over 60% (that’s cor­rect, 60%) of the class on top of read­ing, writ­ing and math I know I put in a full day.

    If a par­ent doesn’t put their child’s edu­ca­tion first, then the child won’t care either. If you choose to have one child or 6 chil­dren or 11, it is still your job to par­tic­i­pate in their edu­ca­tion. If your child has never seen a book and enters kinger­garten, then yes, they are at a dis­ad­van­tage. It isn’t my fault you had more chil­dren than you could han­dle. But I will try my best to edu­cate them all, even if you are too tired to help with home­work. Or to dis­or­ga­nized to run your life. I guess that is my fault, too?

    And finally, why are so many peo­ple writ­ing 7 page papers in the mid­dle of the night before they are due? I find it hard to believe those assign­ments were assigned that day. More than likely they were assigned much ear­lier in the week or even weeks before, and then they were put off until the last minute. I have received phone calls about those assign­ments. I have sent pack­ets home with all the infor­ma­tion and due dates and had par­ents sign them, only to have par­ents tell me “they didn’t know” or they “for­got”. If I show them where they signed off on the packet, they get pissed at me. I am sorry I tried to give you infor­ma­tion to help you help your child get an edu­ca­tion. Sorry I tried to keep you informed about the things we are cov­er­ing. I thought you might be inter­ested. But nev­er­mind! Now I under­stand your child’s future only mat­ters between 8 and 4!

    So, on top of their child not car­ing if they do any work in class, even with every­thing I can think of to get them to do the assign­ment, I always have those who have their arse­nal of excuses. Then the par­ents come with their excuses. The apple never falls far from the tree.

    If I only had to teach to moti­vated stu­dents and inter­ested parents…but I will try to teach the rest, too in the hopes that it will make the dif­fer­ence to at least one or two of the kids.

    Oh, and one other thing. My mom spent many hours with me, prac­tic­ing count­ing change, review­ing mul­ti­pli­ca­tion tables, read­ing to me, and car­ing about me. She did the same with my brother. My par­ents came from noth­ing. They knew school came first. I still played with friends on the week­ends. She never bitched. She wanted me to have a great edu­ca­tion. Thanks, Mom I guess you really are one in a million.

    October 9th, 2009 at 1:12 am
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  52. FedUpMom says:

    Jen098 — I am get­ting so tired of read­ing these hos­tile mes­sages from teach­ers. We keep hear­ing about “teacher-bashing”, but what about the con­stant drum­beat of kid-bashing and parent-bashing?

    “I have had stu­dents involved in many dif­fer­ent activ­i­ties after school who NEVER turned in any assign­ments late and whose par­ents never com­plain. They under­stand that their child’s most impor­tant job is their edu­ca­tion. No excuses. I love those parents.”

    Guess what — some of those per­fect assign­ments that get turned in on time from uncom­plain­ing par­ents are FAKED. These par­ents don’t want to rock the boat, but they’ve only got 24 hours in the day like the rest of us. They want their kids to enjoy their sports or their sunny day, and they’re tired of harass­ing their kids about the home­work, so they just do it for them. You think that doesn’t happen?

    Please, don’t send pack­ets home with due dates. There’s no way a 9 year old child can orga­nize all that her­self, and it’s not fair to hold the child respon­si­ble for her par­ents’ compliance.

    “If your child isn’t keep­ing up with the pace which is set for the aver­age child, then I don’t know if it mat­ters who you blame when he or she is work­ing at McDonald’s and still can’t count back change. I know I did my part to cover the material …”

    There’s a say­ing over at kitchen table math:

    “If the stu­dent didn’t learn, the teacher didn’t teach.”

    Take own­er­ship of what you do. If there’s a child who isn’t keep­ing pace with the mate­r­ial, that’s the school’s respon­si­bil­ity to fix. Does the child have a learn­ing dis­abil­ity? Or does the child actu­ally know the mate­r­ial but she’s become non­com­pli­ant because of bore­dom and alien­ation? What’s going on? Don’t just blame the parents.

    October 9th, 2009 at 10:21 am
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  53. zzzzz78759 says:

    Jen098,

    I com­pletely agree with FedUp­Mom but I’m going to add a bit of my own.

    I’m con­cerned that you don’t feel sports, exer­cise, fam­ily time, errands, relax­ation, etc. are as impor­tant as home­work. I have a job, one that puts food on our table, a roof over our heads, clothes on our backs and a few perks now and then. My job is impor­tant. With­out it we would be liv­ing on the street.

    My daugh­ter spends 35 hours a week in school, plus another about 5 in tran­sit each way. That’s a 40 hour week for her. She’s in sec­ond grade.

    I did not “have more kids than I can han­dle” nor am I too “dis­or­ga­nized” to run my life. I will agree, though, that both my daugh­ter and I are “too tired” to do home­work and I’m “too tired” to do your job because I’ve been doing MY job all day. Silly me, keep­ing us from liv­ing in a box…I’m sure it has its advan­tages. Like leav­ing me more time to do your job for you.

    I know some fab­u­lous teach­ers. Won­der­ful, car­ing, warm, engag­ing, peo­ple who love their jobs and love help­ing chil­dren grow and learn. Their class­rooms are rain­bows of color and sounds. The chil­dren are happy and eager. That’s not a pipe dream, it’s real­ity. I’ve seen it. It’s funny that those teach­ers are, invari­ably, the ones who don’t assign home­work. There’s no need. Why assign math work­sheets when there are so many bet­ter, real world, fun ways to learn math? Look, 5 yel­low flow­ers plus 3 blue ones makes 8 flow­ers. Now, let’s throw in 4 of these pur­ple ones. How many do we have now?

    The teach­ers who come here to post and com­plain that it’s not their “fault” or they’re not to “blame” are typ­i­cally the ones who are, frankly, not cut out to be teach­ers. They don’t enjoy their jobs, they’re stuck in a rut, they have no respect for par­ents, and have a class­room full of bored children.

    And, again, I HAVE A JOB. I work hard at it every day. I don’t have time to do home­work or help with home­work. I would rather take that time and spend it with my daugh­ter who shouldn’t be asked to do home­work, either, since she’s already spent a full day in school. soc­cer­bal­let­foot­ball­dancelacrosse­horse­back­rid­ing­sun­ny­day­busyrun­ninger­rands are impor­tant part of life. Fam­ily time is an impor­tant part of life. Why do teach­ers and schools not see that?

    A cou­ple of days ago, our fam­ily cat got sick and had to be taken to the ani­mal hos­pi­tal ER. We spent a good part of the night there with him. I wrote my daughter’s teacher a note explain­ing why her home­work was not done. Appar­ently, it was not a good enough excuse because not only was she dinged for not hav­ing it done but the teacher actu­ally told my daugh­ter that it was MY “fault” (again, there’s that word) she didn’t get 100 on her spelling test since I didn’t feel it was impor­tant enough to prac­tice her words with her.

    Kids don’t need rewards and/or pun­ish­ments for them to com­plete their “work”, they need work that’s fun and engag­ing and holds their inter­est. And, if the teacher can’t do that in the time allot­ted, then per­haps the teacher needs to reassess their time man­age­ment, goals, and career choice.

    And BTW, I have yet to have a teacher take me up on my offer to have them come do my job for a cou­ple of hours a night when they’re fin­ished with school.

    The usual response, “I have a job.” My thoughts exactly.

    October 9th, 2009 at 11:46 am
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  54. PsychMom says:

    The only thing I have to say to Jen098 is..you have lost your way and all your per­spec­tive. Your idea of edu­ca­tion is just sad.

    October 9th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
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  55. zzzzz78759 says:

    Psy­ch­Mom,

    I agree. Any­one who says, ‘The kids don’t know the mate­r­ial, are frus­trated, tired, and my favorite “are bored”. You actu­ally have to have a grasp of the basics before you get to be “bored”. No one wants to say it but many of the “bored” kids aren’t gifted. They are lazy. That’s right.’ but takes no respon­si­bil­ity for the fact that her stu­dents don’t know the mate­r­ial, are frus­trated, tired and bored might want to reassess her career choice.

    October 9th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
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  56. Disillusioned says:

    Psy­ch­Mom and zzzzz78759– both of you are very elo­quent and your responses to Jen098 are well reasoned.

    In my expe­ri­ence, the “lens” through which many edu­ca­tors view the world is rel­a­tively nar­row and myopic.
    I think they truly believe (the rather hys­ter­i­cal) dogma they adhere to. (All of the kids will be work­ing at McDonald’s if they don’t pass their sec­ond grade spelling tests!)

    October 10th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
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  57. Joyce says:

    I have 2 boys-1 in 2nd grade and the other in 3rd. My 3rd grader had to read a school assigned book about how a kid his age went through life, and how he learned to like the whole world, that kind of thing. One night, he came up to me, and said, “Mom, I hate this book. It’s too bor­ing. There are no fights, no adven­tures, no ANYTHING! I hate this. I’m not gonna read any longer.” I had a talk with his teacher about it, and she agreed with him. She said, “It’s prob­a­bly the shal­low­est book I’ve read. But it’s the school board who decides which books the town schools read.” So I wrote to the town board. No reply. I called. Only an auto­mated mes­sage. I attended a coun­cil meet­ing. When I was fin­ished speak­ing my opin­ion, I was dis­missed. The next day, I received a let­ter say­ing,
    “Dear Joyce X,
    We appre­ci­ate your opin­ion, and so we are truly sorry to say that though your son may not enjoy the book we have cho­sen and approved, it is the only book that meets our stan­dards on vio­lence, sex­u­al­ity, and other issues we are afraid will influ­ence and/or frighten the chil­dren in this town.

    Sin­cerely,
    Mr.whole town board.”

    My son got a D for reading .

    October 11th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
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  58. PsychMom says:

    Wow, Joyce. I can’t imag­ine what it must be like liv­ing in a place where peo­ple are so fear­ful. It’s like some­thing out of a sci-fi movie. What does a D in read­ing mean when you’re in sec­ond or third grade? If your son reads a ton at home but doesn’t read another school/town endorsed book all year, will he still get a D?

    It all seems so bizarre to me. If the “town” feels this way about books that small chil­dren read, do they make sim­i­lar judge­ments about the movies that come to town, the books that adults read?

    October 13th, 2009 at 9:37 am
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  59. lbs3169 says:

    To mom of four:

    Just won­der­ing which it is. School is your favorite time of year because your chil­dren are no longer around as much and you don’t have to talk to them dur­ing the day any­more. How did you describe it? Oh yes, BLISS!
    Or is it the worst time of the year because you love to spend so much pre­cious time with your chil­dren and teach­ers get in your way with all their busy work.
    I am a par­ent and a teacher, so I really can see both points. There have been some assign­ments that I have not agreed with and told the teach­ers about it. But to con­sider all work as busy work just doesn’t sound right to me.
    I though the ques­tions you listed for thought after read­ing a book were inter­est­ing. Think­ing of a dif­fer­ent end­ing for a novel can be thought pro­vok­ing. You need a seri­ous under­stand­ing of the char­ac­ters to know how they would react to that new end­ing. Mom of four, you just seem so bit­ter over some­thing that you can’t see any­thing as worth­while. That seems sad to me. Yes engag­ing your child phys­i­cally is impor­tant, but isn’t engag­ing them men­tally impor­tant also? Just like you expect teach­ers to engage their stu­dents by mak­ing things inter­est­ing (right­fully so). Shouldn’t you at least attempt to do the same for YOUR child. If you present ever assign­ment as dull, bor­ing and mean­ing­less busy work then you can’t be sur­prised when your chil­dren feel that way about all work.
    My son recently had that same assign­ment about con­tem­plat­ing a dif­fer­ent end­ing to a book he was read­ing. He had a good time chang­ing the story around to what he thought should have hap­pened. He insisted that I also read the book so I could give my own alter­na­tive end­ing and to see how I felt about his. I really felt like it was a won­der­ful expe­ri­ence for both of us.
    Try to be pos­i­tive. I tell my son that in my job I don’t always agree with what my boss wants me to do. I can voice my opin­ion about it, and some­times that might change their opin­ion also. If not though I still need to do it, but try in some way to manip­u­late the assign­ment to bet­ter fit my own needs. School can be a learn­ing expe­ri­ence for chil­dren beyond academics.

    October 13th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
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  60. FedUpMom says:

    lbs31609 says:

    *************
    Try to be pos­i­tive. I tell my son that in my job I don’t always agree with what my boss wants me to do.
    **************

    I am so tired of this anal­ogy. The teacher is not the child’s boss, and the stu­dent is not an employee. Edu­ca­tion is sup­posed to ben­e­fit the child! If school­work doesn’t help the child learn, then what is the bloomin’ point?

    Of course kids need both phys­i­cal and men­tal activ­ity. But when they’ve just spent 7 hours sit­ting on a bus and then sit­ting in class­rooms doing school­work, it’s the phys­i­cal activ­ity they need most.

    If the schools were doing their job, our kids would have their men­tal stim­u­la­tion at school, and could come home and be active, or play a musi­cal instru­ment, or knit, or hang out with their friends, or what­ever they and their fam­i­lies feel is a good use of their time.

    October 14th, 2009 at 9:00 am
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  61. PsychMom says:

    You know, FedUp Mom..you are right. I guess I’ve got­ten so used to hear­ing it that I don’t think it sounds weird anymore…but you’re right. We have to stop equat­ing kid’s edu­ca­tion with adult work. Not until kids are in their final years of high school do we have any jus­ti­fi­ca­tion to be talk­ing about the world of work. I used to say that school was kid’s work, just like Montes­sori used to say that play was child’s work. But then I learned how today’s edu­ca­tion sys­tem was orig­i­nally devel­oped to the spec­i­fi­ca­tions and require­ments of cor­po­rate Amer­ica and now I don’t think the word “work” should be assigned to edu­ca­tion at all, except that it is the work of teachers.

    Kids don’t need a 40 hour work week…they need less struc­tured time.
    Kids don’t need punch cards (that is…reading logs) to mon­i­tor their work.
    Kids should not have to seek per­mis­sion to go to the bath­room only on their breaks.
    Kids should have ade­quate time to eat their lunch, play, dream, relax and do noth­ing every­day.
    Kids should be free from school oblig­a­tions when the school day is over.

    Kids should be allowed to be kids…free from adult responsibility.

    October 14th, 2009 at 9:44 am
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  62. Disillusioned says:

    Fed Up and Psy­ch­Mom– Like avid Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans, I some­times won­der if there is any point “debat­ing” the teach­ers who write in. I think our “life philoso­phies” are so dif­fer­ent it is dif­fi­cult to find com­mon ground.

