“I Hate Read­ing Logs,” says FedUp Mom

This is the sixth post by FedUp Mom, the mother of a fifth grader. FedUp Mom’s daugh­ter used to attend a pub­lic school in sub­ur­ban Philadel­phia, but this year FedUp Mom moved her to a pri­vate Quaker school, hop­ing for a more relaxed envi­ron­ment. You can read her other posts here, here, here, here and here.

I Hate Read­ing Logs
by FedUp Mom

Every time I think we’ve solved the school prob­lem some­thing comes along to bite me in the rear. This week it’s the dreaded read­ing log. We found out about it from a let­ter the teach­ers sent home:

“Your child will be expected to read every night. We ask that you sign the log each night … We will also check the log reg­u­larly, in order to ensure fol­low through on your child’s part… Please sign the form below and return it to school tomor­row with your child.”

And now, the fun part:

“Thank you for your part­ner­ship in your child’s education.” (!)

And how does fol­low­ing the teacher’s direc­tions make me a part­ner exactly? I feel more like an unpaid employee. Wait a minute — we’re pay­ing them!

There was a lit­tle form at the bot­tom of the let­ter that said:

“I have read the above let­ter and agree to help my child by sign­ing his/her log each night.”

I crossed this out and wrote in:

“We trust our daugh­ter to do her reading.”

Then we signed it.

Then we sent the fol­low­ing e-mail to the teacher:

Teacher X: we have cho­sen not to par­tic­i­pate in the read­ing log. We’ve expe­ri­enced read­ing logs before and have these objections:

1.) They turn read­ing into a chore.

2.) They send a mes­sage that we don’t trust (daugh­ter) to do the read­ing with­out med­dling and micromanaging.

(Daugh­ter) will do the read­ing she needs to do, but she won’t be log­ging the pages. Thank you.

I’m hop­ing that will be the end of it. I’m really tired of con­fer­ences and I’m sure we all have bet­ter things to do with our time.

Posted in category Moms (and Dads) on a Mission on January 13, 2009 at 8:41 am
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395 Comments on ““I Hate Read­ing Logs,” says FedUp Mom”

  1. PeggyinMA says:

    This gets to the heart of the issue: In true learn­ing there is an ele­ment of trust, and the best teach­ers inspire curios­ity and nur­ture intrin­sic moti­va­tion so chil­dren learn for the love of it.
    When will our schools learn that nag­ging, brib­ing and threat­en­ing stu­dents (and par­ents!) does not work over the long run? Doesn’t every par­ent learn this at some point?

    January 13th, 2009 at 8:54 am
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  2. Kat says:

    Ugh. Read­ing logs. I blame Older Son’s first grade teacher for his hatred of read­ing. He was sit­ting on the fence with his read­ing skills in 1st grade, sort of open­ing up to the idea of read­ing for plea­sure, but not quite there. He has autism and read­ing com­pre­hen­sion issues, so read­ing is dif­fi­cult for him. She did monthly read­ing logs (which were not at a first grade level — they required me to write the date, title of the book, and min­utes read that evening, then sign). If he did not meet his quota for the month, his name was not pub­lished in the monthly class newslet­ter and he did not get his free pizza coupon. I appealed to her to set real­is­tic goals for him so he could be suc­cess­ful — could he read a lit­tle less and then pub­lish his name, and I would buy the pizza? But she did not con­sider that fair to the other chil­dren. it was all or noth­ing. So he chose noth­ing. He could never suc­ceed. He hates read­ing to this day — he’s a 6th grader. In the mean­time, Younger Son is in 1st grade and we don’t actively par­tic­i­pate in the read­ing logs. If he comes home and wants to mark up his read­ing log, that’s great. If he doesn’t I don’t force him to. So far the teacher hasn’t said any­thing, but its prob­a­bly count­ing his read­ing grade down.

    January 13th, 2009 at 11:36 am
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  3. Sara Bennett says:

    My book, The Case Against Home­work, has a whole chap­ter on what’s the mat­ter with typ­i­cal home­work assign­ments, includ­ing read­ing logs. Here’s what the first para­graph on read­ing logs says:

    These days, begin­ning as early as kinder­garten, most kids are expected to duti­fully log all the books they read.Reading logs can be an effec­tive diag­nos­tic tool ifthe teacher takes the time to read each child’s log care­fully, talk to him about what he’s reading,and thus get an under­stand­ing of his read­ing pref­er­ences, says Kylene Beers, a senior read­ing researcher at the School Devel­op­ment Pro­gram at Yale Uni­ver­sity and author of When Kids Can’t Read,What Teach­ers Can Do.But few teach­ers have time for that. Chances are, your child’s teacher uses the log sim­ply as a way of check­ing to be sure you enforce the read­ing require­ment or as a record of what’s been read.

    January 13th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
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  4. Michelle says:

    I don’t remem­ber what bunny trail led me to your blog, but I have a few gen­eral comments.

    I am a for­mer pub­lic school teacher who started teach­ing at age 21. I hate to admit it, but for 8 years or so, I was so clue­less. I was the kind of teacher that, as a mom, I would now hate!

    What did I do that was so bad? Upon reflect­ing, it was assign­ing STUPID “projects”. Most of the time, the ridicu­lous projects ended up being home­work. Why did I assign them? Did I ever think about whether they pro­vided any real edu­ca­tional ben­e­fit? I don’t know and no. What I DO remem­ber think­ing about was how great a par­tic­u­lar project was going to make my room look! I actu­ally thought that hav­ing all these projects made ME look like a great teacher! Ugh!

    Fast for­ward to my hav­ing kids and sub­se­quently mak­ing me THINK about what was important-my hus­band and I decided we would home­school our chil­dren. (He’s a gifted, insight­ful, award win­ning and well-loved edu­ca­tor who HATES home­work, as well.) I am not writ­ing to per­suade you on home­school­ing, but to merely affirm that 1. extra time does NOT equal more under­stand­ing and 2. kids absolutely need to play and have down time. My 4th grade son spends about 5−51÷2 hours on school each day — and this includes 2 hours of read­ing (which he LOVES). The rest of the time, it’s play. His scores on stan­dard­ized tests are excep­tional, and he is 2 – 3 “grade” lev­els ahead in all subjects.

    Now, I don’t think that his (as well as his sibling’s) aca­d­e­mic suc­cess is due is to his being excep­tion­ally smart. I truly believe his suc­cess is due to our “less is more” phi­los­o­phy, and his being given time to sim­ply be a hard-playing, inquis­i­tive child. I know with­out a doubt that his love for read­ing and learn­ing would be squashed if he were to have the work load of his friends that are in the schools around us.

    I am not sure where I am going with all this, or why I even took time out to com­ment, but I wanted to let you know that I applaud you in your efforts to curb home­work and worth­less, silly, time-consuming assign­ments (which, as you saw from my own expe­ri­ence, is what most home­work turns out to be.). Unfor­tu­nately, there are more out of touch edu­ca­tors than you would care to believe. And I can say that because I used to be one.

    January 13th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
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  5. HomeworkBlues says:

    My heart is sink­ing as I read FedUpMOm’s let­ter and the responses. Don’t get me wrong. Kudos to you, FedUP for telling it like it is. High fives for the posts sup­port­ing you here. My dis­en­chant­ment is in full agree­ment duti­ful read­ing logs are non­sense, a chore, and as Sara Ben­nett writes in her book, in the time it takes a child to fill out a log, she could have been read­ing another book! Hey, who let a sane per­son in?. And we entrust our chil­dren to peo­ple who don’t get that, who don’t see the obvi­ous irony?

    I’ve writ­ten about read­ing before many times on this blog, posts far more elo­quent than my tired head can muster at the moment.

    I have writ­ten that my daugh­ter is a rav­en­ous reader. We duti­fully did those read­ing logs in first grade before we knew any bet­ter. As home­work goes, it wasn’t the end of the world, copy­ing word def­i­n­i­tions was our bane, but I still hated those logs. I hated them because they were time con­sum­ing and served ZERO edu­ca­tional pur­pose. Besides, what pur­pose did they serve? In first grade, my daugh­ter was jot­ting down the book, the author, the pub­lisher. When­ever I’d read to her, I always read the author’s name aloud, authors are impor­tant, so why the log?

    As a naive mother of an only child, even I knew, early on, that it was turn­ing read­ing into a chore. I know so many chil­dren who were rewarded to read, please just read five pages and I’ll pay you, it was like pulling teeth, and the resis­tance was surely planted in those tedious read­ing logs.

    I had spent years cul­ti­vat­ing read­ing in my daugh­ter, mod­el­ing to her how much hubby and I love read­ing, it was work­ing, I was delighted beyond mea­sure to see she was as con­sumed and mes­mer­ized by grip­ping read­ing as I’ve always been, and along comes the school, try­ing their hard­est to undo all my efforts, my mod­el­ing love of learn­ing, inquiry and sink­ing tuchus and head into a good chair with a good book.

    One caveat: at least the pri­vate school had its cre­ative moments, were some­times recep­tive to a rea­soned dis­cus­sion and the Head of School was usu­ally wel­com­ing and gra­cious to us. Wel­com­ing but in hind­sight, hope­lessly clue­less at times. She didn’t stop the bul­ly­ing and teas­ing though, so we had to leave. As my daugh­ter now asks, how good was she, really?

    So we leave and enroll daugh­ter in pub­lic school. The dreaded read­ing logs make an appear­ance again. We refused to do them. Because,get this! My daugh­ter was already being pun­ished for…reading! I didn’t read that right, you stam­mer. Yes you did. One day my hus­band pulled a book off our many read­ing shelves and Wuther­ing Heights came tum­bling down. He’d for­got­ten to put the book back, daugh­ter stum­bled over it (lit­er­ally), took the novel to her bed­room, me fol­low­ing, ready to steal it back, and read for hours and hours and hours. She’s not very loqua­cious but had the vocab­u­lary of a col­lege pro­fes­sor at age nine. So she read all afternoon.

    I’ve writ­ten here that she’s also scrupu­lously hon­est (you’re get­ting the pic­ture, right? A lit­tle “weird,” vora­cious reader, inno­cent) so when scolded, why didn’t you do this home­work, she replied truth­fully, I was read­ing. So she lost recess as pun­ish­ment for read­ing. She was penal­ized because read­ing Wuther­ing Heights wasn’t a good way to do lan­guage arts at home. Bet­ter to look up words and painstak­ingly copy def­i­n­i­tions, Side­bar: visual spa­tial right brained chil­dren do not learn words from copy­ing out of a dic­tio­nary, they learn them by read­ing them, par­tic­u­larly in context.

    Okay, along comes the dreaded read­ing log. Now the dippy ques­tions are added, who is your favorite char­ac­ter, what do you think will hap­pen next, do you like this book? I love that last ques­tion. No, I don’t like this book, that’s why I’m read­ing it. I asked the teacher why my daugh­ter was being asked to fill out these logs. Answer. We need evi­dence she is reading!

    I swear pub­lic school was put on this earth for my amusement.

    January 13th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
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  6. Catherine says:

    Read­ing logs should be thrown out! It only encour­ages stu­dents to race through the read­ings to get to a cer­tain num­ber of pages – very bad! In my opin­ion (and expe­ri­ence), engag­ing stu­dents in class­room dis­cus­sion and allow­ing them to express their ideas about the read­ings is much more pro­duc­tive. Many stu­dents like to talk – why not give them an out­let, a voice? Fur­ther, spend­ing 10 min­utes at the begin­ning of class to write a short para­graph about their inter­pre­ta­tions, feel­ings, or ideas about the text preps them for dis­cus­sions and essays, and shows the teacher that the stu­dent did read. They can also use these para­graphs as ground­work for essays. Granted, it’s not a fool­proof method, but I think it’s bet­ter than a read­ing log (for stu­dents, par­ents, and teachers!).

    January 13th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
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  7. HomeworkBlues says:

    “Your child will be expected to read every night. We ask that you sign the log each night … We will also check the log reg­u­larly, in order to ensure fol­low through on your child’s part… Please sign the form below and return it to school tomor­row with your child.”

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»»>

    I love this para­graph. Was is this, the read­ing police? The intel­lec­tual KGB?

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»»»

    “Thank you for your part­ner­ship in your child’s education.”

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»

    It’s been whis­pered that edu­ca­tional staff thinks par­ents are idiots. Look no fur­ther than here for proof.

    Thanks, FedUp­Mom, for refut­ing that. You pay them, they work for you, not the other way around. Go show them what a true part­ner­ship looks like. You have lever­age in these tough eco­nomic times. They can’t afford to lose your checkbook.

    January 13th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
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  8. HomeworkBlues says:

    Michelle, I loved your post. Don’t make apolo­gies for appear­ing pro-homeschooling. I’ve already done that here many times. If one can, it is the BEST option. I even­tu­ally yanked my daugh­ter out of school to home­school too and my only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner, much sooner. At the first glance of the home­work log, the first bul­ly­ing, and above all the at the first meet­ing of the new rigid humor­less pub­lic school ele­men­tary teacher, that dreaded fifth grade year.

    I was amazed, when we began home­school­ing, at the num­bers of for­mer teach­ers who were home­school­ing their own chil­dren! I asked them, why so many teach­ers here? They all said, we saw what hap­pened behind the scenes, or, I assigned stu­pid busy work before I had chil­dren and I never want my child to have a teacher like me!

    I hear you, Michelle. Kudos to your insights. There are many won­der­ful edu­ca­tors. But you are right​.As I sur­vey the long land­scape of our school expe­ri­ence ( I have a junior who spent all but one year home­schooled so I do have per­spec­tive), most teach­ers are clue­less, I’m sorry to say.

    We don’t like crit­i­ciz­ing teach­ers because we view them like priests, it’s not nice to nit­pick. But if we begin by being bru­tally hon­est, we can make head­way, find a way to dump the lousy ones and inspire a new gen­er­a­tion of chil­dren to remake what could and should be a sacred pro­fes­sion (but you see, that’s the whole point. Let’s stop call­ing it sacred because then we can’t crit­i­cize it. Still, teach­ers have on their watch our most pre­cious pro­fes­sions and we need to trust our young to extra­or­di­nary peo­ple. And we need to pay them commensurately.

    Today’s teach­ers often have no idea what home looks like and assume kids get their home­work done at the same clip they do their school­work in class. If we must have home­work, abol­ish the word, lengthen the school day, call it study hall and GET IT DONE AT SCHOOL. DON’T send it home to me unless you put me on the payroll.

    January 13th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
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  9. HomeworkBlues says:

    Our most pre­cious pos­ses­sions, I meant to say!

    January 13th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
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  10. FedUpMom says:

    Every­body — thanks for the com­ments! Keep ‘em coming!

    Michelle — thank you for your hon­esty. I am also con­sid­er­ing home­school­ing. For the moment, though, my daugh­ter is way hap­pier at the Quaker school. I think we’ll stick with it (stay tuned!)

    Home­work­Blues — ack! Don’t even say the words “lengthen the school day!” We’d be home­school­ing for sure. Kids don’t need more time at school, they need to spend their time at school pro­duc­tively and then come home and do their own thing. And how much do you want to bet that even if they length­ened the school day, they’d be send­ing masses of stuff home?

    I haven’t heard back from Teacher X yet — she’s prob­a­bly stunned by my death­less prose!

    January 13th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
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  11. HomeworkBlues says:

    FedUp­Mom writes:

    Home­work­Blues — ack! Don’t even say the words “lengthen the school day!” We’d be home­school­ing for sure. Kids don’t need more time at school, they need to spend their time at school pro­duc­tively and then come home and do their own thing. And how much do you want to bet that even if they length­ened the school day, they’d be send­ing masses of stuff home?

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»»

    You’re right. It did seem odd com­ing from me. I am just so burned out on home­work that I’d rather it just gone done there. Don’t bring any­thing home! Do it there.

    But you are cor­rect. It would still come home. They would tell you your child should and could have fin­ished it all at school but did not so.…Hello, you’re a teacher!

    A bet­ter solu­tion is, keep the school day the same length and just get it all done at school. As chil­dren get older, an engag­ing project that cap­ti­vates their atten­tion may on rare occa­sions be sent home, in high school. but it has to be rare, and only if the stu­dent wishes to embel­ish it at home.

    How’s that for a bet­ter response? :).

    January 13th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
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  12. HomeworkBlues says:

    Got done there. Darn. I try to edit these things but some­thing seems to slip through my fingers.

    January 13th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
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  13. HomeworkBlues says:

    Yikes. I caught another of my mis­takes. I am tired…

    I wrote ear­lier: “I have a junior who spent all but one year home­schooled so I do have perspective”

    I meant the oppo­site. My junior spent all but one year in school, with one lone year of homeschool.

    Now I’ll go to sleep. Wait, I can’t. I have to cajole said junior to just stop home­work, I don’t care if it’s fin­ished, and pack it in. We had a solid week of 2:30 am bed­times. I couldn’t stay up, fell asleep on the couch and awoke to my daughter’s typing.

    If you catch any mis­takes, I’m asleep!

    January 13th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
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  14. FedUpMom says:

    BTW, I for­got to men­tion in my post what the sub­ject of the read­ing is. The sub­ject is … drum­roll, please … civil rights! Yes, kids, this week we’re study­ing the innate dig­nity of the indi­vid­ual per­son. Now shut up and do what you’re told. Gotta love education …

    January 14th, 2009 at 11:27 am
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  15. TeacherBey says:

    I am a pub­lic school teacher at the very high school from which I graduated.

    The prob­lem — yes, sin­gu­lar — with pub­lic edu­ca­tion is that it is reac­tionary and often reverts to the low­est com­mon denominator.

    The par­ents respond­ing here are likely those par­ents who care enough to imbue in their chil­dren a desire to learn. I doubt few here are lan­guish­ing in poverty: I doubt few here are flour­ish­ing in afflu­ence. In short, we rep­re­sent the mid­dle road of socioe­co­nomic sta­tus. We also rep­re­sent the group most likely to take an active role in our children’s education.

    But with the advent of stan­dard­ized test­ing at the state level, pub­lic schools are — right­fully — pan­ick­ing and — not right­fully — attempt­ing to address all stu­dents with strate­gies aimed at ensur­ing that the lowest-achieving (and, by cor­re­la­tion, low­est socioe­co­nomic) stu­dents have the same sup­port at home that they have at school. Often, and I would dare say usu­ally, this is not the case for this group of stu­dents. Each year I have at least one class period of stu­dents from low socioe­co­nomic back­grounds along with two or more AP Eng­lish classes. The dif­fer­ence in turn-out between the two groups at Open House is stag­ger­ing. If I call the par­ent of an AP stu­dent about a con­cern, a con­fer­ence will be sched­uled the next day. If I call the par­ent of an Eng­lish II Reg­u­lar stu­dent, I get a dis­con­nected phone, or an answer­ing machine, or another live-in rel­a­tive who never relays the mes­sage and couldn’t care less to do so.

    Of those groups, which brings the stand­ing of the school down? Of those groups, which will likely have more atten­tion paid to it?

    Is it right? No.

    Is it under­stand­able? Yes.

    What can we do about it? Start by understanding.

    Start by under­stand­ing that most pub­lic schools are try­ing every­thing they know to get all stu­dents to achieve.

    Under­stand that most pub­lic schools would rather have a con­cerned par­ent than an eva­sive one.

    Under­stand that forums such as this can have one of two out­comes: a con­clave for vit­ri­olic invec­tive that argues in the present tense and does not work toward a solu­tion, or a con­vo­ca­tion of minds delib­er­at­ing ways in which school and com­mu­nity can pro­vide an envi­ron­ment for each child to learn and grow and achieve to his potential.

    So don’t hate read­ing logs, or the teach­ers who give them, or the schools who pro­duce them, or even the sys­tem that engen­ders their exis­tence. Don’t even hate the par­ents who are not as involved as we are with their children’s edu­ca­tion. No amount of hate aimed at every­one or every­thing will help any sin­gle child.

    January 14th, 2009 at 11:52 am
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  16. FedUpMom says:

    Teacher­Bey — I’m not in a pub­lic school any­more, I’m in a pri­vate school. There’s no way Teacher X is deal­ing with the prob­lems of the poor. Believe me, we’re all mid­dle and pro­fes­sional class at this school.

    And yes, we are try­ing to work for change, but we are also frus­trated, and the chance to blow off a lit­tle steam among like-minded peo­ple is not a bad thing. And you have to under­stand our frus­tra­tion when we’re deal­ing with teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tions who don’t lis­ten to our concerns.

    Also, I would like to point out that coer­cive tac­tics like read­ing logs really don’t work for any­one. The kid who used to like to read will get turned off. The kid who doesn’t like to read will fake the log or just not bother. Nobody’s inter­ests are being served here.

    January 14th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
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  17. TeacherBey says:

    “I’m not in a pub­lic school any­more, I’m in a pri­vate school.” Fair, but I was not specif­i­cally address­ing just you: I used the sub­ject as a start­ing point for my own argument.

    “Also, I would like to point out that coer­cive tac­tics like read­ing logs really don’t work for any­one”.
    I’m not sure terming read­ing logs “coer­cive” is fair. The ques­tion of whether or not using read­ing logs in any way is an effec­tive instruc­tional strat­egy is not really up for debate: what does the research say? Many peo­ple use only their own anec­do­tal obser­va­tions to form their opin­ion, but I think it is impor­tant to read case stud­ies and other con­tex­tu­al­ized research in order to cull a wide array of evidence.

    With­out look­ing at the research, I sub­mit that some insti­tu­tions prop­a­gate the use of read­ing logs to ensure par­ents’ involve­ment in their children’s lives. In some sit­u­a­tions, this may be nec­es­sary: in your par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion, it does not sound nec­es­sary or effective.

    My broader point is this: over­gen­er­al­iza­tion in edu­ca­tion is the biggest issue, and this stems from reac­tionary pol­icy enac­tion. What may help stu­dents in one set­ting achieve to the best of their abil­ity may not help another, sim­i­lar group of stu­dents in a dif­fer­ent set­ting. Also, within the same set­ting, one strat­egy may not work from year to year.

    January 14th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
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  18. HomeworkBlues says:

    FedUp­Mom writes:

    BTW, I for­got to men­tion in my post what the sub­ject of the read­ing is. The sub­ject is … drum­roll, please … civil rights! Yes, kids, this week we’re study­ing the innate dig­nity of the indi­vid­ual per­son. Now shut up and do what you’re told. Gotta love education …

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»

    I can do you one bet­ter. My daugh­ter was study­ing the tran­scen­den­tal­ist period in Eng­lish last month. No mat­ter how oppressed I feel, I still try to work up excite­ment over what she’s learn­ing. Espe­cially in Eng­lish, I majored in Eng­lish and one of my great­est pas­sions is Amer­i­can Lit­er­a­ture. She was read­ing about Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

    I talked here about our dreary sad Thanks­giv­ing week­end when we had to can­cel our vaca­tion plans because of moun­tains of home­work, despite a “no home­work on breaks” pol­icy at the school. I crafted an ele­gant pas­sion­ate let­ter to the prin­ci­pal who replied that the pol­icy is such that each teacher may assign one assign­ment and that they should not accel­er­ate cur­ricu­lum over break. Oh, I get it. That clears it up nicely, doesn’t it?

    But that’s another story, still in progress. Fol­low­ing that week­end, my daugh­ter entered an unusu­ally intense (even for this school) week. It built to a crescendo the week before break. Let’s wear them out com­pletely, who do they think they are, get­ting so much vaca­tion? Let’s make them pay for it.

    Get this. The week before win­ter break, my 11th grade daugh­ter was hit with five (count ‘em, FIVE) projects, all due in five days. Wait, it doesn’t end there. She also had five quizzes in that one week, two major tests, and all the reg­u­lar home­work which takes no less than five hours each night.

    Wait, don’t go away, there’s more. She’s in one after school activ­ity but the instruc­tor picked that week, of all weeks, to ramp up the rehearsals each night because the design guru was in town. My daugh­ter sent the instruc­tor a care­fully worded respect­ful email, how she takes the activ­ity seri­ously but she is being hit with a bazil­lion projects all due that week and school­work must come first. Pretty mature of her, eh? She received a reply with a threat that she’d be taken off key por­tions of the show if she missed even one rehearsal.

    I am get­ting to a point here, build­ing up to some­thing, don’t go away. Wait, there’s more. To add to daughter’s stress, she was going on a youth con­ven­tion and needed to miss the first two days of break week. Break began Christ­mas eve but the inter­na­tional con­ven­tion (in our back­yard this year, for­tu­itously) was start­ing that Sun­day. New school rule: all stu­dents miss­ing those two days would need to make up all work before­hand. And we were hop­ing she could catch up over break. I didn’t know that when we signed daugh­ter up for con­ven­tion, I fig­ured she’d just have to do it over vacation.

    One of the projects was on tran­scen­den­tal­ism. Daugh­ter was to write a research report, com­plete with many read­ings and cita­tions and then con­struct a poster with very spe­cific guide­lines. It was due the fol­low­ing Tues­day but because daugh­ter would be out, she’d have to have it done by Fri­day. She was able to com­mu­ni­cate to the teacher that she’d try work­ing on it over the week­end and would email it. The teacher received it Sun­day morn­ing, two days before it was due.

    Luck­ily, the teacher finally agreed to allow daugh­ter to work on the poster over break so she would not be penal­ized. There was no way, given the above work load, that the poster could have been fin­ished any ear­lier. Oh, I for­got. Daugh­ter spent the first part of the week­end film­ing for another class so that took up Sat­ur­day. The con­ven­tion starts 11am Sun­day. She has to pack. Just when can she write this research paper?

    She packed for the week-long con­ven­tion late into Sat­ur­day night. She asked me to wake her up at six am so she could fin­ish the long research paper before leav­ing for the con­ven­tion. I didn’t, choos­ing 8am instead. Com­ing up with the con­ven­tion money was a hard­ship and now she’d be miss­ing some of it. Thank good­ness she wasn’t fly­ing and we could drive her over. Sun­day morn­ing I had to make spe­cial arrange­ments for daugh­ter to miss the con­ven­tion bus so that I could drive her in.

    Well, it’s Sun­day morn­ing and mid­way through the report, my daughter’s in tears. It’s almost noon, the bus has long left and she doesn’t want to miss the open­ing at 2:30. She declares deject­edly there’s no way she can fin­ish, she’s only halfway through. At this point, she’d already worked on the paper for four hours so I felt she may as well see it through. She’d get an F if she didn’t get it in that day, may as well fin­ish it. She made a huge push, got it done, fran­ti­cally packed the last of her items and we took off in a flurry.

    Thoreau is all about quiet reflec­tion, going into the woods, com­muning with your thoughts and nature. The irony was not lost on my child. She noted rue­fully with a tinge of humor that per­haps she ought not to do the project at all and just pen a note that she was so inspired by the writ­ings of Thoreau, Emer­son and Walt Whit­man that she begged her par­ents to take her win­ter hik­ing in Shenan­doah National Park instead.

    I loved that idea and actu­ally gave her per­mis­sion to do so. I sug­gested we do in fact take off for the moun­tains and that she should com­pose a beau­ti­ful essay and poetry on her day in the still snowy win­ter woods. Throw in some Robert Frost too.

    In the end, daugh­ter did not dare. She coughed up that report and we raced to the con­ven­tion. She was up till 2:30 am the night before school began to do the poster. Mike, the teacher on the other post, would chas­tise us all for leav­ing it to the last minute. Nope. Yes, it’s true, I sent daugh­ter to the con­ven­tion and then we headed north for a fam­ily wed­ding. But come New Years Day, daugh­ter was buried in home­work for the entire week­end. The poster started at 9pm because math and physics took all day.

    Let’s con­trast this tran­scen­den­tal­ism study with my own high school expe­ri­ence hun­dreds of years ago. I was in 10th grade and my Eng­lish teacher was intro­duc­ing us to Thoreau. I attended a pri­vate school next door to a gor­geous arbore­tum. I adored this teacher and credit her for my love of lan­guage, lit­er­a­ture and poetry. She loved what she taught and would read us poetry aloud with dra­matic into­na­tion, she ges­tic­u­lated wildly, she was eccen­tric and dra­matic and I couldn’t wait for her daily class.

    The teacher cleared it with the rest of the staff and we hiked over to the gar­dens. It was a shim­mer­ing sparkling day in early spring. We ate our lunch in a cir­cle and took turns read­ing Walt Whit­man. We spent hours read­ing Thoreau, Emer­son and Whit­man together. We had lively intense dis­cus­sions and then took a long hike together. She asked us to spend a half hour alone, go find a spot, and med­i­tate. We were given a project asso­ci­ated with it but I remem­ber attack­ing it vig­or­ously over the week­end. I’ve always been inspired by these three tran­scen­den­tal­ists, nature, the woods, and writ­ing and the seeds of that pas­sion were inspired that day at Cyl­burn botan­i­cal gardens.

    Extra­or­di­nary teach­ers like that you never for­get. No child will ever go back to today’s teach­ers and pro­claim, thank you thank you thank you for spend­ing most of my schooled years prep­ping for a big test, I am for­ever moved.

    January 14th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
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  19. Sara Bennett says:

    Dear Teacher­Bey – Thanks for your thought­ful comments.

    January 15th, 2009 at 10:29 am
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  20. Nana says:

    I think that kids aren’t allowed to be kids any­more they never have time to play or have any fun every­thing is how much home­work do you have I have grand­chil­dren in kinder­gar­den and even they have home­work this is realy sad that they can’t even enjoy life at all just do more and more school work and not have time to play I feel sorry for the kids who are not realy good stu­dents they must realy have a hard time try­ing to keep up

    January 23rd, 2009 at 7:42 pm
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  21. FedUpMom says:

    This lat­est com­ment reminds me of an exchange I read on another site:

    Q: Geez! When do kids have time to be kids any more?

    A. After they’ve fin­ished their work­sheets in a quiet, well-lit place!

    January 26th, 2009 at 9:21 am
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  22. jen says:

    All of you whin­ing par­ents need to cut it out. Not only am I a teacher, but a mother of two. If we never made kids account­able for their home­work, they’d never do it! Do you think that when your chil­dren grow up and enter the work­place that they will write a note to their boss? “Dear Boss, I am not par­tic­i­pat­ing in X, Y, and Z. You need to trust me.” Please! You are set­ting your chil­dren up for fail­ure. Read­ing logs teach them about respon­si­bil­ity. My chil­dren read each night. They log the date, min­utes read, and write about their read­ing. Then I sign it. It takes five min­utes! Research even shows that when stu­dents write about what they read they improve their comprehension.

    January 30th, 2009 at 12:25 am
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  23. Another frustrated mom says:

    Hi, to all inter­ested in the issue of edu­ca­tion and the ever-hated home­work. My sec­ond grader is over­whelmed by 2 – 3 hours worth (instead of 20-minutes pro­posed by the guide­lines) of nightly ordeal. What is most upset­ting to me that he is actu­ally con­vinced by now that he is “slow and inca­pable to meet goals”, thanks to those teachers-dictators who should not be let close to schools.
    I wish my child would be blessed with lov­ing, inspi­ra­tional, smart and truly devoted to their pro­fes­sion teach­ers, who would do their magic and make my son to enjoy his expe­ri­ence in school, to crave learn­ing more and more. How­ever so far on his rel­a­tively short path he only encoun­tered cold and heart­less adults who call them­selves teach­ers, whose only achieve­ment so far is: at age 7 he is ready to quit school.
    And to the teacher Jen, mother of 2, — my son reads very well for his age, and what is most impor­tant — he loves read­ing, and I take much more pride in that fact that in him count­ing each night the amount of pages he reads to make teach­ers as you happy.

    Mother of 3, lucky ex-student for hav­ing devoted teach­ers in my school years, from East­ern Europe, whish­ing my Cana­dian chil­dren could one day say the same about those who teach them.

    January 30th, 2009 at 5:19 am
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  24. HomeworkBlues says:

    Jen writes:

    Read­ing logs teach them about responsibility.

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»

    They don’t. They teach chil­dren that read­ing is a chore, a bore, some­thing quickly dis­pensed with to please, you, the teacher. I’ve watched lit­tle chil­dren, who had always loved being read to, who couldn’t get enough, who begged their par­ents for just one more book before bed­time, now count the min­utes and the pages of required read­ing and announce hap­pily they were done! Twenty min­utes of manda­tory read­ing is a joke. My daugh­ter could go on for hours.The manda­tory read­ing time announces to the child that read­ing is painful, oth­er­wise why just twenty min­utes? Most kids, before they are cor­rupted, would be happy to read or be read to for a lot longer but the tedious work­sheets are wait­ing, who has time for read­ing anymore?

    Besides, for young chil­dren, the par­ents are the ones fill­ing in those dreaded logs. My six year old, with a vocab­u­lary that would knock your socks off, didn’t have suf­fi­cient fine motor skills to fill out those logs in rapid time.

    And to all those teach­ers who say, we need those read­ing logs to make sure the par­ents are involved in their children’s edu­ca­tion, do you ever stop to con­sider just how insult­ing that is? If any­thing, the equa­tion should be reversed where we par­ents should be demand­ing to see what our chil­dren do at school. After all, you are the ones who get paid.

    To add, I once tried to tell my daughter’s teacher just how involved we par­ents are (respect­fully, of course), and the teacher couldn’t care less. It’s not about mak­ing sure we par­ents care enough about our children’s edu­ca­tion, it’s about check­ing off the grade book, shunt­ing home the work to the fam­ily. And how dare we ask what you did for seven hours at school today.

    Jen, you need to do some of your own home­work. On home­work, on teach­ing, on inspir­ing, on fam­i­lies. If you don’t have time, can’t be both­ered, do us all a favor and gt out of the class­room before you ruin more children.

    January 30th, 2009 at 6:47 am
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  25. FedUpMom says:

    Jen —  I could write a book in response to your com­ment, but the book has already been writ­ten. Please, read our esteemed Sara Bennett’s Case Against Home­work, and fol­low it up with the Home­work Myth by Alfie Kohn. You like read­ing, I hope?

    In the mean­time, have some respect for us par­ents who are rais­ing our kids the best we can. We want our kids to enjoy learn­ing. Yes, there are unpleas­ant chores in life that must be done. Why should we go out of our way to invent more?

    January 30th, 2009 at 10:41 am
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  26. A Teacher says:

    As a teacher — you need to under­stand that MOST par­ents don’t read or have their kids read. Do your job and we won’t have read­ing logs. Do your job and we won’t have to have con­fer­ences. Do your job and you won’t come and blame the teach­ers for your child not being at or above their edu­ca­tional level.
    Quit being lazy and sign the damn log — then we can focus on the kids who will never get the help they need from home.

    February 3rd, 2009 at 8:38 pm
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  27. A Teacher says:

    by the way FEDUPMOM, Civil Rights? Find a book about it and read it. You will actu­ally learn what that means, oh and I’ll sign your read­ing log.

    February 3rd, 2009 at 8:45 pm
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  28. HomeworkBlues says:

    Dear A Teacher;

    I’ll try to get past your snarky deri­sive atti­tude and respond respect­fully to the points you raise. And I should tell you I didn’t start out this way. When my daugh­ter began kinder­garten, I was always highly respect­ful, con­sid­er­ate, accom­mo­dat­ing, always vol­un­teered to help and deferred to the teacher as a professional.

    I am sorry to admit that as I sur­vey the long land­scape of my daughter’s school expe­ri­ence (she’s a high school junior), the num­bers of teach­ers who have rec­i­p­ro­cated that respect I can count on the fin­gers of one hand. If that. At least sev­eral of the high school teach­ers do treat me bet­ter. But I will say that I have finally found my voice. I have dis­cov­ered a way in which I can be respect­ful but firm and I don’t back down.

    There have been a few teach­ers who are worth their weight in gold and I would do any­thing for those teach­ers. They have made a true dif­fer­ence. But why are there not more? Alfie Kohn says NCLB chased the best ones away.

    Please allow me to address your con­cerns, Dear Teacher. I’m sep­a­rat­ing our com­ments by these »»»»»».

    We’ll start with your first statement:

    As a teacher — you need to under­stand that MOST par­ents don’t read or have their kids read.

    »»»»»»»»»>

    There­fore? Please google me on this blog. Read­ing is my daughter’s pas­sion. In the time she filled out the log in first grade, she could have been read­ing another book. She had book after book taken away because she was read­ing in class. She got pun­ished for not fin­ish­ing her home­work, read­ing instead. You still need proof she’s reading?

    And because Johnny won’t read, why should we suf­fer? I do not under­stand this logic. You are telling me our fam­ily needed to suf­fer through read­ing logs because the other kid didn’t read. For­give me, I’ve heard this argu­ment before and I still don’t get it.

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»

    Do your job and we won’t have read­ing logs.

    »»»»»»»»»»»
    I’m assum­ing you are address­ing the wide pub­lic out there and not me or FedUp­Mom, for exam­ple. Aren’t you lis­ten­ing? My daugh­ter would read all after­noon and evening, if she could. We would have to hide books. When you say, do your job, what do you mean? She’s read­ing! We’re doing our job! You mean as long as Johnny won’t read, you will pun­ish the readers?

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»»>

    Do your job and we won’t have to have conferences.

    »»»»»»»»»>

    I didn’t real­ize we had con­fer­ences because I wasn’t doing my job. I thought they were so the teacher could let me know how my daugh­ter was doing at school. The whole child. I knew she was an ace at aca­d­e­mics. How about the social front? Was she being teased? Was she iso­lated? Was she remem­ber­ing to turn work in on time? ADD, you see.

    I’m sorry you see the chance to meet with par­ents as a bur­den. I know you have to haul some moms and dads in because they are clue­less about their child’s edu­ca­tion. Like that dad who didn’t even know the names of his child’s teachers.

    But that’s not us! That’s not the peo­ple on this list. Aren’t you pay­ing atten­tion? We hate home­work pre­cisely because we are so deeply involved with our chil­dren. We want time with them. Just this evening, I’ve already taken away the news­pa­per twice, the novel three times and halted a polit­i­cal dis­cus­sion my daugh­ter was hav­ing with her dad. And you still don’t think I’m doing my “job?” Since when is my “job” your unpaid aide, anyway?

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»>

    Do your job and you won’t come and blame the teach­ers for your child not being at or above their edu­ca­tional level.

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»>

    My daugh­ter is sev­eral years above grade level. Do we have prob­lems? You bet. Twice excep­tional and all that. Please tell me you know what that means.

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»>
    Quit being lazy and sign the damn log — 

    »»»»»»»»»»»»
    You truly think we are lazy and that’s why we won’t sign the damn log? Oh, dear, you have not been lis­ten­ing. Doesn’t instill con­fi­dence. Didn’t we tell you we don’t want to sign logs, we want to read to our children?

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»>

    then we can focus on the kids who will never get the help they need from home.

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»

    And com­pletely neglect the ones who are.

    Respect­fully submitted,

    Sin­gin’ the Blues

    February 3rd, 2009 at 10:32 pm
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  29. A Teacher says:

    The par­ents com­plain­ing here are the very par­ents teach­ers call “heli­copter parents” — they hover and res­cue. These kids never learn respon­si­bil­ity and only hear you com­plain and thus com­plain too.

    Ask your­self — What are you teach­ing your chil­dren? What exam­ple are you set­ting? Is there more talk than action?
    Gripe all you want — but you are turn­ing the next gen­er­a­tion into lazy com­plain­ers. You think that all chil­dren need to be free think­ing all the time. Guess what — it is not like that in the real world. You can’t keep a job or func­tion in a rela­tion­ship if YOU are all you think about.

    Suck it up — and if you think home­work and read­ing logs are so bad…go back to col­lege, get a teach­ing degree, pass the state required teach­ing tests, spend a year or more on pro­ba­tion (rather than 90 days like most pro­fes­sions) and BECOME A TEACHER. Then after all of that — deal with com­plain­ing “heli­copter” par­ents, lazy irre­spon­si­ble chil­dren, gifted kids you feel guilty about because you can’t give them what they need because you are only allowed to teach to the low­est level in the class — but meet the grade level required lessons, tons of paper­work and NCLB laws, meet­ings, les­son plans, end­less IEP meet­ings, grad­ing papers, kids’ friend­ship drama, drugs, sex, sex­ual har­rass­ment, drink­ing, required pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment, watch­ing for the signs of abuse, spend your week­ends and sum­mers prepar­ing for what’s next, then top it off with one of the low­est salaries for the level of edu­ca­tion you have.

    Oh — and maybe at the end of the day — you will reflect and remem­ber the few kids you did make a dif­fer­ence in their lives.
    Then wake up and do it all again — because you love the kids and see­ing them have a break through. Or maybe in a day you will actu­ally see what you taught being applied by the kids. But — prob­a­bly not and maybe not for years to come.

    And if you don’t have the time to do that — go into pol­i­tics and make changes that will help teach­ers actu­ally use all that time to teach and send less home­work home.

    February 5th, 2009 at 2:46 am
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  30. HomeworkBlues says:

    I was afraid you wouldn’t lis­ten, that you wouldn’t read my whole post. Sadly, I was right. You didn’t read it. There­fore, I can’t respond. We seem to be talk­ing past each other.

    Also, I don’t com­plain in front of my child. This blog doesn’t show up on my history.

    February 5th, 2009 at 9:58 am
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  31. FedUpMom says:

    A Teacher — do you want your kids to enjoy learn­ing and have a pos­i­tive atti­tude toward life?

    I’m actu­ally try­ing to make your life eas­ier. If you didn’t have to assign and super­vise and col­lect unnec­es­sary home­work, you’d have more time for more impor­tant things.

    February 5th, 2009 at 10:33 am
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  32. HomeworkBlues says:

    A Teacher, I ref­er­ence you on the other post, the one about deny­ing recess. I’m putting it here too so you can see it. I hear you vis a vis NCLB.

    Home­work­Blues says:
    Com­ment­ing on FedUpMom’s post, above. We really need to be hav­ing this dia­logue, how prin­ci­pals pro­tect bad teach­ers. Because it over­shad­ows the good ones. We need to be hav­ing this dis­cus­sion in the larger soci­ety and we are not.

    Right now, bad teach­ers, a la Michelle Rhee, are the ones who can’t bring stub­born test scores up. That is NOT what I am talk­ing about here. A Teacher from the other post, we are in your cor­ner about how cor­ro­sive NCLB is and the havoc is has wreaked on your pro­fes­sion. You need to be get­ting on Susan Ohanian’s web site and sign up for her almost daily list serve.

    No, I’m not talk­ing about rais­ing test scores. When the entire empha­sis is not to inspire and teach but to raise test scores, what does that do for the child whose scores are already high?

    I’m talk­ing about teach­ers who don’t under­stand chil­dren or fam­i­lies, who don’t seem to enjoy the very mate­r­ial they are teach­ing, pun­ish because it’s all they know, and as an expert on edu­ca­tion, a friend, a teacher char­ac­ter­ized it to me, are petty dic­ta­tors. These are the ones we need to be get­ting rid of, lest they give the entire pro­fes­sion a black eye.

    February 5th, 2009 at 10:43 am
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  33. Sara Bennett says:

    Dear Teacher,

    I dis­agree that we are “heli­copter” par­ents. We are teach­ing our chil­dren to think for them­selves and to take charge of their edu­ca­tion and learn­ing. At the same time, we also teach them to be respectful.

    I under­stand your frus­tra­tions at all of the require­ments imposed on teach­ers and they come through loud and clear in your writ­ing. Per­haps you can find some other teach­ers who share your frus­tra­tions and join with them to voice your con­cerns. There are teach­ers around the coun­try who stand up against the demands placed on them by stan­dard­ized tests, who refuse to admin­is­ter state tests, who won’t assign home­work regard­less of their school’s reg­u­la­tions, who find a way to engage every stu­dent in the class, regard­less of the child’s level, etc. No one is say­ing it isn’t hard. But just as par­ents need to stand up for their chil­dren, so too do teach­ers, admin­is­tra­tors, and every­one else who comes into con­tact with children.

    And if we hate read­ing logs because we see that they are mak­ing our chil­dren dis­like read­ing, then why shouldn’t we let the teacher know. There are plenty of kids who will duti­fully fill in the read­ing log (or their par­ents will do it for them). But if our research shows no edu­ca­tional value to them, and our kids don’t like them, then we have a duty to step in.

    February 5th, 2009 at 11:40 am
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  34. Anonymous says:

    If the schools want kids to read, then they need to pro­vide them with more library time. That is what got me read­ing when I was a kid — the abil­ity to go to the library sev­eral times a day. Instead, libraries are being cut.

    When I had assigned sum­mer read­ing, me, the kid who would fill a shop­ping bag full of books sev­eral times a week at the library, I pro­cras­ti­nated and wouldn’t read any­thing because I HAD to read those three books, most of which I had read before the high school sum­mer read­ing requirements.

    February 20th, 2009 at 11:59 pm
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  35. JDL says:

    I can’t resist adding another ironic home­work story to the mix:

    At my daugh­ter “Rosie’s” con­fer­ence sev­eral years ago, with fur­rowed brow the teach­ers told me that Rosie tended not to adhere to the direc­tions. For Exhibit A, they showed me a pic­ture of a shield divided into four parts. They explained that each quad­rant was be com­pleted in a cer­tain man­ner, and at the bot­tom of the page, the child was to write a sen­tence explain­ing each. Well! Instead of writ­ing the sen­tence at the bot­tom, Rosie gave her char­ac­ters speech bal­loons so they could explain the design for them­selves. Not only that, but other stu­dents like the idea and, to the teacher’s dis­may, used it them­selves. Per­haps some of you rec­og­nize this pop­u­lar activ­ity. It was a per­son­al­ity shield.

    I quickly deter­mined that, if the teach­ers didn’t see the irony, it was pos­si­ble that point­ing it out to them might not do much to advance Rosie’s sta­tus. And, over­all, Rosie adored one of the teach­ers. I sup­pose our chil­dren learn some resilience, and they should be well pre­pared for a future on the assem­bly line.

    Maybe we should con­sider start­ing an online Hall of Fame or Museum of Stu­pid School Projects.

    I do think there are many teach­ers who are truly try­ing their best and have the best of inten­tions, but just as we tend to par­ent as we were par­ented, we “teach” as we were taught. Our sys­tem of edu­cat­ing our chil­dren is in need of a trans­for­ma­tion. Cul­ture change takes a long time.

    February 25th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
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  36. Sara Bennett says:

    Maybe we should con­sider start­ing an online Hall of Fame or Museum of Stu­pid School Projects.

    Did you know there’s a sec­tion of Chap­ter 6 in The Case Against Home­work called “Card­board, Glue, and Pasta: The Home­work Hall of Shame.”

    That doesn’t mean I can’t start one here. Send me your sto­ries. As soon as I have a few, I’ll post them.

    February 25th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
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  37. HomeworkBlues says:

    I love it. The Home­work Hall of Shame. I remem­ber that chap­ter well.

    Yes, let’s start a Museum of Stu­pid School Projects!

    February 25th, 2009 at 9:41 pm
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  38. Heather says:

    response: “But few teach­ers have time for that. Chances are, your child’s teacher uses the log sim­ply as a way of check­ing to be sure you enforce the read­ing require­ment or as a record of what’s been read.”

    I think that is a very unfair state­ment. The books that the chil­dren in my class read are ones that I send home, and they are on their read­ing level. I don’t grade them on whether or not they read the book each night. We are requried by our BOE to do read­ing logs, so I feel as though I am mak­ing it attain­able by send­ing home the books that are appro­pri­ate for each stu­dent. I spend a lot of time going over the infor­ma­tion and read­ing and respond­ing to the par­ent feed­back about their child’s read­ing. Then I tar­get some of the skills that the par­ents noticed, along with what I notice and base Indi­vid­ual lessons and activ­i­ties around those skills. So I take offense to that com­ment, because I do spend a lot of time look­ing them over, talk­ing to the child about the book, and yes, many of them will say no, they didn’t like the book. We talk about why and they are able to choose other books, books that I pur­chase, and take them home. (ps. I have been teach­ing 8 years and I do not make much over 40,000, with a par­tial masters.)

    February 26th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
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  39. Heather says:

    to Kat:
    I was so upset when I read your post. In your case, I agree that the read­ing log was inap­pro­pri­ate. Your son’s teacher should have made the read­ing attain­able for him, and although I don’t believe in reward­ing those who read and those who don’t, he should have been rec­og­nized for his efforts and acheive­ments. Teacher’s such as that, give teacher’s like myself and the mil­lions like me out there a bad name.
    I hope that you know that most teacher’s would not do that, and that meet­ing the kids where they are com­fort­able is what we strive to do.

    February 26th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
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  40. Heather says:

    Home­work­blues: “Now the dippy ques­tions are added, who is your favorite char­ac­ter, what do you think will hap­pen next, do you like this book? I love that last ques­tion. No, I don’t like this book, that’s why I’m read­ing it. I asked the teacher why my daugh­ter was being asked to fill out these logs. Answer. We need evi­dence she is reading!

    I swear pub­lic school was put on this earth for my amusement”

    I don’t think ask­ing those ques­tions is a good indi­ca­tion of whether or not they are read­ing, evi­dence, as you put it.
    Unfor­tu­natly teach­ers are in a tough situ­taion in many school dis­tricts. stan­dard­ize test­ing, yes I said it…the dreaded words. Teacher’s dis­like them as much as par­ents do, I can say this with assur­ance. We feel they are too difficult,unfair, timely (we could be doing other fun things!) We feel they are an uneeded stress. We AGREE; how­ever, we are forced to give them and like them, kids are forced to take them, and those “dippy” que­si­tons are on them. I guess you could say that we would like to keep our jobs as well…because, con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, we can get booted out of our posi­tions faster than you can bub­ble in a cir­cle.
    Let me end by say­ing that not all test­ing is bad. There has to be a con­crete way to assess chil­dren, and there are very appro­pri­ate ones out there, that do not ask those rote questions.

    February 26th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
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  41. Heather says:

    I think a happy medium must be met. If home­work is given and it serves a log­i­cal and func­tional pur­pose, then I don’t see where the com­plaint is. If home­work were given on a need to give basis, which means not every evening, not on week­ends, and not on breaks would that be a sat­is­fac­tory solu­tion?
    I feel like this web­site brings to light an impor­tant and very debated issue. I have enjoyed read­ing the posts, and although I will debate my feel­ings against many of them, I see a lot of logic, feel the frus­tra­tion and agree with many points being brought up.
    I also feel as though a lot of com­plaints are being voiced, but where are the solu­tions? This web­site is a chance to come up with solu­tions and make dif­fer­ences. The poten­tial is here to brain­storm ways to change the sys­tem, to work together and come up with plau­si­ble solu­tions.
    Not all teach­ers are bad, not all Pub­lic Schools are bad, the gen­er­al­iza­ton needs to be curbed. How can any­thing be accom­plished when the valid­ity of teacher’s is being squashed. What teacher would want to work with par­ents who trash the proffes­sion and belit­tle the career? Rec­og­nize the good ones, or become one of the good ones.
    Be proac­tive, rather than reactive.

    February 26th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
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  42. FedUpMom says:

    Heather — I have never seen home­work assigned on a “need to give” basis, at either of the schools my daugh­ter has attended (one pri­vate, one pub­lic). What I see is stan­dard boil­er­plate home­work assigned because the teacher must assign something.

    When you say “need to give”, are you open to the point that dif­fer­ent kids have dif­fer­ent needs? So, for instance, the child who is com­pletely pro­fi­cient at adding frac­tions shouldn’t be sent home with the same work­sheet as the child who doesn’t under­stand how to add frac­tions. I haven’t seen home­work assigned this way either.

    In your dis­cus­sion of how you work with your stu­dents on read­ing, I would like to add that some kids are intrin­si­cally moti­vated and independent-minded. Kids like this need their own intel­lec­tual space where they can think their thoughts in pri­vate. For them, the con­stant dis­cus­sion between par­ents and teach­ers about what they’re read­ing and how well they’re doing can become an intol­er­a­ble intru­sion, and turn them off to the read­ing that might have become a real source of joy.

    Yes, there are good teach­ers out there. But the sys­tem is so deeply messed up that even good teach­ers wind up doing things that are not in their stu­dents’ best inter­ests, for instance stan­dard­ized tests.

    February 27th, 2009 at 9:37 am
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  43. HomeworkBlues says:

    FedUp­Mom, you put it so suc­cinctly and clearly, I have noth­ing to add! Kudos.

    But here I am, adding! Heather, my child is visual spa­tial. She doesn’t learn words by painstak­ingly look­ing up each one in the dic­tio­nary and then copy­ing it down on a piece of paper. This exer­cise alone took two hours in fifth grade. But this was a kid with a vocab­u­lary close to that of a col­lege pro­fes­sor who loved to read. Why tor­ture her? That Mon­day exer­cise became an exer­cise in tor­ture. For daugh­ter and par­ents alike. Why put her through that?

    It may be hard for a teacher to under­stand why some tasks that come eas­ily for some chil­dren are tor­ture for oth­ers. Mainly because that’s not how her mind learns and this child knew it. She was smart enough to under­stand it was a waste of time, time bet­ter spent writ­ing a novel.

    Don’t get me wrong. I see plenty merit in look­ing up words. When we home­schooled, when she wasn’t hit over the head with all that copy­ing, she sud­denly announced she wanted me to blan­ket the house with dic­tio­nar­ies. So that when she read and came across a word she didn’t know, she’d look it up. With­out all that cajol­ing, I con­stantly caught her look­ing up words! The beauty of unschool­ing! Kids are hard wired to learn. Lose the dire mes­sage (it’ll only get worse in mid­dle school!), stop scar­ing them straight, I couldn’t imag­ine ever say­ing that year, if you don’t do your words, you don’t get to go out­side, and you’d be amazed at what chil­dren can accom­plish in the right environment.

    Dur­ing the home­school year, on days we weren’t run­ning out on a field trip, we started each morn­ing with a refresh­ing walk. I threw in all sorts of hard words, we made sen­tences together, we laughed, we walked, we are both pas­sion­ate about words.

    What hap­pened to edu­ca­tion today? Why did it cease being fun? Heather, I know you’ll blame it on NCLB and you are preach­ing to the choir. But why didn’t your union do some­thing, why didn”t you sign the Edu­ca­tor Round­table peti­tion? Why aren’t you doing some­thing about this oppres­sion? As Sara says, it’s hard, but you have to do something.

    Every time my daugh­ter showed pas­sion in some­thing at that pub­lic ele­men­tary school, along came a teacher to dash it. She cre­ated a mas­ter­piece? She got chided, if you hadn’t worked so hard on X, Y would have been in on time. Never com­pre­hend­ing that X cap­ti­vated her and Y did not. And it’s not just a mat­ter of pick­ing and choos­ing. Yea, I know kids have to learn to be respon­si­ble. It’s that she threw her all into X because she’s cre­ative and in some­where in the haystack of end­less busy work, was a dia­mond she could sink her teeth into.. Isn’t that what ele­men­tary should be all about? Excit­ing, inspir­ing and build­ing life long learners?

    This is a kid who eats words, who lives for words and read­ing. One day she just sprin­kled the word quin­tes­sen­tial into a sen­tence when she was eleven and I almost cried inside. What we were doing was working!

    Okay, Heather, you can’t take my daugh­ter on a two hour walk through the frozen woods to dis­sect the finer points of Shake­speare. But I can! If I pri­vately tell you my daugh­ter learns words best in con­text, through end­less read­ing, believe me! Couldn’t you whis­per, if you don’t tell any­one, I’ll excuse your daugh­ter, she clearly doesn’t need it, bet­ter you two should take that walk.

    But her home­work takes up every spare sec­ond. She’s nei­ther walk­ing with me and learn­ing words nor ben­e­fit­ing from the wrong kind of home­work. After all that time expended, how much has she learned? How much does she retain on six hours sleep in high school? But her fifth grade teacher just scoffed and spewed some old canard about fol­low­ing direc­tions and being a fail­ure at life later if she didn’t lis­ten to Big Bad Teacher. Why do teach­ers think the real world oper­ates like school?

    It took my daughter’s eye doc­tor to tell her what a gift she had, the gift of read­ing. My ten year old needed glasses that year and clutched a book as she was being exam­ined. The doc­tor noticed it and remarked, “your vora­cious read­ing is not the best thing for your eyes and now you are myopic. But what a gift you have, the abil­ity to sus­tain atten­tion this way, to read the way you do! Never stop reading!”

    It took an eye doc­tor to make this point. All her teacher ever did that year was pick on her faults, my daugh­ter never once got any recog­ni­tion for her ver­bal abil­i­ties. Mind you, I didn’t need an award or a cer­e­mony or points. I hate that. We don’t need Accel­er­ated Reader or acco­lades. What she needed des­per­ately but never got was, “I see you love to read. Tell me what books you like!“
    That’s ALL she needed, that’s it, a kind word from an adult at the school, a con­nec­tion, validation.

    But no. Because dare I say it, this teacher couldn’t imag­ine read­ing being this enjoy­able. She saw it as a chore and her raisen d’etre was not to inspire or light a fire but to beat the child into com­pli­ance. Every teacher must want to be remem­bered. Oh, we remem­ber her, alright. But not in the way she would have intended.

    February 27th, 2009 at 11:04 am
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  44. HomeworkBlues says:

    FedUp­Mom wrote above:

    Yes, there are good teach­ers out there. But the sys­tem is so deeply messed up that even good teach­ers wind up doing things that are not in their stu­dents’ best inter­ests, for instance stan­dard­ized tests.

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»»>

    This is the sem­i­nal point. Yes, Heather, there are some good teach­ers left. But the sys­tem is so deeply messed up. We here have some excel­lent ideas on how to fix it. But the sys­tem is so intrin­si­cally sick, so mired, so enmeshed in bad pol­icy and harm­ful prac­tices that even good teach­ers are caught up in the dogma.

    Heather, I am sad that if you so much as veer from the tight script handed you, you will lose your job. But I am sad­dest of all for the chil­dren, their grace and beauty as they stare at you, who come into this world inno­cent and with each day, dis­cover the won­der­ful world around them. When they are lit­tle, they want to know and lean every­thing, their ques­tions are inces­sant, they never stop play­ing, ask­ing, ques­tion­ing, learn­ing, they are fas­ci­nated about the world around them.

    They could be our future, they bring us hope and new­ness and with each fresh gen­er­a­tion, we have in our power to nur­ture these amaz­ing lit­tle human beings, to lis­ten and guide them, we offer expe­ri­ence, they offer hope and new­ness, and we work together to cre­ate a brave new world (not to sound corny).\

    Instead, today, for some odd rea­son that still escapes me, we do every­thing in our power to drum it out of the unique gifts they bring the world. That so many chil­dren are dis­af­fected from their learn­ing today, that they are not per­mit­ted to play in the woods because it’s more impor­tant to sweat over yet another tedious work­sheet, that they have lost their sense of won­der and dis­cov­ery, that so many chil­dren are diag­nosed with depres­sion, anx­i­ety and ADD, that so many young peo­ple become cyn­i­cal, who see each year of school as merely a step­ping stone to the next year, that is the true tragedy in this tale.

    Yes, Heather, there are some good teach­ers. You are one of them. I once asked a friend in utter des­per­a­tion, how on earth did these women ever become teach­ers? My friend responded. I truly believe many but not all, enter the pro­fes­sion because they love chil­dren. Bu after some years, the sys­tem com­pletely chews them up. They go from nice to vile.

    And those are the good ones, Heather. We need to acknowl­edge here that there are many many bad ones, the ones that never started off ide­al­is­tic and pas­sion­ate in the first place. The ones who went into the field, not because they love and under­stand chil­dren and how they tick, but because they couldn’t think of any­thing else to do. There are plenty of those and as long as prin­ci­pals keep pro­tect­ing the awful ones, they will con­tinue to give your pro­fes­sion a black eye.

    If some of us are frus­trated and angered by some teach­ers we’ve encoun­tered, it’s not because we are being need­lessly whiny but because we have good cause.

    February 27th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
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  45. Anonymous says:

    In con­clu­sion, the best way to sum up today’s edu­ca­tional cli­mate comes from a 17-year old home­school girl, as she explains why she left a GT pro­gram after 7th grade;

    “I never worked so hard, to pro­duce so much, to learn so little.”

    February 27th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
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  46. Heather says:

    home­work­blues:
    yes, we defi­natly can agree on the fact that if a child is able to add addi­tion home­work is not nec­es­sary, if a child mas­ters all of their spelling words on monday’s pre-test then they should not have the home­work or need to take the post test, and if a child is con­sis­tently writ­ing sen­tences or solv­ing word prob­lems accu­ratly then there is no need to be redun­dent, but I do feel that there is a need to enrich and build. For exam­ple if they can add money, then sug­gest activ­i­ties such as food shop­ping and see­ing who can add together the two prod­ucts faster, or play­ing a game with count­ing the change at the store…things like that…mandatory no, but sug­ges­tions that, per­haps some par­ents wouldn’t think of, I don’t see a prob­lem with that.
    I think that redunency will fos­ter bore­dom, which can lead to all sorts of issues that aren’t nec­es­sary or good for any par­ties involved.

    February 28th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
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  47. Johnny Tubbs says:

    I admit, I only read ½ of the posts.

    First, I am a high school teacher that hates giv­ing home­work. When I did exactly what “A Teacher” said to do (changed careers and jump through all the hoops and become a teacher) I promised myself I would not do an assign­ment unless it was some­thing that sat­is­fied me intel­lec­tu­ally. After seven years of teach­ing at three of the bet­ter schools in Cal­i­for­nia I can hon­estly say that 70 – 75% of the kids I have in class lack the intel­lec­tual endurance to be stay inquis­i­tive. At the first sign of con­fu­sion they quit. Most do not want to learn­Ev­ery task I ask them to under­take is greeted with the fol­low­ing ques­tions, “How much is this worth? When is it due? Do we have to do it?” Finally, in frus­tra­tion a few weeks ago, I decided that the entire week would be spent fill­ing out dit­tos and look­ing up words and writ­ing down def­i­n­i­tions. I was sadly shocked at how much they LIKED the new cur­ricu­lum. Their sen­ti­ments could be summed up with “Thank good­ness we didn’t have to think. We could just do the work and get the points.”

    I could not have been more bummed out. When I asked a col­league about it, their response was, “they have been pre­con­di­tioned to dit­tos from grade school. I’ll bet that was your eas­i­est day of teach­ing ever.” Yep. It was.

    I work hard (and am known for) cre­at­ing cre­ative thought pro­vok­ing course work. If a stu­dent comes up with an idea on their own, a dif­fer­ent way of approach­ing the work, I always encour­age them to go for it. 9 times out 10, this same kid com­pletes noth­ing. Their ini­tial enthu­si­asm lacks the aca­d­e­mic dis­ci­pline to fin­ish the task. A few years ago I learned an impor­tant les­son. Stu­dents need a goal and a rigid frame­work to be cre­ative. Yes, a rigid frame­work, aca­d­e­mic para­me­ters that allow the stu­dent to pro­duce orig­i­nal work a spec­i­fied “rules.”

    I actu­ally learned this from two sources. First, a stu­dent brought in some of his uncle’s art work. It was a 3 dimen­sional dragon, per­haps 14 inches longs and 3 inches wide that was con­structed com­pletely from gum wrap­pers. I was in com­plete shock. It was breath­tak­ing. Turns out, his uncle landed in prison 8 years ago and, with zero prior art expe­ri­ence, started to cre­ate it, and a few other pieces, from the mate­r­ial avail­able. If he was given all the art sup­plies in the world, he would sim­ply not been able to cre­ate any­thing so amaz­ing. He would have tried this and that, run into a cre­ative obsta­cle, then quit and moved on to some­thing else. But, given a strict set of mate­r­ial and the choice of occupy your mind or go crazy, he pro­duced some­thing great. The sec­ond les­son was that Shake­speare did the same thing with his son­nets. The strict form required a amaz­ing about of lin­guis­tic creativity.

    In the end, I see it this way. If you cared enough to spend 15 –20 min­utes read­ing and reply­ing to infor­ma­tion on this post, you are not the prob­lem. Your chil­dren and stu­dents will be fine. You are all doing the right thing.

    BTW, I have two super-genius chil­dren of my own. My wife and I both teach and I am com­pletely fine with my daugh­ter writ­ing in her read­ing log. I ask her to do one thing: con­nect your read­ing with a real world or real life events. She spends no more then five min­utes reflect­ing and writ­ing then we talk about it, I sign it and she is fin­ished with her respon­si­bil­ity. The younger one reads to us nearly every night and we sign her read­ing log when she is done.

    My advice? If you and your child do not want to do the home­work, then don’t. BUT, do not expect your child to receive straight A’s or ask the teacher to excuse them from the work. Edu­ca­tion is about learn­ing. Some­times learn­ing to com­plete an unde­sir­able task IS the education.

    I love teach­ing, but I hate ½ of the crap I have to do each day. But, that is the job. If I want a pay­check, I do it.

    April 29th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
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  48. Johnny Tubbs says:

    I just reread my own post. Sorry fo the typos! I should have been more care­ful. Hope­fully your chil­dren will have a bet­ter teacher than me! :)

    April 29th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
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  49. FedUpMom says:

    *****************
    Edu­ca­tion is about learn­ing. Some­times learn­ing to com­plete an unde­sir­able task IS the education.

    I love teach­ing, but I hate ½ of the crap I have to do each day. But, that is the job. If I want a pay­check, I do it.
    ******************

    You know, I’m not against kids com­plet­ing unde­sir­able tasks. I make my daugh­ter put her laun­dry away and prac­tice scales on her viola, even though these are not fas­ci­nat­ing projects and she doesn’t always want to do them. But I am con­fi­dent that these tasks are worth doing. The laun­dry needs to be put away so we don’t have moun­tains of laun­dry around the house, and she needs to prac­tice scales to improve her viola playing.

    What I object to is the unde­sir­able task that has no ben­e­fit. The read­ing log does noth­ing but make my daugh­ter dis­like read­ing, which she oth­er­wise loves. Noth­ing good comes of it that would make it worth the unpleas­ant­ness it brings.

    If we could reduce the unpleas­ant crap you have to do, you could be a bet­ter teacher, right? If we can reduce the unpleas­ant, and unnec­es­sary, tasks our kids do, they can be bet­ter students.

    BTW, my daugh­ter told me that for the lat­est book, the teach­ers said that there’s another read­ing log, but it’s optional for the kids who did all the read­ing last time (which of course includes my daughter).

    April 29th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
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  50. FedUpMom says:

    ******************
    After seven years of teach­ing at three of the bet­ter schools in Cal­i­for­nia I can hon­estly say that 70 – 75% of the kids I have in class lack the intel­lec­tual endurance to be stay inquis­i­tive. At the first sign of con­fu­sion they quit. Most do not want to learn­Ev­ery task I ask them to under­take is greeted with the fol­low­ing ques­tions, “How much is this worth? When is it due? Do we have to do it?”
    *******************

    That pretty much says it all. This is where the good stu­dents, who did the home­work we’re object­ing to in ele­men­tary and mid­dle school, wind up by high school. These were once bright, curi­ous kids who wanted to learn about their world. Now they’re a pack of paper-pushing drones. Wouldn’t you like to see that change? If we can give kids their child­hood back maybe you’ll see inquis­i­tive, engaged high school students.

    April 29th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
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  51. PsychMom says:

    To FedupMom…that’s just what I was thinking…

    To J Tubbs.….Doesn’t that sound like burned out kids to you? And they don’t treat uni­ver­sity profs any dif­fer­ently a few years later. I don’t envy your job at all. I would be totally bummed too. We’ve got to stop train­ing young chil­dren to work to please adults. We reward effi­ciency, obe­di­ence and conformity…and this is the result:

    How much do you want, where and when do you want it and how much do I get paid. Can I leave now?

    April 29th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
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  52. PsychMom says:

    I have a few words about read­ing logs, while we’re on the subject.

    You know, when a per­son goes to see a ther­a­pist to try to con­trol or stop a par­tic­u­lar unwanted or unde­sir­able behav­iour, one of the things a ther­a­pist will ask the per­son to do is to keep a diary or log of what they do so that they pay closer atten­tion to what leads to that behav­iour, or sim­ply mon­i­tor how often it does hap­pen. It’s a tech­nique designed to stop or change a behaviour.

    Guess what?.…human beings hate to track their behav­iour. The suc­cess rates of diaries are very low and the usual pat­tern is that some­one will keep track for a few days or a few weeks and then they aban­don it. One of two things hap­pen. The intense self-focus itself causes a change and the mon­i­tor­ing is no longer needed because the behav­iour is gone. Or the task becomes oppres­sive because one is not chang­ing one’s behav­iour and who wants to be reminded of con­tin­u­ous errors?

    The bot­tom line…keeping minute track of behav­iour causes the behav­iour being tracked to either decrease or not change at all. Aside from that, doing it is boring.

    So if the goal of read­ing logs is to mon­i­tor read­ing, the task of mon­i­tor­ing it becomes less and less inter­est­ing as time goes by. Kids would be bet­ter off not keep­ing track. What is the point anyway?

    April 29th, 2009 at 3:08 pm
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  53. FedUpMom says:

    That’s an inter­est­ing point. I’ve heard of peo­ple on diets keep­ing “eat­ing logs” the same way. It dis­cour­ages snack­ing because it’s such a has­sle writ­ing every­thing down.

    So it’s really no sur­prise that read­ing logs dis­cour­age reading.

    April 29th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
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  54. Anonymous says:

    If you think you can do bet­ter then you become a teacher. Stop the com­plain­ing and change the system.

    June 11th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
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  55. HomeworkBlues says:

    Anony­mous, we are try­ing. And I’ve never said teach­ing is easy. But being a pub­lic school par­ent these days is even harder.

    We ARE try­ing to change the system.Sometimes just one child at a time. Meet­ing with your teacher and then telling her politely that you’ve read both home­work books and stud­ied the research and it only con­firms what you already sus­pect, that home­work in ele­men­tary is a huge waste of time. As a result, your child will no longer do home­work, instead she will read and write nov­els all after­noon. You the par­ent will decide what is best for her.

    Com­plain­ing IS the first step. Anger dri­ves peo­ple. Com­pla­cency doesn’t change a thing.

    June 11th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
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  56. Anonymous says:

    When stu­dents don’t get prac­tice at home or dur­ing the sum­mer stu­dents have dif­fi­culity recall­ing infor­ma­tion. Even dur­ing the school year because of state man­dated stan­dards there is no time for mas­tery so home­work is to prac­tice what was taught dur­ing the day. There are par­ents that do care a lot about thier child’s school­ing. Then there are a lot more par­ents that care but don’t have the time of day to put in any effort towards thier child’s school­ing.
    Some stu­dents after school is done for the year come back beca­sue there is some­one will­ing to care and teach them. Home­work maybe point­less for those who are active in their child’s life but mean­ing to those who don’t have some­one to read to at home.

    June 12th, 2009 at 10:43 am
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  57. HomeworkBlues says:

    Anony­mous writes:

    When stu­dents don’t get prac­tice at home or dur­ing the sum­mer stu­dents have dif­fi­culity recall­ing information.

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»»

    I’m not sure what you mean, anony­mous. I’ve been one of the most out­spo­ken crit­ics of home­work over­load on this blog. (and I sup­port ZERO home­work in ele­men­tary, min­i­mal to none in mid­dle and in high school, I would like an ami­able coop­er­a­tive dia­logue, where in a per­fect uni­verse, par­ents, teaches and admin­is­tra­tors would work together for the good the CHILD, not the insti­tu­tion and devise a plan whereby every minute is used wisely dur­ing the day with study halls built in and home­work assigned that makes sense, is utterly nec­es­sary once you’ve elim­i­nated the fluff and test prep and end­less tests, and keeps stren­u­ously to a limit. If the stu­dent goes over the limit, that’s it, she stops. And Har­ris Cooper says that limit is, AT MOST, two hours. And as the stu­dent writes here, not two hours the teacher can do but two hours by stu­dent stan­dards, a stu­dent who has already put in a very long day, com­plete with com­mute, chores, home respon­si­bil­i­ties and out­side activ­i­ties, which by the way, col­lege insists she needs, so don’t blame her for want­ing a life out­side of homework).

    You are posit­ing here that home­work equals prac­tice. Right there I have to stop you. What I have seen over the years is home­work is an exten­sion of the cur­ricu­lum. Time, for all sorts of rea­sons, was not used well in school (too much time eaten up by end­less quizzes and tests, too much time spent assign­ing and col­lect­ing home­work, for exam­ple, leav­ing pre­cious lit­tle time to learn and write). It’s not practice.

    But let’s say for the sake of argu­ment home­work IS prac­tice. But then you are imply­ing that chil­dren wouldn’t do any­thing aca­d­e­mic or worth­while on their own. To you, no home­work means no prac­tice, means no learning.

    Not in my house. And I ven­ture to guess not in many homes rep­re­sented here. As I’ve said a thou­sand times on this blog (new­com­ers, I know you are busy, but please take the time to read some early premises here), here’s what my daugh­ter did instead of home­work. And it breaks my heart to admit I even­tu­ally cajoled her to get back to her home­work. If only I hadn’t, she might have fin­ished and pub­lished that novel in 5th grade. I should have gone with the courage of my con­vic­tions and pulled her out to home­school that year.

    In ele­men­tary, all my child wanted to do when she came home was read and write. Yes, read and write!

    My daugh­ter was perus­ing my book­shelf one after­noon in 5th grade and out tum­bled Wuther­ing Heights. Intrigued, she picked it up and was spell­bound. She didn’t put it down until she was fin­ished. At age 10! When she wasn’t read­ing, she was writ­ing a novel.

    Anony­mous, that’s not prac­tice? If not, then what is? Mind­less work­sheets that were bor­ing and taught her noth­ing? What about all the things we gave up? Scrab­ble is not prac­tice? Bak­ing and mea­sur­ing is not prac­tic­ing math? Puz­zles and leg­gos don’t hone visual spa­tial abil­ity? Muse­ums don’t teach his­tory or sci­ence? What kind of non­sense do teach­ers feed us, that with­out home­work our kids’ brains will shrivel up.

    Oh, you want her prac­tic­ing what she learned that day. Why? I can under­stand prac­tic­ing piano. You have a once a week les­son. Of course you have to prac­tice! I can under­stand prac­tic­ing ten­nis and swim­ming. But they were just in school! Fif­teen spelling words come home, copy the def­i­n­i­tions from the dic­tio­nary unto a sheet of paper.

    Never mind that my daughter’s brain doesn’t work that way. She learned words through all her read­ing, that’s how she makes con­nec­tions. Copy­ing was just a tedious exer­cise she grew to detest and I wor­ried inces­santly that this early reader and writer would lose her love of lan­guage arts.

    Are you talk­ing prac­tice or are you talk­ing learn­ing? Because let’s be care­ful here. As long as edu­ca­tors con­vince us our chil­dren need all this home prac­tice, what’s to stop them from mediocre class instruc­tion? After all, they can do noth­ing all day, send it home, demand it get done, call it prac­tice to guilt mom and dad, and come out smelling (or spelling) like a rose.

    For the mil­lionth time I ask, they get paid, we do the work, just who is the greater fool?

    P.S. Re-read your sen­tence. You left out a comma. I’m begin­ning to won­der just who needs all that prac­tic­ing here.

    June 12th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
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  58. HomeworkBlues says:

    Anony­mous, you hit the nail on the head. Aha! So that is why it’s all sent home! You write: “Even dur­ing the school year because of state man­dated stan­dards there is no time for mas­tery so home­work is to prac­tice what was taught dur­ing the day. ”

    Code: we didn’t get it done dur­ing the day, so you do it at night. THAT’S the rea­son. It’s not prac­tice! It’s sur­vival for the teacher. With­out home­work, NO evi­dence of learn­ing and tan­gi­ble accom­plish­ments could ever be proved!

    My daugh­ter was in a gifted/talented cen­ter in 7th grade. I remem­ber the chutz­pah of the sci­ence teacher. Well, at least she was hon­est, gotta hand her that.

    As stated, it was 7th grade. The fol­low­ing year was the BIG test­ing year. End of 8th grade, there was going to be a state man­dated writ­ing essay. Ooooh, scary, huh? Oh, no, our stu­dents will have to write, we’ll be judged, oh, me, oh, my, what shall we do?

    School must have been scared straight. Because they began doing prac­tice tests for the prac­tice tests (I kid you not) and then a slew of prac­tice tests all year which I pre­sume con­tin­ued into 8th grade but we didn’t stick around long enough to find out how school keeps invent­ing more and more ways to waste my child’s education.

    Well, one school day began with a prac­tice writ­ing exam (my daugh­ter slept in. I decided that was a far more mean­ing­ful use of her time. She has a doc­u­mented sleep insom­nia, dif­fi­culty falling asleep). The prac­tice test gob­bled up two hours of the school day. Instead of just going straight to period three, the school decided to run the entire sched­ule (it was not block, every sub­ject every day). It was a trun­cated ver­sion so each class ran about ten min­utes. Gee, a lot of learn­ing must have hap­pened that day.

    Here’s what the sci­ence teacher posted on Black­board that after­noon: The state tests took up thirty min­utes of our class time so please do all the work at home. She then asked the kids to down­load the work­sheets and even begin a sci­ence exper­i­ment at home.

    I was LIVID. Four years later, I still am. The tests ate up my class period, teacher implies. I have a cur­ricu­lum to meet, sorry, fam­ily, I’m send­ing it home. I never asked for these tests in the first place. It’s a democ­racy but was it put out on a vot­ing ref­er­en­dum? Did you get a say? Me nei­ther. But the school does it any­way. It’s not enough they brazenly waste my daughter’s pre­cious school time, but now they insist the fam­ily has to make up the dif­fer­ence. That inci­dent alone was proof pos­i­tive it was time to home­school because as I saw it, the only place left to get a decent edu­ca­tion was at home.

    I’m not a rad­i­cal. I’m a nor­mal mother who adores her child and wants her to learn and be inspired and who just had enough. I’m happy to engage in a sin­cere com­mit­ted dia­logue with teach­ers, prin­ci­pals, cen­tral staff, school board. But when, where? No one has ever asked my opin­ion. Only my effort.

    June 12th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
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  59. High School Soph--oh wait I'm a junior says:

    Ques­tion to the gen­eral read­er­ship of the site:
    Seems like we get rel­a­tively few teach­ers com­ment­ing on this site from what I’ve seen so far. My dad is an ele­men­tary school sci­ence teacher cur­rently, was a col­lege eng­lish teacher, and works at the K-8th school I attended. He’s in the mid­dle of writ­ing eval­u­a­tions right now (no grades – YES!!!) so he’s super busy (think like 500+ thought­ful, con­sid­ered words for every kid in 3 or 4 grades!) HOWEVER, I might be able to get him to come onto this site and talk about stuff from a teacher’s (and a parent’s) per­spec­tive. Maybe even I could get him to write a post…Anyway, this would have to be in a few weeks once he’s done with his evals, but do y’all think that if I could get him to do it that it would be interesting/informative/useful?