    For me, it comes down to choice. I really think edu­ca­tion is to impor­tant to be in the hands of a gov­ern­ment monop­oly. More than no home­work, I really wish school vouch­ers were a reality.

    October 14th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
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  63. Disillusioned says:

    Whoops– too impor­tant (Right?)

    October 14th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
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  64. lbs3169 says:

    I guess we will just agree that we will never agree.

    I cer­tainly DO NOT think every moment of a stu­dents time out­side of school should be spent doing home­work. How­ever, I just can not under­stand (as a par­ent not a teacher) how a par­ent could object to any kind of thought pro­vok­ing activ­ity out­side of school? Is it just that some­one else assigned it that is the prob­lem, or is it doing any kind of aca­d­e­mic work at home is the prob­lem? I am hon­estly say­ing that most assign­ments my son gets are inter­est­ing and I believe will in some way enhance his knowledge.

    It seems like I am hear­ing, “Why can’t they get it all done in school.” There is ALWAYS more to learn. I do get all my basic lessons (the state’s cur­ricu­lum) com­pleted in class, but I want my stu­dents to be the best they can be. So I try to give home assign­ments that will help them achieve this and get them think­ing and com­mu­ni­cat­ing with their fam­ily in some way.

    Why not home­school your chil­dren if you have such strong dif­fer­ent opin­ions about how you would like them raised and edu­cated? There is no prob­lem in want­ing your chil­dren to have no oblig­a­tions, day­dream and be cre­ative all day, not have to ask per­mis­sion for things like the bath­room or eat and drink when­ever they want. Just give me a clear pic­ture of how I can keep some kind of order in my class (to make sure stu­dents are pro­gress­ing and safe) with­out hav­ing expec­ta­tions and rules to fol­low. Your descrip­tion does sound ideal if I had 1 – 5 stu­dents in my class, but just not achiev­able with 25 – 30.

    Just teach your child your­self at home…really it’s that sim­ple. I do my work as was stated but if your child refuses to do any work then it’s point­less. I am not say­ing that the work your child is doing needs to be mis­er­able, I hope it is enjoy­able just like I con­sider my work enjoy­able. But it does take work to actively engage in con­ver­sa­tions and process what your learn­ing. Psy­ch­Mom you think high school is the time to start teach­ing about adult work, I would agree with that. I guess what we dis­agree with is what adult work is. I just don’t see being taught respon­si­bil­ity and coop­er­a­tion as adult work but a grad­ual process that takes a life­time to learn. And, that wait­ing until high school to try and instill that seems too late.

    I don’t think I am my stu­dents boss and I don’t tell my stu­dents that. I said that to MY son as a way of show­ing him I under­stand dis­agree­ing with some­thing you need to do. That even though I am not in school that I can relate to his feel­ings. You’re your child’s par­ent and I’m mine. I feel it’s my job as his par­ents to help pre­pare him for life, and I think a huge life les­son is being able to work together with other and when needed how to com­pro­mise. Yes, if you extremely dis­agree with some­thing then you need to stand up for what you believe. How­ever not every­thing in life needs to be a fight. I know many on this board will dis­agree with that and think you should always fight about every­thing you think is unac­cept­able, but it just sounds like a dif­fi­cult and aggra­vat­ing life.

    This sure has been an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion. I wish all the par­ents that have dif­fer­ent P.O.V then mine good luck. Obvi­ously we are writ­ing on this board because we really hope what val­ues we teach our chil­dren (and stu­dents) are the best choices. I’m sure every­one has their child’s best inter­est at heart.… even if I dis­agree with it.

    October 14th, 2009 at 11:36 pm
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  65. FedUpMom says:

    lbs3169 says:

    ************************
    Yes, if you extremely dis­agree with some­thing then you need to stand up for what you believe. How­ever not every­thing in life needs to be a fight. I know many on this board will dis­agree with that and think you should always fight about every­thing you think is unac­cept­able, but it just sounds like a dif­fi­cult and aggra­vat­ing life.
    **************************

    I per­son­ally hate fight­ing. That’s why I took my daugh­ter out of the pub­lic schools and am now send­ing her to Quaker schools. We’ve had a few prob­lems, but they were resolved peace­fully and to my sat­is­fac­tion, and in gen­eral it’s been much smoother going. I agree that it is a dif­fi­cult and aggra­vat­ing life to have to fight all the time.

    *********************
    How­ever, I just can not under­stand (as a par­ent not a teacher) how a par­ent could object to any kind of thought pro­vok­ing activ­ity out­side of school? … I am hon­estly say­ing that most assign­ments my son gets are inter­est­ing and I believe will in some way enhance his knowl­edge.
    **********************

    All I can say is your expe­ri­ence of home­work has been the exact oppo­site of mine. I would esti­mate that at least 90% of the home­work my daugh­ter received at the pub­lic school was tedious, point­less, and not suited to her abil­i­ties. Home­work was not a “thought pro­vok­ing activ­ity” for my daugh­ter. It was an irri­tat­ing chore that she had to be nagged to do, until I trans­formed into FedUp­Mom (there was a phone booth involved.)

    I’m okay with teach­ing my child to com­pro­mise, but what I see in school is usu­ally not a com­pro­mise. It’s usu­ally forc­ing the child to do what­ever they were told to by the teacher, no mat­ter how inap­pro­pri­ate. Nobody really lis­tens to the child’s point of view. That’s not teach­ing com­pro­mise — it’s teach­ing passivity.

    October 15th, 2009 at 9:59 am
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  66. PsychMom says:

    lbs3169 said
    —-Is it just that some­one else assigned it that is the prob­lem, or is it doing any kind of aca­d­e­mic work at home is the problem? —  —  —  —  —  — -

    It’s the lat­ter. Why should a child who has been atten­tive and engaged for 6 hours have to do more work at home? Espe­cially the very young ones.…who are under 13. For the older chil­dren, why do they have to do two and three hours more? Why?

    — —  — -There is no prob­lem in want­ing your chil­dren to have no oblig­a­tions, day­dream and be cre­ative all day, not have to ask per­mis­sion for things like the bath­room or eat and drink when­ever they want. — — – I never said that they shouldn’t have oblig­a­tions, rules of con­duct and respon­si­bil­i­ties, but I claim the respon­si­bil­ity for teach­ing those things. I don’t know why you feel that it’s you and you alone who make the dif­fer­ence in these areas. As for ask­ing per­mis­sion to eat, drink and go to the bathroom..to me that’s a human dig­nity and respect issue. If we don’t treat chil­dren humanely, how can we expect them to behave as such? Do you like hav­ing to ask per­mis­sion to go to the bathroom?

    — — -I just don’t see being taught respon­si­bil­ity and coop­er­a­tion as adult work but a grad­ual process that takes a life­time to learn. And, that wait­ing until high school to try and instill that seems too late. —  — -

    Bio­log­i­cal mat­u­ra­tion doesn’t hap­pen because we teach chil­dren things. It hap­pens with time and the oppor­tu­ni­ties for good food, rest, fresh air and a stim­u­lat­ing envi­ron­ment. I have no data to back this up but I’m almost will­ing to bet that you CAN“T teach some­body a sense of respon­si­bil­ity. They have to expe­ri­ence the inner sense of want­ing to do the right thing..not just learn to avoid pun­ish­ment by doing the right (demanded) thing. If a child gets a rep­ri­mand because they for­got their home­work, what are they learn­ing? I think they are learn­ing: Please the teacher, do what she/he says so I don’t get in trou­ble. How is that respon­si­ble behaviour?

    My per­spec­tive is…when a child is old enough and has been involved in envi­ron­ments that model respon­si­ble behav­iour by adults, that show respect for all mem­bers of the group, the child will behave accord­ing to these prin­ci­ples as well.

    My child at age 8, can barely fig­ure out time and the days of the week. But she’s sup­posed to know that math home­work goes home on Thurs­day and is due on Tuesday…Reading log is due on Tues­day, spelling is Fri­day. Wednes­day is gym. ETC ETC.…and that’s only half of it. Maybe some kids can think that far ahead, but I’ll bet dol­lars to donuts that other kids are no dif­fer­ent from mine, but they have moth­ers and fathers who know the sched­ule and THEY make sure all the work gets done when it’s sup­posed to. It’s the par­ents’ orga­ni­za­tional skills at work.…this teaches noth­ing and dri­ves this mother nuts. Why not wait until enough brain cells are fir­ing together in my kid’s head that she has some con­cept of the school week hav­ing 5 days!!!!!

    And on the respon­si­bil­ity front: I’m teach­ing her how to be respon­si­ble in many ways.…that are just as rel­e­vant if not more rel­e­vant than a respon­si­bil­ity for home­work. Her suc­cess in life does not hinge on her pleas­ing her teachers…

    October 15th, 2009 at 11:44 am
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  67. Disillusioned says:

    Ibs3169– Again, Psy­ch­Mom and FedUp Mom echoed my thoughts very well. When you state ““There is ALWAYS more to learn”.… of course there is. I think that’s the point. Becom­ing a life long learner (or seeker) or vora­cious reader doesn’t have to hap­pen in grades 1 – 5. More­over, out­side of the school day, why do you feel the need to dic­tate “more learning.”

    I love to read but it wasn’t forced upon me in ele­men­tary school. My eight year old daugh­ter enjoys read­ing but I real­ize that her enjoy­ment can be incre­men­tal. If she enjoys read­ing now but doesn’t become a vora­cious reader until mid­dle school or high school; I“m okay with that.

    October 15th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
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  68. dena says:

    Have you ever tried talk­ing to the teach­ers to come up with a com­pro­mise? I am a fourth grade teacher who does give home­work, but not so much home­work it should leave the child and par­ent frus­trated. I do believe home­work teaches respon­si­bil­ity and is another way for a teacher to assess if the stu­dents are under­stand­ing what was taught in school. If a par­ent told me that the home­work I am giv­ing was too time con­sum­ing I would work with that par­ent.
    You may be sur­prised at how many par­ents say to teach­ers that they are not giv­ing enough home­work. Really you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t!

    November 1st, 2009 at 9:16 am
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  69. FedUpMom says:

    Dena says:

    ***************
    Have you ever tried talk­ing to the teach­ers to come up with a com­pro­mise?
    ***************

    Good heav­ens, of course we talk to the teach­ers. I talk to my daughter’s teach­ers all the time (and com­mu­ni­cate by email, too.)

    *************
    You may be sur­prised at how many par­ents say to teach­ers that they are not giv­ing enough home­work. Really you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t!
    *************

    Dena, if you have par­ents ask­ing for more home­work, give them more home­work. If you have par­ents say­ing they don’t want their kid doing the home­work, you should respect that too. Let the par­ents decide what they want to do in their own home with their own child.

    One of the great mys­ter­ies of home­work is why teach­ers seem to feel it’s vitally impor­tant for every child in the class to do the exact same work at home. Do you think every child in the class should do the exact same work at school? I hope not. If you’re teach­ing in a pub­lic school, your class prob­a­bly con­tains all kinds of kids, from learn­ing dis­abled to gifted. There’s no way they should all be doing the exact same task. This is how the above-average kids get cheated out of an education.

    ********************
    I do believe home­work teaches respon­si­bil­ity and is another way for a teacher to assess if the stu­dents are under­stand­ing what was taught in school.
    *******************

    Dena, please read The Case Against Home­work and The Home­work Myth. Home­work doesn’t teach respon­si­bil­ity, it teaches com­pli­ance and pas­siv­ity. In 4th grade, you’re not even teach­ing the kids how to be com­pli­ant and pas­sive — you’re teach­ing the mothers.

    And home­work is a ter­ri­ble way to assess what your stu­dents are under­stand­ing. You don’t know who did the home­work the child turns in. It might have been done by a par­ent or older sib­ling, or the child might have copied it from another child on the school bus.

    November 1st, 2009 at 10:50 am
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  70. College Kid says:

    I am 20, in col­lege and try­ing to be a nurse. I am a mil­i­tary child so I have been to mul­ti­ple schools, some­times in the mid­dle of the year. Sadly, because of these changes I have flat out flunked sev­eral classes in high school, not a pretty record for an aspir­ing col­le­giate. The dif­fer­ent styles of teach­ing as well as the shifts in the dif­fi­cultly and home­work load in the dif­fer­ent schools was astound­ing, some­times good and some­times to the point where I was relearn­ing a lot of the same things repeat­edly over again and try­ing not to rip my hair out by the roots in pure frustration.

    I was bored, and saw no point in doing the home­work for some­thing I already knew bet­ter than the other stu­dents. Fur­ther infu­ri­at­ing my teach­ers was the fact that while I did not do the assigned home­work I con­tin­ued to pass every sin­gle test thrown at me with fly­ing col­ors, both in class and state mandated.

    My nephew is now six, and in the first grade, but in kinder­garten he was get­ting assigned home­work everynight. On one dis­atrous evening the teacher sent home two word search puz­zles, he couldn’t remained focused enough, or know how to spell enough of the words to get very far. The poor boy ended up get­ting in trou­ble and sent to bed. His mom went to talk to the teacher about it the next day only to find out that while the work was placed in the home­work folder, it was only some­thing for the chil­dren to do for fun and was not required. Wouldn’t a note have been appro­pri­ate, and accord­ing to the “rule of thumb” was it even appro­pri­ate for kinder­garten­ers to get home­work in the first grade?

    I also am an avid book worm, but I do not under any cir­cum­stances, like being dic­tated to what I should read. I love Romeo and Juliet, and A Prayer for Owen Meany, but I can’t stant Ham­let or Mac­Beth, so how is it fair to me for the school bored or the teacher to force me to read some­thing I do not enjoy? Fur­ther more, why do I have to write a twenty page read­ing log, and an ana­lyt­i­cal paper when I was prac­ti­cally cry­ing in frus­tra­tion try­ing to drag myself through some­thing I found so excruciating?

    And when was the last time the actual stu­dent got to write a paper over a topic they them­selves picked? Yes, there are instances, but the top­ics are often monitered by the instruc­tor, for instance, my Eng­lish Com­po­si­tion class was given a chance to tell the teacher what we may be inter­ested in writ­ing about. We each had ideas, but we finally nar­rowed it down to the dif­fer­ences in the school sys­tems and should there be more of a nation-wide pol­icy, what the teacher gave us? “What is the ideal home­work pol­icy?” It is sim­i­lar in the fact that it deals with school, but was noth­ing close to what we had expressed want­ing to write about.

    And my last point is sim­ply the sheer num­ber of all-nighters I have pulled try­ing to com­plete assign­ments. When a math teacher assigns a sec­tion of prob­lems and says it should only take thirty min­utes, what are they bas­ing that time frame on? I don’t know how many of my friends go to school, then a sport or job, come home and stay up until two in the morn­ing doing all the home­work assigned for the night only to wake up at six the next morn­ing to be to school on time. How does sleep depri­va­tion equate to a more pro­duc­tive stu­dent? If we appear bored or tired in class it is prob­a­bly bea­cuse we were up till ungodly hours the night before doing some psy­chotic assign­ment that has mild rel­e­vance to what we learned in the first place!

    So if you ask me if I think home­work is doing any good I will say that at the rate it is given now it is sim­ply a form of mild tor­ture. How many adults have to bring their work home with them? What did I just spend a large chunck of my wak­ing day sit­ting in a class­room for if you are just going to make me have school at home to, and if that is the case, can I just skip and send you the assign­ments via fax or something?

    November 2nd, 2009 at 4:34 am
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  71. PsychMom says:

    My child is in grade 3… Every Mon­day, there are two Spe­cial Read­ers in class and they are to read a book to their class­mates, hav­ing rehearsed at home, and then take ques­tions (I think so any­way…, I haven’t read the hand­out from the teach­ers since mid Sept.…fuzzy mem­ory). The read­ing assignees are usu­ally listed on the monthly cal­en­dars but today is the first Mon­day in Novem­ber and the par­ents have not been given a new cal­en­dar yet. So it was a com­plete sur­prise to learn, last night at 8PM, that my dar­ling daugh­ter was to be a Spe­cial Reader today.

    My imme­di­ate reac­tion was…oh well, maybe you can be ready by Wednes­day. But intre­pid reader went to her room, found a book, read it out loud in her room. Once. Then she came out and announced her choice, told me I was going to be her audi­ence and then make 3 (positive)comments, ask 2 ques­tions and make one sug­ges­tion. She read her book…well below her read­ing capa­bil­ity level. It took about 5 minutes.…she told me nobody would ask the kind of ques­tions I asked (too hard). There. Done.

    Was that what the teacher intended? I don’t know.
    Did my daugh­ter do what she was sup­posed to do? Dunno.
    Did my daugh­ter learn any­thing from that? I don’t know.

    Did I learn any­thing from that? I learned that ran­dom thoughts pop into my daughter’s head as she “starts” to plan ahead in her life. I learned that she’ll be one of those kids fin­ish­ing assign­ments in the car in the morn­ing, because she’s already done that in Grade 3.

    I learned that it’s the right strat­egy to not fuss about home­work. It’s not my job.

    November 2nd, 2009 at 9:37 am
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  72. FedUpMom says:

    Psy­ch­Mom — hmm … you’ve got one of those kids I’m always hear­ing about from other peo­ple: orga­nized, wants to do what the teacher said (even at home!), will do the home­work on her own with no prompt­ing from Mom.

    I wasn’t that kid as a child and now I have two kids who aren’t that kid either. I hon­estly find it dif­fi­cult to under­stand this per­son­al­ity type.

    If you’ve worked out a strat­egy that you and your child are happy with, that’s great. I guess my ques­tion would be, how long will you be sat­is­fied with your daugh­ter doing work that’s below her actual abil­ity? I have the same ques­tion re: my own daugh­ter, by the way.

    The other prob­lem for those “good stu­dent” types is that they can be so invested in mak­ing the teacher happy that they fail to develop their own point of view. Also, they’re the ones who can really suf­fer from over­work. It sounds like so far your school isn’t over­load­ing the kids, which is fortunate.

    November 2nd, 2009 at 10:25 am
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  73. HomeworkBlues says:

    “What did I just spend a large chunck of my wak­ing day sit­ting in a class­room for if you are just going to make me have school at home to, and if that is the case, can I just skip and send you the assign­ments via fax or something?”

    Last year I joked wryly that my daugh­ter had so much home­work, she no longer had time to actu­ally attend school. Although as you all know, it was and still is no joke.

    There are Fri­days where my daugh­ter comes home with so much week­end home­work, I look at my hus­band and say, should we keep her home on Mon­day so she can get this done? Like the above 20 year old nurs­ing stu­dent, I too have won­dered whether we should just keep her at home and do the assign­ments in tan­dem. Because then she’d actu­ally have time to do them.

    Where on earth do these teach­ers think the home­work time comes from? I know length­en­ing the school day is not a pop­u­lar option here. And I agree. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. In fact, I ought to fish out that essay I wrote here on the subject.

    I’ll reprise it in a nut­shell. I want to see school sit down with us par­ents. I want school to tell us exactly what they feel they need to accom­plish in a given year. Then they ask our opin­ion and input. After all, it’s our chil­dren. Why are we silenced by their edu­ca­tion? Then we work together as a team because that is the only part­ner­ship tI will accept.

    I want schools to elim­i­nate all the fluff and time wasters. As a team, we sit down together. No mat­ter how hard you work chil­dren, it will never be pos­si­ble to learn every­thing. Iive prac­ti­cally next door to a large regional library. Read­ing is my pas­sion. If I pledged to give myself a year to read every sin­gle book in that library, as much as I love to read, it’s not pos­si­ble in the short time frame given? The anal­ogy can be applied to high school right now because our edu­ca­tion is a mile long and an inch deep.

    Right now we have high achiev­ing high school­ers get­ting on aver­age, five hour sleep. This CANNOT go on any longer, this does not work. It’s a no-brainer, right? Obvi­ously not to every­one, cer­tainly not to school offi­cials who cre­ate the unten­able envi­ron­ment in the first place.

    Deter­mine what you need to get done. And then if more time is needed, lengthen the school day and get it done AT SCHOOL. No home­work sent home. The only high school home­work that should ever be done at home is the occa­sional longer form in depth assign­ment and some group work that can’t be done at school. But what I see my daugh­ter mostly bring­ing home are sev­eral sets of math prob­lems, work sheets, essays, reports, papers. and tons of tex­tual and arti­cle read­ing. All this can be done at school.

    I know a longer day is not pop­u­lar here. Trust me, under cur­rent con­di­tions, I don’t advo­cate for it either because what guar­an­tee is there that if they’ve wasted seven and a half hours of my daughter’s day, that they wouldn’t waste two more? But let’s not fool our­selves. The day is already length­ened, with unpaid invol­un­tary labor. Ask my daugh­ter. She’s MUCH rather have a longer school day where it all gets done there so that she comes to a free evening.

    Yes, a longer school day is not the answer right now. The sys­tem is bro­ken and the longer day won’t fix it. But in my per­fect world, with fab­u­lous ded­i­cated teach­ers for whom the stu­dent is the first pri­or­ity, this could work. Right now I see mas­sive class­room time wasted and all the dif­fi­cult stuff sent home.

    To its credit, my daughter’s school does engage the kids in con­ver­sa­tion and dis­cus­sion. I love that. Reverse it. Use the day­time when the chil­dren are still alert, to do the essays and reports. Have the teacher walk around and help the kids. As said many times, my daugh­ter is in a gifted pro­gram. These kids are moti­vated and teach­ers have almost no class­room man­age­ment issues. Where these kids really need help is in sequenc­ing, plan­ning, map­ping, break­ing down assign­ments into man­age­able chunks and con­struct­ing a well crafted ele­gant essay.

    So do that. Walk around, help the kids, brain­storm ideas. It can be engross­ing, fun, cap­ti­vat­ing. You can weave in dis­cus­sions and team work. But do the hard stuff at school. And then at the end of the day, do what you usu­ally do at the begin­ning. The dis­cus­sion, group analy­sis. Do the less tax­ing stuff at the end of the day. And elim­i­nate what you don’t need. Every teacher should ask her­self every day, will this extra essay cause my stu­dent to lose much needed sleep? If the answer is yes, toss it. It’s not worth it. An essay begun at mid­night is not the student’s best work. It’s not worth the price. It’s not going to turn them into a bet­ter writer, only a worse one.

    I have a dream of start­ing a high school. I have a feel­ing it’s going to hap­pen. I do not want my stu­dents stag­ger­ing into school on five hours sleep. Detrac­tors will mock me, say it can’t be done. I don’t want my stu­dents tired and depressed. That they did all the work to please me and arrive exhausted and dis­en­gaged through the day is not good enough for me. I don’t want that.

    I want to tell my par­ents. I want your kids to get ALL the sleep their bod­ies need and I will help you to make that hap­pen. When they come to school, though, be pre­pared to work hard. Really hard. Not in a sweat­shop grind­ing grim resolve kind of way, but in an engross­ing, engag­ing mag­i­cal “flow” state.

    Think it can’t be done? My daugh­ter attends an aca­d­e­mic pro­gram every sum­mer (she’s “grad­u­ated” from it now) and this is how they run the day. The start with a group of highly moti­vated eager kids who want to be there. They do five hours of class­room, two hours of super­vised study hall and it gets done!

    I’m a real­ist. I know school is not a sum­mer pro­gram. But I can take many of these pre­cepts, these tenets, and apply to a daily pro­gram. We still need gifted pro­grams. But not like the ones we have now!

    November 2nd, 2009 at 10:38 am
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  74. PsychMom says:

    Hi FedUp Mom…
    Mmmmm.…I don’t know about the orga­nized part…but yes, she’ll do what­ever the teacher tells her to do, if she remem­bers. She has even come home and told me what the teacher told her I was “sup­posed” to do, which, you can imag­ine went over.….oh sooooo well.

    The teach­ers are expect­ing the par­ent prompts…and that’s where I’m not fig­ur­ing into the equa­tion quite as well as I should. :)
    I don’t read the web­site, I don’t orga­nize my kid’s home­work assign­ments and due dates.…but some­how it’s all get­ting done. I have asked her if she gets held in at recess…she says no, that only hap­pens under cer­tain cir­cum­stances which I can’t recall at the moment. And yes, it’s a rea­son­able school. But I would be hap­pi­est if they aban­doned all home­work for kids under Grade 7.

    I’m strug­gling with the obe­di­ence factor…it’ll be a topic of dis­cus­sion this week in parent-teacher con­fer­ence.
    I see obe­di­ence as spirit killing.…and it gets replaced with anx­i­ety and obses­sions. I know..it hap­pened to me. But get­ting those strokes and good girl labels are so rein­forc­ing when you are 8…and addictive.

    November 2nd, 2009 at 10:44 am
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  75. HomeworkBlues says:

    My above post con­tained some typos. Oh, boy, how am I going to run a school if I can’t write? :). I can actu­ally but my eyes are hurt­ing this morn­ing and when we type the mes­sage, the print is very light. I was in a rush and didn’t catch every­thing. I’m just going to resub­mit the entire thing, cor­rected ver­sion! Please read this and not the one above, but if you are read­ing lin­eally, then obvi­ously you’ve already read it. I’ve added here, this one’s bet­ter. Can’t guar­an­tee you won’t catch some more mistakes ;).

    — —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  —  — —
    “What did I just spend a large chunck of my wak­ing day sit­ting in a class­room for if you are just going to make me have school at home to, and if that is the case, can I just skip and send you the assign­ments via fax or something?”

    Last year I joked wryly that my daugh­ter had so much home­work, she no longer had time to actu­ally attend school. Although as you all know, it was and still is no joke.

    There are Fri­days where my daugh­ter comes home with so much week­end home­work, I look at my hus­band and ask, should we keep her home on Mon­day so she can get this done? Like the above 20 year old nurs­ing stu­dent, I too have won­dered whether we should just keep her at home and have her do the assign­ments in tan­dem. Because then she’d actu­ally have time to do them! Stay home, check Black­board for assign­ments, do them, and email them in or drop them off.

    Where on earth do these teach­ers think the home­work time comes from? I know length­en­ing the school day is not a pop­u­lar option here. And I agree. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. In fact, I ought to fish out that essay I wrote here on the subject.

    I’ll reprise it in a nut­shell. I want to see school sit down with us par­ents. I want school to tell us exactly what they feel they need to accom­plish in a given year. Then they ask our opin­ion and input. After all, it’s our chil­dren. Why are we silenced by their edu­ca­tion? Then we work together as a team because that is the only part­ner­ship I will accept.

    I want schools to elim­i­nate all the fluff and time wasters. As a team, we sit down together. No mat­ter how hard you work chil­dren, it will never be pos­si­ble to learn every­thing. I Iive prac­ti­cally next door to a large gor­geous regional library. Read­ing is my pas­sion and I could spend all day in that place, if I didn’t have a life with respon­si­bil­i­ties. If I pledged to give myself a year to read every sin­gle book in that library, as much as I love to read, it is sim­ply not pos­si­ble in the short time frame given. The anal­ogy can be applied to high schools right now because our edu­ca­tion is a mile long and an inch deep.

    Right now we have high achiev­ing high school­ers get­ting on aver­age, five hour sleep. This CANNOT go on any longer, this does not work. It’s a no-brainer, right? Obvi­ously not to every­one, cer­tainly not to school offi­cials and yes, teach­ers, who cre­ate the unten­able envi­ron­ment in the first place.

    Deter­mine what you need to get done. And then if more time is needed, lengthen the school day and get it done AT SCHOOL. No home­work sent home. The only high school home­work that should ever be done at home is the occa­sional longer form in depth assign­ment and some group work that can’t be done at school. But what I see my daugh­ter mostly bring­ing home are sev­eral sets of math prob­lems, work sheets, essays, reports, papers, the occa­sional poster,. and tons of tex­tual and arti­cle read­ing. All this can be done at school. I like the group work and when bright kids are work­ing together on some engag­ing prob­lem solv­ing assign­ment, I like that and under­stand why it would require time out­side of school. But daily slog? That can be done at school. And while we’re at it, can we elim­i­nate tedious slog as much as pos­si­ble? How on earth does this ben­e­fit students?

    I know a longer day is not pop­u­lar here. Trust me, under cur­rent con­di­tions, I don’t advo­cate for it either because what guar­an­tee is there that if they’ve wasted seven and a half hours of my daughter’s day, they wouldn’t waste two more? But let’s not fool our­selves. The day is already length­ened, with unpaid invol­un­tary labor. Ask my daugh­ter. She’d MUCH rather get a longer school day where it all gets done there so that she comes home to a free evening.