    P.S. sorry about your classes Johnny Tubbs, just know we’re not all like that and we all didn’t USE to be like that…

    June 13th, 2009 at 1:44 am
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  60. Anonymous says:

    Like I said you are par­ents that care a lot and have time to do this. I wish there were more par­ents like those that are writ­ing would be more involved, how­ever there are more par­ents that have to worry more about pay­ing bills rather than edu­ca­tion.
    And please don’t even think about talk­ing about the way one writes because if you do look back at other blogs there are huge mis­takes, but I don’t see you say­ing any­thing about those that sup­port your views.
    There are stu­dents in upper grades that don’t know their times tables and that should have been mas­tered in 3rd grade. Teach­ing goes both ways home and school. But not all are like you that can home­school their child oth­ers have to sup­port fam­i­lies on very little.

    June 13th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
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  61. Sara Bennett says:

    Dear High School Soph – oh wait I’m a junior:

    I hope your dad does take a look at the infor­ma­tion on stophome​work​.com and he’s wel­come to sub­mit a guest blog entry. If you take a look at the cat­e­gory “Teach­ers Speak Out,” you’ll see that teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors do visit and com­ment. And, in fact, there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t hear from at least one teacher or school board mem­ber or prin­ci­pal. Most edu­ca­tors are deeply con­cerned about too much home­work, stan­dard­ized test­ing, bad (and best) prac­tices, etc.

    June 15th, 2009 at 8:05 am
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  62. linda says:

    As a teacher, I believe in home­work to reen­force con­cepts learned in school. For project based learn­ing, stu­dents need to break projects into smaller units, which should be done out­side of class with a degree of independence.

    As for read­ing logs, they should not be con­cerned with the num­ber of pages or other triv­ial things. Rather it should be a reflec­tive jour­nal of the read­ers’ reac­tion to the thing/s being read.

    Too many of our chil­dren are not read­ing. Cur­rently, I am teach­ing a high school class of juniors and seniors who proudly announce, “I don’t read” and have not read one entire book out­side the con­fines of a class­room. So I ask what are teach­ers to do?

    Home­work, yes, play, yes, project, yes.
    I don’t expect par­ents to do my job, but I also don’t expect them to under­mine me when I give an assign­ment. Let’s talk before we disagree.

    July 29th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
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  63. PeggyinMA says:

    Linda (above) – I too do not know what teach­ers are to do when there are some stu­dents who don’t read, but the Book Whis­perer (linked by Sarah on this site) and many other lit­er­acy experts do.
    What are teach­ers to do about some par­ents who don’t sup­port edu­ca­tion? Isn’t this a soci­etal issue?
    Such stu­dents and their fam­i­lies are every­where, among those who are priv­i­leged and those who are not.
    I do know, as a par­ent, that clamp­ing down by giv­ing all stu­dents one-size-fits-all out-of-school assign­ments is not the answer.
    I’m no edu­ca­tion expert, but it’s become crys­tal clear to me that I can­not stand by and watch the love of learn­ing dri­ven out of my chil­dren by dead­en­ing projects, mind-numbing read­ing logs and inane AR quizzes.
    There are other, more thought­ful and mean­ing­ful approaches to reach­ing non-readers.

    July 29th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
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  64. PsychMom says:

    To Linda the Teacher

    I can sense your frus­tra­tion, but I gotta ask.…what on earth do read­ing logs have to do with learn­ing to read? Think of the task you’re sug­gest­ing and apply it to your­self for the next plea­sure book you pick up. Do you want to sum­ma­rize your thoughts on paper about every chap­ter? It’d be like get­ting on a train and being required to get off at every stop and report­ing to the con­duc­tor about how you liked the last leg of the trip. It’s tedious, nobody cares and it takes all the fun out of the trip.

    If we treat kids like this it is no sur­prise that you have juniors and seniors sit­ting in front of you say­ing they don’t read. It’s sup­posed to be fun!!!!
    Yes, it’s a life skill in North Amer­i­can soci­ety, but it MUST start out as a plea­sure­able activ­ity or else kids won’t do it.

    July 30th, 2009 at 2:13 pm
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  65. Anonymous says:

    Isn’t it funny how all the par­ents on this post are engaged in their child’s edu­ca­tion, look­ing for info­ma­tion to bet­ter their child’s expe­ri­ence or even on the com­puter read­ing about read­ing logs and com­ment­ing on them.

    Guess what? Like many other rules, laws, soci­etal cus­toms and pro­ce­dures, read­ing logs were born from a need or basic prob­lem. Why do we have DUI laws? Because peo­ple were not drink­ing repon­si­bly. Read­ing logs were thought up not because teach­ers love check­ing min­utea, trust me we have plenty of other things to worry about, but because there is a major­ity of stu­dents or par­ents who do not engage in lit­er­ate behav­ior at home. So the result, is every­one has to pay. Read­ing logs are not evil. As a mom, I don’t love fill­ing them out but my sons have learned that they are respon­si­ble and just like lunch duty or bus duty, or laun­dry or pay­ing our bills, it’s a part of life. Your chil­dren will not ben­e­fit from you telling them they will not have to fill out the log. This will only under­mine the teacher and give your child a sense that pro­ce­dures do not need to be fol­lowed if they are too tedious.

    August 1st, 2009 at 9:05 am
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  66. FedUpMom says:

    Anony­mous — the point is exactly that I don’t want my kids to view read­ing in the same light as doing the laun­dry. Doing laun­dry is a chore. Read­ing is a pleasure.

    As for the DUI anal­ogy, sup­pose the police came to your house and said, “Your next-door neigh­bor got caught DUI. There­fore we are revok­ing your driver’s license.” That’s what you’re telling me about read­ing logs. “Some­body else’s kids never read. There­fore your kid has to fill out a read­ing log.” Huh?

    And actu­ally, my child did ben­e­fit when I told her not to do the log. The follow-up con­ver­sa­tion I had with the teach­ers resulted in them get­ting rid of manda­tory logs for every­one. Of course, this is at a pri­vate school where teach­ers are much more likely to lis­ten to a parent’s complaints.

    August 2nd, 2009 at 1:05 pm
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  67. Anonymous says:

    Good luck to all of the par­ents out there who enable their chil­dren to not fol­low the rules. When they are 25 and didn’t feel it nec­es­sary to fol­low the law, you can pay for their lawyer fees or visit them in jail.

    I am a teacher and have assigned read­ing logs in the past. I got on here to see what oth­ers thought and felt about them. I do agree that it isn’t fair to those who love to read and do it no mat­ter what…I am lean­ing towards not assign­ing them this year.

    What con­cerns me is the enti­tle­ment atti­tude in soci­ety today. I don’t like this…therefore I won’t do it and I am going to tell my 8 year old child they don’t have to do it. It is ok to dis­re­spect the adults in his or her life…as long as it isn’t mom or dad.

    August 3rd, 2009 at 7:15 pm
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  68. FedUpMom says:

    Anony­mous — do you really think my child will be in jail at age 25 because I got her out of doing a read­ing log at age 11? That’s quite a stretch.

    My daughter’s edu­ca­tion is sup­posed to ben­e­fit her. If an assign­ment comes home that I know would be bad for her, by caus­ing her to dis­like read­ing and cre­at­ing stress in our home, there’s noth­ing “dis­re­spect­ful” about me speak­ing up.

    I think it would be more dis­re­spect­ful to just fake the log, which is actu­ally an eas­ier and more pop­u­lar solu­tion. But if I speak up, I can have a real part­ner­ship with the teach­ers, and make changes that ben­e­fit all the kids.

    August 3rd, 2009 at 9:10 pm
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  69. Anonymous says:

    I totally agree with speak­ing up to ben­e­fit your child. I would do the same for my child. All I am say­ing is that in our soci­ety today, there is such dis­re­spect for not just teach­ers, but adults and author­ity of any type. This is a gen­eral state­ment, not directed specif­i­cally to you, kids need to learn that life is not always going to be per­fect and we don’t always get what we want. If we are con­tin­u­ally mak­ing excuses for them not to do some­thing, how do they learn the life les­son that some­times there are cer­tain things we just have to do not because we like it, but because it is the rule or the law.

    I look at this issue as a much broader topic, I believe. I am look­ing at it like we need to fol­low the rules, if that rule has been imple­mented by the peo­ple in charge. Yes, there can be dis­cus­sion, but in the mean­time we fol­low the rule rather than dis­re­gard it and dis­re­spect the process in which it became a “rule.”

    There are many things I have changed in my teach­ing as my chil­dren have gone through school, that as a par­ent, I now see it dif­fer­ently, but to blast teach­ers who get up every­day to go to work and their pas­sion is to make other children’s lives bet­ter is just another rea­son our edu­ca­tion sys­tem is such a mess. I don’t know one teacher who enjoys being told over and over again that you are not good enough or you didn’t do enough or all you are doing is ruin­ing my child’s life.

    At some point teach­ers are going to have to be treated like pro­fes­sion­als. We work hard, have gone to col­lege, con­tinue to take classes to renew our licenses, yet we are placed in the low­est tier of use­ful­ness. We are the experts when it comes to teach­ing and run­ning a classroom.

    August 3rd, 2009 at 10:50 pm
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  70. FedUpMom says:

    Anony­mous — I think we can agree that we need a mutu­ally respect­ful, sup­port­ive rela­tion­ship between teach­ers and par­ents. This is a goal we can all work towards. I under­stand that teach­ing is a dif­fi­cult, demand­ing, usu­ally unap­pre­ci­ated job (hmm … sounds like parenting!)

    “We need to fol­low the rules, if that rule has been imple­mented by the peo­ple in charge.” Here I think we’re get­ting to a real dif­fer­ence in phi­los­o­phy. I have noticed that many of the peo­ple who go into teach­ing have an author­i­tar­ian approach — they’re in charge, they give the orders, and any­body who ques­tions what they’re doing gets tagged as disrespectful.

    That’s not my approach or my phi­los­o­phy. I think rules should be ques­tioned, espe­cially in the con­text of school, where, again, I would like to stress that it’s about the child’s edu­ca­tion. What I’ve seen many times in school is that the goal of mak­ing the chil­dren obey the rules becomes the whole focus of school life.

    In the con­text of home­work, some peo­ple think that obe­di­ence is more impor­tant than learn­ing. I just don’t agree with this. If home­work doesn’t help my child learn, I’m not going to make her do it just so she can have the expe­ri­ence of being made to do some­thing. If I’m going to make my child do some­thing, it has to be some­thing I believe is worth doing.

    A final thought. You are a teacher, you want to be in com­mand of your class­room. I’m a mother, I want to be in com­mand of my home life. If a teacher assigns home­work that inter­feres with my fam­ily life, that’s dis­re­spect­ing my authority.

    August 4th, 2009 at 10:34 am
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  71. Anonymous says:

    I will con­cede to your last com­ment. I just hope you don’t dis­agree with what I do IN the class­room because that is where I am in control.

    August 4th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
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  72. Anonymous says:

    Whoa! That last two com­ments say it all. It’s about CONTROL. Con­trol, coer­cion, whichever term you choose to use, does not facil­i­tate learning.…whether the learn­ing takes place at home or in school.

    August 5th, 2009 at 12:35 am
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  73. FedUpMom says:

    You know, I com­pletely agree with you. I don’t like to use the argu­ment about how I should be in con­trol of my home life, but it seems to be the only argu­ment that works sometimes.

    August 5th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
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  74. AnonymousToo says:

    Yes, I’m a teacher, too, and I have to com­ment here. Firstly, there are idiot teach­ers as well as idiot par­ents. Just as some par­ents use bribery and extrin­sic rewards to get their kids to do some­thing, some teach­ers assign “busy work” that has no real edu­ca­tional value. I think both acts may be ini­tially to pre­serve adult sanity(and we all know some­times that’s just nec­es­sary), but they can quickly descend into a ter­ri­ble habit. Ulti­mately adults end up with a self­ish, rewards-oriented kid who hasn’t learned any­thing. I see a lot of those.

    My stu­dents have lots of choices in terms of read­ing in the class­room. I have a vast per­sonal library from which they may choose a book. If they don’t like a book they’ve cho­sen, they can exchange it. Dur­ing the read­ing period they may sit any­where they like (even lie on on the floor…provided they are read­ing and not nap­ping). We have lively dis­cus­sions that pro­mote deeper think­ing about the material.

    This is all designed to grow and love for read­ing AND to improve skill. But not every child is a nat­ural or vora­cious reader, and not every par­ent is sup­port­ive and will­ing to hold a child account­able for home­work, or any­thing. In my mind, read­ing (and other cur­ricu­lum areas) must not be some­thing that is asso­ci­ated only with school. It’s impor­tant that stu­dents see these skills and con­cepts are impor­tant out­side the class­room, too. So, my stu­dents may read news­pa­pers and mag­a­zines dur­ing their 20 min­utes of home read­ing. The idea is that with enough choices, skill build­ing, and sup­port, read­ing is not a “chore.” The log is also an exer­cise in account­abil­ity, which is an impor­tant con­cept to inter­nal­ize in fourth grade. It’s nec­es­sary for sur­vival in society.

    I assign home­work pru­dently, but it always includes 20 min­utes each of read­ing and writ­ing. Again, the sub­ject of the read­ing and writ­ing is the student’s choice.

    I should also add here that a child who reads a lot and reads “flu­ently” is not nec­es­sar­ily com­pre­hend­ing the mate­r­ial in equal quan­tity. I’ve had kids who can read aloud per­fectly books that are way above grade level. But ask them a few key com­pre­hen­sion ques­tions (espe­cially those that demand an infer­ence), and they can’t do it. My read­ing home­work assign­ments include prompts to get stu­dents to ques­tion, infer, eval­u­ate and yes, pre­dict. All of these skills get a kid to have a dia­log with his or her book. That is con­scious reading.

    Home­work­Blues says,

    “For the mil­lionth time I ask, they get paid, we do the work, just who is the greater fool?”

    I find that really dis­turb­ing. Do you mean that you plan and imple­ment units, lessons, and assess­ments in SEVEN con­tent areas? Do you crit­i­cally review all the district-sanctioned mate­ri­als and decide where their fail­ures are, and how you’re going to make up for them? Do you make dull mate­r­ial engag­ing by invent­ing games, songs, projects and activ­i­ties? Or do you com­pletely depart from the text, and research, plan, and deliver mate­r­ial from scratch (mean­ing nada, noth­ing, only your own brain), and do you com­plete this on your own time (i.e., week­ends and nights in your class­room), because God knows you have absolutely no time to dur­ing the school day to do it? Do you decide how to parse ridicu­lously dense mate­r­ial so that it is com­pre­hen­si­ble to a ten year old? Are you given a newly adopted math text (with five dis­tinct teacher man­u­als) and told to imple­ment it in 36 hours? Do you move charts and stu­dent work on and off the walls in your class­room daily, not to make it pretty, but so that stu­dents have con­cept sum­maries they can refer to, and can take pride in their work?

    Do you man­age three kids with ADHD, two with speech and lan­guage dif­fi­cul­ties, two with vision prob­lems, among your 30? And are you com­pelled by law to make cer­tain acco­mo­da­tions so that they receive equal access to their edu­ca­tion? Oh, and don’t for­get the four oth­ers with behav­ior prob­lems for which they have no excuse.

    Are you man­dated by your dis­trict to admin­is­ter state PRACTICE tests four times per year, before the actual state tests? Do you fight the dis­trict tooth and nail in order to elim­i­nate them because they serve only to stress and frighten your stu­dents? Still, does your job secu­rity hinge, not on sev­eral assess­ments through­out the year (via projects, pre­sen­ta­tions, writ­ten assign­ments, and other means that address dif­fer­ent learn­ing syltes), or a sin­gle, lengthy test two months BEFORE the end of the teach­ing year?

    I am rel­a­tively new to the pro­fes­sion (4 years), and am in my for­ties. There is no way I could have entered in my twen­ties, as most do. It is over­whelm­ing, and if you haven’t expe­ri­enced some bumps and bruises and just plain mileage before­hand, you’re going to be exhausted, dis­ap­pointed, and close to out of your mind. I quote the NY Times: “The National Com­mis­sion on Teach­ing and America’s Future has cal­cu­lated that nearly a third of all new teach­ers leave the pro­fes­sion after just three years, and that after five years almost half are gone.”

    It is a very dif­fi­cult job, and so the sug­ges­tion that par­ents are doing the work and teach­ers are just get­ting paid is so far off the mark, it isn’t even funny. It is igno­rant and, iron­i­cally, the very thing that ded­i­cated, tal­ented teach­ers are try­ing to get their stu­dents to over­come everyday.

    August 8th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
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  75. FedUpMom says:

    The pri­vate school that both my kids will be attend­ing for their sec­ond year has as its motto, “Learn­ing with Joy.” They don’t always live up to it, but at least it’s under­stood as their goal.

    When I read these mes­sages from teach­ers, I am struck by what a joy­less enter­prise school has become.

    When you say, “my kids choose what books they want to read … we have lively dis­cus­sions”, I’m think­ing “Great!” That’s just what I would want for my kids.

    And then you start dis­cussing home­work, and our paths diverge.

    When you assign 20 min­utes of read­ing plus 20 min­utes of writ­ing for a 4th-grader to do at home, do you under­stand that you are dic­tat­ing the entire home life of a child with two work­ing par­ents? Many kids don’t even get home till 6:00. Then they need din­ner and a bath, and it’s not unusual for a 4th-grader to be in bed at 8:00. Where does your 40 min­utes fit in to this scenario?

    “Not every par­ent is will­ing to hold her child account­able for home­work?” You bet your sweet nelly we’re not, and for good rea­sons. If we can see that the home­work has no effect but to make our child hate learn­ing, why should we force the child to do it?

    “The log is an exer­cise in account­abil­ity.” I don’t see any value in mak­ing a child “account” for her read­ing. The more a child feels that school is a series of hoops that she has to jump through, the less actual learn­ing goes on. The more aware she is of the teacher (or her own par­ents!) look­ing over her shoul­der, demand­ing an account, pass­ing a judge­ment, the less will­ing she will be to engage in real learn­ing for its own sake.

    Your descrip­tion of the hard work you do as a teacher is a ter­rific adver­tise­ment for home­school­ing. So much of your energy goes into con­trol­ling class­room behav­ior and try­ing to fend off clue­less bue­ro­crats. How much energy is left over to inspire our kids?

    When you have kids who read aloud flu­ently but then can’t answer com­pre­hen­sion ques­tions, you need to remem­ber that read­ing aloud for a teacher is a pres­sured sit­u­a­tion. It’s not at all the same as read­ing to your­self. I expect my com­pre­hen­sion goes down when I read aloud too. Also, a child doesn’t have to under­stand every word of what she’s read­ing to get some­thing out of it. When I was a kid, I was con­stantly read­ing stuff that went way over my head. It gave me some­thing to strive for.

    August 9th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
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  76. FedUpMom says:

    “Read­ing must not be some­thing that is asso­ci­ated only with school.” Okay, I agree with you. But when you send home read­ing assign­ments, writ­ing prompts, and read­ing logs, you’re not send­ing the mes­sage that read­ing hap­pens out­side of school.

    Instead, you’re send­ing the mes­sage that school is every­where. Home becomes an annex of school. The child’s par­ents become the teacher’s unpaid assis­tants, enforc­ing the teacher’s demands. The bottom-line mes­sage is that read­ing can only hap­pen within the school con­text, which has now engulfed the home as well.

    August 9th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
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  77. PsychMom says:

    No ques­tion that teach­ing is a dif­fi­cult job…the chal­lenges that face pub­lic school teach­ers are large, but I still don’t see why read­ing home­work is required in such a reg­i­mented way. Who says 20 min­utes does any good? Why not 10, why not 15, why not 22 min­utes? It’s so arbi­trary. And yes, I agree with FedUp­Mom in that the work­ing fam­ily who gets home between 5:30 and 6pm, with chil­dren under 12, does not have 20 min­utes, let alone 40 for home­work. Where is the child sup­posed to get the brain power to do a reg­i­mented task? Where is the par­ent sup­posed to get the where-with-all to make them sit down and do it?

    Don’t teach­ers get any infor­ma­tion dur­ing their edu­ca­tion process about nor­mal growth and devel­op­ment of children?

    August 10th, 2009 at 11:24 am
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  78. Robyn says:

    Aaaah­h­hhh, read­ing logs!
    I’m sad that so many posts are blam­ing teach­ers. Has it not occurred to any­one that teach­ers hardly get to decide any­more what they give for home­work, how they teach, and what they cover? I teach 5th grade and am basi­cally told exactly what con­tent I will teach, the meth­ods I will use to teach it, and a rigid pac­ing guide out­lin­ing exactly when it will be taught.

    Teach­ers didn’t invent read­ing logs to pun­ish stu­dents or par­ents. Read­ing Logs and home­work are often dic­tated by school admin­is­tra­tors who are fol­low­ing state and dis­trict man­dates (try­ing to meet fed­eral stan­dards to receive edu­ca­tion fund­ing). One of our read­ing stan­dards says stu­dents should read a cer­tain num­ber of books. (Researchers deter­mined that to be “good read­ers” stu­dents need to read at least a mil­lion words a year which winds up being about 25 books for flu­ent readers.)

    Work­ing with par­ents who refuse to sign their child’s home­work is but one small annoy­ance in a long list of job haz­ards and obsta­cles that teach­ers agree to put up with, sim­ply because they love teach­ing your children.

    For some per­spec­tive on the vil­lain­ous teacher theme accru­ing in pre­vi­ous posts…As a teacher, I get paid to work 36 hours a week, but typ­i­cally put in an extra 15 to 20, free of charge. I spend this extra vol­un­teer work time on the fol­low­ing: grad­ing your child’s papers, plan­ning inter­est­ing lessons which can be inte­grated into the frame­work of lessons I’m required to teach, and keep­ing up with doc­u­men­ta­tion and account­abil­ity issues, such as com­mu­ni­cat­ing with par­ents. I also am given $100 at the begin­ning of the school year to pur­chase class­room neces­si­ties, but typ­i­cally spend an addi­tional $1000 of my own money per school year.

    For the record, I HATE home­work. assign­ing it, col­lect­ing it, grad­ing it. How­ever, as a teacher, I don’t get to choose. I am required by my school to assign cer­tain things, one of which is read­ing and log­ging books at home. Our school does it because it is a dis­trict expec­ta­tion. Our dis­trict does it because it is a state stan­dard. It is a state stan­dard because our state relies on fed­eral fund­ing for education.

    August 10th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
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  79. PsychMom says:

    So, you’re basi­cally down­load­ing your stress and saying…“look, I have to suf­fer with this sys­tem so you and your kids do too”.….

    If you don’t believe in it..why do you keep push­ing it? Why do you argue with the par­ents who don’t sign read­ing logs? Carry on with­out it, or sign it for them if someone’s sig­na­ture is sooooooo necessary.

    And it rots my socks when I hear about the extra money teach­ers pitch in every year…I’m sure that $1000 bucks is low balling it for most teach­ers. I know, I know…you love the kids but this is ridicu­lous. I don’t want you to spend 1000 of your own money…I want the school sys­tem to do it’s job. How can you feel good about your job when you have to spend extra hours and your own money to do it? And if teach­ers keep prop­ping up this sys­tem, how will it ever change?

    August 10th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
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  80. PergyinMA says:

    I find it incred­i­bly sad that teach­ers post­ing here do not feel they are able to speak up when they believe some­thing is wrong with the instructions/standards handed down to them. The argu­ment seems to come down to: “We are just fol­low­ing orders.” Par­ents are speak­ing up because we see the neg­a­tive effects on our chil­dren, and we are com­pelled to say “This is wrong.”

    August 11th, 2009 at 11:10 am
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  81. FedUpMom says:

    How is it “teacher-bashing” for a par­ent to com­plain about some­thing the teacher hates too? We’re all on the same side here! If the teach­ers hate assign­ing and col­lect­ing home­work, and the par­ents hate enforc­ing it at home, and we all know the kids hate hate hate hav­ing to do it, why is it still going on?

    If the dis­trict is hand­ing down require­ments, just find a way to fake them out. I guar­an­tee you that a high pro­por­tion of the home­work you’re col­lect­ing is fake already.

    August 11th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
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  82. PsychMom says:

    Yes, Fedup Mom, you are right about that..all the busy work amounts to a hill of beans.…This is all a sham and a shame. And what a com­plete waste of time.

    I’m read­ing and re-reading “The Ele­ment” by Ken Robin­son this sum­mer. It’s keep­ing my strength up.

    I had a con­ver­sa­tion with another Mom recently about the home­work issue and miss­ing school for fam­ily trips etc…and off the top of my head I said, “Didn’t you know?..The less time kids spend in school, the bet­ter they do?” But isn’t it true? Get­ting the kids out of school, and into expe­ri­ences, field trips, com­mu­nity involve­ment is far bet­ter for them than most class­rooms. I’m begin­ning to think that the whole idea of edu­ca­tion in North Amer­ica has been corrupted.

    August 11th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
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  83. Sara Bennett says:

    On the prob­lems with schools, I highly rec­om­mend The Global Achieve­ment Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Sur­vival Skills Our Chil­dren Need – And What We Can Do About It.

    August 11th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
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  84. DisappointedTeacher says:

    I am truly dis­ap­pointed that the post here gen­er­al­ize the use­less­ness of read­ing logs. I give home­work to my stu­dents and I give them a read­ing log. I teach in a Title 1 school. For those of you who do not know what that means, it’s sim­ply this: Any Title 1 school has a stu­dent pop­u­la­tion of 35% or more chil­dren that are at or below the poverty level. The school where I teach has a poverty pop­u­la­tion so high that EVERYONE is reciev­ing a free breakfast/lunch. How does this relate to home­work and read­ling logs? Sim­ply put, so many of our children’s par­ents don’t know what they should be doing at home to help them get the extra prac­tice they need to be suc­cess­ful. I give my stu­dents rewards for suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion of their logs and we even have time in the class­room to share infor­ma­tion about the books they read. Being a mother of 2 boys, I know how hard par­ents work at home with their kids on home­work. Those of you who feel it is only a teacher’s job to cre­ate learn­ers should feel ashamed. You are the parent’s that make it harder for teacher’s do their job. It is everyone’s respon­si­b­lity to make sure our chil­dren are learn­ing and devel­op­ing good habits and learn­ing about responsibility.

    August 16th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
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  85. PsychMom says:

    Dis­ap­pointed Teacher:

    What do you respond to your fel­low teach­ers who have dumped read­ing logs?

    Are they neg­li­gent too? I think they have rec­og­nized that read­ing logs do noth­ing to enhance read­ing abil­ity and that there are prob­a­bly 100 other ways to rein­force respon­si­ble behav­iour. Clock­ing in and clock­ing out on read­ing is a waste of time if you want to grow a love of reading.

    August 17th, 2009 at 8:28 am
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  86. Anonymous says:

    It’s moms like fed-up that our mess­ing with our edu­ca­tional sys­tem.. Why should the entire edu­ca­tion of your child rest with the teacher?.…You think we do it for the money; you pay your babysit­ters bet­ter! What’s the big deal with hav­ing to ini­tial your child’s log? Wouldn’t it be nice if you actu­ally inquired about what they were read­ing and had a con­ver­sa­tion with them while you did it? Finally, wouldn’t it be per­fect if the chil­dren could see that their folks and teach­ers were on the same page and wanted the best for them…an EDUCATION!!!

    August 17th, 2009 at 8:29 am
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  87. PsychMom says:

    And with regard to your com­ment about it being “only a teacher’s job to cre­ate a learner”, I’m bring­ing you a learner every­day. I would like to think that she comes home one too, not some mind­less, obe­di­ent, “tick­ing all the boxes cuz the teacher said we have to” kind of child.

    August 17th, 2009 at 8:33 am
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  88. a teacher says:

    Fell across this web­site and don’t have time to read all the responses but did read the first 25. I totally under­stand the drive for no home­work. I give NO HOMEWORK and am a mid­dle school lan­guage arts teacher. We do our work in class in a vari­ety of ways. The only home­work they have is to read on a daily basis self-selected nov­els. I dont hold them to a cer­tain read­ing level either — some teach­ers do and there are pros and cons. I don’t do read­ing logs or make stu­dents take AR (acce­larated reader) tests because I’m not sure they prove that the stu­dent read. You can fake those forms and pass those tests with­out read­ing a sin­gle thing. Instead I give them 10 choices (such as book talks to the class, or other lit­tle projects) to show they’ve read the book and give them a chance to talk about it. I’m curi­ous how you would all feel about that? I’m not sure 1st graders could do that, but mid­dle school definitely!

    I’m not sure where i“m going with this, but I would like to ask every­one not to be so harsh on the teach­ers. I can tell you from my per­spec­tive at my school, WE are held ACCOUNTABLE for every­thing these kids do and we are often asked to prove to higher ups that these kids have been read­ing and as lame as it is those read­ing logs appease them. I’m the kind of teacher who would argue the non­sense, but there is a lot of pres­sure from local school offi­cials and up through the gov­ern­ment to pro­vide evi­dence and back every­thing up with paper trails and often things like read­ing logs are man­dated by those who really don’t know any bet­ter. So just con­sider being a bit nicer to the teach­ers who are often stuck in the mid­dle too and many par­ents play no role in their stu­dents’ lives, so they may be try­ing to force par­ents to be a bit involved (although not in a fun or excit­ing way so I doubt it would do any good).

    August 17th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
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  89. PsychMom says:

    Thanks to “a teacher”…

    It’s been said count­less times in many places in this site, for the most part, the par­ents writ­ing here do take very mea­sured, rea­son­able approaches to teach­ers. The harsh­ness is a result of frus­tra­tion, when hav­ing it said 5 ways nicely and being ignored, gets you nowhere.

    It’s hope­ful to hear from teach­ers like you. I’d still like to know what Robyn and Dis­ap­pointed teacher from their posts above would respond to your treat­ment of home­work. And why can you “get away with” giv­ing no home­work when so many teach­ers say “I have no choice”? It’s the dis­par­ity that bog­gles my mind. I think it has a lot to do with the strength of the teacher and con­fi­dence in their own abil­i­ties. Am I wrong?

    August 17th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
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  90. a teacher says:

    I do agree that it has a lot to do with the strength and con­fi­dence of the teacher. Not nec­es­sar­ily years of expe­ri­ence. Some schools really don’t give you a choice on the sur­face, but if you can prove with research that your method works then they can’t say no. Many teach­ers can accept school has changed.

    I have friends who teach at other schools, in other dis­tricts, and in other states and I can tell that not all schools have the same poli­cies. My school is going to giv­ing “I” for incom­plete instead of zeroes — not sure how that will work at the end if the I’s haven’t been com­pleted still. I think home­work is ok if it is lim­ited and it is not teach­ing a new topic — if given it should rein­force what was taught in class that day. Maybe 5 prob­lems to prac­tice the math con­cept, etc. I just find in Eng­lish most home­work we’d give besides to read could just be done in class.

    I think there does need to be some mean­ing­ful home­work and not nec­es­sar­ily every night or in every class. I think it teaches respon­si­bil­ity and that school and learn­ing con­tin­ues on beyond school hours, but it’s out of con­trol how much is expected of just Kinder­garten stu­dents now! Much of that is man­dated from the state and in regards to pres­sure to “pass” the tests they’ll be tak­ing in a few years. Kids need to be kids too!! I was a for­mer Drama teach­ers and due to cut backs have to go back to Eng­lish, but my plan is to make it as enrich­ing as pos­si­ble and expand their minds and make them inter­ested in learn­ing again after years and years of work

    August 17th, 2009 at 8:32 pm
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  91. PsychMom says:

    Thank you A Teacher for acknowl­edg­ing what most of us par­ents are rec­og­niz­ing and try­ing to change. We say we value chil­dren in North Amer­i­can soci­ety but I don’t see much proof of it. For the most part, chil­dren are viewed as small adults but their needs and abil­i­ties are very dif­fer­ent. Soci­ety seems to want chil­dren to grow up fast, so we don’t have to pay oth­ers to care for them, and so they can get out and make money them­selves. As if that’s the whole point of life and edu­ca­tion. All of it is lined with a belief that more is bet­ter and the faster the better…and for small chil­dren, in most cases, exactly the oppo­site is true.
    Edu­ca­tion should be about enhance­ment of one’s life, of fig­ur­ing out who you are and where you fit in the Big Puz­zle. The kids are not learn­ing to read because it’s a state or provin­cial require­ment. They are learn­ing to read for the love of read­ing and being offered the chance to explore worlds that they oth­er­wise wouldn’t see if they couldn’t read. That’s how you make edu­ca­tion fun and excit­ing. We need to bring won­der back.

    August 18th, 2009 at 8:39 am
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  92. Illinois teacher says:

    Psy­ch­Mom,

    I just wanted to com­ment on your state­ment, “They are learn­ing to read for the love of read­ing and being offered the chance to explore worlds that they oth­er­wise wouldn’t see if they couldn’t read.”

    I wish, with all my heart, that that state­ment was 100% true. How­ever, chil­dren explore worlds through the inter­net, TV, and movies. Tech­nol­ogy is a won­der­ful thing, how­ever it has taken over the writ­ten word. It used to be that our mind was the best TV you could have. Now, we have other ‘cre­ative minds’ that show us how it looks, feels, etc…

    We do need to bring won­der back. I wish I knew how…

    August 19th, 2009 at 12:00 am
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  93. Illinois teacher says:

    Wow. Ear­lier, I peeked at the last few posts, just out of curios­ity. Then, my curios­ity peeked, and I read many, many more.

    Frankly, I am sur­prised that there are any teach­ers left in the pro­fes­sion after read­ing some parent’s posts. I am a teacher, and I would love to respond in an unpro­fes­sional man­ner, but then I real­ized that we’re not looked upon as pro­fes­sion­als, so would my com­ments matter?

    So, I fig­ured, why not? So here it goes…

    I was appalled at one parent’s bla­tent defi­ance of her child’s teacher’s poli­cies. Teach­ers work so very hard to try and please everyone-by every­one I refer to stu­dents, par­ents, com­mu­nity, dis­tricts, super­in­ten­dents, prin­ci­pals, co-workers, state board of education…shall I name more?

    We are not per­fect. We also have our own lives and fam­i­lies. We do not want to spend hours com­ment­ing on every home­work assign­ment every night! I have another FULL time job, plus I wait­ress on the week­ends just so I can sur­vive, in addi­tion to my main job…teaching your chil­dren. So, in the midst of my jobs, I am plan­ning lessons accord­ing to the state stan­dards, mak­ing them fun and excit­ing for your chil­dren, and prepar­ing my defense for the bat­tle of me vs. par­ents when you aren’t happy with me and all my hard work.

    Please, tell me where you work so I may come into your office and crit­i­cize your every move, and all your effort you put into your job. You’ll love it, I promise. It’s the best feel­ing when your pas­sion for your job is reduced to nothing.

    Am I angry? You bet. Get your teach­ing degree. Teach for one year, then tell me how you feel about the edu­ca­tional process.

    August 19th, 2009 at 12:32 am
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  94. Illinois teacher says:

    I am just sick about these com­ments. Some of us teach­ers DO try to fight the system-then we’re labeled “troublemakers.”

    I have par­ents who would have my head on a plat­ter if I didn’t give daily home­work. I have stu­dents who, if I didn’t assign work that evening,said, “But I’ll have noth­ing to do tonight…I’ll be bored or have to watch my brother/sister!”

    I’m done, Home­work­Blues, FedUp­Mom, and the oth­ers who hate teach­ers and the sys­tem. Yes, you are mak­ing changes, but I won­der if these changes you are forc­ing are for the bet­ter­ment of mankind or are just mak­ing future adults even more stub­born and self­ish than they are now. You win. Are you happy now? You made one more teacher who used to love her life– despite the dif­fi­cul­ties– into one who now hates her job.

    Oh, did you notice that I had writ­ten LIFE instead of job…well, that was until you ruined it. I’ll get over it, though, because the chil­dren mean more to me than any­thing. You? Well, I’ll be respect­ful to you because I was raised to be that way. But…I don’t have to like you. You don’t have to like me, either-but, wait a minute…oh, that’s right, you already don’t like me. You stereo­typed me with the ALL the teachers-the good and the bad.

    August 19th, 2009 at 1:12 am
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  95. FedUpMom says:

    Illi­nois teacher — if you’ve got some par­ents demand­ing home­work, and oth­ers refus­ing to do it, here’s a rad­i­cal thought — how about let­ting the par­ents decide what works for their family?

    At the begin­ning of the year, you could send a let­ter to the par­ents stat­ing that the most edu­ca­tional activ­ity their child could pos­si­bly do at home is read (this is backed up by numer­ous stud­ies.) Then you could send home a sug­gested read­ing list, mak­ing it clear that this is just a jumping-off point for those who would like some sug­ges­tions. You could offer to send home math work­sheets for par­ents who are inter­ested in doing these with their children.

    Think of how much time and aggra­va­tion this would save! You wouldn’t have to deal with us par­ents and our “bla­tant defi­ance”. That’s an amaz­ing descrip­tion — think of the premises that under­lie it.

    Premise 1.) Teach­ers have the absolute right to tell par­ents what to do in their own homes with their own children.

    Premise 2.) Any refusal on the part of par­ents is an attack on the teacher.

    “Please, tell me where you work so I may come into your office and crit­i­cize your every move, and all your effort you put into your job.”

    You know, I don’t need to tell you where I work so you can crit­i­cize me. You already know! In my role as par­ent, I work at home. You are already try­ing to boss me around and tell me what to do with my child, and you are already crit­i­ciz­ing my every move, and all the effort I put into my job. If I com­plain that your demands are unrea­son­able, you think I’m “bla­tantly defi­ant.” If I say that home­work is tak­ing up too much of my child’s time, you say it’s my fault that I signed her up for gym­nas­tics. If I say that the home­work is tedious and causes my child to hate learn­ing, you tell me to suck it up because life is painful and unpleas­ant and the sooner my child under­stands this, the better.

    Hon­estly, home­school­ing is look­ing bet­ter all the time …

    August 19th, 2009 at 9:56 am
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  96. Matthew says:

    Illi­nois Teacher, I have to respond to some of your comments:

    “but then I real­ized that we’re not looked upon as professionals” — I used to view teach­ers as pro­fes­sion­als until I had kids in school and real­ized just how few teach­ers have any pas­sion or curi­ousity for their area of exper­tise or abil­ity to actu­ally engage chil­dren. Sev­eral times I’ve had to cor­rect infor­ma­tion taught by teach­ers that was 10 – 20 years out of date. One of my kids has attempted to refute incor­rect infor­ma­tion (“Every­one needs 8 glasses of water a day!”) and been rudely shot down. So many classes are con­sid­ered bor­ing by my kids, yet engag­ing teach­ers can make even the unlike­li­est of classes fas­ci­nat­ing. So yes, I no longer view most teach­ers as professionals.

    “We do not want to spend hours com­ment­ing on every home­work assign­ment every night!” — that’s exactly the point par­ents here are try­ing to make. We don’t want our kids to be doing hours of home­work every night. We don’t want to be stuck teach­ing every night when assign­ments come home that weren’t taught in school.

    “Please, tell me where you work so I may come into your office and crit­i­cize your every move” — There’s a crit­i­cal dif­fer­ence here that you’re miss­ing. 1) I am my child’s par­ent and it is my respon­si­bil­ity to ensure that he is pre­pared for adult life and 2) I pay an enor­mous amount of money in taxes that goes to pay your salary.

    For what it’s worth, I com­plain to the admin­is­tra­tion about their idio­cies, too. It isn’t just teach­ers that are being picked on and I rec­og­nize the dif­fer­ence between prob­lems in the class­room caused by poor admin­is­tra­tion or mis­guided state/federal laws. I don’t direct those issues to the teacher, but I will not hes­i­tate to talk to the teacher about prob­lems that are within the teacher’s control.

    August 19th, 2009 at 10:53 am
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  97. PsychMom says:

    To Illi­nois Teacher:

    If kids are so video-ized, why insist on read­ing logs then.….why are we still try­ing to teach them to read? I don’t under­stand your dis­il­li­sioned com­ment when read­ing is the pri­mary thing we’re all try­ing to get kids to do in the first three years of school. Isn’t it your job to try to make learn­ing as inter­est­ing as possible?

    I agree that it’s a parent’s job to reg­u­late video screen time and many par­ents aren’t vig­i­lant. But I’ve walked into my daughter’s day­care when she was 3 and 4 and seen 16 chil­dren trans­fixed on the teacher read­ing a book to them. I’ve walked into my child’s Grade 2 class­room at 9:10 AM and seen 15 kids focussed, eyes front, on the teacher in front of them. They also can do that at 2:30pm. The “won­der” might be harder to cre­ate, but it can be cre­ated. Stop lis­ten­ing to the peo­ple who don’t know your kids, teacher! Take your class­room back and be the expert in your classroom.

    You can’t con­trol what goes on in your kids’ lives after the kids leave your class­room at 3:15…stop try­ing to and spend your energy on what goes on between 9 and 3.

    August 19th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
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  98. Illinois teacher says:

    Matthew–

    In regards to your com­ment, “I pay an enor­mous amount of money in taxes to pay your salary,” I have to respect­fully disagree.

    I teach in a parochial school where we get NO sup­port from the state. So, your taxes do not pay my salary-at all. So don’t worry about your pre­cious tax dol­lars being used for my salary.

    It seems that any com­ment made by me or any other teacher try­ing to defend them­selves will be bla­tently shot down because you, the par­ents, are ALWAYS cor­rect and have to have it your way. Some of us teach­ers already know that your child NEVER mis­be­haves or insti­gates bul­ly­ing to another child. I know, I know…YOUR child is per­fect. For­give me.

    Until you become a teacher, and attempt to under­stand what is expected of you in that role, there is no rea­son to con­tinue this excru­ci­at­ingly hurt­ful exchange. You are not will­ing to see my point of view, while I have read and taken in yours.

    Not all teach­ers are mind­less robots. Some of us truly care about OUR chil­dren, and I say OUR chil­dren because they are in my care and influ­ence for 6 hours of the day. I do what I can for those chil­dren in the same way I do for mine…And you don’t know my home­work pol­icy or if I even have a read­ing log. You just jumped down my throat.

    August 19th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
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  99. Illinois teacher says:

    Dear FedUp­Mom,

    I will con­cede to one point-and that is being a par­ent, a stay-at-home par­ent, is a very tax­ing job. I have high respect for stay-at-home moms/dads. Par­ent­ing is a job, and like teach­ing, wel­comes crit­i­cism at all points.

    Am I crit­i­ciz­ing you? Prob­a­bly, because the tone of your com­ments are resound­ingly aggres­sive and neg­a­tive. I know I am def­i­nitely defensive.

    Are you crit­i­ciz­ing me? A loud, resound­ing YES!

    I’m sorry you had to deal with less than stel­lar teach­ers. They do exist. I see them at my school. But you know what? I see them, and observe what I think they are doing wrong, and elim­i­nate those qual­i­ties in my own class­room (if I do them).

    No one is per­fect, and if one was, they would be up on a cross with nails pounded into their hands and feet.

    If you want to cre­ate bet­ter teach­ers, then you should eval­u­ate what the cur­ricu­lum is for edu­ca­tion majors in col­lege. Don’t crit­i­cize us. And if you are still unsat­is­fied, by all means, home­school your child. Maybe then the teacher you do not like can get off of his/her anti-anxiety med­i­cine and begin to enjoy teach­ing once again.

    August 19th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
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  100. Illinois teacher says:

    By the way, I do not do read­ing logs. I do trust my stu­dents to read on their own. They do have to com­plete small projects high­light­ing key con­cepts, but my stu­dents enjoy them.

    If a stu­dent doesn’t com­plete their work, then they don’t get credit. Sim­ple enough?

    Home­work? Easy…my stu­dents fin­ish what­ever work they didn’t fin­ish through­out the day, plus an exten­tion assign­ment that ties the les­son to real, every­day life.

    I have a great time with my students-they are my ‘adopted’ chil­dren for the day. We have fun explor­ing and talk­ing and learning.

    I do not agree with some of my fel­low teacher’s pedagogies…but I do agree with mine. Trust me, I read pro­fes­sional jour­nals and books. I go to sem­i­nars that show me how to be a bet­ter teacher. I pick and choose the infor­ma­tion pre­sented that will ben­e­fit my students.

    I’m proud of my class­room, and many of my school par­ents would vouch for me in a heart­beat. The let­ters that they send to me and my prin­ci­pal affirm that.

    God bless all parents-even though I find it extremely dif­fi­cult to include those who don’t respect me. God blessed me with a spe­cial gift, and I use it appro­pri­ately and in his name.

    August 19th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
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  101. HomeworkBlues says:

    I wish I had more time to fol­low all the inter­est­ing dis­cus­sions here. Because read­ing is our fam­ily pas­sion. My daugh­ter has already read ten books out­side of her required four this sum­mer and this in the midst of six weeks away and plenty of oner­ous sum­mer homework.

    My daugh­ter, a ris­ing senior who, to this day, reads inces­santly. I can tell you if I’d treated it as laun­dry or clean­ing her room, no way would she be the rav­en­ous reader she has been her entire life. As Alfie Kohn says, “you can make a child do some­thing, but you can­not make him love it.” Love and pas­sion is some­thing else. It can­not be forced, it has to be cul­ti­vated and nur­tured. We always read to our child, our daugh­ter watched us read, we spent hours at the library together. Wait. You are going to tell me read­ing logs are nec­es­sary because Johnny doesn’t read. Huh?, as Fedup­Mom wonders?

    I won­der whether some of the teach­ers fiercely defend­ing read­ing logs here are them­selves pas­sion­ate read­ers or per­haps secretly find read­ing a chore too. Be care­ful. If you treat the grand art of read­ing as a chore and chas­tise thought­ful par­ents for not turn­ing in read­ing logs (who cares? What on earth do those logs have to do with read­ing and why do you assume that a reluc­tant reader will turn into a ready one once she fills out the log obe­di­ently?), you are more likely to do far more harm than good.

    August 19th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
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  102. HomeworkBlues says:

    Wouldn’t it be nice if you actu­ally inquired about what they were read­ing and had a con­ver­sa­tion with them while you did it?

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»»»

    WHOA! You assume that if a par­ent doesn’t sign a read­ing log, she is show­ing zero inter­est in her child’s read­ing? Good grief. I’ve been known to read my daughter’s books so I can dis­cuss them with her. I home­schooled her for a year. The nov­els we did I’d read in high school and col­lege as an Eng­lish major. I re-read them in tan­dem with my child that year and we had end­less long dis­cus­sions over them.

    I would say over and over that home­work pre­vented me from truly find­ing out what my daugh­ter is learn­ing. I am for­ever forced to cut intel­lec­tual dis­cus­sions short so she can con­tinue to do home­work for hours and hours and hours every sin­gle night. You would think the week­end offered a reprieve, a healthy bal­ance of hard week­day work fol­lowed by much needed week­end rest. For­get about it. And I see the dam­ag­ing effects of burnout every day as we are now in the throes of col­lege road trips. I have to con­stantly watch she not lose her love of learn­ing, her cre­ativ­ity, her ide­al­ism, her zeal.

    When it comes to my child’s learn­ing, I’m there 150 per­cent. Please don’t equate a dis­like of home­work with a dis­like of learn­ing and involve­ment in our children’s lives.

    August 19th, 2009 at 11:12 pm
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  103. Anonymous says:

    Thank god for Teacher Bey. Unfor­tu­nately I’m pretty sure that most of these fired up ladies aren’t going to pay enough atten­tion to your words to really digest any of them.

    August 20th, 2009 at 12:47 am
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  104. Anonymous says:

    I, as a teacher and par­ent, have found your com­ments amus­ing. I love that those of you opposed to read­ing logs (and many other things) think you are work­ing with the teach­ers after decid­ing that your child does not have to com­plete the given assign­ment. If you came to my class­room and made that dec­la­ra­tion, I would not be very will­ing to work with you. If you came to me with your rea­sons and we dis­cussed them, I would lis­ten to you, explain my rea­sons and hope we could come to an under­stand­ing or at least agree to disagree.

    If you came to me as a par­ent and made that dec­la­ra­tion, I would prob­a­bly laugh at you. I would also tell my chil­dren that they were not to lis­ten to peo­ple that felt they could do what they wanted sim­ply because they felt like it. I have spo­ken to my chil­dren (14, 12, & 7) about their read­ing logs. One hates them (14), one is ok with them (12), and one loves them (7). How­ever, all three con­tinue to read on their own. Go figure…

    As a teacher, I dis­agree with your belief that read­ing logs will only make chil­dren hate to read. I have had count­less chil­dren and par­ents thank me for requir­ing read­ing in my class­room. One par­ent this past year told me that I was the first teacher to ever require her twins to read at home. They didn’t mind read­ing, but were never required to do so. She loved that they now read together as a fam­ily and were able to have dis­cus­sions about what they were read­ing. She even asked for a book we were read­ing in class so she could go over it with them. She did this on her own with­out insin­u­at­ing that she was my unpaid aide…hmm…

    I use read­ing logs in my class­room. This is nor­mally the only home­work I assign, unless the stu­dents are work­ing on a research paper, which they have a month to com­plete both in class and at home if needed. (They don’t have to work on it at home, but many choose to do so in order to add extras we don’t have time for in class.) I allow my stu­dents to read what­ever they want, i.e. books, news­pa­per, mag­a­zines, etc… They have to read for 30 min­utes a night or 210 min­utes a week, how­ever it works best for them. The par­ent signs once. They write a brief sum­mary about what­ever they read. Then, each Fri­day any stu­dent that would like to share what they have been read­ing is given that opportunity.

    A direct quote from a stu­dent last school year (and the rea­son I will con­tinue this “dreaded” assign­ment) was this,“I never read a sin­gle book before you made me read. Now, I read everything.”

    Now, she is not like your chil­dren, because she didn’t read already. But, the twins men­tioned ear­lier did, and they still had a good result. My own chil­dren are grow­ing up in house­holds full of learn­ing expe­ri­ences and books and they have had pos­i­tive expe­ri­ences with read­ing logs — none have stopped reading.

    I love my job. I love my stu­dents. I will con­tinue to teach until I no longer love my job. While I became very angry at some of your com­ments, I would never allow your com­ments to dis­il­lu­sion me from being the best teacher I can be in my class­room. I just hope that your com­ments, and peo­ple who lump all teach­ers together as “bad,” don’t scare away the newer teach­ers that we des­per­ately need to keep in the class­room, for the sake of your child and mine.

    August 21st, 2009 at 5:32 pm
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  105. HomeworkBlues says:

    Anony­mous writes:

    If you came to my class­room and made that dec­la­ra­tion, I would not be very will­ing to work with you. If you came to me with your rea­sons and we dis­cussed them, I would lis­ten to you, explain my rea­sons and hope we could come to an under­stand­ing or at least agree to disagree.

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»»>

    Anony, you seem to have a mis­un­der­stand­ing of how we par­ents go about busi­ness and you embody some really neg­a­tive myths about par­ents. The out­spo­ken ones are arro­gant, con­de­scend­ing, dis­mis­sive, rude and unco­op­er­a­tive, you sur­mise. Some teach­ers here have expressed real anguish that they are not respected and that is a legit­i­mate con­cern. Yet, I’d like teach­ers to pause for a moment and do some soul search­ing. So many start the school year already dis­lik­ing par­ents and that comes through loud and clear.

    Read your com­ments. Many of you really really don’t like par­ents. You say you don’t like us because of this blog, but c’mon. Your mes­sage is clear. We love your chil­dren (if that) but we don’t like you. Never mind that we spawned said chil­dren and with­out us, you wouldn’t have them. Your com­ments about par­ents are vit­ri­olic. We either are com­pletely unin­volved and don’t read to our chil­dren or take them to a museum. Except when we do and then we are vil­i­fied for doing exactly that because home­work, no mat­ter how mind­less or use­less, must always come first.

    For starters, Anony­mous, and I’ll speak for myself here, many of us do exactly as you sug­gest. We don’t march in and take over, demand­ing and threat­en­ing. In fact, most par­ents are quite the oppo­site. Many are sub­mis­sive and bot­tle up the resent­ment because as one home­schooler put it, “you have our kids.” A lot of par­ents are actu­ally really ter­ri­fied of teach­ers and feel pow­er­less because you have some­thing vul­ner­a­ble in your care all day long, our children..

    I can­not agree with you more about work­ing together and indeed have made your point many times on this blog. When you have time, read some more. But many of us did exactly what you sug­gest and got nowhere. Once, twice, three times. You speak up in pub­lic school, you are auto­mat­i­cally labeled a trou­ble­maker. A pro­fes­sional we were work­ing with once coun­seled me, albeit mis­guid­edly, “don’t say any­thing. She’ll become hos­tile towards your child, I see it all the time.”

    When my daugh­ter attended pri­vate school (K-4), I had very few teach­ers speak to me deri­sively and con­de­scend­ingly. One of the two kinder­garten teach­ers was pretty much it. Were all her pri­vate school teach­ers out­stand­ing, pro­fes­sional, wise, inspir­ing, highly accom­plished teach­ers? I wish I could say yes. In fact, some were quite mediocre. But almost all of them were pleas­ant, were not threat­ened, and really took the time to listen.

    When I think back, I remem­ber my email exchanges as respect­ful, diplo­matic and gra­cious. I always tried to say some­thing com­ple­men­tary (my daugh­ter loved your lit­er­ary dis­cus­sion, she really enjoyed that field trip, she had a lot of fun mak­ing that dio­rama, even though it took all week­end) and usu­ally I’d get some­thing rea­son­able in exchange. When I didn’t, I’d ask for a meet­ing and we ironed things out.

    The sit­u­a­tion changed dras­ti­cally when we entered pub­lic school. I was stunned at how I was now treated. Not just by teach­ers but most espe­cially by office per­son­nel. A writer in the Los Ange­les Times last year hit this point home. She said par­ents are treated as felons when they walk into an office and sug­gested school reform begin with, “How may I help you this morn­ing?” Par­ents are impor­tant in the equa­tion. I’ll give ample credit where credit is due. My daughter’s cur­rent high school office peo­ple are dar­ling and I love them to death. I will do any­thing for those two women, they treat me well and have never offered an unkind word. It goes both ways.

    Some teach­ers here, you have to make peace with par­ents. Lis­ten to them. Lis­ten to us. It can’t just be about com­pli­ance. You’re a good lit­tle girl, you rea­son, you do what you’re told, you fol­low instruc­tions to the let­ter of the law, so there­fore, so should your lit­tle charges. And their idi­otic par­ents, to boot.

    That’s now what we want to grow. We want to raise think­ing car­ing com­pas­sion­ate cre­ative suc­cess­ful human beings. Stop telling par­ents their kids will wind up in jail if they don’t lis­ten to the teacher and don’t do their read­ing logs. Amer­ica was not built on blind com­pli­ance and it’s what has made this nation so great. Thomas Jef­fer­son was an edu­cated intel­lec­tual renais­sance man. Let’s not lose what makes us so unique. Blind com­pli­ance can lead to very dan­ger­ous things.

    “The price of lib­erty is eter­nal vig­i­lance.” Thomas Jefferson

    August 21st, 2009 at 7:37 pm
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  106. FedUpMom says:

    “If you came to me as a par­ent and made that dec­la­ra­tion, I would prob­a­bly laugh at you.”

    Wow! That says it all. Who’s being dis­re­spect­ful here?

    And notice that among your own chil­dren, the older they get, the less they like read­ing logs.

    “I would also tell my chil­dren that they were not to lis­ten to peo­ple that felt they could do what they wanted sim­ply because they felt like it.”

    You know, I am really not a big fan of unques­tion­ing obe­di­ence. I think it’s com­pletely rea­son­able for kids (and cer­tainly their par­ents!) to ques­tion what goes on at school, and the assign­ments that get sent home. And I don’t tell my kids they don’t have to do some­thing “sim­ply because they felt like it”, this is a care­ful deci­sion that I made in the best inter­est of my child’s edu­ca­tion. My daugh­ter did all of the assigned read­ing, she just didn’t log the pages, and I didn’t sign the log.

    I used to be sur­prised at how many par­ents would com­plain bit­terly to me about the home­work their kids have to do, but never com­plain to the teacher. After I spent time try­ing to advo­cate for my child I under­stood it a lit­tle bet­ter. Teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors don’t want to hear the com­plaints, so they get defen­sive, dig in their heels, and refuse to make changes. They tell the par­ents, “we’ve never had any com­plaints before!” A lot of par­ents give up after a while.

    August 21st, 2009 at 9:35 pm
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  107. FedUpMom says:

    Like Home­work­Blues, I have expe­ri­enced the dif­fer­ence between the way teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tion treat me at a pri­vate school vs. a pub­lic school. Peo­ple often say to me, “Of course they treat you bet­ter at the pri­vate school, they need your money.”

    But it’s really not that sim­ple. The pub­lic school had plenty of motives to try to keep me there. They get money for every enrolled stu­dent (more than the tuition I’m now pay­ing, I dis­cov­ered.) Plus, they live and die by test scores, and my daughter’s scores are very high and made the school look good. When I told the prin­ci­pal that we were going to apply to pri­vate schools, it was clear from the hor­ri­fied expres­sion on her face that she didn’t want us to go.

    Yet none of that was enough for the prin­ci­pal or teach­ers to make the changes that would have made it pos­si­ble for my daugh­ter to stay in the sys­tem, with­out the chronic anx­i­ety and depres­sion that were ruin­ing her childhood.

    I think this is a good exam­ple of how dif­fi­cult it is to change a cul­ture once it has taken root. It’s also an exam­ple of how car­rots and sticks often don’t have their intended con­se­quence. The con­stant focus on test scores has pro­duced a reg­i­mented, hos­tile envi­ron­ment that ulti­mately causes high-scoring kids to flee the pub­lic schools.

    August 21st, 2009 at 10:12 pm
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  108. FedUpMom says:

    An excerpt from “Bad Teach­ers”, by Guy Strickland:

    “The teacher wants a sense of con­trol over her world. She has cre­ated a micro­cosm in her class­room in which she is the supreme being. Teach­ers like the feel­ing of con­trol, and are often resent­ful of interference …

    “The teacher, hav­ing estab­lished her con­trol over her lit­tle world, wants that con­trol to con­tinue … She may even attempt to close off any avenues of parental inter­fer­ence or involvement.

    “Par­ents should also be aware that there is a dark side to the teacher’s need for con­trol … Some peo­ple aspire to be teach­ers, not from altru­ism or a love of chil­dren, but because it gives them the oppor­tu­nity to play God with peo­ple smaller and less pow­er­ful than them­selves. All of us, espe­cially chil­dren, need to be pro­tected from peo­ple with a patho­log­i­cal need for control.”

    August 21st, 2009 at 11:03 pm
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  109. HomeworkBlues says:

    Fedup­Mom, excel­lent. We have encoun­tered exactly what you quote above.

    Yes, there are many good teach­ers. But a very respected teacher’s advo­cate, after lis­ten­ing to my sto­ries over the years finally con­ceded this, “some teach­ers are petty dic­ta­tors.” The woman I quote is a well known national fig­ure who doggedly fights for teach­ers’ rights. We had long dis­cus­sions about the con­trol issue, the rigid home­work poli­cies, the deri­sion. Yes, it hit me like a bolt of light­ning after she declared that. Some (many) teach­ers are dic­ta­tors in the classroom.

    There. I said it. It’s not about bash­ing teach­ers. You think we busy har­ried par­ents, try­ing to put bread on the table and keep our chil­dren clothed, fed and loved, have noth­ing bet­ter to do? I’ve said it here before. We are loath to crit­i­cize teach­ers. We treat it like the priesthood.

    Bad things hap­pen in dark cor­ners. Sun­shine, shed­ding light on a prob­lem no one wants to address, is a good thing.

    On another front, and back to good teach­ers: This national advo­cate won­dered why more teach­ers haven’t signed anti-NCLB peti­tions, taken a stand, stood up for jus­tice. She loves teach­ers, she was one her­self for twenty five years.

    She finally wrote, many teach­ers may have sub­mis­sive per­son­al­i­ties to begin with, they are sweet and kind and tend to feel strongly about fol­low­ing direc­tions. I’ll be less san­guine. When teach­ers write that they do what they are told, it’s out of their con­trol, it then becomes the peck­ing order. Feel­ing com­pletely pow­er­less to con­trol their teach­ing envi­ron­ment in the face of their higher ups, they take that need to con­trol young sub­mis­sive charges and they want undy­ing devo­tion and obe­di­ence. The good lit­tle girl who does all her home­work is the teacher’s pet. Sweet, com­pli­ant, sub­mis­sive, aim­ing to please; these are still qual­i­ties we admire in girls today. Pretty, to boot, just ups the ante.

    Some teach­ers say they’ll lis­ten to par­ents if they are rea­son­able and respect­ful. My expe­ri­ence in that ele­men­tary school shows that to be untrue. The more edu­cated the par­ent, the more level headed, the more involved, the more threatening.

    If only we could rid the sys­tem of all the bad teach­ers to make room for the truly awe­some ones. But union rules seem to pre­clude, No, I’m not union bash­ing, there’s a place for it. But what has your union done about No Child Left Untested?

    August 22nd, 2009 at 10:25 am
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  110. HomeworkBlues says:

    I have spo­ken to my chil­dren (14, 12, & 7) about their read­ing logs. One hates them (14), one is ok with them (12), and one loves them (7). How­ever, all three con­tinue to read on their own. Go figure…

    »»»»»»»»»»»»»>

    The greater ques­tion I have for you, why is your four­teen year old still being assigned read­ing logs? That is WAY too old to be doing this busy work, he’s in high school! I will say this. In gifted pro­grams, they are not assigned. We haven’t seen read­ing logs, I think, since third grade. It may be assumed that gifted kids enjoy read­ing. Which is con­de­scend­ing to non-gifted ones. Many chil­dren would love read­ing if the pas­sion hadn’t been crushed by well mean­ing but clue­less adults.

    Also, watch the pro­gres­sion. Your lit­tle one loves read­ing logs, the mid­dle one not so much and the teenager hates them. I rest my case.

    You say all three still read. Then why the logs? I have to hide books so my daugh­ter would do her home­work, she got chas­tised for read­ing too much. Read­ing logs would have been hilarious.That’s like ask­ing me, an over­weight per­son, to show proof of my eating.

    I doubt your chil­dren read more because of those logs (I still can­not see the point) but in spite of them. The logs are unnec­es­sary and a huge waste of time. Aren’t they? Even if your kid can whip them out, what’s the point? Just ask the kid to tell you what he read. That oughta do the trick!

    Your prin­ci­pal insist­ing on those logs? Wait, he comes to your class­room each week and scans every sin­gle sheet of paper to make sure you are doing your job? Doesn’t he have any­thing bet­ter to do? I agree with Psy­ch­Mom. Fake him out. As a blog­ger on Teacher Revised says, when that door closes, you still have con­trol. I don’t mean con­trol­ling the kids, but con­trol over your own des­tiny there, imbu­ing your class­room with your val­ues and work­ing around those scripted les­son plans. I’m not say­ing it’s easy. But years after NCLB was enacted, it’s time for some “reform.”

    Back to the logs, I knew many many par­ents who filled out those damn sheets in lieu of the chil­dren. They decided it wasn’t worth the nag­ging, pick your bat­tles but dared not stand up to you. We are in dan­ger when everyone’s play­ing a game.

    August 22nd, 2009 at 11:33 am
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  111. FedUpMom says:

    I posted the excerpt from “Bad Teach­ers” because I think it’s get­ting to the core of the problem.

    With some teach­ers, there’s no such thing as a respect­ful way to object to an assign­ment, because the objec­tion itself is per­ceived as dis­re­spect­ful. Some teach­ers are so thin-skinned that the meek­est and mildest com­plaint is per­ceived as an attack on their authority.

    We have to acknowl­edge that part of the mix here is that it’s usu­ally moth­ers who advo­cate for their child at school. The con­tempt directed toward moth­ers by the pub­lic school has to be seen to be believed. It’s a hier­ar­chi­cal mind­set, and moth­ers are at the bot­tom of the heap. What? A mere mother says she objects to busy­work? How dare she! It’s as if the earth­worms in your gar­den sud­denly announced they were going on strike because your com­post isn’t good enough.

    One of the few things in “The Case Against Home­work” that I’m not crazy about are all the instruc­tions about how to nego­ti­ate with teach­ers. Does any­one write books tar­geted at men that include step-by-step exam­ples of what to say so that you will be per­ceived as respect­ful and unthreat­en­ing? Of course not. Men are allowed to say what they think.

    And my own expe­ri­ence has been that my attempts at being respect­ful made no dif­fer­ence at all. My nego­ti­at­ing got me nowhere at the pub­lic school, but the pri­vate school has made real changes for me. It’s not because my nego­ti­at­ing changed (if any­thing, I become less def­er­en­tial over time), it’s because the cul­ture of the pri­vate school includes lis­ten­ing to parents.

    August 22nd, 2009 at 12:29 pm
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  112. HomeworkBlues says:

    FedUp­Mom, again, you hit the nail on the head. Heather wants real dia­logue to take place and I agree. But we must first get to the very core of the prob­lem. Bad teach­ers, dis­dain towards par­ents par­tic­u­larly moth­ers (they lis­ten when dad talks but not when I do and he is not more artic­u­late than I am), incred­i­bly thin skinned teach­ers who fly off the han­dle and per­ceive every lit­tle con­cern as a full blown attack and the hier­ar­chal mind­set that treats par­ents as an unnec­es­sary med­dle­some intru­sion. If we don’t get to the organic core here, we can­not proceed.

    August 22nd, 2009 at 1:31 pm
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  113. HomeworkBlues says:

    FedUp­Mom, with regard to moth­ers, see my ear­lier post above. When it comes to girls, teach­ers, espe­cially female ones, to this day reward and like the girls who are sweet, com­pli­ant, do every drop of home­work, smile a lot and aim to please. Girls see this and model such behav­ior in order to be liked. Boys are con­di­tioned to be assertive, girls are still con­di­tioned to be liked.

    Pretty unbe­liev­able, con­sid­er­ing this is 2009! Fem­i­nist lead­ers, where are you now when we need you the most? Women are still sup­posed to be seen and not heard. An assertive mother is still seen as anathema.

    August 22nd, 2009 at 1:35 pm
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  114. FedUpMom says:

    As a case in point, con­sider what the anony­mous teacher above said:

    “If you came to my class­room and made that dec­la­ra­tion, I would not be very will­ing to work with you.”

    In other words, “I choose not to lis­ten to you because you aren’t def­er­en­tial enough.” How patron­iz­ing is that? It’s the way I talk to my rammy 6-year-old. “I won’t push you on the swing if you don’t say please!” No one addresses an equal this way.

    And if you go in there hat in hand, and try to be def­er­en­tial and polite, and beg for a few scraps, guess what? They still ignore you. Because all your def­er­ence just con­firms their belief that they are in charge and you are an underling.

    I’m not advo­cat­ing that any­one should go in to the teacher’s con­fer­ence and start scream­ing and throw­ing things, although I under­stand the impulse. Of course, we should treat every­one with a rea­son­able level of civil­ity and respect. Yes, we should lis­ten and try to under­stand the teacher’s point of view. Yes, let’s be sure to say some­thing pos­i­tive. I make an effort to acknowl­edge when something’s going well in the class­room, and let the teach­ers know I appre­ci­ate it. But let’s not give away our rights as par­ents. Let’s not buy into the sys­tem that makes teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors petty tyrants who treat every­one with disdain.

    August 22nd, 2009 at 3:13 pm
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  115. FedUpMom says:

    I wanted to share some­thing I read on another forum:

    http://​www​.moth​er​ing​.com/​d​i​s​c​u​s​s​i​o​n​/​s​h​o​w​t​h​r​e​a​d​.​p​h​p​?​t​=​1​1​2​6​640

    I’ve known peo­ple who boast that their chil­dren are going to the “best” schools, attended by the chil­dren who per­form well aca­d­e­m­i­cally and who come from “good” fam­i­lies — high income, pro­fes­sional par­ents. Yet these schools strug­gle with drug prob­lems (stu­dents who can afford ‘designer’ drugs) and cheat­ing (on a high tech basis — cell phone mis­use dur­ing exams, sophis­ti­cated pla­gia­rism off the inter­net) and men­tal health issues (too much pres­sure on the stu­dents to pro­duce, as opposed to learn).

    Boy does that describe our local “high-performing” schools.

    August 22nd, 2009 at 4:10 pm
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  116. HomeworkBlues says:

    FedUp, I’d love to read this. But the link didn’t take us directly to the arti­cle. Can you resend it? Thanks!

    August 22nd, 2009 at 5:47 pm
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  117. FedUpMom says:

    Hmm … you may have to try going here:

    http://​www​.moth​er​ing​.com/​d​i​s​c​u​s​s​i​o​ns/

    then look for the head­ing “Edu­ca­tion” and choose “Learn­ing At School.” The com­ment I quoted from is from a thread titled “Can smart kids sur­vive a lousy school?”

    Actu­ally, you can Google “smart kids lousy school” and find the thread faster.

    August 22nd, 2009 at 7:15 pm
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  118. Anonymous says:

    I wish that all par­ents under­stood your point of view. As a teacher, I am get­ting notes and emails won­der­ing why I don’t give tons of home­work and read­ing logs. Why? The kids either 1) aren’t doing it, 2) don’t under­stand it, 3) don’t care either way. I don’t want to make these kids hate school.

    August 23rd, 2009 at 4:47 pm
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  119. PsychMom says:

    I was read­ing the com­ments from Fedup Mom and Home­work Blues all week­end and say­ing “yes, yes” to my com­puter screen. I was going to bring up the point about the “con­trol” issue for teach­ers, but hes­i­tated to. Aside from my recent expe­ri­ence with school­ing and my young­ster, I’ve had 25 years of friends who are teach­ers, co-workers who have teacher spouses, clients that were teach­ers, I had an aunt who was a school teacher.…and in almost every sin­gle case, when that teacher gets into con­flict or gets into a per­sonal dilemma, the prime rea­son is a con­trol issue. Some teach­ers run into con­flict with other adults (aside from par­ents) because the other adult doesn’t par­tic­u­larly want to do things the way the teacher does and it causes con­flict. And I think we see so many teach­ers off on stress leave because bat­tling for con­trol of every­thing, all the time is stress­ful. In the case of my aunt, over-control may have has­tened her death because she with­held infor­ma­tion from doc­tors which delayed treatment.

    Going with the flow is eas­ier on every­one, but the school­ing sys­tem just can’t seem to han­dle that one.

    The other point about blind obe­di­ence gets me too. The teach­ers who have been writ­ing in lately seem to think that just because they think what they’re pre­scrib­ing is cor­rect, that no one should ques­tion it. But they should be teach­ing our kids to ques­tion absolutely every­thing. Take noth­ing for granted!! That’s the basis for crit­i­cal think­ing and analysis.

    This blind unthink­ing obe­di­ence shuts kids down. You are mis­tak­ing struc­ture and obe­di­ence. Yes, kids need structure..they need pre­dictabil­ity. The class­room is ideal for those two things when you are there every­day and orga­niz­ing the day for the chil­dren. But your grasp can­not reach out beyond the classroom…and it shouldn’t.

    August 24th, 2009 at 9:04 am
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  120. Matthew says:

    Regard­ing the com­ments on teach­ers treat­ing com­ments from fathers dif­fer­ently than moth­ers, I’m not sure I agree.

    The odd­ity I’ve noticed (as just one per­son, this is a very small sam­ple size so it may mean noth­ing) is that when I’ve dealt with other men (one teacher and one prin­ci­pal) the con­ver­sa­tions have been very pro­duc­tive with me feel­ing the teacher lis­tened to what I had to say and con­sid­ered it even if we ulti­mately had to agree to dis­agree. After those con­ver­sa­tions I felt like even if things didn’t change now, they might in the future if enough par­ents chimed in.

    My deal­ings with female teach­ers, how­ever, has been very sim­i­lar to what the rest of you have expe­ri­enced: either a com­pletely defeatist atti­tude (admin­is­tra­tion makes me do this, sorry, good­bye), mind­less agree­ment, but con­tin­u­ing every­thing as-is once I went away, or thinly veiled hos­til­ity (once out­right rudeness).

    August 24th, 2009 at 9:49 am
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  121. FedUpMom says:

    Matthew — trust me, this is one of those things that you can’t pos­si­bly observe for your­self because you’re a man. Unless you can con­vinc­ingly dis­guise your­self as a woman and try hav­ing those con­fer­ences again, the fact of you being in the room changes the whole dynamic.

    What­ever dif­fi­culty you’ve had with female teach­ers, rest assured, if they were talk­ing to a woman they’d be even worse.

    As for men? Hmm … the pub­lic school that I took my daugh­ter out of had a sur­pris­ing num­ber of male teach­ers (proof that they pay well, I expect.) Of the 4 men teach­ers my daugh­ter had while she was there, I’d say one was quite good, one was pretty good, one was mediocre, and one was an absolute train wreck and a big part of the rea­son we left. About the same range as the female teach­ers, in other words. And, at least from my point of view, male and female treated me about the same. Teach­ers who did a good job in the class­room tended to lis­ten to me and treat me rea­son­ably. Bad teach­ers were the first to get defen­sive and hostile.

    Actu­ally, this high­lights another prob­lem. The bad teacher, the one you most need to make changes, is also the one who is least will­ing to lis­ten to you. Then the prin­ci­pal fig­ures it’s her job to back up the teacher. Then what?

    I’d like to report a con­ver­sa­tion I had with one of the men teach­ers, as an exam­ple many oth­ers could use­fully fol­low. This teacher had been send­ing home quite a lot of home­work, much of which I returned with a note explain­ing why we weren’t doing it. We had a con­ver­sa­tion at our first parent-teacher con­fer­ence that went like this:

    Me: You’ve prob­a­bly noticed that I sent a lot of the home­work back undone. I really don’t believe in home­work for ele­men­tary school kids.

    Him: My pol­icy is, I never argue with par­ents about homework.

    And that was that. He didn’t pun­ish my daugh­ter for the undone home­work, either, because I had writ­ten a note.

    He was also the only per­son in the school who expressed con­cern over my daughter’s depres­sion and anx­i­ety. He left the school the next year.

    August 24th, 2009 at 11:02 am
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  122. FedUpMom says:

    For more on sex­ism in school, this is an excel­lent article:

    http://​sen​gifted​.org/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​s​_​s​o​c​i​a​l​/​R​e​i​s​_​S​o​c​i​a​l​A​n​d​E​m​o​t​i​o​n​a​l​I​s​s​u​e​s​F​a​c​e​d​B​y​G​i​f​t​e​d​G​i​r​l​s​.​s​h​tml

    August 24th, 2009 at 11:29 am
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  123. FedUpMom says:

    A few more thoughts about the con­trol issue.

    I’ve noticed that teach­ers who are all about con­trol really lack per­spec­tive. A teacher posted on this blog, pre­dict­ing that my daugh­ter who got out of keep­ing a read­ing log at 11 will be in jail at 25. These are the teach­ers who hon­estly believe that a child who sim­ply for­got to do some triv­ial piece of her home­work is being “defi­ant” and deserves to be pun­ished. These are the teach­ers who believe that if a child flunks a test, she must be “lazy” and should be forced to work harder. Every­thing that doesn’t go the way the teacher wants is taken as a per­sonal attack.

    For a sen­si­tive child, who hates any sug­ges­tion of unfair­ness, get­ting stuck with one of these teach­ers is like liv­ing in a Kafka novel.

    August 24th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
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  124. FedUpMom says:

    I wanted to high­light some­thing from the arti­cle I men­tioned above:

    http://​sen​gifted​.org/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​s​_​s​o​c​i​a​l​/​R​e​i​s​_​S​o​c​i​a​l​A​n​d​E​m​o​t​i​o​n​a​l​I​s​s​u​e​s​F​a​c​e​d​B​y​G​i​f​t​e​d​G​i​r​l​s​.​s​h​tml

    “Teach­ers were usu­ally able to iden­tify gifted boys, but were often sur­prised to learn that a girl was con­sid­ered smart.”

    Ouch. Been there, done that, both as a child and as a parent.

    August 24th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
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  125. PsychMom says:

    As a gen­eral idea of unfairness…and this is not directed at teach­ers per se…how harsh are we with kids????

    Because one course is flunked, I know of a child who had to go to sum­mer school, no trip to visit fam­ily and no trip to Dis­ney with the rest of the fam­ily. It sounds a bit harsh to me…

    August 24th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
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  126. NOHMEWRKmom says:

    I found your blog last night as my 13 yr old was on her 5th hour of home­work. Below is an email I am send­ing to the prin­ci­pal and super­in­ten­dant of our dis­trict because I am still fuming:

    ****************************************************************
    I would appre­ci­ate you look­ing into the home­work sit­u­a­tion at SFMS. It is the begin­ning of the 3rd week of school and last night my eighth grade daugh­ter spent 5 hours doing work that came home from 4 dif­fer­ent sub­jects. The first week of school, 3 out of the 5 nights she had 4 hours each night. Last week was a bit lighter, but not by much. It was man­age­able, and more in line with what I expect. How­ever, when she came home with as much as she did last night, I knew I had to say some­thing. Are you aware that they are in your school for 7 hours each day? Why should there be another 4 – 5 hours of extra work com­ing home? I can­not imag­ine that there is so much infor­ma­tion that has to be crammed into their minds that it can’t be done in the time of a class period each day. You do real­ize that besides being able to read, have good com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills and the abil­ity to process infor­ma­tion, the rest is pure trivia that they will only retain if they use it on a reg­u­lar basis? I would love for there to be a more cre­ative excuse than get­ting them ready for high school because I know quite a few advanced level chil­dren in high school that do not bring home this kind of home­work and I need to know what is going to be done about it at the mid­dle school level.

    Please cor­rect me if I’m wrong, but these kids only get to be kids once. They don’t get home from school until 5pm and then are expected to sit down and do another 4 – 5 hours of work after sit­ting and doing the same type of work all day? Let me tell you how this is work­ing for my fam­ily: it’s not. The only thing that is hap­pen­ing here is that she is get­ting dis­cour­aged and I would hate for my daugh­ter to not suc­ceed due to being burnt out from extra busy work given in the eighth grade. Maybe you can tell me where I can sched­ule all of the “extracur­ric­u­lar” activ­i­ties she needs to be doing in order to keep her well rounded and have for her col­lege appli­ca­tion. At this rate, she has already down­graded from becom­ing an ortho­don­tist to not know­ing due to the daunt­ing real­ity of try­ing to accom­plish that goal.

    There are 5 aca­d­e­mic classes taught each day. I am sure that a school full of intel­li­gent edu­ca­tors like your­selves will be able to come up with an ade­quate sched­ule which will allow your teach­ing pro­fes­sion­als to plan around each oth­ers assign­ments in order that home­work hours of this mag­ni­tude cease in the very near future.
    ****************************************************************
    Please feel free to comment!