    Yes, a longer school day is not the answer right now. The sys­tem is bro­ken and the longer day won’t fix it. But in my per­fect world, with fab­u­lous ded­i­cated teach­ers for whom the stu­dent is the first pri­or­ity, this could work. Under­stand that this dream school is a pri­vate one where I don’ t have to answer to the gov­er­nor. Right now I see mas­sive class­room time wasted and all the dif­fi­cult stuff sent home.

    To its credit, my daughter’s school does engage the kids in con­ver­sa­tion and dis­cus­sion. I love that. Reverse it. Use the day­time when the chil­dren are still alert, to do the essays and reports. Have the teacher walk around and help the kids. As said many times, my daugh­ter is in a gifted pro­gram. These kids are moti­vated and teach­ers have almost no class­room man­age­ment issues. Where these kids really need help is in sequenc­ing, plan­ning, map­ping, break­ing down assign­ments into man­age­able chunks and con­struct­ing a well crafted ele­gant essay.

    And yes, they need an edu­ca­tion, not just more and more work. It should be about qual­ity, not merely quan­tity. A more rig­or­ous pro­gram does not have to mean more home­work. These kids need to con­nect with teach­ers. They need to be seen not merely by what they can pro­duce but as who they are. As peo­ple, as human beings. With all the wants, strengths and inse­cu­ri­ties that go along with it.

    So do that. Walk around, help the kids, brain­storm ideas. It can be engross­ing, fun, cap­ti­vat­ing. You can weave in dis­cus­sions and team work. But do the hard stuff at school. And then at the end of the day, do what you usu­ally do at the begin­ning. The dis­cus­sion, group analy­sis. Do the less tax­ing stuff at the end of the day.

    And elim­i­nate what you don’t need. I’m still won­der­ing why my daugh­ter takes so many tests and quizzes every week. Yea, yea, I know, it’s for the grade­book. But let’s ask our­selves, does it pro­mote learn­ing? Does it have high edu­ca­tional value? Is the time expended worth the gain? I have thought this through long and hard and I’m firmly con­vinced the answer is no. On every count.

    Every teacher should ask her­self every day, will this extra essay cause my stu­dent to lose much needed sleep? If the answer is yes, toss it. It’s not worth it. An essay begun at mid­night is not the student’s best work. It’s not worth the price. It’s not going to turn the stu­dent into a bet­ter writer, only a resent­ful one.

    I have a dream of start­ing a high school. I have a feel­ing it’s going to hap­pen. I do not want my stu­dents stag­ger­ing into school on five hours sleep. Detrac­tors will mock me, say it can’t be done. I don’t want my stu­dents tired and depressed. That they did all the work to please me and arrive exhausted and dis­en­gaged is not good enough for me. And it should not be good enough for any teacher or admin­is­tra­tor who deals with high school­ers. It should not be good enough. If your stu­dents are up half the night, you should be wor­ried. Not relieved.

    I want to tell my par­ents this. I want your chil­dren to get ALL the sleep their bod­ies need and I will help you to make that hap­pen. When they come to school, though, be pre­pared to work hard. Really hard. Not in a sweat­shop grind­ing grim resolve kind of way, but in an engross­ing, engag­ing mag­i­cal “flow” state.

    Think it can’t be done? My daugh­ter attends an aca­d­e­mic pro­gram every sum­mer (she’s “grad­u­ated” from it now) and this is how they run the day. They start with a group of highly moti­vated eager kids who want to be there. They do five hours of class­room, breaks in the mid­dle, din­ner, activ­i­ties, two hours of super­vised study hall, social time, and lights out at 10:30 with a 9am start time. It gets done!

    I’m a real­ist. I know school is not a sum­mer pro­gram. But I can take many of these pre­cepts, these tenets, and apply them to a daily pro­gram. We still need gifted pro­grams. But not like the ones we have now!

    For those par­ents who don’t want this, that’s what pub­lic school is for. I am look­ing for that rare stu­dent who loves to learn, inhales infor­ma­tion and mate­r­ial, does not work for a grade, thinks out­side the box, works bet­ter in depth than a lit­tle bit of a lot and works bet­ter in space than time. Chil­dren like this are really suf­fer­ing and out­side of home­school­ing, there is no place for them. I’d like to cre­ate that place.

    November 2nd, 2009 at 11:07 am
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  76. PsychMom says:

    I re-read FeUpMom’s com­ment and she asked.…
    “I guess my ques­tion would be, how long will you be sat­is­fied with your daugh­ter doing work that’s below her actual ability?”

    It’s dicey, because the school puts a big empha­sis on pub­lic speak­ing and pre­sen­ta­tions by the kids, and this requires a lot of self con­fi­dence. I think, even as an adult, you want to speak about some­thing you’re con­fort­able with if you have to present to an audi­ence, so I want her to choose for her com­fort level. If I was going to read in pub­lic I wouldn’t want to be stum­bling over words either.

    For the most part I rely on mat­u­ra­tion to do its work. I really believe she will chal­lenge her­self nat­u­rally rather than have to be forced to do more chal­leng­ing work. Bore­dom is a big fac­tor in learning.….it dri­ves us for­ward as long as the more chal­leng­ing stuff is avail­able, and cer­tainly at our school, chal­lenge is avail­able if you seek it. I think back to mile­stones she’s mas­tered and passed…at every step she was ready to make the next leap. If I just wait…it’ll hap­pen. If I blink, I’ll miss it sometimes.

    November 2nd, 2009 at 11:32 am
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  77. PsychMom says:

    To Home­work­Blues

    My child will need high school in about 6 or 7 years. depend­ing on what you define high­school as. We will need to enrol in your school…I’ll get started on the immi­gra­tion paper­work now.

    Seri­ously though, that’s the kind of high school­ing that would nuture a life-long learner. It would demand pres­ence by the chil­dren attend­ing, full presence…not blearly eyed, mal­nour­ished pre­sense. And it would be worth every cent invested by parents.

    Where do I sign up?

    November 2nd, 2009 at 12:37 pm
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  78. HomeworkBlues says:

    Psy­ch­Mom, THANKS for the endorse­ment. So Sara Ben­nett, what do you think of my school? I have been dream­ing about this for years. You know, there are some amaz­ing inno­v­a­tive pri­vate schools out there that exist because some­one had a vision. And it took a hor­ri­ble expe­ri­ence to lead them down that epiphanous path..

    November 2nd, 2009 at 3:37 pm
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  79. Liz says:

    Read­ing this kind of stuff dri­ves me crazy! To the per­son up at 3:17 am., with the daugh­ter with the research paper, I hope that’s not me Fri­day morn­ing, when my own daughter’s research paper is due. She’s already frus­trated, because she’s got­ten points marked off because her name was on the wrong line on her bib­li­og­ra­phy. I know another girl (dif­fer­ent school) who got an F on her Eng­lish paper and the major­ity of the points off were not on con­tent, but on how the com­puter didn’t put the page num­bers in the right spot and her name and class period were reversed. Now, I’m a for­mer copy edi­tor, so details DO mat­ter to me. But mostly what these expe­ri­ences serve to do is suck all the joy out of learn­ing out of these kids. Then you take a look at a pro­gres­sive pub­lic school, such as the one out­lined in a great book called “Lives of Pas­sion, School of Hope,” (by Rick Pos­ner) and you see how a school can trans­form lives and not deaden them. If noth­ing else, the book shows par­ents what we should demand of our schools, and can show young edu­ca­tors what they can do, and how to dis­cover (or redis­cover) the joy of teach­ing. It angers me that these kids have so much, and my kids have got­ten so lit­tle, in terms of pas­sion and joy of learning.

    November 18th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
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  80. HomeworkBlues says:

    Liz, I read your insight­ful com­ments on free range kids. Thank you.

    I have to stop. I can­not argue with dar any­more. I’m drained. It’s scary because dar could be your child’s teacher.

    Thanks for your validation.

    November 18th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
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  81. Steven Y. says:

    After read­ing many com­ments I can not restrain myself any more I have to tell MY story. I am thir­teen, I live in Canada, i’m gifted, I have two learn­ing dis­or­ders (one social, one con­cen­tra­tion,) I found this blog after search­ing on Google for “read­ing log help”, my teacher has assigned read­ing for 3 hours a week (easy for me, I love to read,) but has also assigned read­ing logs, which we have to write about the book and how we can con­nect with it. This is where it is dif­fi­cult for me, my mind doesn’t work in words (I can’t for­mat, I strug­gle to put my ideas on paper) my mind works in metaphors and sym­bols, when I first started the read­ing log I did great, It was like a spark went off in my head and I could write, but now the spark isn’t there and its like i’m a train thats been de-railed and can’t get back on track, The spark is going of right now in my head I know what i’m writ­ing and i’m focus­esed on it, but I can’t do it for the read­ing log. When I go to school tom­morow I will ask my teacher if instead of writ­ing about my book I could dis­cuss my book with her (like what lots of the com­ments on this blog say with the read­ing con­frences) I also have math home­work, I am gifted, when I learn some­thing I mas­ter it and if I don’t know enough about it I do inde­pen­dant learn­ing (I learn some­thing new off of Wikipedia each day, I have a need to inde­pen­dently learn) but with math we get tons of home­work about stuff I already have mas­tered and I would work on it but the ques­tions are tedious and repet­i­tive some­thing are just not appro­pri­ate (why would I care is Stacy lost sev­en­teen mar­bles) and to bet­ter explain the inap­pro­pri­ate­ness of the ques­tions, I had a prob­lem solver that wanted me to put a num­ber in a cal­cu­la­tor and find out how the num­ber was related to the beach, I turned the cal­cu­la­tor upside down and it said SHELLS! SHELLS! i’m thir­teen, i’m gifted, why am I wast­ing my time on this stu­pid ques­tion. The school and the gov­ern­ment treat me like i’m some­thing less of a per­son, they think there “help­ing” me with my social dis­or­der, but I don’t need help with that, only recently has it been that the school rec­og­nized me as need­ing help but its to late I am teach­ing myself the appro­pri­ate­ness of what to say and what cer­tain emo­tions mean. I really think home­work is use­less I get good grades and I never study for a test, and most of the time home­work is stuff that we did not fin­ish in class, I spend seven hours a day 5 days a week at school and they have work that they couldn’t get to, if it’s a prob­lem cut art class out do I really need to learn how to fin­ger paint, I know many kids like art and thats could but it doesn’t have to be a sub­ject, if the kids like it they will want to learn more and now that infor­ma­tion is at our fin­ger­tips (thank god for com­put­ers) we can learn more. Thank you for read­ing! Sorry about the for­mat­ting and confusion.

    November 22nd, 2009 at 1:02 pm
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  82. Steven Y. says:

    I have just read Liz’s com­ment and I wish schools were like that but my mom has fought for 17 years to get the schools to do the sim­plest of tasks and she can’t do it any more, she has a busi­ness, two kids with dis­abil­i­ties, sched­ules to orga­nize, and a house­hold to run. Being a par­ent must be very hard but why is it that sim­ple tasks are so hard for schools to do, for gov­ern­ments to realize.

    November 22nd, 2009 at 1:07 pm
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  83. Steven Y. says:

    ‘We do not choose who we will become, are envi­ron­ment does, but we can choose are envi­ron­ment.“
     – Steven Y.

    November 22nd, 2009 at 1:13 pm
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  84. Fed Up Dad and Teacher says:

    Steve, read some of this guy’s stuff about home­work Alfiekohn​.com

    Keep edu­cat­ing your­self and take a stand.

    November 22nd, 2009 at 1:14 pm
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  85. Fed Up Dad and Teacher says:

    Alfiekohn​.org

    Arti­cles

    November 22nd, 2009 at 1:17 pm
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  86. Steven Y. says:

    Home­work­Blues if that school becomes real I want to go to it, hope it becomes real fast because I start high school in 2010. You seem to know exactly what I want from a school, A place where your encour­aged to do what inter­ests you, a place where you can actu­ally learn some­thing new, a place where you have as fun work­ing with a stu­dent that is the same intel­lec­tual level as you. Please make this school real it could ben­e­fit all who wish to enjoy there child­hood because you only get it once and it should be a pro­duc­tive but happy time!

    November 22nd, 2009 at 1:23 pm
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  87. Steven Y. says:

    Thank you Fed Up Dad And Teacher this Alfie Kohn guy seems very inter­est­ing, and I will take a stand. Edu­ca­tion is key to a suc­cess­ful life.

    November 22nd, 2009 at 1:27 pm
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  88. Steven Y. says:

    If gov­ern­ments and schools want to turn out suc­cess­ful stu­dents that can make advance­ments in soci­ety then they need to change schools so that stu­dents are treated indi­vid­u­ally, if every­body is unique and indi­vid­ual then every­body needs a cus­tom learn­ing plan. It may cost lots of money to get every child a cus­tom learn­ing plan that evolves as the child grows but it will pay off there will be suc­cess­ful stu­dents that will change the world but for that to hap­pen the schools have to change.

    November 22nd, 2009 at 1:37 pm
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  89. Steven Y. says:

    I asked my teacher if I could dis­cuss my con­nec­tions rather then write them and she said that it was a good idea and that she was going to start putting us in groups to dis­cuss our books, she also told me that instead of writ­ing the log I could just use a micro­phone and record my log on Audac­ity (if you haven’t read my other posts, I have trou­ble putting my thoughts on paper and that its eas­ier for me to just speak my thoughts and ideas.) Thank you! to the cre­ators of this web­site and all the peo­ple com­ment­ing I would be strug­gling to write my log if it wasn’t for you!

    November 23rd, 2009 at 5:07 pm
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  90. Mrs. M says:

    Hello all.
    I’ve been read­ing everyone’s com­ments for the last 45 min­utes now and I am amazed at how this home­work topic has some peo­ple so fired up. Mind you, I’ve lis­tened to argu­ments on both sides, but I, per­son­ally, am torn. Here’s why…
    I am a 2nd grade teacher in an urban city where I have many below-level chil­dren in my class­room. This is my 2nd year teach­ing.
    I strug­gle with the notion of not giv­ing ever giv­ing home­work. Sure, it would prob­a­bly ben­e­fit me and free up some time in my own life so I don’t have to check it, but I don’t know.
    Here’s the deal…There are so many chil­dren in my class­room that are 2 years below read­ing level and I have been told by my admin­is­tra­tors that home­work, specif­i­cally READING, must be assigned every night. Whether its being read to them or if they are read­ing them­selves I am sup­posed to send home a read­ing log for the week. Now there is some­thing to be said about how much chil­dren need to prac­tice read­ing to become flu­ent read­ers. I mean if my 2nd graders can­not read and write at a 3rd grade level by next year they will not even be able to read the direc­tions on the state tests. With that said, how can I not push them to read at home. Many of my stu­dents do not even have books at home, so I pro­vide the books for them. I am really the only vehi­cle that dri­ves them to become edu­cated many par­ents in our areas do not pick up their chil­dren until 7pm and so the work gets done in an after­school pro­gram of sorts. I, per­son­ally as a teacher, do not give home­work that should take any more than 30 min­utes. I mean my stu­dents are only 7 or 8.