    August 25th, 2009 at 10:51 am
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  127. PsychMom says:

    And this is why we are on this site!!!! Wel­come to the fold “NOHMEWRK­mom”.
    Your let­ter is good. You should try to get Sara’s book and read it too. Fol­low your let­ter up with a visit with the prin­ci­pal.
    What you’re describ­ing is what we’re all try­ing to pro­tect our chil­dren from. Just how long do they think a 13 year old is going to be able sur­vive under that kind of pressure?

    Maybe set­ting some lim­its for your daughter/your fam­ily about how much home­work will be done would be a place to start. Every fam­ily has lim­its for all kinds of things…no smok­ing in the house, no dis­re­spect­ful lan­guage, no walk­ing across the car­pet with boots on…rules of the home we all live by. If the rule in your fam­ily is 1 hour of home­work a night, then out­side influ­ences have to respect that.

    August 25th, 2009 at 11:27 am
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  128. FedUpMom says:

    Wel­come NOHMEWRKMom!

    Your let­ter to the prin­ci­pal is a very good start.

    While you’re wait­ing for a response from the prin­ci­pal, which could take a while, I com­pletely agree with Psy­ch­Mom. Make a pol­icy for your own home and stick with it. Even Har­ris Cooper, who appointed him­self the country’s expert on home­work (that’s another dis­cus­sion) thinks mid­dle school kids should never have more than 1 1/2 hours per night of home­work. Any­thing over that and you’re just burn­ing the kids out.

    So you could start with a time limit that you enforce for your child. Once she’s got­ten to an hour and a half (or what­ever limit you choose), close the books and take her out to the park or out for a walk or play a board game or what­ever. Write notes to her teach­ers explain­ing that this was your deci­sion and she should not be pun­ished for unfin­ished homework.

    Every­one focuses on quan­tity, and when it gets to 5 hours that’s under­stand­able, but there’s also the issue of qual­ity. Some home­work isn’t worth 5 min­utes of our kids’ time, as Alfie Kohn rightly points out. Take a look at your daughter’s home­work. Is it really help­ing her learn, or is it busywork?

    A pol­icy I decided on for my fam­ily was that I wasn’t going to force my child to do any­thing unless I felt that it was worth doing. That knocked out a huge per­cent­age of the home­work right there. If my daugh­ter enjoys doing it (she likes mak­ing dio­ra­mas, go fig­ure!) I don’t stand in the way, but if she hates it and I can see it’s point­less, I tell her not to do it and I write a note to the teacher.

    Best of luck to you. Please post again and let us know how you’re doing.

    August 25th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
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  129. PsychMom says:

    Just to rein­force what FedUp Mom wrote…for me, this whole change of mind about school and home­work began with think­ing about what I value and what’s impor­tant to my fam­ily. My child comes first, her health and wellbeing…happiness a close third. Close fam­ily bonds are impor­tant because it’s just the two of us and when we’re fight­ning over a third party’s idea of a “fun fam­ily learn­ing activ­ity”, I must shake my head and think again. We need to get back to the basics…family, time spent with fam­ily and nur­tu­rance of child­hood. We do not need to con­stantly pre­pare for any­thing (ie, Mid­dle School, High School, college)…they will come in their own time and if we’re well adjusted peo­ple we can cope with anything.

    August 25th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
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  130. HomeworkBlues says:

    NOHOMEWORK, I feel for you com­pletely. My daugh­ter was putting in upwards of six hours in 6th grade. When I made her stop and go to bed, the teacher was nasty to her the next day. I stood my ground, send­ing an email that was not def­er­en­tial and did not back down. Enough is enough.

    August 25th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
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  131. BigDaddyTeacher says:

    And another 2cents:
    As a teacher, I’d love to get away from read­ing logs and spend more time IN CLASS just read­ing — both me and the stu­dents. Sadly, with all the teach­ing require­ments and bench­mark tests and ed. stan­dards to cover and…well you get the pic­ture. Read­ing for fun at school is a lux­ury that is not often attainable.

    The trust issue regard­ing read­ing at home is, IMHO, is eval­u­ated on a case-by-case basis. I can trust some of my stu­dents to read every night w/o super­vi­sion. And I can trust that some of my stu­dents will be goof­ing off until 10pm w/o supervision.

    Regard­ing nightly home­work, I hate it too. Home­work should be given when it will specif­i­cally enrich what was taught in class that day. My stu­dents receive home­work maybe 3 days/week — and that’s if they don’t fin­ish it in the class­room before they go home. That’s right — I make sure the kids have time to do their home­work where the teacher can help them directly. shocking!

    Projects — I give out projects 4 – 5 times a year. Since many schools in our dis­trict don’t have time for art/music/etc, the projects always involve a cre­ative ele­ment as well as an aca­d­e­mic ele­ment. They’re only graded on the aca­d­e­mic side. As long as they fol­low instruc­tions (or can show how their cre­ative ele­ment fits the cri­te­ria) they get full credit for that part of it.

    Com­ments?

    September 2nd, 2009 at 6:54 pm
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  132. PsychMom says:

    To Big­Dad­dyTeacher

    You didn’t say what grade you teach…my com­ments would depend on the age of the children.

    Projects are fine…relevant home­work is fine too. I guess my per­spec­tive would be..it’s all fine, as long as it’s age appro­pri­ate, it can be com­pleted by the child inde­pen­dently and isn’t sent home as a “fam­ily” project, and it takes no more than half an hour (or less) to do. It’s the inva­sion of school work into my family’s home­life that I object to, espe­cially in the ele­men­tary grades.

    The one com­ment I would make is around what you said about some stu­dents goof­ing off and being unsu­per­vised. Again…why do teach­ers feel they can dic­tate what a child does after 3:15? All you can con­trol is what goes on in your class­room. Whether some­one is goof­ing off til 10 pm is really not some­thing you can control…so why bother try­ing? That’s my ter­ri­tory as the par­ent. And in my house if it’s 10 pm my child has been asleep for at least an hour if not longer.

    September 3rd, 2009 at 8:08 am
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  133. Anonymous says:

    You don’t like pub­lic school? Get your kids out of it. Teach them your­selves. I’m tired of com­plain­ing par­ents. You think you can do a bet­ter job? Let’s see it. Home­school (des­o­cial­ize, iso­late, and spoil) your kids — bet­ter for teach­ers that dis­trust­ing and overly-critical par­ents are NOT in the picture.

    September 3rd, 2009 at 2:12 pm
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  134. Anonymous says:

    What do you think your kids will be doing in col­lege? They won’t just get to lay around after­school and read books with­out some level of account­abil­ity. Try that with a col­lege pro­fes­sor and see what happens.

    September 3rd, 2009 at 2:14 pm
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  135. PsychMom says:

    Col­lege is not ele­men­tary school. She won’t be 8 years old…she’ll be 18 and an adult. And because I’ll have made sure that she got a good edu­ca­tion AND enough rest and good food and a well bal­anced life…she should be very suc­cess­ful in what­ever she chooses to do.

    Hope­fully, I’ll have kept her spir­its up despite cop­ing with an edu­ca­tional sys­tem that thinks the only way she’ll learn is to fol­low blindly and not ques­tion any­thing her teach­ers tell her.

    September 3rd, 2009 at 2:36 pm
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  136. HomeworkBlues says:

    “You don’t like pub­lic school? Get your kids out of it. Teach them yourselves.”

    That is in fact what many par­ents are doing. It’s called home­school­ing. And by and large, it seems to work pretty well.

    September 3rd, 2009 at 3:07 pm
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  137. HomeworkBlues says:

    “Home­school (des­o­cial­ize, iso­late, and spoil) ”

    You really think that’s what home­school­ing amounts to? That if you home­school, you des­o­cial­ize your kids? My daugh­ter had her best social­iza­tion year out­side of school, rather than in it.

    You think home­school­ers are iso­lated? You think they sit home all day? What about co-op classes, drama, Girl Scouts, Sea Scouts, base­ball, foot­ball, robot­ics, bal­let, ice skat­ing, park day, muse­ums, out­door clas­si­cal con­certs, plays, lec­tures, art pro­grams, his­tory, sci­ence, math leagues, Odyssey of the Mind; why, I could go on for­ever. Oh, boy, do you have a lot to learn about the world of homeschooling.

    Spoiled? What causes you to draw that con­clu­sion? We are not wealthy, not by a long shot. Home­school­ers I know vol­un­teer in hos­pi­tals, raise money for can­cer, clean up parks and streams, do far more com­mu­nity ser­vice than schooled kids. Fam­i­lies learn to live with a lot less because the pub­lic school, which pur­ports says “we meet the needs of every child,” in fact leaves many many chil­dren behind.

    September 3rd, 2009 at 3:13 pm
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  138. FedUpMom says:

    ***************************
    What do you think your kids will be doing in col­lege? They won’t just get to lay around after­school and read books with­out some level of account­abil­ity. Try that with a col­lege pro­fes­sor and see what hap­pens.
    **************************

    Now that’s clas­sic. I can tell you that my hus­band teaches at an Ivy League Uni­ver­sity, and he’s thrilled to get stu­dents who have a gen­uine inter­est in the sub­ject. He’d be very happy to get a stu­dent who read books on their own time and out of their own inter­est. Since when does any­one have to account for their reading?

    September 3rd, 2009 at 11:53 pm
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  139. FedUpMom says:

    You don’t like pub­lic school? Get your kids out of it.
    ***********************

    I did take my kids out of the pub­lic school, thanks for ask­ing. If you were my kid’s teacher, and you told me to leave the school, you’d be in big trou­ble with the prin­ci­pal. My daugh­ter has very good test scores, which of course the prin­ci­pal wanted to keep in the pub­lic schools, and I vol­un­teered my time and gave money to help sup­port the school. It was not a good day for the school when we left.

    September 3rd, 2009 at 11:56 pm
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  140. John says:

    It would appear that the read­ing logs were designed to ensure that your child actu­ally reads the required readings…I’m sure the school only had the best inter­ests of your child in mind…and I am quite con­vinced that there would be many child who can­not bring them­selves to read with­out a par­ent breath­ing down their neck — there­fore, yes, I agree…maybe the read­ing log is not ideal for some­one in your circumstances…however, I would think it is per­ti­nent to read­ing devel­op­ment for chil­dren who are less moti­vated and trust­wor­thy as yours.

    September 5th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
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  141. FedUpMom says:

    John — you give a very good argu­ment for an opt-out policy.

    With an opt-out pol­icy, par­ents could decide whether each piece of home­work was appro­pri­ate for their own child, and make changes to the assign­ment as needed. Then they would write a note to the teacher explain­ing what they had done, with the under­stand­ing that the child would not be pun­ished for unfin­ished homework.

    If a school had an offi­cial pol­icy that they would not argue with par­ents about what they do at home, and would accept notes, it would result in a lot less headache all around.

    September 5th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
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  142. HomeworkBlues says:

    John, I’ll cut you a deal. Give to them, not to us. We read. She reads. We don’t breath down her neck to read. Maybe there’s a connection?There was plenty of evi­dence she was read­ing. No read­ing log record­ing needed.

    September 6th, 2009 at 10:50 am
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  143. Anonymous says:

    “I can tell you that my hus­band teaches at an Ivy League University…”

    Well that explains a lot. Sorry if you haven’t noticed, but MOST peo­ple don’t have the finan­cial abil­ity to home­school their kids and take them here and there all over the city (muse­ums, plays, etc.). Par­ents with money think they know it all, which is another rea­son why I am SO GLAD you’re kids are not in pub­lic school and you and your hus­band don’t think you can con­trol the school and the prin­ci­pal because you “gave money.” I don’t even think this is about read­ing logs. I think this is about par­ents want­ing to con­trol how a class­room is run. Like I said before, if you can do bet­ter — do it. I get paid $35,000 a year. That is sim­ply not enough money for me to put up with par­ents with noth­ing bet­ter to do than to ter­ror­ize a teacher. Maybe your prin­ci­pal was upset about you leav­ing but I can’t imag­ine the teacher shed­ding tears for a “FedUp Mom.” Where are all the FedUp Teachers?

    September 6th, 2009 at 11:10 am
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  144. HomeworkBlues says:

    Sorry if you haven’t noticed, but MOST peo­ple don’t have the finan­cial abil­ity to home­school their kids and take them here and there all over the city (muse­ums, plays, etc.). Par­ents with money think they know it all,

    »»»»»»»»>

    Please allow me the moment to clear up a glar­ing mis­con­cep­tion. Most home­school­ers I know are not rich. Yes, there will always be the prover­bial home­schooler who’s taken out of school because the par­ents are sail­ing around the world or mom got a research expe­di­tion assign­ment in Antarc­tica for a year and thought it would be cool to take the kids along for a few months. You go, mom!

    But…that does not describe the major­ity of home­school­ers. When we did it for a year, we took money out of our IRA (and wound up pay­ing hefty fees) in order to finance two on line courses. We didn’t have the money. We were pay­ing Peter to rob Paul. I con­tin­ued free­lanc­ing while my daugh­ter read in the next room but admit­tedly had to put much of that on hold.. Where I live, many muse­ums are free so we took ample advan­tage of the edu­ca­tional and cul­tural gold­mine we find our­selves in.

    We didn’t home­school because we were rich. We home­schooled for that year because the home­work over­load and sleep depri­va­tion were intol­er­a­ble and I wanted to keep the love of learn­ing, the spark, the imag­i­na­tion, alive. We home­schooled because we didn’t see a bet­ter option at that time. It was not a lux­ury and we ago­nized long and hard over it. The major stick­ing point was, you guessed it, MONEY! We didn’t have much and my hus­band rea­soned we could not do it. But we found a way.

    There’s a mar­velous book, “Home­school­ing on a Shoe­string bud­get” you should take a look at. Many home­school­ers I know well make up in resource­ful­ness what they lack in money. If you have the wit, imag­i­na­tion, and cre­ativ­ity to cob­ble some­thing together, you’d be amazed at how far that can take you. I’m not say­ing home­school­ing is for every­one. But please lose that “we don’t need all you elit­ists, good rid­dance” attitude.

    We had a mag­i­cal home­school year. To the school’s credit, it was hardly an awful place. It was merely okay while what we had instead was heaven. You can either mud­dle through and get a ho-hum edu­ca­tion or decide, this is your child’s life, they get only one, you get only one long chunk of time at being their parent,so why not make the edu­ca­tional jour­ney as excit­ing, ful­fill­ing and adven­tur­ous as possible?

    Yea, yea, I know some things will be bor­ing. Of course I know that. But that mind­set com­pletely misses the point of child­hood. It misses won­der and imag­i­na­tion and cre­ativ­ity. You never want to steal won­der. Great things come from won­der. Far bet­ter than apa­thy, as I see in so many of my daughter’s teen friends.

    September 6th, 2009 at 11:38 am
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  145. FedUpMom says:

    Anony­mous — I didn’t bring up my husband’s pro­fes­sion to talk about money, it’s because you were mak­ing state­ments about what col­lege pro­fes­sors want. I live with a col­lege pro­fes­sor and I know that he wants stu­dents who are gen­uinely inter­ested in learn­ing, not just doing what the teacher told them. The school grind is destroy­ing our kids’ nat­ural curiosity.

    You say, “Par­ents with money think they know it all.” What qual­i­fi­ca­tions would I have to have to con­vince you that my per­spec­tive should be taken into account? This is not about money. Where we live, we’re actu­ally in the lower bracket finan­cially. This is about par­ents, who, no mat­ter how much they know about edu­ca­tion, are treated with total hos­til­ity from teach­ers like you.

    When it comes to read­ing logs, I’m not try­ing to con­trol the class­room. I’m try­ing to con­trol my own home! I’m try­ing to set lim­its on what I do in my own home with my own daugh­ter. When an assign­ment comes home that I know will be bad for our fam­ily life, and also bad for my daughter’s edu­ca­tion, I have a right to say no.

    I’m not “ter­ror­iz­ing” anyone.

    September 6th, 2009 at 11:45 am
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  146. HomeworkBlues says:

    Anony­mous, you’ve got it back­wards. It isn’t that par­ents want to con­trol the class­room, it’s that many teach­ers want to con­trol a child’s, and by exten­sion, a family’s home life. You need to stop think­ing of after school hours as merely an exten­sion of the school day where par­ents are your invol­un­tary unpaid teacher’s aides.

    Once you begin to under­stand that the very last thing we par­ents want is to ter­ror­ize you and that we signed onto this blog ini­tially because we were so dis­traught over what we saw was a destruc­tive force in our home life, then we can start talking.

    I am sorry you only get paid $35,000 a year. Sadly, you embody that old adage, “you get what you pay for.” But it might help if you would use more rea­son­ing and less emo­tion. After all, isn’t that what you should be instill­ing in your stu­dents? Bal­ance, inquiry, analy­sis? If not, and you want blind alle­giance, then you are doing a mar­velous job prepar­ing your lit­tle charges for…the assem­bly line.

    September 6th, 2009 at 11:59 am
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  147. FedUpMom says:

    Anony­mous asks, “where are all the FedUp teach­ers”? I expect they’re in the class­room, tak­ing out their frus­tra­tions on our kids. It’s not a pretty picture.

    We’re going in cir­cles here. I’ve already posted about the thin-skinned con­trol freak. How is it “ter­ror­iz­ing” a teacher for a par­ent to refuse to do an assign­ment which she knows is bad for her daugh­ter? Holy cow.

    “If you can do bet­ter, do it”. What pro­fes­sion would allow its prac­ti­tion­ers to speak this way to a client? If I com­plain to the doc­tor that the pre­scrip­tion isn’t work­ing, would she say, “if you can do bet­ter, you go to med­ical school and become a doc­tor!” Of course not. She would say, “let’s talk about your symp­toms. Let’s look for another treat­ment, if this one doesn’t work.” If you want to be treated as a pro­fes­sional, you need to behave like one.

    Which gets us down to a really basic issue. If teach­ers are pro­fes­sion­als, who is their client? Whom do they serve? Shouldn’t it be the kids and their parents?

    September 6th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
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  148. HomeworkBlues says:

    I agree that we are going in com­plete cir­cles around here. Sup­pose a teacher comes on who does not agree with us? But she couches her com­ments as, “I am lis­ten­ing to your con­cerns. Please talk to me. Let’s see what we can work out.” Or how about, “wow, I am a young teacher, I have no school aged chil­dren, I had no idea my home­work was tak­ing that long, thank you for open­ing my eyes,” or even, “I may dis­agree with you but I am still con­cerned that home­work is caus­ing so much pain in your house­hold,” now we’re talking.

    I’m not wild about the “I don’t agree with you” part because it shows the teacher hasn’t stopped to read and learn, but at least it shows con­sid­er­a­tion and a will­ing­ness to be open minded. What I can­not abide is this thinly veiled dis­dain of par­ents, par­tic­u­larly moth­ers, and the rude dis­mis­sive way in which some teach­ers here speak to us.

    When a teacher comes on, dis­re­gards every posi­tion we have taken, every point we have made, sneers at us to get the hell out, labels us all as wealthy whiny snobs, all it does is rein­force to us how some teach­ers are con­trol freaks, petty dic­ta­tors one well known edu­ca­tor calls them, want undy­ing devo­tion from their stu­dents, com­plete com­pli­ance, no ques­tions asked, from their par­ents, and are really not inter­ested in this so-called part­ner­ship between home and school.

    If all you ever want are cook­ies and PTA min­ions, let’s be hon­est. It’s not a part­ner­ship so we can all just stop pre­tend­ing it is.

    September 6th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
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  149. VA Teacher says:

    I acci­den­tally came upon this web­site when search­ing for read­ing logs to give to my stu­dents this year for home­work. This blog has really made me rethink the valid­ity of the entire idea and really home­work in gen­eral. Read­ing the com­ments from so many frus­trated par­ents has been insight­ful, because I hon­estly never thought about how home­work can invade a child’s home/after-school life. I applaud the par­ents who advo­cate for their kids and the tremen­dous weight home­work can put on their shoul­ders. As a teacher, I want par­ents to feel like part­ners in the class­room and hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions like this one can only help kids get the best edu­ca­tional expe­ri­ences pos­si­ble. The last thing I want to do is to stress my stu­dents out, so I’ll prob­a­bly make the read­ing logs optional.

    One thing I noticed by this site is a dis­tinct divide between teach­ers and par­ents and while I do think dis­cus­sion is impor­tant, it seems to get hos­tile. There are huge assump­tions being made on both sides. I think teach­ers and par­ents BOTH need to have a gen­eros­ity of the spirit. I am not, and have never been inter­ested in doing harm to any stu­dent in my class — that’s not why I teach. In the same way, I don’t think con­cerned par­ents are try­ing to “ter­ror­ize” teach­ers. There has to be mid­dle ground on which teach­ers and par­ents can both feel validated.

    I think this is impor­tant to keep in mind: Teach­ers have kids for 7 hours a day for only 9 months. Par­ents have kids for a life­time. Par­ents are a child’s first teach­ers and par­ents know their kids the best. I believe good, effec­tive teach­ers honor this. It is very sad to me that so many fam­i­lies have expe­ri­enced such neg­a­tive expe­ri­ences with pub­lic schools, espe­cially because kids and their opin­ion of school and learn­ing are caught in the crossfire.

    I will def­i­nitely have a dif­fer­ent mind­set about home­work going into this new school year.

    September 6th, 2009 at 9:35 pm
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  150. FedUpMom says:

    VA Teacher — thank you thank you thank you! It’s great to hear from an open-minded teacher. I’m so glad you came across this site.

    I too would like to have a more civ­i­lized dis­cus­sion, but some­times it’s dif­fi­cult to achieve.

    Here’s some­thing I would love to see. Could you start the school year by ask­ing par­ents for their ideas about home­work? Ask them to let you know what their expe­ri­ence has been. Does it cause prob­lems at home? Does it help their chil­dren learn? What are exam­ples of good assign­ments and bad assignments?

    September 7th, 2009 at 8:38 am
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  151. exhausted already says:

    here i sit,on labor day, look­ing for com­fort the day before i send my sweet 6 year old off to1st grade,for his sec­ond year in pub­lic school. i am absolutely guilt rid­den and dis­ap­pointed in myself for the amount of work i’ve put my guy through this sum­mer. not only did he receive home­work pack­ets (every­day for entire sum­mer), i sub­jected him to a psych ed eval­u­a­tion (thank­fully my own deci­sion and done inde­pen­dently), read­ing tutor, yes, we have to sub­mit a sum­mer read­ing log (he’s 6!!!!),and crash hom­work that we just fin­ished this morn­ing. i lost my patience (don’t worry, i am mild), he cried…all for what? for him to com­plete SUMMER home­work given by a k teacher who has never had a sin­gle doc­u­ment sent home with­out spelling errors. yet, my 6 year old is expected to be spelling (not just cat, dog) by 1st grade. i sent him to the beach with dad to get away from me. i plan to hug him end­lessly and apol­o­gize for my behav­ior. i am filled with anx­i­ety about whether he is ready or am i push­ing him (for 1st). his very kind but sim­ple k teacher sug­gested reten­tion. the psych ed scores are good.…in some areas, excep­tional (way above 90th pecen­tile). i am con­fused, angry, and defen­sive that my son is smart and typ­i­cal, albeit a lit­tle small for age with mild low mus­cle tone (which of course is con­nected to hand­writ­ing speed and accu­racy). what is going on? we’ve tried pri­vate and now pub­lic (i am not pub­lic school minded, never attended pub­lic school). i worry that i am set­ting him up to fail in a sys­tem where NCLB is actu­ally caus­ing kids to be left behind. my gut feel­ing about our school is that there is a boniker men­tal­ity masked with smiles and lip ser­vice. very high test scores, lots of hard work­ing par­ents who trust that they have their kids best inter­est in mind (because they don’t have the time to worry oth­er­wise). not really look­ing for any answers, i’ve read more this year on early ed than any­thing. i am lucky to be a SAHM but even at this very young age try­ing to fig­ure out how to bal­ance a long school day,homework,play etc. and this on top of the fact that he is exhauted at end of school day. good liuck every­one! i am going to beach!!!

    September 7th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
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  152. FedUpMom says:

    exhausted already — your post is one of the sad­dest things I have ever read. Please, take your guilt and turn it into action. Your son needs to have a child­hood. He needs to run and jump and play.

    Make some rules for your home. Set lim­its to how much time will be spent on home­work. Har­ris Cooper rec­om­mends a max­i­mum of 10 min­utes per day for a first grader. Your school dis­trict may be bonkers, but your home belongs to you. Make it a sanc­tu­ary for your child.

    Please, talk to the other par­ents in your son’s grade. How many actu­ally had their child do all that home­work? You’ll find that a lot of them just didn’t do it, and oth­ers faked it for their child.

    You know more about your child than any teacher or psy­chol­o­gist he will ever have. Make the “experts” lis­ten to you for a change.

    If the school dis­trict is really that nuts, you might want to start look­ing at your options. Is there a good Montes­sori school nearby? Can you home­school? There is just no good rea­son to put a young child through all this pres­sure and anxiety.

    Please, post again and let us know how you’re doing –

    September 7th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
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  153. PsychMom says:

    I think the reg­u­lar posters would agree…this site is made for peo­ple like “exhausted already”.

    It’s a place for peo­ple to go for sup­port and con­fir­ma­tion of their right to par­ent their chil­dren. The school sys­tem is not allowed to con­trol our lives and in shar­ing infor­ma­tion and resources, we can help fam­i­lies become stronger. Pro­tect­ing our chil­dren must be at the fore­front .… it’s the only hope our kids have. If we don’t sup­port them, who will?

    It was refresh­ing to hear from some­one like “VA teacher”. Get­ting dia­logue going is the only way. When teach­ers write in and only den­i­grate par­ents as a whole, my first instinct is to not respond. What can one say to some­one who isn’t look­ing for any­thing but a fight? But if a teacher reads part of this blog and rec­og­nizes what par­ents (and some teach­ers too) are try­ing to do, then we’ve made a dif­fer­ence that will hope­fully affect many chil­drens’ lives in a pos­i­tive way.

    September 8th, 2009 at 9:18 am
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  154. exhausted already says:

    good morn­ing

    thanks for acknowl­edg­ing my post. as i men­tioned, i hugged and loved my guy, explained that i was sorry for los­ing patience and we pro­ceeded to fin­ish our read­ing log. we packed it up along with his sum­mer home­work in his back­pack and said adios. don’t worry,our home is a “sanc­tu­ary”, pos­si­bly to a fault. he has time for play and cre­ativ­ity. though, he did work very hard this sum­mer. i guess my anx­i­ety stems from the pres­sure he felt in kinder­garten and likely will feel in 1st. my hus­band and i are very easy going and we do not fit into the pub­lic school model. from feb­ru­ary thru this sum­mer, we have ago­nized over the “reten­tion” deci­sion. there are many details to this point which if any­one is inter­ested to hear, i will share in another post. ulti­mately, we decided to move him into 1st. the part that is frus­trat­ing is that i (and my son) need a clean slate…the school claims to sup­port our deci­sion but i believe that they just don’t have a choice. i don’t want him to be judged unfairly or ass­esed as if he is under a micro­scope. unfor­tu­nately, i have become the par­ent to con­tend with. it didn’t start out that way. any­way, 1st day of school today. as always, he went with a smile. i am a lit­tle weepy. i just don’t think that our kids should be pushed so hard as early as k and 1st. as a par­ent, these should be the very spe­cial years where chil­dren are free to learn at their own pace. a very good teacher friend emailed me a per­fect quote that is unde­ni­ably the truth that all schools should be held to: “in order for ALL chil­dren to be treated equally and fairly, they MUST be treated dif­fer­ently” amen

    September 8th, 2009 at 10:38 am
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  155. PsychMom says:

    Dear Exhausted Already

    Your child has every right to head off to school every morn­ing with a smile. School should feel spe­cial to him, a place where he is with his friends and where every­body loves him. He has to feel as if he belongs. Test­ing, by it’s very nature, sep­a­rates one child from another, and does every­thing pos­si­ble to pull kids apart from one another. I never felt that way until very recently but now I see test­ing of young chil­dren as less than use­less. I hope you’ re able to work with your child’s teacher early on so that your son will feel spe­cial. Every moment you devote to help­ing him be the best kid (not best small adult) he can be will be well worth it.

    September 8th, 2009 at 11:23 am
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  156. Rebecca says:

    I’m up way too late and found myself read­ing all the com­ments. I’ve taught sev­enth graders, and now I’m an ele­men­tary librar­ian. In the class­room I didn’t assign home­work other than study­ing for a test or fin­ish­ing undone class­work. If the entire class didn’t fin­ish (or a major­ity) then we car­ried it over to the next
    day.
    And I still had a par­ent write me notes com­plain­ing about her son’s home­work. I can still quote one of these notes five years later because it irri­tated me so much. “I don’t believe in home­work so my son will not be doing the assign­ment you sent home.” What I wanted to write back was, “Lady, if you’d paid any atten­tion to any­thing I sent home this year, you’d real­ize that I don’t believe in home­work either. If you’d bother to read the emails I sent you, you’d know that the rea­son you son has work every night to fin­ish for my class is that he spends his class time draw­ing pic­tures & writ­ing notes to friends unless I’m stand­ing right over him. Obvi­ously he’s fig­ured out that if it becomes home­work he won’t have to do it because you don’t believe in home­work.“
    What I actu­ally wrote was more diplo­matic than that, but argh! I guess my point is to please make sure all this work sent home is being assigned as home­work before you get
    all angry with a teacher.
    I know there are bad teach­ers out there-control freaks, those who see noth­ing wrong with assign­ing a sec­ond grader three hours of home­work that requires help every night, and some just plain mean ones. I’ve worked with some. But the over­whelm­ing major­ity of the teach­ers I know are teach­ers because they like chil­dren and want to help them. Believe me, I could change jobs to some­thing that pays more, has far fewer “bosses,” and much less to worry about out­side work hours. On a bad day, I’ve given it some seri­ous thought.
    Back to the orig­i­nal topic. I don’t like read­ing logs per­son­ally. It seems like busy­work to me as well, & kind of point­less. The kids who’re going to read for plea­sure at home will find them irri­tat­ing, and those who hate to read already won’t sud­denly start lov­ing it if you add another step. But my school dis­trict requires teach­ers to use them. Sigh. I’d rather just have time to talk with all my stu­dents about what they’re read­ing. I did require my sev­enth graders to write up book­talks for a few books a year, ask­ing some
    of the ques­tions other posters have termed busywork-why did you like this book-and share them in class. Because that’s what adults who like to read do-talk about books they liked with their friends. It also gave me a chance to talk about books with my stu­dents. I still do some­thing sim­i­lar with my ele­men­tary stu­dents. Par­ents, please don’t assume writ­ing about books is busy­work.
    This almost turned into its own post. Sorry about the length! The topic hit a nerve.

    September 13th, 2009 at 4:11 am
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  157. HomeworkBlues says:

    Dear Rebecca:

    I’ve started read­ing you post and I’m going to have to table it, alas, because this week is crazy but I’ll get back to you soon with some feed­back. What imme­di­ately, this stood out. You say a par­ent announced thus to you: “I don’t believe in home­work so my son will not be doing the assign­ment you sent home.”

    NO one here is advo­cat­ing that approach. There are par­ents here who have writ­ten thought­ful, well researched, intel­li­gent, ele­gantly crafted emails to teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tion, cit­ing research and describ­ing how home­work has taken over their lives.The research that Har­ris Cooper has done is valid. You as a teacher should be respect­ing that.

    I first became involved when my third grader was doing three hours of home­work daily and all Sun­day. For me per­son­ally, the angst and the need to advo­cate for my child was born of home­work over­load and a deep con­cern for the dam­age it was caus­ing. The time spent far exceeded any real ben­e­fit and was caus­ing harm. This to a child who loved to read and write and still does and raised in a home where learn­ing, intel­lect and aca­d­e­mics are top pri­or­ity. We weren’t beg­ging for less home­work so she could plant her­self in front of the tele­vi­sion or video games all after­noon but because we wanted to do “home­school­ing on the side” and allow her a child­hood full of play, won­der and imagination.

    Please don’t pull triv­i­al­ize our prob­lems. They are real and real reform is needed here. Par­ents and chil­dren are major stake­hold­ers in the home­work debate. Their voices need to be heard in order to cre­ate this so-called part­ner­ship. I see you fly­ing off the han­dle instead of lis­ten­ing. Pre­cisely what you are ask­ing your par­ents NOT to do.

    And we have names. We are not “Lady.”

    September 13th, 2009 at 11:37 am
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  158. HomeworkBlues says:

    Dear Rebecca:

    My abject apolo­gies. I jumped the gun on this one. I did what I decry teach­ers here doing to some of us — not read­ing our posi­tions fully, jump­ing to hasty con­clu­sions about us and tak­ing our points out of con­text. I typ­i­cally read a poster’s entire com­ments before remark­ing so I have a fuller pic­ture of where he/she is com­ing from. But this is a busy day for me and I promised myself I’d stay off the inter­net or only stick to my work.

    Your com­ment about that one par­ent caused me to assume about you that any time a par­ent speaks up, whether they do so intel­li­gently or not, is labeled an unco­op­er­a­tive mother and anti-education. It reminds me of when my hus­band and I met with the teacher, our debate was rea­soned and thought­ful, we made the case of how much read­ing she is doing at home, we needed to del­i­cately con­vey the home­work was too easy and that was why she was pro­cras­ti­nat­ing on it, and we really needed that 5th grade teacher to lis­ten to our con­cerns. All she did was purse her lips and state, “but she still has to do her home­work,” mak­ing us feel that she had not heard a sin­gle word we’d just uttered.

    Rebecca, I see you are more rea­son­able and that you under­stand not all par­ents are like that, not all kids are like that. You write: “In the class­room I didn’t assign home­work other than study­ing for a test or fin­ish­ing undone class­work. If the entire class didn’t fin­ish (or a major­ity) then we car­ried it over to the next day.”

    Trust me, I’d “kill” for this amount of home­work in 7th grade but it’s unheard of in gifted pro­grams. My daugh­ter was seri­ously sleep deprived that year because it was still dark when I dropped her off at school, thanks to unwieldly early start times that began in mid­dle school. Imag­ine being that exhausted every day, only to come home and know you have another five hours of work wait­ing for you. She’d walk in, listless,head straight up to a room we set aside for home­work, and hole her­self up there for hours and hours.

    So you think, she’s really worked hard all week, paid her dues, now give her the week­end off, she’s earned it? No. As one high schooler con­firmed on this blog, our chil­dren don’t look for­ward to week­ends. And my daugh­ter admit­ted she hates hol­i­day week­ends because it’s just one more day of home­work. She’d rather be in school than stuck home all day try­ing to com­plete mega-assignments.

    You can imag­ine why I was so wor­ried. This is no life for a child! She attends aca­d­e­mic sum­mer pro­grams and does extremely well. I asked what she attrib­uted to her home­work suc­cess (and I cringe at my own term here, home­work suc­cess. This pro­gram doesn’t even call it home­work and nei­ther did I dur­ing our home­school year,. That word was too loaded and I ban­ished it.). She replied, “study hall is two hours.” I can do two hours!

    When it’s two hours in high school, a stu­dent can tackle it, even eagerly. When the child knows it’ll take seven hours, they pro­cras­ti­nate. As a pro­fes­sional we were work­ing with years ago told me, “Think of it as an adult. No adult wants to come home from a long day at the office after an exhaust­ing com­mute with a brief­case stuffed full of work. Yes, adults bring work home too. But not every day, every week­end, every hol­i­day. And those who do are called CEO’s. They get paid hand­somely for all that blood sweat and tears. And notice many of them burn out. And our kids are not adults. Rinse and repeat. OUR KIDS ARE NOT ADULTS!!! There­fore, they should not be given adult responsibilities.

    But Rebecca, you’re not quite off the hook here! You con­tinue to write: “I guess my point is to please make sure all this work sent home is being assigned as home­work before you get all angry with a teacher.”

    If unfin­ished home­work is sent home and it’s not on top of daily home­work, then there may be some jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for it. But my daugh­ter has ADD and was refused accom­mo­da­tions. You may not be able to imag­ine how hard it is for a child to come home with new work and all the unfin­ished class­work as well. One ADD expert calls that par­ent per­se­cu­tion! He asserts that when a child isn’t fin­ish­ing at school, it’s a school prob­lem and the school needs to look into why that the child is not finishing.

    Your exam­ple is of a child who is “goof­ing off” and is dis­re­spect­ful because his mother has given him a pass to treat school­work friv­o­lously. But that doesn’t describe every child. When a well behaved smart earnest child does not fin­ish, and the dis­re­spect and goof­ing off does not apply, you need to look deeper. It is the school’s respon­si­bil­ity to exam­ine why that is.

    In our case, the teacher knew why because we told her! And she was still send­ing all of it home. The school was not help­ing, not uncom­mon when the child is gifted and already work­ing well above grade level, and dump­ing the entire prob­lem in our laps.

    My hus­band and I ini­tially spent a lot of time on home­work, not on help­ing her but set­ting up that “dis­trac­tion free” envi­ron­ment, sit­ting next to her so she wouldn’t be lonely and mak­ing sure it got done by just stay­ing on top of it. That same pro­fes­sional told us not to do that. He said, as long as you guys put out this kind of home effort, the school will say, we see no prob­lem and con­tinue doing noth­ing to help her. I’ve also been told that some teach­ers think that help­ing a twice excep­tional child is enabling. I shake my head. And it makes me won­der just what is cov­ered dur­ing those weekly fac­ulty meet­ings. Please tell me you guys do more than talk about stan­dard­ized test scores.

    Yes, you may counter that lots of kids with ADD get school sup­port. Not a gifted one. Not in our experience.

    September 13th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
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  159. FedUpMom says:

    If you Google “read­ing logs”, this post comes up as the sec­ond entry! How cool is that?

    Back to the dis­cus­sion at hand. Rebecca, I’m inter­ested in the boy who spends his class time draw­ing pic­tures and writ­ing to his friends. What’s going on here? How did he get so deeply alien­ated from what you’re doing in class? Let me guess — is he gifted?

    So you say you’re frus­trated, because the boy doesn’t do the work in class unless you force him to, and you expect the mother to force him to do this work at home, after your efforts have failed in class. This is called “out­sourc­ing to par­ents”. There’s a prob­lem at school, and it needs to be fixed at school.

    Maybe the boy feels that this school­work is just not worth doing. Maybe the mother feels the same way.

    I have a great deal of sym­pa­thy for the refusenik and the kid who “goofs off”. I was that kid. I just couldn’t bring myself to do school­work that felt like an insult to the capa­bil­i­ties I knew I had.

    I don’t think the exam­ple you gave of the notes the mother sent in — “I don’t believe in home­work, so my son you will not be doing the work you sent home” — is so ter­ri­ble, either. She’s telling you how she runs her home, which is her right.

    September 13th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
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  160. FedUpMom says:

    More on refuseniks — I had the fol­low­ing very sad dis­cus­sion with an acquain­tance whose son is now attend­ing the pub­lic mid­dle school my daugh­ter would have gone to.

    Me: How’s your son doing at the mid­dle school?

    Other Mom: Ter­ri­ble! He doesn’t give a *bleep*. He gets As on all the tests, but he just won’t do the work!

    Me: You mean he doesn’t do the homework?

    Other Mom: No! We send him up to his room but he just goofs off.

    Me: If he’s get­ting As with­out doing the work, maybe he’s just bored. Have you had him tested for the gifted program?

    Other Mom: I asked about that, but they won’t let him try for the gifted pro­gram because he doesn’t do his work.

    Ugh. Of course, the gifted pro­gram might not be a solu­tion either, because it’s basi­cally the exact same approach, but with more pres­sure and “cov­er­ing” more material.