    November 24th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
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  91. Mrs. M says:

    Oh to make my pre­vi­ous entry a lit­tle clearer. I have yet to imple­ment the “Read­ing Log.” I have not done it yet. My stu­dents will pick out a book of their choos­ing to do this for the first few weeks. Your thoughts please…

    November 24th, 2009 at 10:13 pm
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  92. Sara Bennett says:

    Dear Mrs. M,

    I am thrilled to see you are grap­pling with these issues and really try­ing to fig­ure out what will help your stu­dents learn how to read bet­ter. While I don’t think assign­ing a read­ing log will help, I do believe that cre­at­ing a cul­ture of read­ing in your class­room will go a long way towards get­ting your stu­dents excited about read­ing. And let­ting them take home books of their choos­ing to read in the evening or over the week­end is crit­i­cal, espe­cially if your stu­dents don’t have books in their homes. Are you famil­iar with Nan­cie Atwell’s, Read­ing in the Mid­dle, or Don­a­lyn Miller, who has a blog and a book of the same name, The Book Whis­perer? While both those authors/teachers work with mid­dle school stu­dents, their approaches can work just as well with early or non-readers.

    I am not a teacher by train­ing, but I have taught in a vari­ety of set­tings, most recently in an alter­na­tive school with plenty of non-readers. Slowly, over the course of the year (I was in the school for 3 hours a week), I was able to encour­age the stu­dents to read, just by set­ting aside a time and place for them to read in school, sug­gest­ing books, read­ing aloud to them (some­times one on one), and hav­ing them read to or with me as well. I would always start off our ses­sions by hav­ing one or two stu­dents talk about the books they were read­ing (it was always vol­un­tary). As the stu­dents talked about “their” books, other kids would then want to read them as well. And, even though I set aside some of my class time for writ­ing, I often couldn’t get the stu­dents to write any­thing. So I started a newslet­ter and after the first issue came out, the stu­dents who hadn’t writ­ten any­thing were sorry not to have par­tic­i­pated and con­tributed from then on. Those who couldn’t write would draw or write a few words or dic­tate to me and, with each issue, there was more and more writing.

    But best of all, as the year pro­gressed, I could see the stu­dents becom­ing read­ers. They were eager to share what they were read­ing and wanted to tell me all the books they had read dur­ing the pre­vi­ous week.

    The stu­dents at this school were incred­i­bly diverse and came from a mix of socio-economic back­grounds. My stu­dents were ages 5 – 13; some were strong read­ers, some couldn’t read at all. At the end of the year, all of the stu­dents had made incred­i­ble progress but, most impor­tant, all were read­ers in the best sense of the word.

    November 25th, 2009 at 10:22 am
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  93. Anonymous says:

    this is so stupied

    November 30th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
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  94. teachermom says:

    Such ani­mos­ity. Boys and girls, it’s quite sim­ple. If your child’s teacher assigns things you dis­agree with, than use it as a chance to dis­cuss the issue with your child. Come to a deci­sion and fol­low through. Do this for every­thing in life. Help your child make choices that fit your val­ues and aspi­ra­tions in life. And yes, you can explain this even to a kinder­garten. You could say, well honey, this work isn’t some­thing you and I are going to spend time on this evening. Your teacher assigned this work to her stu­dents because he/she believes it will help your learn­ing. Your learn­ing is so impor­tant and your teacher is doing what he/she thinks is best for all her stu­dents. In our fam­ily, we do what’s best for us and right now what is best is to spend time doing —-, not this home­work. I will make sure your teacher under­stands. You do not need to worry about it.” If your child’s teacher does any­thing other adjust the grade, you have the right to com­plain to his or her boss and make sure it never hap­pens again. Take advan­tage of this freedom.

    If how­ever you are bemoan­ing the fact that the grade adjust­ment isn’t fair either, than you need to think about whether you really care about your child’s LEARNING or about your child’s GRADES. Because, as so many have pointed out, they are dif­fer­ent entities.

    Con­sider this example:

    Home­work A is assigned: par­ent and child frustrated/don’t agree with busy work/practice/whatever.
    Dicus­sion ensues.
    Par­ent and child choose not to do it.

    Result: grade is affected (because soci­ety has cho­sen for schools to eval­u­ate both learn­ing and work ethic and assign a let­ter to rep­re­sent it. If you dis­agree with it, fight to change it, accept it and assign your own per­sonal value to it, or cry and bemoan your hor­rid cir­cum­stances for liv­ing in a soci­ety with both great and poor rules and regulations.)

    Grade card comes home: par­ent and child frus­trated assign blame to oth­ers OR par­ent and child real­ize why grades are what they are (because of choices made together), they dis­cuss if these let­ters truly rep­re­sent child’s REAL learn­ing and whether or not they care enough about these let­ters to:
    A: com­plete future home­work assign­ments or
    B: con­tinue choos­ing which assign­ments mat­ter to their fam­ily val­ues and life style and life aspi­ra­tions and con­tinue to self-evaluate if true learn­ing is still occur­ring despite let­ters on grade card.

    Con­tinue above through­out edu­ca­tion:
    If par­ent and child are frus­trated about the lim­i­ta­tions soci­ety (col­leges and/or employ­ers) have set for stu­dents with poor grade cards than do some­thing about it, accept it, or choose a dif­fer­ent route in life. Par­ent and child will ben­e­fit from their deci­sions (improved fam­ily life, spir­i­tual life, leisure time, etc.) and suf­fer the other (per­haps not as many options for careers, soci­etal views/scrutiny, keep­ing up with the Jones’, etc.) How­ever, this should bal­ance out accord­ing to what is impor­tant to you anyway.

    If par­ent and child ulti­mately decide that work­ing on things they believe are not really impor­tant to them, but the advan­tages given by soci­ety are worth the incon­ve­nience, they will ben­e­fit as such.See above in reverse!

    Really, in a nut­shell, your child’s edu­ca­tion is up to you as a par­ent. The Amer­i­can edu­ca­tion sys­tem is set up to present con­tent and processes to stu­dents. For the most part, teach­ers do their best to present the mate­r­ial in an appeal­ing way to stu­dents that is the most effec­tive while still deal­ing with the con­straints set upon them by the soci­ety (work force) in which they choose to work.

    For the most part, par­ents are doing their best to raise chil­dren in the most appeal­ing and effec­tive way while still meet­ing with the con­straints set upon them by the soci­ety where they choose to live.

    We must remem­ber we have choices. We are not liv­ing in an ideal soci­ety and the hard­ships we and our children/students face may or may not be our faults or any ONE per­son, par­ent or teacher’s fault. It is what it is and you must choose how to deal with it and how to help your child deal. So you may choose to accept it in a way that best suits you and your family’s value sys­tem or you may choose to fight and change the sys­tem. But let’s all stop the name call­ing and blam­ing. There are so many won­der­ful, ded­i­cated teach­ers out there who just want what is best for chil­dren and many who are turds who need to step down from teach­ing. There are also many par­ents who for­get that their child is ulti­mately their respon­si­bil­ity to edu­cate and choos­ing the Amer­i­can pub­lic edu­ca­tion sys­tem is just one way par­ents choose to do so. Home­school­ing, pri­vate schools, mov­ing to other coun­tries, expand­ing at home on pub­lic school cur­ricu­lums are other choices often made by par­ents. You choose your child’s doc­tor, you choose your auto mechanic, you choose your spouse, YOU CHOOSE the way to edu­cate your child.

    So make your choice and accept the consequences.

    I assign home­work and read­ing logs. It moti­vates SOME to get extra prac­tice either for learning’s sake, the sake of their grades, out­side pres­sures, or for fun. Some parents/students choose not to do it. Some­times the choice affects their grades, some­times not.

    Some parents/students cry about their grades and raise holy —- because they don’t like the grades. Silli­ness.
    If they care about their child’s GRADES, then they will adjust their value sys­tem to include all of the hard work, time, effort, and occas­sional frus­tra­tions and baloney that goes along with earn­ing them. If they care about their child’s LEARNING, then they will take and leave home­work, school work, assign­ments, etc. and use just what suits their family’s value sys­tem and ideas of valu­able learn­ing. Par­ents will have to accept the out­come if this is their choice. I have met par­ents that choose this route and there are mixed results. So be it. No one is forc­ing you or chil­dren to do home­work or school work for that mat­ter. Never the less we live in a soci­ety with rules and you may move away from this soci­ety, accept and deal, or fight to change our edu­ca­tion sys­tem. Mean­while, every­one, teach­ers and par­ents, quit ur belly­ach­ing. Edu­ca­tion in this nation is still a choice, just as par­ent­ing and choos­ing your career is still a choice. If you don’t like it, home­school, change it, or deal with it.

    December 9th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
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  95. Sara Bennett says:

    Dear Teacher Mom,

    Hear, hear!

    –Sara

    December 9th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
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  96. Matthew says:

    @teachermom and Sara, I don’t really agree here because this is a Hobson’s choice. Sure, we have the free­dom to not do home­work, but if the cost of choos­ing that is always a 0 then we don’t really have a choice, do we?

    A bet­ter solu­tion (and one that I have seen teach­ers imple­ment) is to sim­ply not count the assign­ment if we chose not to do it and can pro­vide suf­fi­cient jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. What that means is that when the grades are tal­lied up at the end of the quar­ter, each of the other assign­ments counts pro­por­tion­ately more and a bad grade in some­thing else will weigh down the aver­age more heav­ily. This seems fair.

    And none of this means that I, as a par­ent, am obsessed with grades just for the sake of hav­ing high grades. If a bril­liant stu­dent could pass all his tests and other assess­ments in a G/T level class with­out doing home­work, but got zeros for those assign­ments because he chose not to do them, do you think he’d be allowed to stay in the G/T pro­gram very long? No. The grades have a rel­e­vance within the system.

    December 9th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
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  97. Sara Bennett says:

    Matthew–

    Very true. But if you can’t per­suade the teacher to do what you sug­gest and if you can’t get your school to allow your child to opt out of home­work, then teachermom’s ideas make sense. And I hate to say this, but many of those G/T classes aren’t nec­es­sar­ily more inter­est­ing or thought-provoking; they just move at a faster rate so a stu­dent can cram in more mate­r­ial to forget.

    –Sara

    December 9th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
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  98. FedUpMom says:

    Good heav­ens, I don’t say “Hear, hear” to teacher­mom at all. Her mes­sage is basi­cally, “yeah, the home­work may be point­less and totally unre­lated to learn­ing, but that’s life, suck it up.” This seems like the road to nowhere to me.

    There’s a basic con­tra­dic­tion here:

    *************
    Never the less we live in a soci­ety with rules and you may move away from this soci­ety, accept and deal, or fight to change our edu­ca­tion sys­tem. Mean­while, every­one, teach­ers and par­ents, quit ur belly­ach­ing.
    *************

    And how exactly can we fight to change the sys­tem with­out “belly­ach­ing”? Belly­ach­ing is the first step. It shouldn’t be the last step, but it’s the obvi­ous place to start. My only warn­ing is that it’s impor­tant to com­plain to the right peo­ple, that is, teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors. It’s not enough to com­plain to the other moth­ers at the bus stop.

    If we all took teachermom’s advice, we’d be guar­an­teed to get no change and we would just have to put up with the sta­tus quo. That cer­tainly isn’t my plan.

    teacher­mom says:
    ******************
    If they care about their child’s GRADES, then they will adjust their value sys­tem to include all of the hard work, time, effort, and occas­sional frus­tra­tions and baloney that goes along with earn­ing them.
    ******************

    In other words, if we care about our child’s grades, we’re not allowed to chal­lenge the school, we just have to make our child do what­ever the school requires, even if it’s baloney, even if it’s eat­ing our child’s free time and caus­ing the child to lose sleep. How is this a good idea?

    Speak­ing of con­tra­dic­tions, what about this?

    *****************
    But let’s all stop the name call­ing and blam­ing. There are so many won­der­ful, ded­i­cated teach­ers out there who just want what is best for chil­dren and many who are turds who need to step down from teach­ing.
    ****************

    OK, let’s stop the name call­ing. I, for one, have never called a teacher a “turd”.

    December 9th, 2009 at 11:11 pm
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  99. teachermom says:

    Fed Up needs to reread. If every­one took my advice, you would have peace. Peace with your deci­sion to deal with home­work as is, peace with your deci­sion to go forth and work for changes, peace with your deci­sion put your emotional/time invest­ment into other mat­ters. Belly­ach­ing is not the first step to change, it is the first step towards get­ting oth­ers riled up while every­one says, “They should do some­thing” and leak­ing poi­son amongst other par­ents. Tak­ing action is the first step towards change. I did not call any­one a turd, I merely stated that some are turds. Because there are. Reach­ing a bit aren’t we?

    Seri­ously, folks, I was a mom before I was a teacher, so I truly under­stand the non-teacher per­spec­tive about the pres­sures put on stu­dents. My child was assigned a project to build a his­tor­i­cal vic­to­rian man­sion out of a card­board box. The chil­dren were taken on tour of the his­toric neigh­bor­hood, learned archi­tec­tural ele­ments, learned some town his­tory, etc. Great lesson/silly project to US!! Wel laughed as we assem­bled and painted a card­board box with win­dows and fash­ioned a front porch from a shoe­box lid. Tedious and not beau­ti­ful. Not a ton learned on that project, although the build up to the project was def­i­nitely ben­e­fi­cial . I griped and groaned to any­one and every­one about how point­less this project was and how it was a “mom” project, because the kids could not pos­si­ble do this on their own. How­ever, when brought to school, our project sat next to a really nice card­board man­sion. Ha, obvi­ously that mom had a lot of time on her hands I mut­tered to myself. Yet, in this case, the child did the major­ity of the work him­self, bar­ring the cut­ting of the card­board. The mom glowed about his project and told any­one who would lis­ten how he had come up with adding the “gin­ger­bread” trim and win­dow shut­ters out of pop­sci­cle sticks. “He wants to be an archi­tect now!” she beamed. Obvi­ously, the stu­pid, point­less, tedious project to us really caught inter­est to this lit­tle guy. True story boys and girls. Hum­ble pie.

    One time I had a stu­dent bust into tears as I began to explain the home­work for the evening. I pulled her aside to see what was wrong and through sobs she began to explain that she had a lot of home­work tonight and it was her sister’s birth­day and her fam­ily was going out to din­ner, party, etc. She was afraid she would have to miss her sister’s birth­day. I calmly explained to her that, no, she would not have to miss her sister’s birth­day, because sis­ters and fam­ily come first. Los­ing a few points on her home­work was no big deal com­pared with miss­ing a very spe­cial evening with her fam­ily. I explained to her that she was a very hard worker who took her learn­ing seri­ously and her respon­si­bil­i­ties very seri­ously and she should be very proud of her­self, but that tonight she would be a sis­ter and not a student.

    Folks, this pres­sure did not come from school. No way. It came from her inter­nally or from fam­ily or society.

    Par­ents, re-evaluate where the expec­ta­tions are truly com­ing from. Say lights out to the child up at 3am doing a paper. Hind the books from your over­achiever if they don’t know bal­ance of learn­ing, suc­cess, fam­ily, love, nature, spir­i­tu­al­ity, etc. Let them know that there is no doom and gloom at the end of C, D, or F. Only a desire to accept or change, or accept a lit­tle and change a lit­tle. If that’s not accept­able to your fam­ily, than set your child’s learn­ing pri­or­i­ties and make room for the work. If not, than don’t. Quit blam­ing teach­ers for the home­work, and start look­ing at who is putting the pres­sure on the kids.
    I could say with con­fi­dence that fewer than 1% of the teach­ers in this nation would admon­ish a stu­dent if the par­ent were to come in early in the year and say, “Our fam­ily may oper­ate a lit­tle dif­fer­ently than most. We encour­age our chil­dren to be able to pass every test you give. In fact, we encour­age and work towards A’s and B’s on the tests and projects that demon­strate his abil­ity to apply his learn­ing. We also encour­age our child to par­tic­i­pate in —-(activ­i­ties, church, fam­ily time, what­ever) and so there will be times when we excuse him from home­work. We are pre­pared for the grades that will result. Please let us know if at time you are con­cerned about his learn­ing being below aver­age as at that time we will re-evaluate our approach. Mean­while, we don’t expect him to endure any con­se­quences except for those con­nected with his grades and we are aware of some of the neg­a­tive affects this approach may have on col­lege appli­ca­tions, etc. Please direct all your con­cerns to us. Mean­while, we want you to know that we expect our child to be respect­ful and to put in his best effort every­day in your class­room. We appre­ci­ate all your hard work and want you to know that we value your time and exper­tise, but we also appre­ci­ate you sup­port­ing us rais­ing our child in a way that we believe suits our family’s needs.”

    And yes FedUp­Mom, if you care about your child’s GRADES you must put up with the baloney, because that “baloney” may not be baloney to the other stu­dents in that class. In fact, that baloney, may be just the ticket towards under­stand­ing or achiev­ing a goal for sev­eral of those stu­dents. Dif­fer­en­ti­ated learn­ing is a prac­tice that is won­der­ful and every­one hopes that it will become eas­ier to imple­ment even as class sizes increase…but, until then, there will not be per­fec­tion. The great news is, you still have a choice. There are many oppor­tu­ni­ties to choose pri­vate schools who have dif­fer­ent poli­cies, or you can home­school, or you can advo­cate and begin pol­icy changes within your own schools.

    How­ever, schools will never be the per­fect haven that adapts an entire cur­ricu­lum towards your child’s per­sonal needs, nor would teach­ers with cur­rent cir­cum­stances be able to imple­ment such a cur­ricu­lum. (That would be why I said that, ulti­mately, PARENTS are respon­si­ble for your child’s edu­ca­tion. Teach­ers are still striv­ing to help indi­vid­ual stu­dents while still work­ing for all their stu­dents, just as par­ents would not want their child to gain if meant the other chil­dren may suf­fer. We all want the same thing. Don’t we?

    December 10th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
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  100. PsychMom says:

    Sorry teacher­mom, I repect­fully disagree.

    And I dis­agree so much that I don’t know where to begin.
    I’m going to sleep on it.

    December 10th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
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  101. FedUpMom says:

    teacher­mom writes:

    **************
    I did not call any­one a turd, I merely stated that some [teach­ers] are turds.
    *************

    If I had writ­ten this, there would be cries of “teacher-bashing!” echo­ing all around the inter­net. I guess you can write things like this with impunity because you iden­tify your­self as a teacher. It sure sounds like name-calling to me.

    *************
    Obvi­ously, the stu­pid, point­less, tedious project to us really caught inter­est to this lit­tle guy. True story boys and girls. Hum­ble pie.
    ************

    So appar­ently one kid in the class got some­thing out of this assign­ment while numer­ous oth­ers wasted their evening on some­thing with no mean­ing for them. Why is this OK? Let the kid who gains some­thing from the project go ahead and do it, and let the oth­ers opt out.

    *************
    One time I had a stu­dent bust into tears as I began to explain the home­work for the evening. I pulled her aside to see what was wrong and through sobs she began to explain that she had a lot of home­work tonight and it was her sister’s birth­day and her fam­ily was going out to din­ner, party, etc. She was afraid she would have to miss her sister’s birth­day. I calmly explained to her that, no, she would not have to miss her sister’s birth­day, because sis­ters and fam­ily come first. Los­ing a few points on her home­work was no big deal com­pared with miss­ing a very spe­cial evening with her fam­ily.
    ****************

    You’re putting this child in a com­pletely impos­si­ble posi­tion. (How old was she, by the way?) Chil­dren want to trust the adults in their lives. When they get grades and points, they take it very seri­ously, and they con­stantly get the mes­sage from school that they should take it seri­ously. You are not help­ing her when you pull her aside and say, “it’s no big deal to lose a few points on your home­work”, when the whole sys­tem is telling her that her value as a stu­dent depends on her points.

    The child burst into tears because she already had home­work from other teach­ers, right? Will those other teach­ers tell her it’s OK to not do the home­work because her sis­ter is more impor­tant? I doubt it. Will her par­ents think it’s OK, or will they keep her home to get the home­work done? The child doesn’t have con­trol over this situation.

    If you think fam­ily is so impor­tant, why didn’t you give the child an exten­sion on the home­work? Con­versely, if you know that skip­ping the home­work will make no dif­fer­ence to the child’s learn­ing, why do you assign it? Do you teach actual con­tent, or just “work ethic” (i.e., compliance)?

    December 10th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
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  102. Matthew says:

    @teachermom said “I calmly explained to her that, no, she would not have to miss her sister’s birth­day, because sis­ters and fam­ily come first. Los­ing a few points on her home­work was no big deal com­pared with miss­ing a very spe­cial evening with her family.”

    Gosh, how gra­cious of you.

    That bor­ders on child abuse because you’ve an already emo­tion­ally dis­tressed kid in an impos­si­ble situation.

    December 10th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
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  103. PsychMom says:

    So much for sleep­ing on it.….

    teacher­mom, do you not see the emo­tional bind you are putting the child into? You are pun­ish­ing her for doing the right thing, all the while giv­ing sub­tle mes­sages that she’s doing the wrong thing, because grades are a com­pet­ing force here. The point I would make is that if you are seri­ous about tak­ing “pres­sure” off kids, then don’t trap them in impos­si­ble binds, and don’t pun­ish them for mak­ing the cor­rect choice. You could have instantly relieved this poor child by say­ing: “It’s Ok, you can forgo the home­work tonight, with­out penalty. It’s not that important.”

    There should not be a penalty for mak­ing the right choice. Not for children.

    December 10th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
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  104. FedUpMom says:

    teacher­mom writes:

    ***********
    Folks, this pres­sure did not come from school.
    ***********

    This is such a cop-out. The child is stressed because she has a big pile of home­work assigned the same night as her sister’s birth­day party. Of course the pres­sure came from school! If the school had a rea­son­able home­work pol­icy, this con­flict wouldn’t have hap­pened in the first place.

    For one thing, if the school had a pol­icy that home­work would only be assigned if it was nec­es­sary for the child’s learn­ing (and I mean learn­ing an actual sub­ject) the amount of home­work could be cut way down.

    ***************
    Quit blam­ing teach­ers for the home­work, and start look­ing at who is putting the pres­sure on the kids.
    ***************

    Why shouldn’t we blame teach­ers for the home­work? You’re the ones who assign the stuff.

    Teacher­mom, you seem to think that every­one involved needs to make changes except you and the other teach­ers. I don’t buy that. Schools are not forces of nature that we just have to live with. They are social con­structs and they can change in the future, as they have changed in the past.

    December 10th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
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  105. teachermom says:

    To all the above, what penalty? What emo­tioanl dis­tress? The dis­tress placed on her by her par­ents for putting such impor­tance on grades in the first place? The penalty of see­ing her par­ents dis­ap­pointed at her or angry at her teacher? If I had not taken away some “late” points, than I would be doing her a dis­ser­vice, because she would later expect oth­ers to do the same…when cir­cum­stances may have changed and then she would blame the teacher rather than take respon­si­bil­ity for her cir­cum­stances and take her lumps. Which, by the way, wouldn’t be so lumpy if the PARENTS would teach her that grades ARE ink in the shape of a let­ter on paper, not an exten­sion of her self-worth. LEARNING is impor­tant, not grades. (I won’t even get started on how much I agree with so many of you about YES we need schools, sys­tems, pro­grams, teach­ers that are will­ing to imple­ment a NO grade sys­tem with an indi­vid­ual learn­ing cur­ricu­lum in its place and col­leges who let stu­dents test in rather that “Make the Grade” and then demon­strate their work ethic with valu­able com­mu­nity service/volunteer hours, etc.) Until our soci­ety works on this, and people/parents like us and teach­ers like me keep on keep­ing on with our good fight, instead of blam­ing and cry­ing and moan­ing we must OURSELVES com­fort, teach and guide our own chil­dren about our edu­ca­tional beliefs. Remem­ber Aris­to­tle said, “It is the mark of an edu­cated mind to be able to enter­tain a thought with­out accept­ing it.” Are you teach­ing that to your chil­dren? You can go through school, take what is use­ful and mean­ing­ful, dis­re­gard the rest, apply what you want and need in order to reach the goals you’ve set for your­self. In Amer­ica we pride our­selves on work­ing for our suc­cesses. Why can’t the same hold true for our edu­ca­tion? Do the work if you want the priv­i­leges, don’t if you don’t. If the work proves too much, why should oth­ers not ben­e­fit from it just because it is too much for you? Any­way, I may or may not believe what I just wrote, I’ll have to pon­der it, but it will be inter­est­ing to see other thoughts and ideas branch out it.

    Okay, I’m step­ping down from my soap box now. Just putting another per­spec­tive out there folks, my per­spec­tive and I wouldn’t want to live in a coun­try where oth­ers didn’t argue back. So thanks for an inter­est­ing cou­ple of hours these past after­noons and I will resume my search for “read­ing logs” which is how I came across this blog. Many bless­ings to all.

    December 10th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
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  106. FedUpMom says:

    teacher­mom says:

    *************
    teach­ers like me keep on keep­ing on with our good fight,
    *************

    What good fight?

    Let’s try an anal­ogy here. Sup­pose your prin­ci­pal said to you, “I’m send­ing all the teach­ers to a con­fer­ence this week­end. Your job assess­ment will depend partly on your par­tic­i­pa­tion at the conference.”

    And then you said, “What? I’m not free this week­end! I’ve got a spe­cial roman­tic anniver­sary trip planned this week­end with my husband!”

    And then the prin­ci­pal said, “Don’t worry. Your mar­riage is really more impor­tant than your job. I’ll still have to mark you down, of course, because that’s prob­a­bly what your next prin­ci­pal would do.”

    How would you feel? Would you feel grate­ful to the prin­ci­pal for rec­og­niz­ing that your mar­riage is impor­tant? Or would you feel that you had been put in a no-win sit­u­a­tion for no reason?

    December 10th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
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  107. HomeworkBlues says:

    Teacher mom, I’m a reg­u­lar com­ment con­trib­u­tor here but have been away from the blog for a almost a week and have a lot of catch­ing up to do. .

    My imme­di­ate reac­tion is one of dis­may. I too don’t see a “hear hear” quite the way Sara does, although Sara is one of my favorite blog­gers. The best I hear com­ing from you, teacher­mom, is that at best you won’t nec­es­sar­ily harass my kid for not doing the home­work but you’ll still penal­ize her.

    Okay, points off are bet­ter than recess missed. They’re bet­ter than hos­til­ity. But as Alfie Kohn says, to use another anal­ogy in express­ing his dis­com­fort over time outs (time outs were a big deal ten years ago, are they still?), he would say, peo­ple tell me all the time, but time outs are bet­ter than spank­ing. Well, spank­ing is bet­ter than shooting.

    So points off are bet­ter than shoot­ing, to be unbear­ably humor­ous here. Not to get into a dis­cus­sion over time outs here, but you get my drift. You won’t harass (as least you say you won’t) but you’ll still take points off. You say that par­ents are too grade focused. But lis­ten to this case scenario.

    My daugh­ter is in a selec­tive mag­net pub­lic high school. She likes the school (unfor­tu­nately it’s laden with stress) but keeps telling me, they are too grade focused, they are too grade focused. She’s been telling me this for years. She wants to learn, she is tired of the inces­sant empha­sis the teach­ers put on grades, not just here but start­ing in elementary.

    Well, recently I had a meet­ing with a teacher over some­thing. In an email, he made the case that the stu­dents sim­ply will not learn XYZ with­out the con­stant tests. So in meet­ing with him, I repeated my daughter’s com­plaint, that she feels the school is too grade focused. He told me she needs to learn to get over it, that’s the real world.

    So as a par­ent, you can’t win. You are accused of being overly grade focused except when you’re not. Then you are crit­i­cized for not car­ing enough about grades.

    Bot­tom line: the school is too grade focused. I don’t care if the Stevens fam­ily wants con­stant tests and grades. I don’t. As long as you don’t keep giv­ing all those tests and grades, it mat­ters not a wit if the Stevens fam­ily cares too much about grades. It is so easy to shift the blame on the par­ents. And trust me, I know where you’re com­ing from. I’ve brushed up against a horde of hyper-competitive par­ents in the years my daugh­ter has attended GT pro­grams. But…the school, in my opin­ion, cre­ates the mon­ster in the first place. And if they don’t, they do a heck of a job of enabling.