    September 13th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
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  161. Joshua says:

    I am a 1st Grade teacher who agrees with most of what was said on here. Many times how­ever, admin­is­tra­tion put pres­sure on the teacher to “fin­ish the cur­ricu­lum” (I actu­ally have an admin­is­tra­tor who ran­domly checks to make sure we are on the right part of the les­son plan on the cor­re­spond­ing day of the school year). It’s frus­trat­ing. I don’t like to send home home­work (after all, I’m paid to teach in class, not at home).

    My obser­va­tion has been that home­work (includ­ing read­ing logs) con­tin­ues they way it does because it’s been done that way so long and nobody really wants to come out of their com­fort zones and try some­thing dif­fer­ent. As a mat­ter of fact, I believe the whole grad­ing sys­tem needs some work and should be com­pletely revised. Kids have so much pres­sure on them that they are to stressed out to just be kids. They can’t func­tion as kids because there is so much pres­sure from the adult world to make the into lit­tle adults. While there is an ele­ment of “train­ing” involved with any les­son to be learned, kids are NOT lit­tle adults. Our cur­rent sys­tem of edu­ca­tion is rob­bing kids of their most pre­cious moments – child hood.

    When will peo­ple real­ize that they have their whole life to be an adult? They need to be kids. Yes, they need direc­tion, teach­ing, and edu­ca­tion, but not in the bro­ken, com­pul­sory way we have been giv­ing it to them.

    My opin­ions make me not pop­u­lar with other teach­ers but I care not. It needs to be said and I won’t change my mind.

    September 13th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
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  162. HomeworkBlues says:

    Hey, who let a sane per­son in? Joshua, hats off to you. You’re my kind of man;

    You stood up and said it. The Emperor Has No Clothes! Class­rooms today don’t seem all that dif­fer­ent from class­rooms in the 1950’s. We do things a cer­tain way because we’ve always done them that way. Whether they make sense or not.

    In fact, the 1950s were bet­ter. Now we have the worst of both worlds. At least chil­dren were allowed to play in the 1950s. Now we get archaic edu­ca­tion right along with Nature Deficit Dis­or­der. I don’t think we could screw this up more if we tried.

    September 13th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
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  163. FedUpMom says:

    Joshua — good for you! It’s good to hear from a teacher who agrees.

    Home­work­Blues — I often feel that we have the worst of all pos­si­ble worlds. We’ve got the author­i­tar­ian, tedious approach of the tra­di­tion­al­ists plus the hollowed-out cur­ricu­lum of the left-wing types. The result is kids who are nei­ther enjoy­ing them­selves nor learn­ing any­thing useful.

    September 13th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
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  164. HomeworkBlues says:

    FedUp­Mom writes: “The result is kids who are nei­ther enjoy­ing them­selves nor learn­ing any­thing useful.”

    Stop and pon­der this one for a moment. Isn’t this amaz­ing? Chil­dren nei­ther take plea­sure from their school expe­ri­ence nor are they aren’t learn­ing either. Reminds me of what that extremely bright dili­gent seri­ous home­schooled high schooler told me about her 7th grade expe­ri­ence, before her par­ents pulled her out: “I never worked so hard, to pro­duce so much, to learn so little.”

    Home­work is vol­ume vol­ume vol­ume. If a child isn’t sweat­ing over a work­sheet or gri­mac­ing through a read­ing response assign­ment, con­ven­tional wis­dom goes, he’s not learn­ing any­thing. We value work­sheets and logs and inter­ac­tive note­books and end­less test and as long as it’s work work work we assume the child is assi­m­il­i­at­ing it.

    I am sure many tra­di­tion­al­ists would dis­par­age our fam­ily walks in the frozen woods, where we seri­ously (and joy­fully) ana­lyzed lit­er­ary works. But think about it. Think how much learn­ing got done. I am not ask­ing the teacher to take the kids on walks for two hours. I am ask­ing the teacher to get as much done at school so that I may do so.

    September 14th, 2009 at 8:48 am
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  165. HomeworkBlues says:

    Cor­rec­tions:

    1. Chil­dren nei­ther take plea­sure from their school expe­ri­ence nor are they aren’t learn­ing either.

    Take out AREN’T.

    2. TESTS not test

    See if you can stump me and catch more. Don’t blame me. I was an “involved” par­ent last night. I stayed up late with my daugh­ter while she cranked out a writ­ing assign­ment at 1am and then it was hard to set­tle down and fall asleep.

    What would hap­pen if she had a few less essays per year? A few less reports so she could get all the sleep her body needs? Will she truly become a bet­ter writer if she crams? If good writ­ing is all about inspi­ra­tion and pas­sion, what if we kill that? And all that’s left are the mechan­ics. There’s so much infor­ma­tion out there today, so much writ­ing, so much of it mediocre. Is this what we are try­ing to breed?

    Exhibit A here. We value VOLUME. More work, more essays, more write ups, more swaths of text­book read­ings gulped down at 2am. We don’t ask the crit­i­cal ques­tions. Will we lose more than we gain? Our chil­dren are earnest. They don’t want to come to school with home­work undone. It is our respon­si­bil­ity, all of ours, teach­ers, admin­is­tra­tors and par­ents, to see to it that just because our chil­dren will do the impos­si­ble, it does not give us the right to demand the impossible.

    September 14th, 2009 at 8:57 am
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  166. HomeworkBlues says:

    Hey, FedUp­Mom, kudos to you. Not only does this come up on a Google hit, this post will make it com­ment #166! Must have hit a nerve. In both directions.

    September 14th, 2009 at 11:04 pm
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  167. HomeworkBlues says:

    “Research even shows that when stu­dents write about what they read they improve their comprehension.”

    You know what really improves read­ing com­pre­hen­sion? Read­ing! In the time it takes a small child to fill out one of those busy logs, she could be read­ing another book.

    You know what? Back when my daugh­ter had to do them, in first grade, she didn’t really mind. Which is funny because a good two years later, she came to dread home­work. Psych Mom, be care­ful. Don’t fall for that, it’s a dif­fi­cult year, sup­port your child. They’re eight. Much too young to turn them off.

    And even with unevent­ful read­ing logs, I remem­ber think­ing, what a waste of time. So while this par­tic­u­lar assign­ment wasn’t as oner­ous as some oth­ers to come, I still sup­port FedUp­Mom on this com­pletely. And if I only knew then what I know now, you can bet I wouldn’t have signed the damn read­ing log either.

    The logs stopped in 3rd grade, I think. But 5th brought weekly dippy assign­ments on inane ques­tions, designed more to crush the soul than to inspire read­ing. My daugh­ter is still a vora­cious reader. Not because of those “com­pre­hen­sion” assign­ments, but in spite of it.

    September 14th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
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  168. PsychMom says:

    I think I have to change my name to “Quandry”.

    The first rule I’ve made up for us at our house is…it’s not called home­work at home. It’s school­work. Home-work is clean­ing your room, help­ing set the table, help­ing with the gro­ceries and clean­ing up the flood in the bath­room after you’ve played in there for half an hour. It’s a brand new school year for my daugh­ter and she’s keen, but not in a good way. In an obses­sive com­pul­sive, “it’s Mon­day and this has to be done by Thursday-oh-no” way. “I’ve only writ­ten half a page and I have to write a page and a half and I don’t know what to write-oh-no”. Sounds like a vol­ume require­ment. I’m not impressed.

    But I guess what is throw­ing me off, is the shrug­ging shoul­ders and “mmmmm, I know”, that is com­ing from other par­ents. “But you know, it gets better.…now we hardly have a prob­lem at all with Ash­ley doing her home­work. She just knows she has to do it and it gets done.“
    All I can visu­al­ize is a yoke around a lit­tle girl’s neck as yet another spirit bites the dust.

    BUT, and I’m ask­ing you all out there, how will my child main­tain her spirit if I try to keep her “8” as the other bazil­lion girls in the class sub­mit and get “seri­ous” and suc­cumb to the pres­sure. She very much wants to be a part of the home­work crowd.….it’s the in crowd.

    Just sign me Quandry

    September 15th, 2009 at 7:55 am
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  169. HomeworkBlues says:

    Psy­ch­Mom writes “The first rule I’ve made up for us at our house is…it’s not called home­work at home. It’s schoolwork.”

    Exactly! This is what I wrote as I recounted our glo­ri­ous home­school year. I ban­ished that word. It was too loaded. Besides, there was no delin­eation between school­work and home­work. She didn’t spend all day on school­work and then do home­work! A pre­pos­ter­ous idea for schooled kids and even worse for home ones. She took three on line classes and I called the assign­ments, well, assignments!

    I hear you about third grade and the other par­ents and how all the per­fect girls do every drop of home­work with a smile and with­out protest. At third grade Back to School Night, one of my daughter’s teach­ers queried, “does any­one have trou­ble with the home­work?” Kudos for ask­ing. But not one parental hand shot up. I sat there, not sure what to do. We were into the third week of school and it was already oppressive.

    I thought it only took my daugh­ter three hours to get it done. Now, this was pri­vate school and at least they lis­tened. I will tell you though, Psy­ch­Mom, despite the fact that I could meet with the direc­tor, I still wish we’d home­schooled instead. Go to a home­school Park Day and watch how much fun the eight year olds are hav­ing. And pay care­ful atten­tion to this line: When asked why I was home­school­ing my thir­teen year old, I would say, “I can’t bring back eight. But I can sal­vage thirteen.”

    Just think, Psy­ch­Mom, you are in bet­ter shoes. You can still sal­vage eight and you don’t have to wait five years, filled with regret. She’s eight and you are keenly aware of it. What­ever you do, and I didn’t have this blog for sup­port then, resist the pres­sure and keep your lit­tle girl eight. She is not a lit­tle adult and you fer­vently know it!

    Back to that third grade year, and yes, I know, it’s a day at the beach com­pared to what we wres­tle with now. As said, I thought it only took my daugh­ter three hours to get her home­work done. Per­fec­tion­ist, very cre­ative, very smart, dis­tractable, pro­cras­ti­na­tor. Then I pri­vately ask around and find out many other kids, espe­cially girls, are in the same boat! Most likely not a sin­gle par­ent wanted to raise his or her hand and call atten­tion to the prob­lem. Peer pres­sure. Gotta keep up that per­fect front. .

    What to do? That’s an involved ques­tion. I have to run now, it’s 8:10 and I should be doing getting-her-off-to-school duties. I hope oth­ers quickly chime in dur­ing my absence from now till next week.

    The first advice I will give you is, RESIST PARENTAL PRESSURE. This in fact is the best advice you will get from me and it will carry you through 12th grade. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make a friend in that grade. But choose care­fully, find an ally and avoid the hyper-competitive Step­ford Wives. They’ll just make you feel bad. It’s how I learned to survive.

    September 15th, 2009 at 8:10 am
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  170. PsychMom says:

    Thanks HWB. My gut tells me I’m on the right track…oh I hope the teacher asks the same ques­tion 2 weeks from now when we have cur­ricu­lum night.
    I wel­come the challenge.

    September 15th, 2009 at 8:23 am
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  171. HomeworkBlues says:

    Psy­ch­Mom, now Quandary, if the teacher asks, stick up your arm straight up. Announce that why yes, we are! You can be respect­ful, I know you like the school for its other attrib­utes. If you are dar­ing, you can be armed with research. You know, Har­ris Cooper says no home­work in ele­men­tary, or, ten min­utes per grade. I like the out­spo­ken approach and I think you can pull it off with aplomb. If you can’t, raise your hand any­way and then tell the teacher pri­vately you have con­cerns and sched­ule a meet­ing soon​.By rais­ing your hand, you are telegraph­ing to the silent resister that there is support.

    Many here sug­gest the diplo­matic approach, lots of meet­ings. But after years of research (even Jay Math­ews of the Wash­ing­ton Post, who calls him­self Mr. Home­work and loves “rigor” and NCLB came around on the ele­men­tary home­work issue three years ago), why is this tak­ing so long? I’d hate for a par­ent to have to spend her entire year advo­cat­ing and defend­ing, only to have the school sys­tem stall and at best, arrange more meet­ings. But it’s a start and if change does even­tu­ally take place, you are paving the way for a bet­ter life to those chil­dren right behind you.

    In the past, when we par­ents brought up the min­utes rule, it tended to invite rebut­tal. The school may very well say, but it’s not SUPPOSED to take three hours. Or two. We only assign thirty min­utes. It’s tak­ing your child longer because, take your pick:

    1. She has poor time man­age­ment skills (a school favorite)

    2. She pro­cras­ti­nates (yea, no kidding)

    3. You didn’t fol­low our tips sheet (con­de­scend­ing. Assumes par­ents are idiots)

    There’s another prob­lem with min­utes we haven’t quite addressed. Last week I spoke of minute mis­con­cep­tions. When a teacher assigns lit­tle Jackie a thirty minute spelling assign­ment and she does it in thirty min­utes, teacher assumes this is how it works at home. But home is not school and chil­dren behave dif­fer­ently. Also, it’s the end of their day and chil­dren can­not be expected to sit still for yet one more hour. The home­work you think takes one hour (way too long for six year olds) has now dragged out to an all night affair because lit­tle Johnny can­not sit still any longer. Think of all the wasted time cajol­ing him when he could be play­ing out­doors and reading.

    Okay, so we’re get­ting to some­thing. Schools need to know what school­work looks like when it’s been neatly trans­ferred to the home. Should there be doubts, many of you will gladly open your homes for a visitation.

    But there’s another angle. We assume the child got dis­tracted and couldn’t stay focused. But what if the reverse hap­pens, which it fre­quently does. Say your child loves to learn (it hap­pens) and is asked to write a report on some his­tory project (yep, that hap­pens too. My eight year old was asked to do a six-part project, assigned the sec­ond week of third grade and due a month later, I thought I was going to die and that was the start of Project Hell. Hey, guess who time man­aged that first one?).

    Your daugh­ter is intrigued by the topic and becomes engrossed. She reads every­thing on the sub­ject she can get her hands on and then when it’s time to do the project, she has a thou­sand ideas and col­ors and shapes. School wants home­work to be like school. I say school is where kids have to keep to a clock (I don’t like it which is why I would home­school but it is school and school needs some sem­blance of struc­ture and order). But home is where our chil­dren should be allowed to linger with their learn­ing, savor­ing their discoveries.

    So there is your child, cap­ti­vated (this seems to hap­pen less and less in today’s dra­con­ian envi­ron­ment but my daugh­ter was in pri­vate where she tells me each day the work was more inter­est­ing) by her spelling story. She wants to write eight pages. But if she does, the math won’t get done and the teacher, rather than rec­og­niz­ing one gift, chas­tises the lack of another. There is a famous quote and I’ll get in trou­ble for say­ing this, but hey, shoot the quoter, not me, I’m only the mes­sen­ger: “There are some teach­ers who will seek out cre­ativ­ity in a child and then go about doing every­thing they can to destroy it.”

    So now your child is engrossed. The only way home­work can take thirty min­utes is if you stand there with a whip and stop­watch. It takes away any inci­den­tal learn­ing the child would stum­ble upon on his own because for the entire time he is work­ing, every­thing is pre­scribed. What he should do, when he should do it and long he should do it. No won­der the kid’s hid­ing under the table or lock­ing him­self in the bath­room. He’s try­ing to tell us some­thing, if only we’d stop call­ing him long enough to lis­ten. He is say­ing, I was engrossed, I was in flow, I enjoyed it, I wasn’t allowed to, so I’m giv­ing up. I have decided that under the cur­rent con­di­tions, I will get noth­ing out of it so why bother?

    This espe­cially hap­pens with gifted kids, the higher the more resis­tance. Many teach­ers con­clude these chil­dren are lazy and mis­in­ter­pret their rest­less­ness for inso­lence. They are in fact scream­ing a mes­sage but we are shout­ing so loud our­selves, we can’t hear them.

    September 15th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
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  172. PsychMom says:

    The school tends to stick to the 10 min­utes per grade rule and lives by the con­cept that young chil­dren need to be trained to do home­work. We give it to them in Grade 3 because they’ll have alot more of it to do in mid­dle school and if we don’t start them now then they’ll NEVER be able to do it in Mid­dle school.…kind of idea. Home­work is good for chil­dren, they believe. It’s a nec­es­sary evil, like cod liver oil.

    I can’t abide by the 10 minute per grade rule because it’s not based on any­thing. I work in health care, and the cur­rent big thing is hand washing.…we all need lessons in hand wash­ing. They have done stud­ies to deter­mine the min­i­mal amount of time it takes to clean your hands well.…it’s about 40 to 60 sec­onds. Not 30, not 2 minutes…if you want to be a gen­er­al­ist, you say it takes about a minute. But the same “rigor” (love that word) is not applied to this 10 min­utes per grade rule. It’s a stab in the dark. It sounds catchy.
    So with­out even con­sid­er­ing the indi­vid­ual dif­fer­ences offered by the chil­dren, 10 min­utes per grade is a crock.

    And there’s one other thing I’ve noticed. These girls who love fol­low­ing the rules and being orderly, are only get­ting these obses­sive habits more deeply ingrained by hav­ing these dead­lines and cri­te­ria applied to their work. They’re already learn­ing to fill the page rather than fol­low their minds. And that’s the stuff I object to.

    September 15th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
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  173. FedUpMom says:

    Ah yes, the com­pletely self-referential loop. My favorite.

    “The pur­pose of going to school is to learn how to go to school so you can get into a really good school.”

    “The pur­pose of home­work is to learn how to do home­work. We need a whole lot of home­work this year because there’ll be a whole lot more home­work next year!”

    “The pur­pose of tak­ing tests is to learn how to take tests so you can do well on tests.”

    Wince and repeat.

    September 15th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
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  174. HomeworkBlues says:

    Wince and Repeat.

    Cute, FUM! It does seem as if we are in end­less cir­cles. I can imag­ine how incred­i­bly frus­trat­ing hear­ing that mantra is when we’ve digested it so thor­oughly on this blog.

    It’s frus­trat­ing, mad­den­ing and ill informed. I would start a meet­ing diplo­mat­i­cally relat­ing that you have reached this con­clu­sion after read­ing, research­ing and dis­cussing home­work with sea­soned vet­er­ans. Dis­pel the notion that over-preparation leads one to be pre­pared for more prepa­ra­tion. You can head it off at the pass. It would be hilar­i­ous if it weren’t so sad that so many edu­ca­tors roll out that line. Do they actu­ally believe it or do they think it’s a show stopper?

    It’s insult­ing to hear it. It’s bad enough if you are a new­bie, green, inno­cent, where you know some­thing is wrong but the pow­ers that be con­vince your instincts are all wrong. It’s another when you already know that prepa­ra­tion mania doesn’t work and is unnec­es­sary if not down­right harmful.

    Wince and Repeat indeed!

    September 15th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
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  175. PsychMom says:

    I get the best lines from you guys.…Wince and repeat…that’s genius.

    September 16th, 2009 at 10:49 am
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  176. HomeworkBlues says:

    Isn’t it, indeed!

    September 16th, 2009 at 11:31 am
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  177. FedUpMom says:

    I should clar­ify — I can’t take credit for “wince and repeat”. I read it in a com­ment on the kitchen table math blog.

    September 16th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
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  178. HomeworkBlues says:

    I read that blog too! We do cir­cle in the same orbit, don’t we? No, don’t say it, don’t give it away!

    September 16th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
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  179. PsychMom says:

    Mugs.…I think we should start sell­ing mugs and teeshirts.
    What’s an obvi­ous icon for home­work that we could put a cir­cle around and then a line through?

    September 16th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
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  180. HomeworkBlues says:

    1. Kid car­ry­ing giant back­pack, huge over­sized back­pack, hunched over from the weight, sleepwalking.

    2. Kid’s head down on a pile of text­books and note­books, Pile should be sky high. To get the point across.

    We had a moment of lev­ity at LL Bean. In their back to school back­pack sec­tion, they fea­ture an ENORMOUS back­pack. And I mean ENORMOUS. The kids loved it. Any­one seen it?

    My daugh­ter walked over and slid into the straps. It’s too big to hoist so she was forced to sit down. (Another g ood image, back­pack so heavy, she can no longer carry it). She said, good­na­turedly, I go to ______________ school, I need a back­pack this size.

    We couldn’t stop laugh­ing. I took pic­tures but I only had my cell phone. We need to sub­mit this one for the school news­pa­per, it was priceless!

    Of course, it’s no laugh­ing mat­ter. But that day, with her, before school started, I thought laugh­ter might carry the day a lit­tle bet­ter than tears. After all, if not for the back­pack that is so heavy, she can’t ride the bus and walk home from the sheer weight, and the ten ton text­books and home­work that ends at…when does it end? My cajol­ing that she MUST stop starts at eleven, and end­less exams and quizzes, it’s not a bad school. That’s like saying…

    September 16th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
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  181. Brian says:

    There are a cou­ple of issues here that I’d like to bring up. I cur­rently teach at a low-income, urban high school in Chicago. Most of my 9th grade stu­dents read well below grade level. To make the state­ment that this read­ing log assign­ment is bad, is a dras­tic gen­er­al­iza­tion. It may be a “chore” for mid­dle class to upper class school chil­dren. Par­ents of these chil­dren are read­ers and have books all over the house. The fact that this par­ent even wrote an email to the school illus­trates a lot. How­ever, a read­ing log at my would ensure that my stu­dents are read­ing out­side of school. My kids come from house­holds where read­ing is often not mod­eled by adults in their lives. Lets be real here; what applies to pre­dom­i­nantly white, middle-class schools does not always apply to low-income, urban schools.

    September 18th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
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  182. HomeworkBlues says:

    Brian asserts; “It may be a “chore” for mid­dle class to upper class school chil­dren. Par­ents of these chil­dren are read­ers and have books all over the house. ”

    Which begs the ques­tion. Then why assign them to mid­dle class fam­i­lies with books all over the house? FedUp­Mom has already said, over and over, that her daugh­ter is in a pri­vate school com­prised of mid­dle and pro­fes­sional class families.

    FedUp, you don’t mind, do you? After all, I’m not giv­ing away any con­fi­dences. You made this point the last time.

    We are going in cir­cles. Every time we decry home­work, along comes some­one to tell us we need it because lower income chil­dren don’t read at home.

    Brian, I admire what you do, and you have made it clear mid­dle class fam­i­lies with involved par­ents and books should not have to waste time pro­vid­ing evi­dence of their read­ing. Kudos to you! But over and over, along comes some­one to tell us we need home­work because some other kid doesn’t read.

    If Johnny won’t read, that means my kid isn’t allowed to either (home­work pre­vents my daugh­ter from read­ing, I’m not kid­ding)? If Suzy doesn’t play out­side, that means my daugh­ter can’t either (one teacher wrote that not all par­ents take their kids to the park and the kid would just be sit­ting home, planted in front of the tv so bet­ter give home­work)? If Jimmy doesn’t get taken to muse­ums (same argu­ment made. Not all par­ents are going to take their kids some­place edu­ca­tional so we need to send home home­work), there­fore I’m not allowed to take my daugh­ter to the sci­ence museum either?

    Sup­pose you and I are in the same room. You’ve been lost at sea and by the time they find you, you are near star­va­tion. I am over­weight. They need to fat­ten you up. Do they need to fat­ten me up too?

    Let’s give kids what they need. And let’s stop jus­ti­fy­ing oner­ous home­work on the grounds that most par­ents are idiots and wouldn’t know to read to their kid unless the gov­ern­ment asked for evidence.

    September 18th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
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  183. Brian says:

    HW Blues:

    Com­pletely agree with you. For the most part, mid­dle class/upper class stu­dents are read­ing out­side of class; this is a given. With such stu­dents, crit­i­cal think­ing should be the focus of home­work (if hw is to be given at all). Assign­ments where stu­dents are cre­at­ing and not just reproducing.

    September 18th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
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  184. Morty says:

    Impor­tant to add that manda­tory read­ing assign­ments with intru­sive mon­i­tor­ing doesn’t make sense for chil­dren of any social class. Kids from lower income fam­i­lies may need more sup­port, but let’s be care­ful not to assume that dis­re­spect­ful and coun­ter­pro­duc­tive prac­tices, includ­ing giv­ing kids no say about what they’re doing and impos­ing the school’s agenda on par­ents, is no more appro­pri­ate for poor kids than for rich kids.

    September 18th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
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  185. Miss Incognegro says:

    If she’s so ‘fed up’, what’s her solution?

    Par­ents who com­plain, and offer no alter­na­tive, make me tired.

    September 18th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
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  186. Morty says:

    To Miss Incognegro:

    What exactly is the prob­lem to which she, as a par­ent, is oblig­ated to offer a solu­tion? (Other than “stop send­ing home read­ing logs and turn­ing read­ing into a chore for my child”)

    September 18th, 2009 at 7:36 pm
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  187. ReadingCountess says:

    I am a fifth grade read­ing teacher and a mother of three boys (all of whom are vora­cious read­ers). I was guilty of assign­ing read­ing logs (and I var­ied the log each year, try­ing to “tweak” it until it worked…which it never did). This year, I decided to take a hard look at this prac­tice. And what did I decide? I decided to throw it out.

    My old­est son was in fifth grade last year, and read 2 – 3 books a week. How­ever, he never wrote down the time he started to read, the time he fin­ished and the pages he read. That meant that the night before the (major grade) read­ing log was due, he was hur­riedly writ­ing down every book, date and page num­ber he could remem­ber. Unfor­tu­nately, that meant pre­cious lit­tle was remem­bered! The log turned out to be a big, fat, fab­ri­ca­tion. This was my a-ha.

    I then began to think about how I, also a huge reader, behave when I read. Do I com­plete a log? No! I just begin read­ing. If I am to model to my stu­dents what liv­ing a read­erly life is all about, if I want them to feel the same deli­cious feel­ing I enjoy when I curl up with a good book, then requir­ing them to keep an eye on the clock and the pages does not fit into that equation.

    My stu­dents were DELIGHTED when I shared with them my think­ing this year. Does that mean that I just ask them to read at home? Yes and no. When they come back to school after a night of read­ing, I check in with them. I ask them to share the page num­ber that they are cur­rently on. I call this “sta­tus of the class.” In five min­utes, I can tell who was really busy last night, who read a ton (and there are a lot of them), and who has been repeat­edly NOT read­ing by pick­ing up on the trend. The record keep­ing is put on ME, the pro­fes­sional. The tra­di­tional read­ing log places the duty on the reader/parent. I use the sta­tus to then guide my instruc­tion and con­fer­enc­ing through­out the week. It is also a great tool to show par­ents when con­fer­enc­ing time rolls around.

    In addi­tion to this, my chil­dren are required to keep a reader’s note­book. In it, there are sec­tions: Iden­tity of a reader, books on deck (books they are plan­ning to read-they get ideas through my book­talks, book­talks from their peers, par­ents, librar­ian…), read­ing list, let­ters, thoughts about my read­ing, and book club sec­tions. In the read­ing list por­tion, the kids write down the title of any book they begin, then the date, genre, and date fin­ished with a rat­ing between 1 – 10 after they read. By the end of each six weeks, they tally how many books they read (and they com­plete any work in their note­books in class — it is a teacher dri­ven tool), and they should have around 5 – 6 books logged.

    Read­ing should be authen­tic. Any doc­u­men­ta­tion of the read­ing should be solely on the teacher’s shoul­ders. Any­thing else is a farce!

    September 18th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
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  188. Do You Require “Reading Logs” For Homework? | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... says:

    […] blog post titled “I Hate Read­ing Logs,” says FedUp Mom has been mak­ing the rounds on Twit­ter (thanks to Dawn Mor­ris for the tip).  In it, a mother speaks […]

    September 18th, 2009 at 10:29 pm
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  189. Miss Incognegro says:

    To Morty:

    My mother rarely com­plained about teach­ers. When she did, she at least had a help­ful sug­ges­tion for the teacher.

    I guess my mother is part of a gen­er­a­tion of par­ents which no longer exists.

    September 19th, 2009 at 12:27 am
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  190. FedUpMom says:

    To Miss Incogne­gro: your mother was likely part of the gen­er­a­tion which was expected to stay out of their kids’ home­work. Back then, schools didn’t assign home­work until the child was old enough to han­dle it on her own, and they didn’t rou­tinely send home work for the par­ents to do. I’d bet money that no teacher told your mother to sign your home­work every night. Right?

    September 19th, 2009 at 5:28 am
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  191. News from our Twitter Feed « Education Revolution says:

    […] “I Hate Read­ing Logs” says Fedup Mom […]

    September 20th, 2009 at 10:21 am
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  192. PsychMom says:

    In response to the com­ment “par­ents who offer no alter­na­tive (to homework).….….make me tired”

    I think the alter­na­tive to home­work has been very well artic­u­lated. Leave kids alone and let them be kids. Home­work has become such an accepted way of life, peo­ple don’t even think about it any­more, and won­der why many of today’s kids are dis­en­gaged from their school­ing, their fam­i­lies, and even from them­selves to a large extent. Going to school and learn­ing is a child’s job but that does not mean that com­ing home with two hours of home­work every night is also a part of their job.

    September 21st, 2009 at 8:14 am
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  193. Really? says:

    So home­work is the root of all evil huh? Home­work is why stu­dents are con­sis­tently fail­ing in Amer­ica. Home­work is why America’s edu­ca­tional sys­tem is falling behind other coun­tries, behind China, Japan, India, Europe.…yes, it must be those darn read­ing logs. Because God For­bid that coun­tries like China and Japan, who are pro­duc­ing their top sci­en­tists and engi­neers, will think of the audac­ity to mon­i­tor their child’s read­ing progress and work account­abil­ity. I think par­ents just needs to stop being so lazy and sit down with their “busy” middle/high class lives and talk with their kids about their read­ings for a few min­utes – mean­while take about 15 sec­onds to sign their read­ing logs. Is this web­site for real?

    September 21st, 2009 at 7:23 pm
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  194. HomeworkBlues says:

    Really, oh, boy am I glad you are not my daughter’s teacher. I dare say you come off pretty une­d­u­cated your­self. You clearly didn’t do your home­work. Take the time to read this blog, it’s ori­gin, why peo­ple joined, what the issues are, and ways in which we can resolve them. Smart involved par­ents are dis­cov­er­ing one way is resistance.

    You come off ill-informed and rigid.Shudder.

    September 21st, 2009 at 11:29 pm
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  195. Charlotte says:

    Are any of you con­sid­er­ing vot­ing out the politi­cians who have cre­ated and per­pet­u­ated this test­ing frenzy?

    Teach­ers have no choice about fol­low­ing direc­tives from admin­is­tra­tors, who in turn are fol­low­ing direc­tives from state boards, etc., on through the chain of folks who cre­ated and enforce these problems?

    Vote these peo­ple out, tell them you have had it with stan­dard­ized test­ing, state stan­dards (that ought to be called dic­tates), with mak­ing test­ing com­pa­nies rich, with text­book pub­lish­ers spin­ning out revised ver­sions of junk, etc.

    You have the power to change the sys­tem. Teach­ers do not have the power. Maybe if we stopped allow­ing out­siders to dic­tate to tal­ented teach­ers how to do the job they are so pas­sion­ate about, they might just sur­prise you.

    And quit day­dream­ing that if we leave chil­dren alone, they are intrin­si­cally moti­vated to learn. Intrin­si­cally moti­vated to play, to watch TV, to avoid any­thing hard, etc. – yes. Are some, a few, intrin­si­cally moti­vated? Yes. On the whole, stu­dents don’t do assign­ments, don’t show up pre­pared to dis­cuss top­ics they have not pre­pared to dis­cuss, don’t want to write down any­thing, like to whine and com­plain, and pass the buck and play the blame game. (And my stu­dents were largely mid­dle class, not liv­ing in poverty, with lots of advantages.)

    I am a pas­sion­ate teacher who hates home­work for no pur­pose, but some sub­jects require a lit­tle more than can be accom­plished in 45 min­utes. I hated stay­ing up until 2 a.m. doing home­work at our house – a lot of it need­less, time-consuming and not instruc­tional. But let’s get real. Both sides of this argu­ment have some merit.

    Day­dream about ideal teach­ers and ideal chil­dren. Mean­while, teach­ers get to work with the real ones who show up every day. And a great many of us love them, love the job, and want to do it well. And most of us have our hands tied at every turn. Given fewer crit­i­cisms and fewer lists of things we must do from out­side the field, we might be able to sim­plify the process for every­one. The more pres­sures we get, more rules, more reac­tions, more poli­cies, and more ridicu­lous responses are created.

    September 22nd, 2009 at 12:06 am
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  196. Miss Incognegro says:

    @ FedUp @PsychMom,

    FYI:

    My mother was *very* involved in my edu­ca­tion, despite the fact that Black par­ents are widely believed to be dis­con­nected and dis­in­ter­ested in their children’s edu­ca­tion. So, when teach­ers were act­ing like a-holes, she stepped up imme­di­ately, and let them know. But, this was rare.

    Addi­tion­ally, my mother is also a Depression-era, Jim Crow-era, Civil Rights-era lady. She knows and under­stands full well the impor­tance of edu­ca­tion and learning.

    September 22nd, 2009 at 7:00 am
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  197. FedUpMom says:

    Miss Incogne­gro — I’m sure your mother was very involved. I’m not crit­i­ciz­ing your mother at all. And I would guess that most Blacks in the mid­dle class today got there because of their par­ents’ inter­est in education.

    I’m say­ing that in today’s school sys­tem, we start home­work with kids at such a young age that it really becomes the mother’s prob­lem. Then the school tries to enforce “Par­ent Involve­ment” in a com­pletely patron­iz­ing way.

    When you were in school, home­work prob­a­bly didn’t start until you were old enough that you could do it your­self with­out con­stant man­age­ment. Right? So your mother could take a dif­fer­ent role in your edu­ca­tion, instead of becom­ing “home­work cop” when you were 5.

    September 22nd, 2009 at 7:44 am
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  198. FedUpMom says:

    Char­lotte says:

    *****************
    On the whole, stu­dents don’t do assign­ments, don’t show up pre­pared to dis­cuss top­ics they have not pre­pared to dis­cuss, don’t want to write down any­thing, like to whine and com­plain, and pass the buck and play the blame game. (And my stu­dents were largely mid­dle class, not liv­ing in poverty, with lots of advan­tages.)
    *****************

    Char­lotte — how do you think your stu­dents got this way? Kids are born want­ing to learn. How did these kids get so com­pletely turned off to school? My the­ory is that they get turned off by years of point­less busy­work. What’s your theory?

    When I read para­graphs like the one above, and then you protest that you “love the kids!”, I’m skeptical.

    And it would be eas­ier to vote out the guilty politi­cians if I knew of any­one who was run­ning on a plat­form of true school reform.

    September 22nd, 2009 at 8:04 am
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  199. Lisa Read says:

    Let the bash­ing begin. I am a Pub­lic School Teacher.

    Now, put down that rot­ten tomato and lis­ten. I do the best I can with the resources I get. Yes, your taxes pay my wages, but you did not pay for 7 years of Uni­ver­sity, make up for lost wages for the years I worked on-call (Substitute/Supply teach­ing), and you have not walked a mile in my Birkenstocks.

    For the record: I have taught all grades from 1 to 9, the most of my years at grade 4÷5÷6, I am cur­rently at Mid­dle School. I stopped doing spelling tests years ago. I never did read­ing logs, and I never par­tic­i­pated in the “read 10 books, get a coupon for a pizza” pro­gram, and I rarely give homework.

    I read aloud to my stu­dents (still, even in Mid­dle School) and I talk about books and authors and lit­er­a­ture ele­ments and the fun and joy of read­ing a good book.

    But I also get told what I will do in my class, despite any under­stand­ing I have about pro­fes­sional auton­omy. The Min­istry tells us what to do, the dis­trict tells us what to do, Par­ents come in and expect us to do all sorts of other magic. The Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion is run by politi­cians, not edu­ca­tors. Teach­ers have no voice at the admin­is­tra­tive level. We don’t think par­ents are idiots (well, col­lec­tively) but guess what? My col­leagues are some of the best edu­cated, most trav­eled, diverse peo­ple on the planet– I assure you we are not idiots, either (by and large)

    Blame the bureau­crats who insist on col­lect­ing mean­ing­less data, rather than offer­ing sup­port and resources. We are just doing our best

    September 22nd, 2009 at 2:10 pm
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  200. FedUpMom says:

    Lisa Read — we’re not in the busi­ness of “bash­ing” here.

    I have a ques­tion for you — what coun­try are you in?

    September 22nd, 2009 at 2:34 pm
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  201. PsychMom says:

    To Lisa:

    “For the record: I have taught all grades from 1 to 9, the most of my years at grade 4÷5÷6, I am cur­rently at Mid­dle School. I stopped doing spelling tests years ago. I never did read­ing logs, and I never par­tic­i­pated in the “read 10 books, get a coupon for a pizza” pro­gram, and I rarely give homework”…if this is the way you treat your stu­dents (respect­fully and with much kindess and thought), then why on earth would you be stand­ing up for the teach­ers who solidly believe in those things and who treat some par­ents badly who are objecting?

    We don’t teacher bash…for the 10,000th time. We stand up for our chil­dren and for our­selves. We ask ques­tions. If we feel the school sys­tem and teach­ers are run­ning over us we say some­thing. IF that’s teacher bash­ing then I guess not a lot of inquiry goes on in schools anymore.

    If you’re refer­ring to Min­istries, then I’m guess­ing you’re a teacher in the Cana­dian system.…I’m Cana­dian. I know that the schools and their cur­ricu­lums are based on the whims of the politi­cians. But other teach­ers have been on this site who have said they do what they like in their class­rooms and they had the same edu­ca­tion you had, and they live under the same Min­istries you do…but still they have minds of their own. I think you do too.…but there are some teach­ers who don’t.

    Was any­thing of what I just said teacher bashing?

    September 22nd, 2009 at 2:44 pm
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  202. Lisa Read says:

    Well, you could start with this quote from the sec­ond post on the page: ” I blame Older Son’s first grade teacher for his hatred of reading.”

    I was respond­ing to a feel­ing I got read­ing (and skim­ming) this incred­i­ble vol­ume of pas­sion­ate expression.

    My orig­i­nal post was an attempt to shine a light on the real prob­lem: Edu­crats col­lect­ing mean­ing­less data instead of sup­port­ing teach­ers who DO know how to edu­cate kids.….for the most part, we arrived to teach­ing because we were called.

    I am Cana­dian, and live on Van­cou­ver Island on the West Coast.

    I’m just say­ing, teach­ers aren’t to blame, the sys­tem is.

    If you care to read more about my feel­ings on Edu­ca­tional Top­ics, my blog is: http://​read​lis​aread​.edublogs​.org/

    You might find this story telling, as well: http://​teacherteachme​.blogspot​.com/

    September 22nd, 2009 at 3:28 pm
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  203. Annie says:

    I am a mid­dle school spe­cial edu­ca­tion (LD and SED) teacher. I teach lan­guage arts. I spend most of my time “think­ing” about how to make kids like school again. I spend most of my time in meet­ings, doing paper­work, or other stu­pid bureau­cratic junk.

    I am required to send home­work home. Most of the time I have them take unfin­ished work home. I hate home­work. I have them pick their own spelling/vocab activ­i­ties. I accept ideas that they come up with. Now I have to have read­ing logs.….

    Today I told them about read­ing logs. I explained that it was not a chore. I am allow­ing them to read inter­net sto­ries, mag­a­zines, news­pa­pers, books…ANYTHING. I want them to find some­thing they like to read at home. I want to know what they want to read. After dis­cussing what I wanted them to do I asked “is this ok? is it a chore?” and the answer was that it wasnt that bad. I dont require par­ent sig­na­tures, but I want to know (at least one sen­tence) what they read about.