    Again, bot­tom line: What­ever the moti­va­tion, teach­ers are unbear­ably grades, tests, and points obsessed. And as Mathew pointed out, just how long would your child sur­vive in a GT pro­gram if the par­ent did as you sug­gest, refuse to do the homework?

    Oh, we picked our bat­tles and stood our ground when I saw fit. And the teacher took it very per­son­ally. Trust me, I would have been happy with the reduced marks alone. It would have been bet­ter if she’d not been penal­ized at all. It was the hos­til­ity and missed recess I could have done very nicely without.

    But points alone? It’s fifth grade! Who cares? The teach­ers use the grade as the stick. But who wants a stick when you love to learn? Who wants to be hit over the head all the time?

    December 10th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
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  108. Disillusioned says:

    FedUp­Mom– Great counter points. Teacher­mom– I’m not sure you hear the patron­iz­ing, con­de­scend­ing tone you have (“such ani­mos­ity boys and girls”). Your patron­iz­ing tone is com­mon amongst edu­ca­tors today. By the way, at my child’s ele­men­tary school, the kids miss rec­cess if they don’t turn in home­work (I would say this is a penalty). More­over, par­ents who do not turn in home­work are vil­li­fied and made to feel they are erod­ing their child’s self esteem. Again, please hear your arro­gant tone (oh, boys and girls…we know what’s best, if you would only lis­ten and com­ply, the world would be a much more peace­ful place). Yes, the world would be a much more peace­ful place for the teach­ers and admin­ista­tors if every­one just did as they were told!

    December 10th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
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  109. Disillusioned says:

    More thoughts upon re-reading teacher­mom. In addi­tion to your patron­iz­ing, con­de­scend­ing tone (“true story, hum­ble pie”?) your logic is mud­dled. I find it so frus­trat­ing that the teach­ers who reply can’t con­cede we have log­i­cal points.

    December 10th, 2009 at 7:38 pm
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  110. HomeworkBlues says:

    Dis­il­lu­sioned hit the nail on the head for me. Teacher­mom, you must be won­der­ing, why are these par­ents gang­ing up on me? What did I say? I tried to help them!

    Your patron­iz­ing com­ments vir­tu­ally drip with sar­casm and con­de­scen­sion. It was hard for me to accept them in the “good faith” you thought you were intending.

    December 10th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
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  111. FedUpMom says:

    teacher­mom says:

    ***********
    To all the above, what penalty? What emo­tioanl dis­tress?
    ***********

    OK, here’s the penalty:

    *************
    If I had not taken away some “late” points, than I would be doing her a dis­ser­vice,
    *************

    Here’s the emo­tional distress:

    *************
    One time I had a stu­dent bust into tears as I began to explain the home­work for the evening.
    *************

    What I see from teacher­mom is a real fail­ure to take respon­si­bil­ity for her actions. She causes a child to burst into tears in her class, because she’s assign­ing so much home­work. And then some­how she wants to blame the child’s par­ents! What the …?

    Teacher­mom, who’s assign­ing this unnec­es­sary, time-consuming home­work? YOU ARE! Take respon­si­bil­ity for what you do. Don’t tell us par­ents it’s our fault because we neglected to tell our chil­dren that they shouldn’t take grades seriously.

    Sim­i­larly, she says that many teach­ers are “turds”, and then denies that she is name-calling.

    And then she expects us to believe we’re all on the same side!

    *************
    people/parents like us and teach­ers like me keep on keep­ing on with our good fight
    *************

    Psy­ch­Mom, we need your ser­vices here. I don’t get it.

    The really dis­turb­ing part is the com­plete lack of sym­pa­thy that teacher­mom has for the child’s point of view.

    December 10th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
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  112. HomeworkBlues says:

    FedUp­MOm, teacher­mom has us so befud­dled, we need a shrink? Psy­ch­Mom, get on over here. We need you!

    December 10th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
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  113. FedUpMom says:

    HWB, I don’t know whether to call in a psy­chol­o­gist, an exor­cist, or a boot­leg­ger. Time to shut down the computer …

    December 10th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
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  114. PsychMom says:

    Ok, Ok…I slept on it…it was Dis­il­lu­sioned who artic­u­lated the urk­some feel­ing I had as I read teachermom’s post…“dripping with sar­casm”, wasn’t it?

    There was a char­ac­ter in one of the mid­dle Harry Pot­ter sto­ries, I can’t think of her name, but she smiled as she pre­scribed what was best for the school, and it that was what­ever she said it was. I got the same sense from teacher­mom and it rat­tled me.

    As for my par­tic­u­lar “exper­tise”, I don’t think I know any­thing the rest of you don’t already know. I wouldn’t pre­sume to ever think, I, as a par­ent, would ever have a part­ner­ship with this kind of teacher.

    I fun­da­men­tally dis­agree with her about grades being the focus of par­ents not school.…parents do need to take a stand but, as I always say, teacher and edu­ca­tion experts are sup­posed to be the EXPERTS. They have the pro­fes­sional respon­si­bil­ity to be on the fore­front of best prac­tices in edu­ca­tion. The research seems to show that home­work is of no ben­e­fit to ele­men­tary stu­dents. The research is now show­ing us that car­rot and stick moti­va­tional prac­tices DON’T work. See Dan Pink. But school and uni­ver­si­ties stick to grades. They “know”.

    But teacher­mom has moved on..I’m sure.

    December 11th, 2009 at 8:24 am
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  115. PsychMom says:

    Did any­one pick up on the “Late” points com­ment that teacher­mom made in her last post. She didn’t take points off for miss­ing home­work. She took points off for late home­work which implies that the child who fool­ishly thought she should enjoy a fam­ily sup­per out for her sister’s birth­day, still had to do the home­work, she just was allowed to hand it in later. So the sup­posed break this woman was extend­ing to this child was no break at all. The child got pun­ished for enjoy­ing her­self AND for doing her home­work late. Nice.

    It’s the same bind some employ­ers put work­ers in over H1N1 this year. They say, if you have symp­toms stay home for 7 days. But, if you are off work for more than 3 days in a row, you switch over to short term dis­abil­ity and are docked pay. Or you may work for an employer that pays for no sick time. So, the mes­sage is: You are doing the right thing by pro­tect­ing your fel­low work­ers from catch­ing the flu, look­ing after your own health, and fol­low­ing our pol­icy, but we’re pun­ish­ing you for it by tak­ing away your pay.
    Guess how many peo­ple report symp­toms of the flu?

    It just makes no sense to pun­ish the desired behaviour.

    Don’t dog han­dlers say you should never pun­ish a dog who has run away from you, for returning?

    December 11th, 2009 at 9:06 am
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  116. HomeworkBlues says:

    Psy­ch­Mom, on the docked pay issue, for many work­ers, it’s not sim­ply the loss of wages that make them afraid of report­ing symp­toms. That alone might be man­age­able to some, heinous though it may be. It’s the deeper issue that they may lose their jobs over it. In this tight econ­omy, it sets up a dichotomy and places the worker in a very dif­fi­cult posi­tion. And it rein­forces that truth comes at a cost. Hence, the worker keeps his mouth shut and winds up infect­ing the entire department.

    And as Matthew says, teacher mom has merely set up a Hobson’s choice This is even more insid­i­ous because chil­dren are impres­sion­able, vul­ner­a­ble and look up to teach­ers as role mod­els and author­ity fig­ures. teacher­mom is putting the dis­tressed child in an unten­able posi­tion. A Hobson’s choice is a free choice in which only one option is offered, and one may refuse to take that option. The choice is there­fore between tak­ing the option or not; “take it or leave it.”

    teacher­mom, the child came to you for some com­fort and trust. You had a rare moment there, to con­nect, to make a dif­fer­ence, to do some­thing kind that might have immor­tal­ized you in this child’s eyes. Don’t you want to be the teacher some lit­tle kid remem­bers forty years from now? You blew it. I doubt that lit­tle girl will ever reach out to you again.

    December 11th, 2009 at 9:19 am
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  117. PsychMom says:

    Good point about the job loss fact and report­ing ill­ness, Home­work­Blues.
    Yeah, and I agree too, that when that girl encoun­ters a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion again, she will be no fur­ther ahead. She won’t know how to solve the dilemma for her­self and will have no peace. It was a missed opportunity.

    December 11th, 2009 at 9:39 am
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  118. FedUpMom says:

    I’m think­ing teachermom’s strat­egy is more of a Morton’s fork, where there are two options, both bad. The child can do all the home­work as assigned, and miss her sister’s birth­day party. Or the child can do the home­work slightly late, which means an even big­ger home­work pile-up the next day, plus los­ing points for lateness.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morton%27s_Fork

    And as usual, the teacher doesn’t even attempt to claim that the home­work is nec­es­sary for the child’s learning.

    We need a Bad Choices Bingo card, on the model of the Log­i­cal Fal­lacy Bingo card.

    http://​www​.sha​gadel​ica​.net/​?​p​=​627

    December 11th, 2009 at 9:42 am
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  119. Matthew says:

    Learned some­thing new…I’d never heard of Morton’s Fork before. I always thought that’s what a Hobson’s choice was.

    Of course, the offi­cial pol­icy of our mid­dle school is that you can’t use Wikipedia for any­thing. Not “here’s how to eval­u­ate sources to assess their accu­racy”, just “you can’t use it — period.” Goes with the whole “mem­o­riza­tion — your key to life in the 21st cen­tury” plan that my school sys­tem pushes.

    So FedUp­Mom, I didn’t offi­cially learn any­thing from you. :)

    December 11th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
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  120. Anonymous says:

    Wow, I think teachermom’s essen­tial idea, the ker­nel at the heart of what she wrote (and what Sara cried “Hear, hear!” to), is get­ting lost.

    Boiled way way down, I took teachermom’s post, at its heart, to say that we have to teach our chil­dren that school grades should be con­sid­ered in a larger con­text, rather than blindly sought at any cost.

    If we teach chil­dren to con­sider grades in their proper per­spec­tive, then they grow up know­ing how to work for grades when there’s a good rea­son (col­lege, sports require­ment), and how to let bad grades roll off their backs when the price is too high.

    Grades should be a means to an end, but not an end in them­selves. That’s a les­son that can be taught.

    December 11th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
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  121. HomeworkBlues says:

    I’d love to take it a step fur­ther, anony­mous, and throw the grades out entirely. Given that that sug­ges­tion might unleash a bar­rage of, BUT THEY WON’T LEARN OTHERWISE!, do know that there are kids for whom grades are a turn off to learn­ing and as Alfie Kohn says, it forces kids to focus on per­for­mance rather than process.

    I doubt my daugh­ter is the only one. Research shows that inter­est in learn­ing begins to take a dive in sec­ond grade, pre­cisely when grades are for­mally intro­duced. Pub­lic school, in its infi­nite wis­dom, has in the last few years decided to intro­duce them even ear­lier, in kinder­garten. Hey, it’s never to early to crush love of learn­ing, is it?

    My daugh­ter learns in spite of grades, surely not because of them. Sim­ply put, I am sick of them, I’m sick of the inces­sant pres­sure. I’m, sick of talk­ing about them, I’m sick of ask­ing about them, and I’m espe­cially sick of that con­ver­sa­tion, “we have to bring up her grades.” How about, we have to use our time wisely in school so that she learns? Please. Don’t send me inter­ims. Four annual report cards are quite enough, thank you very much.

    Find me a cre­ative school that takes learn­ing uber-seriously, com­bin­ing the best prac­tices of tra­di­tional and pro­gres­sive edu­ca­tion, and I’ll be there 9:30 Mon­day. Not ear­lier, though, I’m afraid. Teen sleep phase delay, you see.

    December 11th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
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  122. FedUpMom says:

    anony­mous says:

    *************
    If we teach chil­dren to con­sider grades in their proper per­spec­tive, then they grow up know­ing how to work for grades when there’s a good rea­son (col­lege, sports require­ment), and how to let bad grades roll off their backs when the price is too high.
    **************

    But why is the price so unbe­liev­ably high? Kids should not be asked to give up their sleep, their social lives, and their men­tal health in order to avoid bad grades.

    The prob­lem can­not be solved with­out real change in the schools. It’s not enough to tell par­ents to tell their kids not to worry about grades. That doesn’t fix a bro­ken system.

    December 11th, 2009 at 10:56 pm
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  123. HomeworkBlues says:

    FedUp­Mom writes: “The prob­lem can­not be solved with­out real change in the schools. It’s not enough to tell par­ents to tell their kids not to worry about grades. That doesn’t fix a bro­ken system.”

    This is very sem­i­nal. It is key. The sys­tem is bro­ken. A promi­nent jour­nal­ist, a friend, whose chil­dren attend schools in our wealthy dis­trict, recently char­ac­ter­ized our schools as “sick.” She was specif­i­cally refer­ring to the early high school start times but our con­ver­sa­tion pro­gressed to home­work over­load, pro­duc­ing chil­dren who are tired, dis­en­gaged from their learn­ing, and unhealthy. She is right.

    At its core, the schools have lost our trust. Yes, there are many par­ents who have drunk the Cool-Aide are sop up all the frothy PR the schools dis­sem­i­nate.. As Dis­il­lu­sioned wrote, these par­ents are delib­er­ately delud­ing them­selves because admit­ting the “nom­i­nally high per­form­ing school dis­tricts” are offer­ing mediocre edu­ca­tion, out­sourced to par­ents, would decrease their prop­erty val­ues and brag­ging about the “excel­lent” school down the street, “com­mit­ted to excel­lence and rigor” means the value of your house rises.

    Until that trust is restored, until par­ents are treated as real part­ners and not as lowly ser­vants, forced to obe­di­ently bow to the bid­ding of schools with­out input, we can­not pro­ceed. An intel­li­gent dis­cus­sion requires scrutiny. You sim­ply can­not have one with­out the other.

    December 12th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
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  124. HomeworkBlues says:

    Cor­rec­tion: I wrote “are sop up.” Meant to say, AND sop up. Of course!

    Sara, if you get this fast, can you cor­rect and repost? I’d love that!