    Am I happy I have to do this? Orig­i­nally, no. Now that I spoke to the kids I feel bet­ter. I really want them to find that read­ing is fun. If they skip read­ing one night, but read the next night and give me a longer sum­mary, thats great!

    I am ram­bling, mainly because I dont want to start on my moun­tains of paper­work (my homework!).

    Can read­ing logs be “not that bad”? Can kids buy into them if they are used appro­pri­ately and not as a way to track and mon­i­tor responsibility?

    My stu­dents need to have some feel­ing of own­er­ship over their work. They need to feel suc­cess­ful and that they are work­ing toward some­thing ben­e­fi­cial to them. I think that if read­ing logs get them to try new books out and start to enjoy read­ing, then they might be worth it.

    September 22nd, 2009 at 5:06 pm
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  204. A Teacher says:

    Have any of you ever taught in a Pub­lic School? Par­ents need to help their chil­dren learn. It takes the stu­dent, the par­ent and the teacher…not just the teacher. With some of the atti­tudes many peo­ple on this web­site have…and lack of sup­port for the teach­ers and class­rooms, it’s no won­der your chil­dren dis­like read­ing. Most teach­ers feel that a read­ing log (espe­cially for K — 2) means that the chil­dren either WERE READ TO, READ IT THEMSELVES OR READ TO a par­ent or younger sib­ling. Chil­dren that are read to and encour­aged to read, become bet­ter read­ers. Stu­dents whose par­ents take them to the library AND have books in the home (whether bor­rowed or bought) enjoy read­ing more. Chil­dren who see their par­ents read, enjoy read­ing. Teach­ers are not mir­a­cle work­ers. We are all not per­fect, but most of us do our best. When there is par­ent sup­port, not bit­ter­ness, it is eas­ier for everyone.

    September 22nd, 2009 at 11:54 pm
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  205. HomeworkBlues says:

    A Teacher, this is what I con­sider an inspir­ing teacher, one a kid will never forget:

    “I let a 13-year-old boy who dreamed of being a comic-book writer spend a week in the pub­lic library — with the assis­tance of the librar­ian — to learn the tricks of graphic sto­ry­telling. I sent a shy 13-year-old girl in the com­pany of a loud­mouth class­mate to the state capi­tol — she to speak to her local leg­is­la­tor, he to teach her how to be fear­less. Today, that shy girl is a trial attorney.

    If you under­stand where a kid wants to go — the kid has to under­stand that first — it isn’t hard to devise exer­cises, com­plete with aca­d­e­mics, that can take them there.”

    It’s from that arti­cle by John Tay­lor Gatto I just posted. In fact, he advises doing exactly what FedUp­Mom did, resist­ing the read­ing log!

    “What Can You Do About All This? A lot.

    You can make the sys­tem an offer it can’t refuse by doing small things, individually.

    You can pub­licly oppose — in writ­ing, in speech, in actions — any­thing that will per­pet­u­ate the insti­tu­tion as it is. The accu­mu­lated weight of your resis­tance and dis­ap­proval, together with that of thou­sands more, will erode the energy of any bureaucracy.

    You can calmly refuse to take stan­dard­ized tests. Fol­low the lead of Melville’s moral genius in Bartleby, the Scrivener, and ask every­one, politely, to write: “I pre­fer not to take this test” on the face of the test packet.

    A Teacher, I know it’s hard to teach in pub­lic school. But you actu­ally believe kids will read more because of read­ing logs? We’ve made con­vinc­ing cases that busy home­work does far more to turn kids off to learn­ing than on to it.

    You don’t like the likes of us, it seems, but are you really read­ing us? Because my daugh­ter is a rav­en­ous reader! Home­work, over the years, did more to thwart her cre­ativ­ity than enhance it. It took sig­nif­i­cant time away from the read­ing and writ­ing she loves, it lim­ited learn­ing rather than added to it.

    You go on to tell us what makes a great reader. Which leads me to believe you are not lis­ten­ing. Because the pri­mary posters here already have kids who love to read with par­ents who read to them and take them to the library. That is what we are plead­ing to do! Go to the library and read. Don’t you see that empty time wast­ing home­work over­load is just that a waste of our most pre­cious com­mod­ity, time and that it has dimin­ish­ing returns when it severely cuts into sleep?

    We have made strong elo­quent pas­sion­ate con­vinc­ing cases that espe­cially for chil­dren who love to read and write, that is what they should be doing in ele­men­tary when they return from school. Not busy work that drains them and kills their excite­ment, ini­tia­tive and wonder.

    September 23rd, 2009 at 11:21 am
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  206. HomeworkBlues says:

    A Teacher asserts: “With some of the atti­tudes many peo­ple on this web­site have…and lack of sup­port for the teach­ers and class­rooms, it’s no won­der your chil­dren dis­like reading.”

    I would ven­ture to claim that it is pre­cisely because of “my atti­tudes on this web site” that my daugh­ter loves reading.

    Lack of sup­port for teach­ers and class­rooms? Wish you’d told me this ear­lier. Could have saved me count­less hours of vol­un­teer­ing, fund rais­ing, chap­er­on­ing on field trips and a host of school func­tions, donat­ing money, food and sup­plies, always ask­ing to help out in the class­room, pho­to­copy­ing, ask­ing the front office phones„ serv­ing on the PTSA, board mem­ber of booster groups, not to men­tion all that home­work coach­ing and sup­port at home. A Teacher, please tell me, what does involve­ment and sup­port look like on your side of the planet?

    September 23rd, 2009 at 1:11 pm
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  207. HomeworkBlues says:

    I already said I was a typo dis­as­ter today so I have immu­nity, no? ANSWERING the front office phones, meant to write. And just one comma to fol­low. The print is hope­lessly light in the draft, I don’t see a comma so I add one and up pop two!

    September 23rd, 2009 at 1:14 pm
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  208. Anonymous says:

    Fed up Mom,

    If you are a pub­lic school teacher, you know that schools in the United States are noth­ing com­pared to that of any school out­side the United States where edu­ca­tion is val­ued beyond mea­sure and by par­ents as well. I have trav­eled to var­i­ous coun­tries and have been able to see in depth that sad real­ity that is our school today. I am a teacher and it is evi­dent that the edu­ca­tion sys­tem we have within in U.S is a dis­grace and even­tu­ally the United States will lose its promi­nent posi­tion as a world power soon enough. Intel­li­gent stu­dents may be com­ing out of our col­leges, but in recent years the major­ity of doc­tor­ate degrees were being given to for­eign­ers. The stu­dents of today are expected to com­pete on an inter­na­tional level. There­fore, edu­ca­tion is becom­ing that much more impor­tant. How­ever, how does a stu­dent learn to suc­ceed on an inter­na­tional level? They must fully develop the skills nec­es­sary to suc­ceed in col­lege and even­tu­ally the work­force. What skills? As many researchers have noted read­ing pro­fi­ciency is the main skill that almost all jobs require. These skills require basic recall, analy­sis and the like. I believe that any way a teacher can aid a stu­dent to suc­cess­fully devel­op­ing these skills, the bet­ter chance the child will be able to suc­ceed. Now, your opin­ion on read­ing logs indi­cates a sense of lazi­ness. Read­ing is sup­pose to be fun. Yet, in the real world how many of us have read text books and the like and enjoyed every minute of it? Real­is­ti­cally, these chil­dren will have to read texts that are not enjoy­able. If we base read­ing on a purely plea­sur­able bases then we are show­ing our chil­dren that read­ing is only to be done when it is fun. The prob­lem that we face in soci­ety is that we are teach­ing our chil­dren that they must enjoy every minute of school­ing. This why the con­struc­tivist the­ory has taken hold of our edu­ca­tional sys­tem and is why group learn­ing plagues our schools. I feel more like a clown in class than a teacher as our schools want us to enter­tain our stu­dents all the time. It is a funny idea to think about when they get to col­lege and they get a rude awak­ing as they find out what real work is and what it means to sit, lis­ten and take notes, rather than being given a show about the les­son. For a teacher, to say that read­ing logs serve no instruc­tional pur­pose rather than mak­ing it a chore, you are ter­ri­bly mis­taken. In my eyes, this is a per­fect chance for you to inter­act with your daugh­ter. have her read to you, or you read to her.…it is your job to help edu­cate her. And no, you do not get paid. Its a sad day when a par­ent feels they have to get paid to help their chil­dren through school. More­over, no child can be trusted. Show me a child that has never lied or has made a mis­take. I am sure your per­fect angel has never fal­tered in any­thing she was requested to do and as such you can trust her with­out thought. This is what I hate about par­ents. They hate to admit that their child is not per­fect. Again, it is your oblig­a­tion as a par­ent to fol­low behind your daugh­ter until she is of legal age. To ask for your par­tic­i­pa­tion in sign­ing off on a read­ing log is the least you can do. And I say “par­tic­i­pa­tion” because every par­ent should be ask­ing more on how they can help the teacher help their child suc­ceed. I am sure you are ask­ing her teacher what more you can do for her to help your daugh­ter. I am a read­ing teacher, work­ing on a mas­ter, and parental involve­ment is key to read­ing pro­fi­ciency. Yet, we have par­ents like you that have to be paid. Take time and review your state scores and national scores. Math and sci­ence I am sure are low. But, think about why. Maybe it is because they do not or have not devel­oped those skills that require them to read effi­ciently and accu­rately. Read­ing is across the cur­ricu­lum and as such read­ing should be the pri­mary focus of any school­ing sys­tem and edu­ca­tion as a whole. The read­ing logs serve the pur­pose of basic recall, pred­i­ca­tion, analy­sis and many more intel­lec­tual skills. Teach­ers do not give ran­dom work just to give it. This has a pur­pose and maybe instead of talk­ing so much and act­ing like you know what read­ing is and how one devel­ops it, take a course or read a bit on it. Oh! But I for­got it may not be inter­est­ing to you, so why read it? And those of you who have noth­ing but bad things to say about an edu­ca­tor, if you are not a teacher, become one and see the prob­lems that edu­ca­tion faces when we have par­ents that send their kids to school for babysit­ting. If you are not an edu­ca­tor, count your­self lucky as you will never know the work that is involved in tak­ing an unin­ter­ested, lazy child and mold­ing him/her into a future pres­i­dent, doc­tor and the like, And Miss FED up MOM, you are dis­grace to my pro­fes­sion and to all teach­ers and par­ents alike.

    September 23rd, 2009 at 8:39 pm
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  209. proudteacher says:

    With all due respect, it seems obvi­ous that many of the par­ents who’ve posted on this site have no con­cept of what it’s like to teach in today’s class­rooms. With the empha­sis on test­ing man­dated by the states, the num­ber of lan­guage skills that must be taught in less than an hour per day to 95 – 110 stu­dents is daunt­ing. This isn’t meant as an excuse, just the real­ity of the situation.

    Today’s teach­ers assume more and more of the func­tions that were for­merly done at home. A pos­i­tive con­nec­tion between home and school goes a long way in help­ing stu­dent achieve­ment. The more student’s read and com­pre­hend what they read, the more they will suc­ceed in all areas of edu­ca­tion. I love my job, but it truly gets harder every year.

    Not quite sure what type of read­ing logs many of you are refer­ring to, but it seems to me that ask­ing for a parent’s coop­er­a­tion to sim­ply ini­tial a piece of paper to ver­ify that your child is extend­ing their learn­ing to home isn’t too much to ask. If you’ve ever won­dered why teach­ers remark that teach­ing just isn’t the same any­more and that stu­dents aren’t as respect­ful as they used to be, you may want to look at the mes­sage you’re giv­ing your child when you openly ques­tion teach­ers’ requests and assign­ments. (Would you do the same with your spouse?) Sorry to say, but you’ve prob­a­bly put your child at a dis­ad­van­tage from the moment they walk through the class­room door. Your atti­tude shines right through them.

    Teach­ers aren’t threat­en­ing your role as par­ents, we don’t think we could do a bet­ter job of rais­ing your chil­dren, and we cer­tainly aren’t try­ing to make your life mis­er­able. We’re just ask­ing for some help, a lit­tle coop­er­a­tion, and a signature.

    September 23rd, 2009 at 9:00 pm
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  210. FedUpMom says:

    Anony­mous — what makes you think that I’m a teacher?

    I never said that I want to get paid, I said that the teacher gives me orders as if she was my boss. I’m not ask­ing the school to pay me. I’m ask­ing them to stop telling me what to do in my own home with my own daughter.

    “No child can be trusted”, you say? That’s nice. Now you’ll tell me you went into teach­ing because you love chil­dren so much.

    I’m start­ing to think there’s a teacher’s web­site some­where with a big link say­ing, “go post a mes­sage and put those uppity par­ents in their place!”

    September 23rd, 2009 at 9:20 pm
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  211. HomeworkBlues says:

    FedUp­Mom, take that one on. I read it care­fully but the entire com­ment com­posed in one sin­gle para­graph tells me some­one didn’t learn her gram­mar. I gave up, my eyes buzzed.

    I’m a pretty tough edi­tor. You are very con­cerned with the real world. In the real world, Anony­mous, you write some­thing like that and in the words of Don­ald Trump, YOU’RE FIRED!

    September 23rd, 2009 at 9:31 pm
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  212. proudteacher says:

    And one more thing that would be really help­ful… a lit­tle respect.

    September 23rd, 2009 at 9:32 pm
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  213. Siyer says:

    Hi — prob­a­bly a bad idea to point this out. The web­site http://​www​.read​in​glogs​.com is online, elim­i­nates many prob­lems asso­ci­ated with on-paper read­ing logs.

    The site does NOT solve all of the prob­lems, but it reduces the bur­deon on kids. Well, I emphathize with
    your feels (believe me, I expe­ri­ence it every day, with 2 kids in ele­men­tary school). If you have to do it, the online read­ing logs is less of a chore!

    September 23rd, 2009 at 9:33 pm
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  214. Oliver says:

    FedUp Mom wrote, “I’m hop­ing that will be the end of it. ”

    Out of curios­ity, was it?

    September 24th, 2009 at 12:46 am
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  215. FedUpMom says:

    Oliver — that was pretty much the end of it. My daugh­ter did the read­ing, with­out log­ging, and we never saw a read­ing log again. DD told me later that for the next book the teach­ers announced there was a read­ing log, but it was optional for the kids who had done all the read­ing last time, which of course included DD.

    I’m still not con­vinced read­ing logs help the kids who don’t like read­ing, either. It seems to me it just con­firms their belief that read­ing is an unpleas­ant chore.

    September 24th, 2009 at 8:08 am
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  216. HomeworkBlues says:

    I’m amazed that so many teach­ers on this post got so bent out of shape with these read­ing logs. I con­tinue to assert that when the school pop­u­la­tion is pri­mar­ily com­prised of involved par­ents, mak­ing them sign logs is dis­dain­ing. And unnecessary..

    In the best of all worlds, a par­ent can make that case respect­fully and teach­ers can then give it some thought. Then, those kids who enjoy the logs can con­tinue to do them and for the oth­ers, let them read in the after­noon with­out tak­ing away pre­cious time to fill out logs. And allow par­ents to use those ever more scarce after­noon and evening moments to read to their child instead of fill­ing out more paperwork.

    My daugh­ter is a rav­en­ous reader so the logs were a waste of time. There was sim­ply no edu­ca­tional value I can recall. I’d like to think they are also a waste of the teacher’s time, only adding to the moun­tains of paper­work a teacher already has to juggle.

    As for the unin­volved par­ents? That’s not as sim­ple as sign­ing a log. Don’t delude your­self into think­ing it’ll turn a reluc­tant reader into an eager one (and yes, teach­ers, it goes bet­ter when we can instill some mea­sure of plea­sure) or an absent par­ent into an involved one. Those are seri­ous issues and can’t be glossed over with one sim­ple piece of paper. And it’s not the school’s job to teach par­ents how to par­ent. It’s the school’s job to teach the chil­dren. That’s what our tax dol­lars are for.

    You teach, I par­ent. Deal?

    September 24th, 2009 at 8:36 am
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  217. FedUpMom says:

    Home­work­Blues — “those kids who enjoy the logs”? You must have put that in for the sake of argu­ment. I’ve never met a kid who enjoys read­ing logs, and I don’t think I want to meet her.

    You ask why teach­ers get so bent out of shape about some­thing as triv­ial as read­ing logs. One pos­si­ble rea­son is that they’re con­trol freaks. Another pos­si­ble rea­son is that schools have com­pletely lost touch with their real mis­sion — help­ing our kids learn. I’ve seen so many times that learn­ing isn’t really the goal; the true goal is com­pli­ance. That’s why teach­ers get so bent out of shape. “You ques­tion my orders? How dare you!” Thanks for the part­ner­ship, guys.

    September 24th, 2009 at 9:05 am
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  218. HomeworkBlues says:

    FedUp­Mom asks: “Home­work­Blues — “those kids who enjoy the logs”? You must have put that in for the sake of argu­ment. I’ve never met a kid who enjoys read­ing logs, and I don’t think I want to meet her.”

    I was being sar­cas­tic :). You like them, log away. To your heart’s con­tent. Any takers?

    September 24th, 2009 at 9:18 am
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  219. HomeworkBlues says:

    Bingo, FedUp­Mom. It’s about con­trol. Do the damn logs!, some teach­ers here scream. You dare to ques­tion, you are inso­lent, dis­re­spect­ful, a sloppy mother who does not teach your child val­ues and it’s your fault stu­dents are as dis­rup­tive, dis­re­spect­ful, unin­ter­ested as they are. And let’s not for­get that “your per­fect lit­tle angel” will go to jail when she’s 25 if she does not do her read­ing logs. Time to break out “Another Brick in the Wall,” isn’t it? “You won’t get your pudding!”

    You are right. We touched a nerve, not because read­ing logs pro­mote read­ing (they don’t) but because it touched on con­trol and com­pli­ance. That’s what you find when you dig deep enough.

    I’ll say it again. We aren’t going to get very far if we don’t dig deep down for the root causes. And we had some on this blog assert that our chil­dren aren’t read­ing because we have taught them not to do read­ing logs. Except our chil­dren read. Mine does. That’s the whole point. Is any­one actu­ally lis­ten­ing? I feel like I’m con­stantly going in circles.

    September 24th, 2009 at 9:22 am
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  220. FedUpMom says:

    BTW, I want to clar­ify what I meant by “the real mis­sion of schools is to help our kids learn.” I’m talk­ing about learn­ing actual sub­jects here — math, his­tory, lit­er­a­ture, art.

    I’m not talk­ing about learn­ing fake sub­jects that have noth­ing to do with real life. This cat­e­gory includes things like “note-taking skills” (how hard is it?), “good study habits” (i.e., com­pli­ance), and “test-taking skills” (give me a break).

    Teach­ers, please teach the actual sub­ject. The kids will learn how to study when they have some­thing worth studying.

    September 24th, 2009 at 10:59 am
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  221. HomeworkBlues says:

    “But the whole enter­prise still feels so wrong to me. It’s as if some­one came up to you post-orgasm and said, “How was that? Would you give it a five? Or a four? Please, just write it down on this form each time.” It just seems so — con­trary to what great read­ing is.”

    From “The Cursed Read­ing Log”

    I thought the author was a bit obse­quious but the gist is pow­er­ful. I don’t have a prob­lem with respect­ful and gra­cious but I wouldn’t be quite so mag­nan­i­mous. It’s loathed, dreaded, turns read­ing into a chore. Get rid of it! Still, a good read.

    http://​the​di​a​mondinthewin​dow​.type​pad​.com/​t​h​e​-​d​i​a​m​o​n​d​-​i​n​-​t​h​e​-​w​i​n​d​o​w​/​2​0​0​9​/​0​9​/​t​h​a​t​-​c​u​r​s​e​d​-​r​e​a​d​i​n​g​-​l​o​g​.​h​tml

    September 24th, 2009 at 10:41 pm
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  222. PsychMom says:

    Con­fes­sions from Psy­ch­Mom
    I had seen on a let­ter from my child’s teacher that read­ing logs are an issue for some rea­son on Tues­days. I admit that I don’t look at it more closely to see whether it’s “assigned“or “due” or what it involves because frankly scarlett.….

    So this morn­ing, on a lark, I said, “So what are these read­ing logs all about”

    Child age 8 says, “What read­ing logs? What are read­ing logs?”

    “Never mind”, says I, curs­ing myself that I brought it up.

    “Oh, like I’m sup­posed to keep track of the books I read? I can do that, I can keep track in my black book…I’ll go get it…” enthu­si­as­tic child says, while she’s run­ning away from me to go get it.

    Now I’m really kick­ing myself. She comes back with a book she’s started…“See?” she says. “It’ divided up by the time of day…I read one chap­ter of X book, I read three pages of Y book, and after sup­per I read.……”

    My child has cre­ated her OWN freak­ing read­ing log by her own design. Doesn’t she know who her mother is? And how vehe­mently she opposes read­ing logs? Doesn’t she know she’s sup­posed to hate the mundac­ity of writ­ing these things out…that it’s mean­ing less to cat­a­logue what you’ve read?

    “Wow, you’ve done a lot of work”, I said in a lamely sup­port­ive way.

    She has 4 books on the go right now. She’s a pro­lific writer..and she’s com­pletely obsessed with spelling and punc­tu­ta­tion and .….I have noth­ing to com­plain about.
    To all those teach­ers who say my child can’t read because she doesn’t do read­ing logs.….hooey

    But, I know it’s not like this in many households..So I guess I have to stand up for other par­ents who are hav­ing the trou­bles, and fac­ing walls of rigid bureaucracy.

    September 25th, 2009 at 8:59 am
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  223. FedUpMom says:

    Psy­ch­Mom — I don’t see any con­tra­dic­tion here. The impor­tant point is that your daugh­ter came up with this idea her­self. If she enjoys orga­niz­ing her read­ing in her own way, bully for her.

    That’s a com­pletely dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tion from a child with a teacher-assigned read­ing log.

    September 25th, 2009 at 9:36 am
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  224. Sara Bennett says:

    My per­sonal expe­ri­ence with read­ing logs: Two years ago, I decided I would keep a log of all the books I was read­ing, just to see what that was like. (I read about 5 books a week.) I man­aged to keep the log for 8 entries, and then I just couldn’t be both­ered to pull out my log book and write it down. You’d think that would be so sim­ple (I know that’s what teach­ers think), but for me it was a bore.

    A few months ago, I reg­is­tered with goodreads, think­ing, again, that I’d keep track of what I was read­ing and share that with my face­book friends. I entered 4 books and gave up.

    When I was doing research for my book, I spoke at length with Kylene Beers, a lit­er­acy expert. She told me, “Read­ing logs can be an effec­tive diag­nos­tic tool if the teacher takes the time to read each child’s log care­fully, talks to him about what he’s read­ing, and thus gets an under­stand­ing of his read­ing pref­er­ences.” (page 125, The Case Against Homework)

    My ques­tion to teach­ers: How do you use your read­ing logs?

    September 25th, 2009 at 10:10 am
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  225. PsychMom says:

    I sus­pect, Sara, that my daughter’s inter­est in keep­ing track will wane quickly too…making lists is a thing she’s into at the moment.
    And I agree, FedUp­Mom, with what you say about the dif­fer­ence between my daughter’s new pen­chant and a teacher pre­scribed task that incor­po­rates the parent’s sig­na­ture and super­vi­sion. I sus­pect that this will become a real­ity shortly in our house too..I was just mak­ing light of the irony that I am wag­ing ver­bal counter-offensives against read­ing logs that my own child cre­ates for her own pleasure.

    September 25th, 2009 at 11:20 am
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  226. proudteacher says:

    To Home­work­blues:
    It seems that you’ve obvi­ously had some bad expe­ri­ences with schools far beyond the scope of any read­ing log. I’m not sure what type of demand­ing, auto­crats you’ve encoun­tered but they don’t sound pleas­ant. Cer­tainly, there are some teach­ers who would do us all a favor by retir­ing or find­ing another way to make a liv­ing, but if that’s all you’ve encoun­tered, I’d con­sider another school dis­trict if I were you.

    To Fedup­Mom:
    Your quote, “I’m not talk­ing about learn­ing fake sub­jects that have noth­ing to do with real life. This cat­e­gory includes things like “note-taking skills” (how hard is it?), “good study habits” (i.e., com­pli­ance), and “test-taking skills” (give me a break)” absolutely astounds me!

    Not real life! Really? I truly beg to dif­fer. Inter­ested in hav­ing your chil­dren go to col­lege but not know how to take notes, study for or take a test? Want your chil­dren to be in any pro­fes­sion that requires a post-grad license with­out these skills (law, med­i­cine, teach­ing)? I wish them well. Oh, and let me add one more… orga­ni­za­tional skills by requir­ing the use of agen­das, fold­ers & binders. If you’ve ever looked inside the back­pack of many mid­dleschool­ers, you’d under­stand the need for this one!

    The real­ity of the school class­room is not what I envi­sioned when I first started teach­ing where I sim­ply thought that by inspir­ing stu­dents to dis­cover their pas­sions, they will auto­mat­i­cally be moti­vated to learn, wher­ever that lead them. It doesn’t always work that way, I’m sorry to say. I’m given a cur­ricu­lum decided by the pow­ers that be at the state and local lev­els that I’m held acount­able for teach­ing. I’m count­ing on the teach­ers in the grades below me to teach what they’re sup­posed to teach as are those in grades above. If I don’t do my job, it makes other people’s jobs more dif­fi­cult. Ideal? Maybe not. Real­ity? Yes.

    But, what is one way I can inspire my stu­dents to become what­ever then want to be and to dis­cover their pas­sion in life? By hav­ing them READ books that inter­est them about things that inter­est them and record­ing it in a read­ing log! Yes, some stu­dents will do and are already doing this. But many, many stu­dents (for a vari­ety of rea­sons) would never pick up a book of their choos­ing if it weren’t an assign­ment. My goal for them is to estab­lish a habit of read­ing for their own per­sonal enjoy­ment and to dis­cover a world within their imag­i­na­tion that can’t be found on a video screen (none of them yet own a Kin­dle). They are asked to inter­act with their books by ask­ing ques­tions, mak­ing pre­dic­tions, and con­nect­ing to real-life expe­ri­ences. They share their books in class through both ver­bal and writ­ten exer­cises which inspire oth­ers to read even more. You may find it con­tra­dic­tory that it’s required for their enjoy­ment, but in my expe­ri­ence, it works.

    By the way, for those who think it’s a bad thing for teach­ers to be “con­trol freaks” as it were, good luck try­ing to teach in a class­room of 30 kids where the teacher isn’t in con­trol! I keep my class­room fairly quiet just for that shy & timid stu­dent who has a hard time learn­ing with dis­tract­ing noise but doesn’t know how to yet speak up for them­selves, some­thing else we try to teach our stu­dents (or would that, too, be con­sid­ered a “fake subject”?).

    Read­ing these post­ings makes me even more grate­ful for the par­ents who are sup­port­ive, rec­og­nize that we’re doing the best we can, and even say thank you on occasion.

    September 27th, 2009 at 11:11 am
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  227. proudteacher says:

    P.S. To Home­work­blues:
    You state: “You teach, I par­ent. Deal?”

    Deal! I wouldn’t dream of telling you how to par­ent, ques­tion the tasks you’ve assigned to your child, or tell you how to man­age your house­hold. And even if I see some things dur­ing par­ent con­fer­ences or through com­ments your child makes at school that I would do dif­fer­ently, it would not be my place to ques­tion your pur­pose for things you do in your home (espe­cially not in front of your child), even if it influ­enced what I do in my class­room. You are the best at par­ent­ing your child, and I admire, respect and sup­port that. If I were to expect those same cour­te­sies in return, do we still have a deal?

    September 27th, 2009 at 11:50 am
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  228. FedUpMom says:

    The rea­son I call note-taking skills, study habits, and test-taking skills fake sub­jects is because so often they are invoked as the rea­son kids need to do assign­ments that have no other point. This is what I’m opposed to.

    It’s not so much that no one ever uses those skills, it’s just that some of the most tedious, ill-designed home­work I’ve ever seen is defended on those grounds. The way to learn these skills is to use them in the study of some­thing impor­tant, like the actual sub­jects I men­tioned (math, his­tory, art, etc.)

    September 27th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
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  229. PsychMom says:

    I’d just like to respond to proudteacher, if I may.…
    As a par­ent who does have tremen­dous respect for teach­ers (I know I could not do their jobs), I would have this deal if your job did not involve telling me what should hap­pen in my home regard­ing school­work. I don’t write notes to you sug­gest­ing what I’d like to see taught this year. So why would you send work home with chil­dren indi­cat­ing that their job for an hour tonight involves school­work? That hour of school­work was not on my agenda for my child tonight.

    And on the sub­ject of col­lege prep for ele­men­tary students…it’s the old blan­ket about “bet­ter get-em used to it”- how many of those shin­ing faces in front of you Proudteacher, will be sit­ting in col­lege? There are so many other things they could be doing besides col­lege, but all those kids have to be sub­jected to col­lege prep men­tal­ity. It could be turn­ing off many capa­ble stu­dents who won’t go to col­lege. I was always harped on in high school to take typ­ing. I was cer­tainly going to uni­ver­sity but I could never see why typ­ing was such a big deal. I never was taught to take notes.…I never took lessons on how to take tests, but by some small mir­a­cle, I made it all the way to a master’s degree. If you need to do it, you’ll learn it.

    And on the con­trol issue. The idea of “Con­trol freaks” has noth­ing to do with keep­ing a class­room under con­trol. It’s the rigid­ity of thought and the man­ner in which one deals with the unex­pected (con­trol freaks don’t man­age well) that high­lights the dif­fer­ence. A teacher who is in con­trol of his/her class­room should still be able to tol­er­ate their 30 points of view.

    September 28th, 2009 at 11:21 am
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  230. proudteacher says:

    To Psy­ch­Mom:
    First, con­grat­u­la­tions on your suc­cess. I hope there were some teach­ers along the way who encour­aged and inspired you. To answer your ques­tion about col­lege, approx­i­mately 90 – 95% of the stu­dents I teach go to col­lege so what­ever advan­tages I can give them by teach­ing them skills they can use now and in the future is to their ben­e­fit. Although I have in the past, I don’t cur­rently teach ele­men­tary. The skills I’m refer­ring to are age-appropriate, not taught in iso­la­tion, and done with pur­pose & meaning.

    I real­ize that par­ents need an avenue for vent­ing frus­tra­tions about things, like schools, that have an enor­mous impact on their lives. Chances are, there’s also a site for par­ents who are upset that their stu­dents don’t have enough home­work which is a more fre­quent par­ent com­plaint in my expe­ri­ence. It’s impos­si­ble to please everyone.

    The edu­ca­tional pen­du­lum will con­tinue to swing, old ideas will con­tinue to be repack­aged and sold as new, and life will go on as we all do the best we can. I wish you well.

    September 29th, 2009 at 6:45 am
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  231. PsychMom says:

    But Proudteacher…and notice I cap­i­tal­ized your name because I think you are a proud teacher…I see you as a pro­fes­sional who should not be swayed by trends.….you should “know”, the pro­fes­sion should know, about the research around home­work. I work in the health care field…we don’t go by what’s “pop­u­lar”, we base our work and our opin­ions on research, hope­fully sound research. It’s pro­fes­sion­ally uneth­i­cal to use meth­ods that have been shown to be inef­fec­tive or ignore the lat­est find­ings because you still cling to old standards.

    You, as the teach­ing pro­fes­sional, should be able to tell par­ents when they ask for more home­work for their chil­dren, that “No, Mrs and Mr. So-and So, more home­work is NOT going to make your child more suc­cess­ful because the research shows that hav­ing a fam­ily din­ner with you is more pre­dic­tive of a child’s suc­cess than any other sin­gle element”.

    I’ve watched teach­ers sway their hands and totally dis­miss the con­tro­versy around home­work, “Ho hum, we’ve heard it all before…there has been debate about it for­ever so we’re not going to change a thing in the way we do things”. You can­not live in that bub­ble. Pro­fes­sion­als don’t work that way.

    September 29th, 2009 at 9:40 am
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  232. PeggyinMA says:

    Thank you Psy­ch­Mom. The above com­ment on keep­ing up with cur­rent research is exactly the point I have been try­ing to express in polite, respect­ful con­fer­ences at our schools, but I have encoun­tered a wall of defen­sive­ness and com­pla­cency from many (not all) teach­ers and administrators.

    I know teach­ing is a tough job and that we all want what is best for the stu­dents. Stu­dents and their fam­i­lies, for their part, are trust­ing that schools will keep up with the lat­est research and do what is pro­fes­sion­ally sound.

    If a school wants to know that chil­dren are read­ing at home, on their own time, teach­ers could sim­ply, directly ask par­ents and guardians in per­son dur­ing con­fer­ences. For our fam­ily, the answer is yes, thank you, and we can then move on.

    September 29th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
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  233. JustaLibrarian says:

    Why do teach­ers make read­ing so hard? Why do teach­ers use it as pun­ish­ment? Why do teach­ers make stu­pid, arbi­trary restric­tions (must be at least 150 pages, etc.)? Why do we use pro­grams like AR so that books become just a way to get some points to sat­isfy the teacher?

    If I were a stu­dent today, I would HATE to read.

    September 29th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
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  234. Teacher1 says:

    Whiney par­ents = whiney stu­dents. Get over your­selves and stop blam­ing the teach­ers for every­thing. Unfor­tu­nately, more and more leg­is­la­ture at all lev­els dic­tates what, how and even when we teach. Very lit­tle is left to the teacher any­more. Get involved in your schools or go to school board meet­ings and see where the deci­sions that affect the class­room and your chil­dren are made. Believe me, it’s not the teacher! Local, state and fed­eral gov­ern­ment are deter­min­ing how and what we teach. I just spent the first 5 weeks giv­ing a tedious assess­ment to each stu­dent when I could have learned the exact infor­ma­tion from work­ing with them in small groups in one week. Did I want to give the assess­ment? No. Did I have to give the assess­ment? Yes, as per state man­date. Did I waste pre­cious teach­ing time? You bet and I’ll have to give the same test 2 more times this year! As for read­ing logs…I do send them home but it’s optional for them to use and return them as is the rest of my home­work. Do most of my stu­dents read each night like your amaz­ing, bril­liant chil­dren men­tioned above? Absolutely not.…kids are honest…ask them and they’ll tell you. “No, Miss X, I didn’t have time to read. We don’t have any books and besides I was busy play­ing video games until bed­time.” I think you all need to find some­thing bet­ter to do with your time than whine about teach­ers and read­ing logs. Vol­un­teer at your schools or libraries and start a children’s book club and get the chil­dren excited about read­ing books (not com­puter screens). Sorry I came across this site look­ing for use­ful infor­ma­tion and didn’t find it.

    September 29th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
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  235. zzzzz78759 says:

    Teacher1 said: ‘ask them and they’ll tell you. “No, Miss X, I didn’t have time to read. We don’t have any books and besides I was busy play­ing video games until bedtime.” ’

    That’s the point, right there. If chil­dren were taught to love read­ing, they’d be going to library to get books. They would make time to read.

    As for play­ing video games, what’s wrong with that? They spent their 7 hours in school, they need some down time. If video games are it, so be it.

    When read­ing turns into an assigned chore, with no choice as to what they’re read­ing or how long they spend read­ing or if they want to take a day off and do some­thing else, it teaches chil­dren that read­ing is an oblig­a­tion, not a leisure time activ­ity to look for­ward to.

    Frankly, not every child is going to turn into a vora­cious reader. Not the fault of the par­ents or teach­ers, some kids just don’t enjoy read­ing. Maybe they have an undi­ag­nosed (or diag­nosed) learn­ing dis­abil­ity, maybe they’re more inclined toward ath­let­ics or sci­ence or math.

    Do chil­dren need to learn to read? Yes. Do they need to read books for a spe­cific period of time every day? No. Forced read­ing just turns them off and it’s sad.

    At our house, we don’t con­sider read­ing to be “home­work”. We read what we’re forced to read then we read what we want to read. We spend hours snug­gled on the couch read­ing to each other or just hav­ing Mommy read a new book we’ve checked out of the library.

    And, we play video games together. My daugther and I have spent end­less hours play­ing “Mario vs. Luigi” and laugh­ing at our antics. That is called qual­ity time and there’s absolutely noth­ing wrong with it.

    September 30th, 2009 at 6:38 am
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  236. proudteacher says:

    To Psy­ch­Mom:
    Pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment is an impor­tant part of any educator’s life so keep­ing up with the lat­est research is part of what we already do, thank you. For every arti­cle or book that you can pro­duce against home­work, I can pro­duce 2 in favor within age-appropriate limits.

    Yours and other par­ent con­cerns about what stu­dents bring home, although impor­tant, are not new. Farm chores have since been replaced by after-school sports and com­put­ers, It’s our job as pro­fes­sion­als to sift through the ever-moving stream of the lat­est infor­ma­tion to decide what is in the best inter­est of our students.

    It’s not my place to sug­gest to par­ents how they should nour­ish their fam­i­lies in the evening, but in my expe­ri­ence with my own fam­ily, there is time for food, con­ver­sa­tion, read­ing, and a bit of home­work. Do I believe that there’s valid­ity in the argu­ment that too much home­work is too much? Absolutely. So does that mean there should be a mora­to­rium on all home­work? No. So what about mod­er­a­tion? After all, I believe we’re both work­ing towards the same goal.

    September 30th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
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  237. Sara Bennett says:

    ProudTeacher: Please show me the “2 in favor with age-appropriate limits.”

    I’m still search­ing for that well-researched study that shows the ben­e­fits of home­work. I’m not talk­ing about those arti­cles where experts say that home­work teaches respon­si­bil­ity, self-discipline, and moti­va­tion. No one has ever stud­ied that to show whether it’s true or not. I’m not talk­ing about stud­ies that show that stu­dents will get bet­ter grades if they do their home­work. Of course they will, since home­work com­ple­tion is a per­cent­age of the grade.

    I’m talk­ing about a com­pre­hen­sive study that shows that a first grader who does home­work will be bet­ter edu­cated than one who doesn’t, or that shows that a sixth grader who does an hour of night of the stan­dard home­work (read a chap­ter, answer ques­tions; do a math sheet; make a book cover, etc.) is bet­ter off than the sixth grader who does noth­ing assigned by the school out­side school hours.

    Most of the home­work that I see is not well designed, is not well thought out, and is mostly busy­work. Please show me otherwise.

    And yes, I believe we’re all work­ing towards the same goal of rais­ing happy, healthy, well-rested, cre­ative, ana­lytic, thought­ful, and well-educated chil­dren. I just wish that home­work wouldn’t inter­fere with that goal.

    September 30th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
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  238. zzzzz78759 says:

    Proudteacher, I still don’t see the value of home­work at all.

    Chil­dren are in school 7 hours or more a day. In that 7 hours, they should cer­tainly be able to accom­plish every­thing that’s in their home­work folders.

    We, as work­ing adults, are expected to work at least 35 hours a week. Any­thing over 40 and we expect over­time. There are lim­its to the amount of hours we can be forced to work. And still, we’re exhausted by the end of the week.

    Now we’re ask­ing our chil­dren to spend 35 or more hours a week in school then put in over­time at the end of the day. We’re also expect­ing par­ents to add edu­ca­tor to their already over­loaded work load.

    If the chil­dren do not do their home­work, they’re expected to forgo their recess for “study hall”. Per­son­ally, I have for­bid­den the school to put my child in “study hall” (mind you she’s in sec­ond grade). She needs her exercise.