    December 12th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
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  125. Disillusioned says:

    HWB– You are cor­rect about a loss of trust. Con­versely, the pub­lic school sys­tem doesn’t trust the par­ents (or chil­dren) either. The iron­i­cally named Prin­ci­pal at FedUp Mom’s pub­lic school lacks prin­ci­pal. As so many have noted, par­ent tri­an­gu­la­tion is a form of manip­u­la­tion. Again, the irony of try­ing to build char­ac­ter and respon­si­b­lity in our chil­dren when the pub­lic school sys­tem breeds dis­trust and fear.

    December 14th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
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  126. HomeworkBlues says:

    Dis­il­lu­sioned, again, you hit the nail on the head. Very astute.

    The irony in all of this is, when you stop and pon­der it all, we have a mono­lith, a huge sys­tem that, and for­give the blunt can­dor, doesn’t trust us or our chil­dren but doesn’t give us much rea­son to trust it with either. It’s a huge entity, gulp­ing down vast resources and dol­lars, and despite the slick PR of “world class edu­ca­tion, com­mit­ted to excel­lence and rigor,” is essen­tially a test prep fac­tory where every­one is on guard.

    December 14th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
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  127. Anonymous says:

    Wow! It just amazes me to lis­ten to some of the views and posi­tions that are being expressed by the par­ents on this page.

    As I read each blog it puts such a bad taste in my mouth about some of the things that are being said. You have one side say­ing that home­work shouldn’t be given– (of course this is com­ing out of the mouths of indi­vid­u­als who evi­dently don’t teach) and then the other side that say that home­work needs to be given– (appar­ently from indi­vid­u­als who are in the class­room every­day, stay­ing hours after the school day has ended, as well as assess­ing their stu­dents’ work per­for­mance con­tin­u­ously pon­der­ing effec­tive ways to meet every need of every child in their class) hmmmm?
    Like I tell my team, my bat­tle isn’t my stu­dents– that is only half the bat­tle. The real bat­tle is the par­ents– maily those who don’t work with their chil­dren at home to ASSIST the teacher in the SUCESS of their childs learn­ing. Par­ents have low­ered their expec­ta­tions for their chil­dren which makes teach­ers job twice as hard in the class. If you do not require you child to excel in life then don’t expect them to excel in the class­room. Appar­ently teach­ers are send­ing home work to rein­force what is being taught to HELP your child. So if you are the par­ent that feels that home­work is a waste of time. Do your teacher a favor and tell him or her not to give your child any home­work since you feel it is a waste of time. Then you make sure to refrain from all request for con­fer­ences on your child’s progress, ( because that would be a waste of time) defi­nately don’t make any (rude) phone calls when your child brings home those won­der­ful C’s, D’s and F’s you and I both know they don’t deserve and defi­nately don’t expect them to advance to the next grade level with con­fi­dence and skills needed to do well and keep up.
    Do me a favor and make my job eas­ier– this way I can focus on the stu­dents who par­ents are active in their childs learn­ing. We would greatly appre­ci­ate it.

    December 26th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
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  128. HomeworkBlues says:

    Gosh, Anony­mous, do you always write so poorly or is it just today? Frankly, I’d rather trust our chil­dren to the par­ents of this blog all after­noon, evenings and week­ends than to your homework.I can only imag­ine the drek you send home. Could it be you assign so much home­work because you are so inef­fec­tive in the classroom?

    I fully sup­port home­work. For you! Go back to school and brush up on your gram­mar, spelling and syn­tax. Per­haps you teach per­sua­sive essay writ­ing in your class­room but please don’t lead by exam­ple! And while you’re at it, read a book in your spare time. It’ll do your and your stu­dents far more good than all the paper­work and assess­ments crowd­ing your desk and your time.

    December 27th, 2009 at 11:02 am
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  129. HomeworkBlues says:

    Cor­rec­tion: “It’ll do YOU and your stu­dents,” not YOUR and your stu­dents. Typo.

    December 27th, 2009 at 11:06 am
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  130. HomeworkBlues says:

    Anony­mous writes: “Like I tell my team, my bat­tle isn’t my students – ”

    I’m con­fused. You’re clearly a teacher. Dear god, please don’t tell me you are a prin­ci­pal too.

    December 27th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
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  131. Disillusioned says:

    Anony­mous– Your com­ments leave a ter­ri­ble taste in my mouth! As HWB has already pointed out, your writ­ing is atro­cious. More­over, I find your use of war metaphors unset­tling. I’m sure the major­ity (if not all) of your stu­dents’ par­ents do not con­sider them­selves at war with you or your school. How­ever, I know this rather foul and offen­sive ide­al­ogy is preva­lent amongst edu­ca­tors. To para­phrase, “You’re either for us or againts us!”

    Just because a par­ent (an adult by the way) dares to ques­tion home­work poli­cies should not mean he or she should not hold the pub­lic school sys­tem account­able for his or her child’s progress while they are in school six to eight hours a day! Your aston­ish­ing claim that you would pre­fer to focus on stu­dents whose “par­ents are active in their child’s learn­ing” is asi­nine and lacks logic in the extreme!

    First off, how dare you assume that any­one who ques­tions your home­work poli­cies does not care about their child’s edu­ca­tion? Sec­ondly, if you are spend­ing hours after class assess­ing your stu­dents work per­for­mance; shouldn’t you know who needs some extra help mas­ter­ing the cur­ricu­lum? Thirdly, why would you not deign to help a child whose par­ents you con­sider “not active in their child’s education?”

    If you con­sider par­ents who do not fall in line with your expec­ta­tions regard­ing home­work “mak­ing your job twice as hard” too damm bad! Instead of becom­ing a teacher/martyr; why don’t you leave acad­e­mia and see what the rather ruth­less, com­pli­cated, nuanced, com­pet­i­tive real world is like for awhile. Maybe you won’t be so quick to judge all of those slacker par­ents who make their way every­day wor­ry­ing about their jobs and how to advance in a world where peo­ple skills matter!

    Good lord, if I had a job where I could spout off the inani­ties I have heard from you and your ilk, I guess I could have a con­fronta­tional, con­de­scend­ing, arro­gant atti­tude and not have to worry about get­ting fired!

    December 28th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
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  132. HomeworkBlues says:

    Bravo, Dis­il­lu­sioned. I was fit to be tied when I read that let­ter from Anony­mous. I don’t just find Anony­mous’ poor writ­ing a joke, I find it a tragedy that we hire, main­tain and pay such “edu­ca­tors” to teach our chil­dren. My daugh­ter wrote bet­ter prose in sec­ond grade.And when I home­schooled, you can be damned assured I would never have let such sloppy writ­ing go past my eyes.

    I wasn’t expect­ing Abe Lin­coln or T.S. Eliot but it blows my mind how con­cerned you are about our children’s SUCCESS when you can’t even spell the word.

    And to sec­ond Dis­il­lu­sioned, how dare you assume we don’t care about our children’s edu­ca­tion because we ques­tion bad home­work poli­cies? We care because we want our chil­dren engaged in mean­ing­ful learn­ing when they arrive home from school, and not just blindly fol­low­ing your orders. We care more than you are will­ing to acknowl­edge. That is why we have gath­ered here on this blog.

    December 28th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
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  133. FedUpMom says:

    Anony­mous says:

    *************
    The real bat­tle is the par­ents– maily those who don’t work with their chil­dren at home to ASSIST the teacher
    **************

    Well, at least you’re hon­est enough not to call the par­ents “part­ners”. But guess what — we’re not your assis­tants either. We have our own agenda, and our own ideas about how we run our fam­i­lies in our own time.

    This crazy idea of the parents-as-assistants seems to be a nat­ural out­growth of start­ing home­work too early in the school cycle. If you delayed home­work until it was devel­op­men­tally appro­pri­ate (prob­a­bly high school), you wouldn’t have to depend on par­ents to orga­nize and nag and be respon­si­ble for get­ting the home­work done.

    I would like to see a no-homework pol­icy for ele­men­tary schools. Then par­ents could stop fight­ing with their kids and the teach­ers could stop fight­ing with the par­ents. Then we could see what the teach­ers were actu­ally doing with their prime 30 hours a week when the kids are at their freshest.

    December 29th, 2009 at 12:09 am
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  134. FedUpMom says:

    From Bad Teach­ers, by Guy Strickland:

    ***********
    [The teacher] feels that she has turned her back on income and social stand­ing in order to help the world as a teacher, and she wants par­ents to appre­ci­ate her self-sacrifice. Even the bad teach­ers, those who have not devoted effort or ded­i­ca­tion to their teach­ing, expect par­ents to be grate­ful for the *time* they have sac­ri­ficed.
    ***********

    In other words, the teacher as martyr.

    December 29th, 2009 at 11:21 am
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  135. HomeworkBlues says:

    FedUp­Mom, excel­lent. Dis­il­lu­sioned ref­er­enced that too, the mar­tyr, who sac­ri­fices and expects the par­ents to be sub­servient and grate­ful to this supreme sac­ri­fice. Wouldn’t it be won­der­ful if teach­ing was about teach­ing and not all this emo­tional (some­body please love me!) baggage?

    I’m still stuck on the appalling writ­ing. Later, when I have more time, I’ll extract another Guy Strick­land piece about teach­ers who can­not write and there­fore don’t bother teach­ing it. He says, when your child comes home with an essay and it’s not marked up, all you see is a grade on top and the occa­sional CLEVER, don’t fall for the “I didn’t have time to do more” line. More likely, the teacher can­not write and doesn’t want to high­light that deficiency.

    I know there are some good teach­ers out there. If only we could get rid of the bad ones…

    December 29th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
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  136. FedUpMom says:

    From “Bad Teach­ers”, by Guy Strickland:

    **************
    Here are a few things to look for:
    .……
    2.) Notes from the teacher that con­tain mis­spelled words and gram­mat­i­cal errors; this isn’t just a clue, this is plain evi­dence that the teacher lacks fun­da­men­tal skills.
    3.) The absence of graded papers, espe­cially com­po­si­tions.
    ****************

    December 29th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
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  137. HomeworkBlues says:

    FedUp, our Anony­mous teacher here writes that we should be will­ing to ASSIST her. I see where she’s com­ing from. With that kind of writ­ing, she needs all the help she can get.

    December 29th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
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  138. FedUpMom says:

    I just fin­ished read­ing “Mak­ing the Grades”, by Todd Far­ley. I highly rec­om­mend it.

    I wanted to high­light a quote from the book:

    **************
    I always hoped my teams would con­sist of peo­ple who were smart enough to under­stand the rules but not so smart they’d be dis­in­clined to agree with them.
    *************

    This reminds me so much of our local pub­lic schools. They want kids who are smart enough to make the school look good, but not so smart that they ques­tion the busy­work they’re made to do every day. Don’t look behind the curtain!

    December 29th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
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  139. Disillusioned says:

    FedUp­Mom– Exactly. They also want par­ents who do the same (and most do).

    December 30th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
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  140. HomeworkBlues says:

    As John Tay­lor Gatto says, very smart chil­dren who think out­side the box cause trou­ble for schools because they do indeed peer behind that cur­tain. Those are the ones most vul­ner­a­ble to dis­il­lu­sion­ment because no one both­ers to answer their ques­tions. Notice how the most vocal par­ents on this blog are highly intel­li­gent and can write a decent sentence?

    I’m not brag­ging here but I’m incensed that if you dare to ques­tion pol­icy, you are branded a slacker. When in fact, the oppo­site is true. It’s when you really care, when you start to ques­tion what your chil­dren are bring­ing home, when you won­der what they do in school all day;when you decide that as a tax­payer you really do have inalien­able rights, that is the epit­ome of a car­ing, nur­tur­ing INVOLVED par­ent who is in fact very con­cerned about the edu­ca­tion her chil­dren are get­ting from the pub­lic school system.

    How about in this new year, school brass resolves to put the PUBLIC back in PUBLIC school and has the dog wag­ging the tail, for a change. When pigs fly?

    December 30th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
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  141. Angela says:

    what is the point!! we were just at school!!! home­work is dumb!!

    January 4th, 2010 at 5:46 pm
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  142. LM says:

    I am a sec­ond grade teacher. I give home­work because it is required by our school board. I’ve tried to min­i­mize and I’ve got­ten com­plaints from sev­eral par­ents. On another note, I’ve been teach­ing for almost 20 years and I have a five year old. I’m plan­ning on home­school­ing him. I know sev­eral teach­ers who are fed up with “the sys­tem” and are home­school­ing their own chil­dren.
    **
    Our prin­ci­pal told us at a meet­ing recently that if all of our kids were not pro­fi­cient in the near future, we would be los­ing our jobs. But, no stress right? I believe all kids can learn, but it’s devel­op­men­tal. Wouldn’t it be nice if kids could learn at their own pace? Or what THEY wanted and not this list from the gov­ern­ment?
    **Climb­ing off the soapbax**Thanks for listening.

    February 10th, 2010 at 9:54 pm
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  143. PsychMom says:

    Oh LM…I wish teach­ers like you felt more empow­ered because you’re the type of per­son who has a right to call her­self a pro­fes­sional teacher. You are 100% cor­rect about devel­op­ment being at the crux of young children’s learn­ing. Insist­ing on young chil­dren meet­ing mile­stones at a pre­scribed is just non­sense and you have the sense to see that. And it’s refresh­ing to hear that a pub­lic school teacher would homeschool…from the sounds of some teach­ers who write in here some­times, home­school­ing is a choice for par­ents who are anti­so­cial at best, and mol­ly­cod­dlers at the very least.

    February 11th, 2010 at 8:04 am
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  144. cfuchslao says:

    I don’t mind min­i­mized amounts of school home­work. How­ever, I do a lot of addi­tional “home­work” with my chil­dren. For exam­ple, my four year old, knows how to count by 2s, 5s, 10s, and 100s. He also knows a great deal of sight words too.

    My now just turned 7 year old, who is in first grade, is doing mul­ti­pli­ca­tion and read­ing “Cap­tain Under­pants” books. As a for­mer teacher, in a pri­vate school, … it is not about good ” stock” or great “genes.” That is an opin­ion; and more often, this IS not the case. Most kids are aver­age!! How­ever, you can teach your chil­dren to have great study habits if you start early, rather than later. If you wait until an issue arises with your child’s per­for­mance in a spe­cific area, it is usu­ally very dif­fi­cult to “catch up” and rem­edy the given situation.

    If you are a par­ent, you have to decide what is impor­tant … (kind of like buy­ing a house … loca­tion, or big­ger home, etc). If you sac­ri­fice one area, you bet­ter be will­ing to pick up the slack!! And, a final note, liv­ing in a great local with a great school and a non active par­ent still means aver­age results at best with the child.

    March 1st, 2010 at 10:02 pm
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