    So no, I do not believe there is “age appro­pri­ate” home­work. I do believe there should be a mora­to­rium on home­work. We are over­bur­den­ing our chil­dren with work and fail­ing to allow them to be children.

    Maybe the US is behind the Asian coun­tries in Math and Sci­ence but it has always been so. We may not be turn­ing out math­e­mat­i­cal and sci­en­tific robots but we turn out some very free thinkers..

    We don’t need more peo­ple run­ning the same exper­i­ments, chew­ing over the same math­e­mat­i­cal equa­tions, we need peo­ple who will find cures for ter­ri­ble dis­eases like can­cer, AIDS, mus­cu­lar degen­er­a­tive dis­eases and the like. The HPV vac­cine did not come from Europe or Asia. It came from the good, old USA.

    We need more peo­ple like “The Steves” (Jobs and Woz­niak), Bill Gates, and John Nash. We need cre­ators of riv­et­ing lit­er­a­ture. We need sci­en­tists mak­ing break­throughs. We don’t need copycats.

    I would be will­ing to bet that few, if any, of those geniuses can attribute home­work to their genius.

    September 30th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
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  239. zzzzz78759 says:

    Well said, Sara. I didn’t mean to step on your post…we just crossed in cyberspace :-)

    September 30th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
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  240. FedUpMom says:

    Proudteacher says: “For every arti­cle or book that you can pro­duce against home­work, I can pro­duce 2 in favor within age-appropriate limits.”

    The prin­ci­pal at the local pub­lic school said the same thing. I should have asked her to pro­duce them. She also said that there were par­ents clam­or­ing for more home­work, and I should have asked to meet them too.

    No mat­ter what a par­ent says, the response is, “Some­body else says the oppo­site.” It’s the all-purpose excuse to avoid mak­ing any changes whatever.

    If some par­ents want home­work and oth­ers are opposed to it, give par­ents the choice. Let par­ents decide when and what home­work they want their kids to do.

    September 30th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
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  241. proudteacher says:

    I can see by the responses that “home­work” (not just read­ing logs, but in any form) has become 2 four-letter words to most of you on this site. It really makes no dif­fer­ence what ratio­nale or research may be pre­sented, it will be dis­sected, dis­counted, and dis­carded by one of you well-intentioned par­ents. I wish you well as you assist your chil­dren in nav­i­gat­ing their way through the edu­ca­tional sys­tem. I hope that the val­ues you choose to instill in them prove to be to their advantage.

    If you’re inter­ested in an inspir­ing dis­cus­sion about edu­ca­tion and haven’t yet done so, may I invite you to view Pres­i­dent Obama’s speech to school chil­dren and show it to your chil­dren… and I’ll bet, with the insis­tence of his grand­mother, he did his homework!

    September 30th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
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  242. zzzzz78759 says:

    Proudteacher said: ‘I can see by the responses that “home­work” (not just read­ing logs, but in any form) has become 2 four-letter words to most of you on this site.’

    I’m not sure what you expected from a site called “StopHome​work​.com” but yes, the major­ity of us on this site are frus­trated and more than a lit­tle angry at being dis­missed by the school sys­tem as to igno­rant to understand.

    For the few home­work pro­po­nents that come to set us straight, we have not received one scin­tilla of research that says home­work is advan­ta­geous to chil­dren. Not one speck of research prov­ing that there is any­thing about home­work that’s healthy.

    We get a lot of anec­do­tal evi­dence but sim­ply say­ing, “For every arti­cle or book that you can pro­duce against home­work, I can pro­duce 2 in favor within age-appropriate lim­its” doesn’t prove any­thing if you don’t pro­duce even one.

    As for Obama’s speech, I don’t want to get into pol­i­tics but I had my child opt out of it. I read it prior to the actual broad­cast and felt it was not appro­pri­ate for her or her age group and it ws inap­pro­pri­ate for him to force his way into the class­rooms with­out parental consent.

    Did he do home­work? Maybe. Most likely not, though, given his age and where he went to school.

    But he’s a politi­cian, not a sci­en­tist or a math­meti­cian. He’s not find­ing a cure for dis­eases or invent­ing new ways of com­mu­ni­cat­ing or solv­ing real world issues through math­e­mat­i­cal equations.

    The last thing this coun­try needs is another politician.

    That said, may I invite you to read Sara’s well researched book, “The Case Against Home­work”. It has a bib­li­og­ra­phy and everything…very inspiring.

    September 30th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
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  243. Sara Bennett says:

    ProudTeacher: I noticed in your response to my com­ment (#237) that you didn’t come up with the “2 in favor with age-appropriate lim­its.” Instead, you wrote, “It really makes no dif­fer­ence what ratio­nale or research may be pre­sented, it will be dis­sected, dis­counted, and dis­carded by one of you well-intentioned par­ents.” Please show me the research! (And, since you’re a teacher, you might want to take a look at the recently released Rethink­ing Home­work by Cathy Vatterott.)

    October 1st, 2009 at 7:36 am
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  244. Anonymous says:

    Note to peo­ple who post here against home­work, against read­ing logs, your only hurt­ing your child!

    1: do your home­work on the issue– read the research– if you did you would see how ridicu­lous you sound.

    Let me break it down:
    The more you read, the more you know.
    The more you know, the smarter you grow.

    A quote from a book by Jim Tre­lease: The Read-Aloud Hand­book. take a look.

    Get your­self an edu­ca­tion before you ruin your child’s!

    October 1st, 2009 at 11:33 pm
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  245. Anonymous says:

    Show you the research? You are kid­ding right? Go to the library– there is so much research out there regard­ing this issue and it all points to — READ TO, AND WITH, YOUR CHILD EVERY NIGHT! Don’t be a lazy par­ent, don’t let your child suf­fer because you are too busy to take 15 min­utes out of your day. It is too important.

    “the sin­gle most impor­tant activ­ity for build­ing the knowl­edge required for even­tual suc­cess in read­ing is read­ing aloud to chil­dren“
    J. Trelease

    October 1st, 2009 at 11:40 pm
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  246. proudteacher says:

    http://​www​.wash​ing​ton​post​.com/​w​p​-​d​y​n​/​c​o​n​t​e​n​t​/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​2​0​0​6​/​1​1​/​2​1​/​A​R​2​0​0​6​1​1​2​1​0​0​6​3​3​.​h​tml

    October 2nd, 2009 at 7:59 am
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  247. FedUpMom says:

    Anony­mous — Of course read­ing is good for kids. No one is argu­ing with that.

    Read­ing logs are a bad idea because they tell kids that read­ing is a chore. Home­work over­load is a bad idea because it wears our kids out to the point that they don’t have the energy to read on their own, or exer­cise, or play out­side, or do any num­ber of more inter­est­ing and use­ful things.

    October 2nd, 2009 at 8:00 am
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  248. FedUpMom says:

    proudteacher — your link doesn’t go to research, it goes to an op-ed by Jay Math­ews, writ­ten in 2006. He later changed his mind about home­work for ele­men­tary school, partly due to our esteemed Sara Bennett.

    Here’s a quote from a later Jay Math­ews arti­cle, “Boost­ing Schools’ Value With­out Spend­ing a Dime”:

    1. Replace ele­men­tary school home­work with free read­ing. Throw away the expen­sive take-home text­books, the bor­ing work­sheets and the fiendish make-a-log-cabin-out-of-Tootsie-Rolls projects. One of the clear­est (and most ignored) find­ings of edu­ca­tional research is that ele­men­tary stu­dents who do lots of home­work don’t learn more than stu­dents who do none. Elim­i­nat­ing tra­di­tional home­work for this age group will save paper, reduce text­book losses and sweeten home life. Stu­dents should be asked instead to read some­thing, maybe with their par­ents — at least 10 min­utes a night for first-graders, 20 min­utes for second-graders and so on. Teach­ers can ask a few kids each day what they learned from their read­ing to dis­cour­age shirkers.

    http://​voices​.wash​ing​ton​post​.com/​c​l​a​s​s​-​s​t​r​u​g​g​l​e​/​2​0​0​9​/​0​2​/​b​o​o​s​t​i​n​g​_​s​c​h​o​o​l​s​_​v​a​l​u​e​_​w​i​t​h​o​u​t​.​h​tml

    October 2nd, 2009 at 8:11 am
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  249. zzzzz78759 says:

    I read the edi­to­r­ial (note this is not research but an edi­to­r­ial) and I’m sorry Mr. Math­ews was annoyed.

    What I found inter­est­ing, though, is, in less than a year, he seems to have done a com­plete about-face in a later edi­to­r­ial here:
    http://www.evri.com/media/article?page=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fwp-dyn%2Fcontent%2Farticle%2F2007%2F08%2F01%2FAR2007080101713.html&source=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com&title=Hit%20the%20Books

    Maybe those projects tak­ing hours of his time and hav­ing lit­tle or no value to his daughter’s education.

    October 2nd, 2009 at 8:29 am
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  250. PsychMom says:

    To Anonymous.….I sus­pect most of the par­ents here, sent their 5 year olds to school already capa­ble of reading.…I’m a par­ent who has books in every room of the house. Read­ing to my child isn’t even a part of this dis­cus­sion, it’s a given. That’s not what we’re talk­ing about.

    Maybe you need to do more read­ing of what this dis­cus­sion is actu­ally about.

    October 2nd, 2009 at 9:54 am
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  251. proudteacher says:

    Thank you so much for mak­ing my point! I agree with you. Home­work assign­ments should be age-appropriate which is exactly what read­ing is at the lower grade lev­els. If any of you would have the cour­tesy of read­ing what I’ve posted before dis­agree­ing, you’d see that we agree more than dis­agree! I teach 6th grade and the only home­work I assign as their lan­guage arts teach­ers is just like you sug­gested, read­ing a book of their choice! That’s it! Yes, it’s home­work and yes, they record it on a read­ing log, and yes, it’s for a grade, and yes, it works. Stu­dents who already read are read­ing more, and those who didn’t are read­ing and respond­ing to their books.

    My issue has been and con­tin­ues to be with the blan­ket state­ments made on this site and, with all due respect, by those who have a finan­cial inter­est in sell­ing more books, that ALL home­work should be banned. Mod­er­a­tion, mod­er­a­tion, moderation.

    October 2nd, 2009 at 6:26 pm
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  252. Teacher1 says:

    zzzzz78759 says: “And, we play video games together. My daugther and I have spent end­less hours play­ing “Mario vs. Luigi” and laugh­ing at our antics. That is called qual­ity time and there’s absolutely noth­ing wrong with it.“
    Kudos to you for spend­ing time with your child while she plays video games. Unfor­tu­nately, many par­ents use it as a babysit­ter so they don’t have to inter­act with their children.

    October 3rd, 2009 at 12:07 pm
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  253. M@ says:

    Hmmm… have any of the par­ents or stu­dents requested to see the teacher’s read­ing log each week? If it is that inte­gral to the read­ing process, then it stands to rea­son that they would all have their own logs, no?

    October 5th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
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  254. proudteacher says:

    I’d be happy to show you my read­ing log, M@. I model it for stu­dents before I ask them to do one and I show it to them fre­quently through­out the week. I model how to sum­ma­rize a story as well by sum­ma­riz­ing the books I’m read­ing and model how to make lit­er­ary responses through­out before I ask them to do the same. They dis­cuss their books in class as well as par­tic­i­pate in writ­ing activ­i­ties based on their books. They also have the oppor­tu­nity to rate their books and make rec­om­men­da­tions for other read­ers which cre­ates a great deal of enthu­si­asm and interest.

    Any other requests? Or was that just an irre­sistible oppor­tu­nity to take a cheap shot at teachers?

    October 5th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
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  255. Jacky says:

    I hate home­work includ­ing read­ing logs

    October 5th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
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  256. zzzzz78759 says:

    Teacher1 says, “Kudos to you for spend­ing time with your child while she plays video games. Unfor­tu­nately, many par­ents use it as a babysit­ter so they don’t have to inter­act with their children.”

    Really, it doesn’t mat­ter whether par­ents use it to inter­act or to babysit or just because the kids like to play them to wind down at the end of the day.

    It’s not up to the school or the teach­ers to decide how chil­dren spend their time after school, it’s up to the par­ents. Assum­ing that home­work is a “bet­ter” way for chil­dren to spend their time than TV or video games or build­ing with Legos or rid­ing their bikes or hang­ing out at the mall is mak­ing assump­tions that are insult­ing and dis­re­spect­ful to parents.

    It’s assum­ing that par­ents are too stu­pid, too igno­rant, or too unin­volved to take care of their chil­dren. It’s assum­ing that ALL par­ents are stu­pid, igno­rant or unin­volved. It’s assum­ing that the schools/teachers know best.

    Unin­volved par­ents are not going to mag­i­cally become involved because their chil­dren have home­work. They’re not going to think, “Wow, the school must really know bet­ter! I think I’ll make sure Johnny does his home­work. I’m so glad I see the light!”

    I’m sorry but some­times, actu­ally MOST times, we have bet­ter things to do than busy work.

    October 5th, 2009 at 11:08 pm
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  257. zzzzz78759 says:

    Proudteacher says, ” I model how to sum­ma­rize a story as well by sum­ma­riz­ing the books I’m read­ing and model how to make lit­er­ary responses through­out before I ask them to do the same. They dis­cuss their books in class as well as par­tic­i­pate in writ­ing activ­i­ties based on their books. They also have the oppor­tu­nity to rate their books and make rec­om­men­da­tions for other read­ers which cre­ates a great deal of enthu­si­asm and interest.”

    What hap­pened to read­ing for the joy of read­ing? Does any­one really need to dis­sect every book they read? I read all sorts of books; some are heavy, some are light, and some are trashy. I read them for plea­sure and isn’t that what we’re try­ing to instill in our children?

    October 5th, 2009 at 11:11 pm
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  258. PsychMom says:

    To proudteacher,
    Would you keep a log if you weren’t “mod­el­ling”? I mean seriously…who keeps a log of their plea­sure books? What­ever for?

    October 6th, 2009 at 8:11 am
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  259. Disillusioned says:

    I have a daugh­ter in third grade in an afflu­ent pub­lic school dis­trict known for its “great schools” (she is my only child). When she started Kinde­garten, I was excited to be in a “great school” known for its exel­lence. How­ever, after three years, I find myself doing much soul search­ing re: the school and our whole edu­ca­tional system.

    As a mother, I find the whole expereience dif­fi­cult to nav­i­gate and it makes me weary and sad. When­ever I vol­un­teer in the class­room (or walk on to the cam­pus for that mat­ter), I am struck by how air­less and joy­less it seems.

    The com­mu­nity has many stay-at-home moth­ers which view their moth­er­ing role as a job. The school, in turn, seems to view the moth­ers as unpaid employ­ees (which most resent but still seem to buy into). In addi­tion, the enor­mous amount of home­work and tests cre­ates an “us against them” men­tal­ity between the teach­ers and the moth­ers (this is sub­text and never openly acknowl­edged at the school). In my opin­ion, the moth­ers are emo­tion­ally over­in­vested in the school. This leads to a “hor­nets nest” in regards to rela­tions with the school and each other.

    The Prin­ci­pal is author­i­tar­ian (she benches the kids for recess if they are 30 sec­onds late) and feared. The teach­ers are “on a mis­sion” and don’t really care about the intru­sive nature of home­work into the fam­ily. Also, they are de-sensitized to the hurt­ful, inhu­mane way the kids are treated.

    I am frus­trated, sad and weary that this is con­sid­ered “exel­lence” in our schools.

    October 6th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
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  260. FedUpMom says:

    Hello Dis­il­lu­sioned, and Wel­come! Your story sounds very much like mine. I also had my daugh­ter in “great” pub­lic schools in a wealthy dis­trict. I had to take her out of the pub­lic schools when she became severely depressed and anx­ious at the ripe old age of 10. She is now much hap­pier in a Quaker school.

    If there are good pri­vate schools in your area, I sug­gest you look into them. If you can’t afford them, look into their finan­cial aid services.

    If you really have no choice but to stay in the pub­lic schools, here’s my advice (as if you asked!): first, give your daugh­ter as much sup­port as you can out­side of school, includ­ing cut­ting down on her homework.

    Sec­ond, get a group of par­ents together. I never suc­ceeded in doing this at the pub­lic school and it’s pos­si­ble I might have had more influ­ence with a group.

    On the other hand, if you have no influ­ence at the pub­lic school, don’t blame your­self! Pub­lic schools are set up to pro­tect their own inter­ests and jobs.

    The prin­ci­pal takes recess away if the kid is 30 sec­onds late? What cen­tury is this?

    Oh, also, google “nom­i­nally high-performing schools” to con­firm every­thing you’ve already seen. You are not alone in your experience.

    Good luck!

    October 6th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
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  261. PsychMom says:

    You know Dis­il­lu­sioned, I’m maybe a lit­tle less dis­cour­aged because the pri­vate school my 3rd Grader attends has many pluses com­pared to pub­lic schools locally, but I empathize with you because I thought we were going into a no homework(or very lit­tle any­way) school 4 years ago. But there is home­work and I object to it and some­times I kind of sit there at the meet­ings and feel mis­er­able because I object, but most other par­ents are buy­ing in. You feel so …so.…outnumbered and out of place.

    It helps to write here though and to read about what other fam­i­lies have done.

    October 6th, 2009 at 1:45 pm
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  262. Disillusioned says:

    Start­ing in fourth grade, the kids are benched for rec­cess if they don’t turn in their home­work (no exep­tions). They must go to the office and sit on the “bench of shame” as the office man­ager calls it.

    If you dare object to the Prin­ci­pal, she tells you if you are not happy with her poli­cies you should leave!

    October 6th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
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  263. Steve K says:

    I’m dis­cour­aged as I read this, because I agree with you about the point­less­ness of read­ing logs, but I also find them to be a nec­es­sary evil as a teacher. My fifth graders com­plete their read­ing log each week, but I do not require a par­ent sig­na­ture any­more. I’ve tried stop­ping it, but my par­ents and fel­low fifth grade teach­ers have objected. I tend to get com­plaints already that I am not giv­ing enough home­work, and that their child may not be pre­pared for the amount of work they have to do in mid­dle school. I try to explain that research show that doing home­work doesn’t really improve learn­ing, but that doesn’t seem to con­vince any­one but me. Mean­while I am buried under a daily onslaught of mean­ing­less papers that I have to assess for my 28 students.

    October 6th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
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  264. Steve K says:

    On the other hand, if I had a par­ent say that the read­ing log was point­less, and their kid wasn’t going to do it, I would not object, but actu­ally rejoice at hav­ing some­one who was on my side!

    October 6th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
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  265. Fed Up Dad and Teacher says:

    “but I also find them to be a nec­es­sary evil as a teacher“
    Dude, WTF, Grow a set of balls and do what you know is right for your students!

    October 7th, 2009 at 3:59 am
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  266. PsychMom says:

    Way to cut to the chase. Though I wouldn’t use those terms, (the reg­u­lar Moms who write in talk about self con­fi­dence and pro­fes­sion­al­ism — dif­fer­ent styles in approach) this is the crux of the mat­ter, isn’t it. I always go back to the pro­fes­sional theme.…if any other pro­fes­sional would say what you’ve said, Steve K, they would not be taken seri­ously, or worse yet, they would be seen as behav­ing uneth­i­cally. Take the exam­ple of a physi­cian treat­ing chil­dren in his/her prac­tice. If a child has a cold, the cur­rent best prac­tice is to NOT give antibi­otics willynilly (a tech­ni­cal term). Physi­cians handed out antibi­otics for years..for the most minor of infections…but they know bet­ter now. Would you have con­fi­dence in a fam­ily doc­tor who con­tin­ued to give out antibi­otics to small chil­dren because a par­ent demanded it? I wouldn’t.

    I trust my child’s teach­ers to be “state of the art”…they’re the experts on edu­ca­tion. If I, as a par­ent, have to find moun­tains of cur­rent research to back up my claims that home­work is use­less in ele­men­tary school.…the least they should be able to do is counter it with their research. But they don’t, they have their beliefs. They have their tra­di­tions. They just believe that they know what’s best.
    I’m sorry but I don’t buy it.

    October 7th, 2009 at 7:54 am
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  267. Patrick says:

    You are a winer.

    October 7th, 2009 at 11:36 am
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  268. PsychMom says:

    I like a good glass of wine…thanks.

    October 7th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
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  269. Disillusioned says:

    “They have their beliefs, they have their tra­di­tions.” A very true state­ment. I’m not try­ing to teacher bash, yet, In the three years I have been at my daughter’s “great school” I have seen a great amount of unprofesionalism.

    Dur­ing my daughter’s Kinde­garten year, I was a run­ning a fam­ily busi­ness that was in a long, com­pli­cated, sale of the busi­ness. I had never had more than a five word con­ver­sa­tion with a stay at home mom at that time and felt a cul­ture shock so pro­found when I spoke with them. They had an almost rev­er­ent atti­tiude towards the Kinde­garten teacher which stunned me. I made the tran­sis­tion to stay at home mom halfway through Kinde­garten and (though I didn’t know it at the time), fell into a deep depression.

    I was clue­less about the school cul­ture. How­ever, I don’t think I was “dis­re­spect­ful” to the teacher. Yet, being in a field dom­i­nated by men, I was kinda irrev­er­ent toward her. She sent me e-mails nit­pick­ing my daughter’s wardrobe, told me I could not vol­un­teer in her class­room, sent me e-mail telling me my daugh­ter was “fail­ing” P.E.,. Finally, at our last con­fer­ence, she started with the words “your daugh­ter is a “late bloomer” and needs a tutor. Then, she handed me a let­ter (with­out a word) which told me my five year old daugth­ter was :“fail­ing to meet all stan­dards for the district.”

    I was angry, upset, and felt like I had been sucker punched in the gut. I reacted emo­tion­ally and told her maybe the school and I weren’t a good fit. She whole­heart­edly agreed and sug­gested I leave the school!

    I guess my point is, if they feel you are a “dif­fi­cult” mother. Their pro­fes­sion­al­ism can go out the win­dow in an instant.

    October 7th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
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  270. PsychMom says:

    Wow, I’m sur­prised you still have the patience to still be at that school. Any other options in the sur­round­ing area?

    October 7th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
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  271. FedUpMom says:

    Dis­il­lu­sioned — I agree with Psy­ch­Mom. You’re putting up with this crummy school why exactly?

    And I really don’t want to make this an issue about stay-at-home moms vs. work-outside-the-home moms. We’re all moth­ers, let’s band together. Any­way, I know very few moth­ers who are 100% stay-at-home or 100% career women. Most of the moth­ers I know have been some­times employed full time, some­times part time, some­times not employed for pay. It’s much more of a spec­trum than a binary thing. I’m employed part time for pay, but I also have a voca­tion which has not gen­er­ated money so far, although it might in the future. I don’t con­sider myself “stay-at_home” although some might describe me that way.

    My big com­plaint about moth­ers with regard to the schools is that they are just too pas­sive, and put up with way too much garbage. They com­plain about the school to each other at the bus stop but never fol­low through with the teach­ers or prin­ci­pal. That’s true for moth­ers who work out­side the home as much as stay at home mothers.

    October 7th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
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  272. Disillusioned says:

    As a mother, I’m very ambiva­lent about pulling my daugher out of the school (she actu­ally likes the school!). I have been told by the other moth­ers that all of the three ele­men­tary schools in our tiny “high per­form­ing” school dis­trict are the same. As stated ear­lier, the prin­ci­pal is very much an “advo­cate” for her teach­ers (to make mat­ters worse this Kinde­garten teacher lives in our com­mu­nity and I run into her out­side of school…very akward).

    I agree that the moth­ers are too pas­sive and put up with way too much garbage. How­ever, I see the moth­ers that oppose the school branded as “trou­ble­mak­ers.” Very oppres­sive. In a sense, school has become “reverse world” where the moth­ers kow tow to the teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tion. Also, they are very good at “divid­ing and con­quer­ing” in regards to fathers (if mom doesn’t agree with us, let’s set up a meet­ing with both parents).

    Per­son­ally, it has caused me to “emo­tion­ally check-out” of my daughter’s school and have as lit­tle con­tact with the teach­ers as I can.

    October 7th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
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  273. zzzzz78759 says:

    I can under­stand Disillusioned’s feel­ings. It’s very dif­fi­cult to buck the sys­tem and yes, being branded a “trou­ble­maker mom” is painful. Per­son­ally, I had to move from our 3 bed­room house with a big yard to a tiny 2 bed­room duplex with no yarto keep my daugh­ter in her school for exactly that rea­son. I bucked the sys­tem and the prin­ci­pal didn’t like that..

    I went into every meet­ing, ARD, con­fer­ence with the same atti­tude. I want my daugh­ter to have the best edu­ca­tion pos­si­ble but I also want her to be a kid. I’m a very busy, sin­gle mother with a more than full time job. The school is in a very afflu­ent com­mu­nity with lots of room moth­ers who drive BMWs and have birth­day par­ties in their back­yard pools.

    The prin­ci­pal finally told me that, unless we move into the neigh­bor­hood my daugh­ter couldn’t trans­fer into that school any­more. She knew I couldn’t afford to live here. She even went so far as to say that if we did change our address, she would come over to “make sure [we] were sleep­ing there.”

    So we moved. When I went to the school to change our address, I told the prin­ci­pal I was look­ing for­ward to her com­ing by because I could use help unpacking.

    My thought is that if I can’t stand up for my daugh­ter and take the heat that comes down from it, then how can I teach her to stand up for herself?

    I do fold on some things. Some­times I’m just too exhausted from fight­ing or work­ing or tak­ing care of the house­hold to fight. I admit it, I’m human. And some­times I get pretty lonely stand­ing out there in the open all by myself.

    But I think I’m doing some good, at least I hope I am. And when my daugh­ter says, “I love being a kid!” it gives me renewed energy to bat­tle the system.

    October 7th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
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  274. Disillusioned says:

    zzzzz78759– I admire your tenac­ity and bold­ness. How­ever, as other posters have pointed out, why should we have to have so much con­flict? If it were the parent’s choice re: home­work (if we must have it sim­ply make it extra credit) all of this con­flict would sim­ply go away.

    I think it’s very telling that the teach­ers who com­plain about par­ents want­ing more home­work don’t even con­sider it should be the parent’s choice. Par­ent empow­er­ment in “great” pub­lic schools is pretty much non-existent.

    October 7th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
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  275. Fed Up Dad and Teacher says:

    OK Here it is:

    1. Home­work is so entrenched in the sys­tem, even in the early grades, you will not be able to make the slight­est dent of a change in pol­icy or thought. It’s all about eek­ing out a few more points on the next stan­dard­ized test, not about learning.

    2. So, what to do?

    Option 1 — Leave and find a school that is appro­pri­ate for your child and edu­ca­tional phi­los­o­phy. Chances are 80% of what they do in class is also the worst kind of learning.

    Option 2 — Start your own school (char­ter school, pri­vate, homeschool).

    Option 3 — Just don’t do any of the home­work. Who cares about grades any­way? If they give you any prob­lems or if they pun­ish and harass your child, doc­u­ment every­thing and call a lay­wer. Make sure to opt out of all stan­dard­ized test­ing ( it’s you right) or tell your child to mark all a’s on the scor­ing sheet.

    OK This is why:

    1. The joy of learn­ing is beaten out of our childeren at an ear­lier, and ear­lier age every year.

    2. The school could care less about your child, they are not stu­dents, they are test scores. Do you want a standard(ized) child or an excep­tional child who whose growth and love of learn­ing dis­cov­er­ing, explor­ing, invent­ing, and nutur­ing has no bounds?

    Start Here: ALFIE KOHN. ORG

    October 8th, 2009 at 1:35 am
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  276. Disillusioned says:

    Wow– Fed Up Dad and Teacher pretty much summed it up! What a sad state of affairs at our pub­lic schools.

    I like option three. How­ever, I con­sider myself a “bridge builder” and don’t think I should have to take such a mil­i­tant stance against a school that is sup­ported with my (very high) tax dollars.

    October 8th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
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  277. Disillusioned says:

    I have been read­ing some of the other blogs with lurid fas­ci­na­tion. I find the com­ments posted by the teach­ers most fascinating.

    Again, I am not teacher bash­ing, sim­ply report­ing what I have observed at my daughter’s “great” pub­lic school (with very, very high test scores). My daughter’s sec­ond grade teacher was feared by stu­dents and moth­ers alike. She assigned about thirty per­cent more home­work then the other two sec­ond grade teach­ers (not to men­tion end­less “par­ent projects”). I was brave enough to vol­un­teer in her class­room once week (I con­sid­ered it char­ac­ter build­ing). She con­stantly belit­tled the kids, made degrad­ing com­ments about other par­ents and teach­ers and yelled at me for not “being fast enough” grad­ing homework.

    Her e-mails to the par­ents were rid­dled with spelling errors (and she had spell check!), and poor syn­tax. I hon­estly don’t think she could pass a high school equiv­a­lency exam. Most of the moth­ers who vol­un­teered agreed, “the kids just kinda taught them­selves.” Dur­ing my time in the class­room I saw her hand out end­less work­sheets and “ver­bally abuse” the kids who didn’t com­plete them fast enough. When­ever the prinic­i­pal would come into the class­room she would “turn on a dime” into a kind, car­ing, nur­tur­ing soul. When she left, back to her mean spir­ited self. The moth­ers seethed but didn’t com­plain for fear she would “take it out” on their kids.

    Fast for­ward to mid sum­mer when I received my daugh­ters test scores.….they were all in the advanced cat­e­gories for lan­guage arts and mathematics.

    I guess my point is.… the cur­ricu­lum is so struc­tured toward achiev­ing high test scores that I’m not sure you even need a “great” teacher to achieve “great” test scores. Hon­estly, I would pre­fer a “kinder, gen­tler” ele­men­tary school because the end­less work­sheets the kids do six hours a day at school (regard­less of the com­petancy of the teacher) are designed to achieve high test scores!

    October 9th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
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  278. PsychMom says:

    I would really begin to won­der what edu­ca­tion my child is get­ting in this sup­posed “great school”. Sounds like a sweat shop to me..

    October 9th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
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  279. FedUpMom says:

    Dis­il­lu­sioned — I’d bet you real money that your daughter’s test scores are in spite of the work­sheets, not because of them.

    The high test scores that our wealthy dis­tricts crow about have very lit­tle to do with what actu­ally hap­pens dur­ing the school day. Dis­tricts achieve high scores by attract­ing pro­fes­sional par­ents with bright kids.

    October 9th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
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  280. Disillusioned says:

    Agreed. This “teacher” also com­plained about the par­ents who “didn’t care” about their kids education.

    I guess what galls me is the hypocrisy evi­dent at our school. I really think the school ben­e­fits from good demo­graph­ics. An army of vol­un­teer moms do copy­ing, grade home­work, teach art classes and are treated with enour­mous dis­s­re­spect by the staff. Now start­ing third grade, my daughter’s teacher has also started to send home e-mails rid­dled with poor gram­mar and syn­tax (this is a National Blue Rib­bon school!).

    If I were a teacher, I would be very aware (in this well edu­cated sub­urb), of send­ing out poorly writ­ten e-mails to the whole par­ent pop­u­la­tion. (Do as I say not as I do stu­dents and parents).

    For a teacher, our well behaved, respect­ful stu­dent body (along with enor­mous mother sup­port), should be a dream job. How­ever, when I vol­un­teer in the class­room (as an unpaid employee!), I always get an ear­ful about the poor, belea­guered, teacher martyrs!

    October 9th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
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  281. DeidraHewitt says:

    I was sur­prised to see, in Fed Up Dad’s post, that I might actu­ally have a right to opt my chil­dren out of stan­dard­ized test­ing. Is this true? If so, wouldn’t that be a great way for par­ents to tilt the tables? If sev­eral fam­i­lies opted out of test­ing, per­haps the pow­ers that be would be more will­ing to lis­ten to us.

    October 9th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
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  282. FedUpMom says:

    Yes, Fed Up Dad, can you send some links about our right to refuse stan­dard­ized tests? I’m inter­ested in this too.

    October 10th, 2009 at 10:00 am
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  283. -Frustrated in California says:

    I teach first grade in a pub­lic school and do use read­ing logs in my home­work pack­ets. At back to school night I explain to the par­ents that this is not sup­posed to be a painful chore, but a spe­cial read­ing time with a fam­ily mem­ber. It is not my expec­ta­tion that first grade stu­dents read inde­pen­dently as a chore for 20 min­utes, but that they learn to love read­ing. They may choose to read to their par­ents, with an older sib­ling, or have their grand­mother read to them, etc. They can read in any lan­guage. When chil­dren are given the oppor­tu­nity to share some­thing as won­der­ful as a book with some­one they love, it can lead to life-long, joy­ful read­ing… THAT is my goal. I sus­pect that many other teach­ers feel the same.

    Fur­ther­more, I take my respon­si­bil­ity as a teacher very seri­ously. I do my best for every child in my class. I DO get paid for teach­ing; but have many con­straints of time and money. I have only so much time with my stu­dents in the class­room. Since I have 22 stu­dents, you can imag­ine how many min­utes of one-on-one time each stu­dent gets with me each day: not many. I get paid to be here from 7:55 to 3:30 every day, but am here from at least 7:00 to 4:00 every day. I also do one late day per week when I sat until 7 or 8pm. I take work home to cor­rect. I plan lessons on the week­ends, and have $200 dol­lars of my mea­ger salary bud­geted for class­room needs and par­ties every month. My first year of teach­ing I needed so many things, that I spent over $2,000 of my own money. The amount that I get paid for what I do is ridicu­lous, but I do it because it is my call­ing in life to help chil­dren in need and I love it. I chose this job and accept what comes with it… but am becom­ing increas­ingly bit­ter about the lack of appreciation.

    The fact of the mat­ter is that most peo­ple in Amer­ica feel enti­tled to every­thing with­out want­ing to take any respon­si­bil­ity for it. Peo­ple buy things they can’t afford because they feel they deserve it. Some peo­ple go on wel­fare even though they could get a job because the gov­ern­ment owes them. Peo­ple want their chil­dren edu­cated but are igno­rant and self­ish enough to think that that only hap­pens at school. It is YOUR child! Why are you lay­ing the blame at the feet of the teacher? In kinder, most stu­dents come in with­out the abil­ity to count to 10 or write their name. I under­stand that some par­ents are illit­er­ate… but who can’t count to ten?

    Almost any well edu­cated per­son got that way for 3 rea­sons: they worked hard, their par­ents sup­ported them, and they had a teacher that taught them. Notice that 2 of these com­po­nents are not the teacher. I am sick of hear­ing (after com­pletely drain­ing myself of energy at work,) “I send my child to school, but they just don’t teach them there!”

    –From: Frus­trated in California

    October 12th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
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  284. FedUpMom says:

    Frus­trated in Cal­i­for­nia — the prob­lem is that there’s a big gap between your inten­tions and actual fam­ily life at home. Your inten­tion is for your stu­dents to love read­ing. No argu­ment there.

    But as soon as an assign­ment comes home that must be done, it puts stress on the fam­ily. First-grade chil­dren are nowhere near old enough to reli­ably remem­ber and carry out their home­work, so it becomes another job for Mom. At the end of a long, dif­fi­cult day for both mother and child, remem­ber­ing to fill out the read­ing log is just one more hassle.

    If you want to encour­age read­ing, couldn’t you just … encour­age read­ing? Skip the paper­work, skip the assign­ments, and just send the par­ents a let­ter about the impor­tance of read­ing, and maybe say that about 20 min­utes a night is a rea­son­able goal for 1st grade. Offer to pro­vide a read­ing log for any par­ents who want one.

    October 12th, 2009 at 11:03 pm
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  285. zzzzz78759 says:

    Frus­trated wrote:
    The fact of the mat­ter is that most peo­ple in Amer­ica feel enti­tled to every­thing with­out want­ing to take any respon­si­bil­ity for it. Peo­ple buy things they can’t afford because they feel they deserve it. Some peo­ple go on wel­fare even though they could get a job because the gov­ern­ment owes them. Peo­ple want their chil­dren edu­cated but are igno­rant and self­ish enough to think that that only hap­pens at school. It is YOUR child! Why are you lay­ing the blame at the feet of the teacher? In kinder, most stu­dents come in with­out the abil­ity to count to 10 or write their name. I under­stand that some par­ents are illit­er­ate… but who can’t count to ten?
    =========

    I dis­agree that *most* peo­ple have a sense of enti­tle­ment nor do I agree that *most* Kinder­garten stu­dents can’t count to 10. I do agree that many, most likely, can­not write their names but, as a teacher, you must know that writ­ing is devel­op­men­tal and 5 year olds don’t have the small motor skills nor eye-hand coor­di­na­tion to write.

    5 year old “Left­ies” haven’t even got­ten a dom­i­nant hand at that age.

    Schools are there to edu­cate. There’s a dif­fer­ence between edu­cat­ing and teacher. I do teach my child. I teach her morals. I teach her to love. I teach her to ride a bike. I teach her to respect oth­ers. I teach her all sorts of things but it is your job to edu­cate her, not mine.

    I work from 7:00 to at least 4:00, then work some more after my daugh­ter goes to sleep. I do that all year. I make her meals, I give her baths, I take her to Brown­ies and gym­nas­tics and play dates and assorted other activ­i­ties. I clean the house, I do the laun­dry, I pay the rent, the util­i­ties, car pay­ments, vaca­tions and I have never col­lected wel­fare. And now I’m expected to do the teacher’s job.

    I am edu­cated, not igno­rant, but I am self­ish. I want to spend some time with my child while she’s still a child. I want to play with her and ride bike with her and learn magic with her. If that’s self­ish, so be it.

    I’ve got news for you, every job requires an out­lay of per­sonal funds, whether it’s a uni­form, a com­puter, cam­era, inter­net access, car, insur­ance, whatever.

    I see such dis­re­spect for par­ents from yet another teacher with the “poor me’s”. I’ve been called igno­rant, stu­pid, lazy, and a host of other names by teach­ers who don’t even know me, sim­ply because I pre­fer to be a par­ent that a teacher.

    Is it any won­der par­ents balk at teach­ers try­ing to sched­ule their fam­ily time?

    October 12th, 2009 at 11:17 pm
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  286. PsychMom says:

    I was struck by how the Frus­trated in Cal­i­for­nia teacher started out the post in pleas­ant terms but it was almost as if, as he/she wrote, he/she got mad­der and mad­der, just think­ing about par­ents and the teach­ing job.

    I agree that our soci­ety seems to be full of peo­ple who feel enti­tled to many things right now. Many folks don’t want to take respon­si­bil­ity as parents.…but that does not describe any of the par­ents who are express­ing their opin­ions here. DIs­il­lull­sioned voiced much of what her role is as a par­ent. Mine too…I’m a sin­gle par­ent, work­ing full time, and for­tu­nately I don’t take work home with me at night but in 25 years of being a paid employee, I’ve done my fair share of non-paid hours.

    The fact remains, I’m not a teacher. The teacher does not want me teach­ing my daugh­ter arith­metic the way I learned it…she wants me to encour­age a new way of think­ing about num­bers and math con­cepts. Why do I have to pay any atten­tion to that!! I’m not a teacher. When my daugh­ter asks me for help with home­work, why do I have to fig­ure it out first? That’s why I have decided that, from now on, if it comes home to me…I’m doing it. My way. My child obvi­ously can’t do it, or she wouldn’t be ask­ing me for help. Since they aren’t graded on it…everything should be fine.

    Right?

    October 13th, 2009 at 9:13 am
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  287. FedUpMom says:

    Here’s an excel­lent dis­cus­sion about read­ing logs, writ­ten by teachers:

    http://​www​.pro​teacher​.net/​d​i​s​c​u​s​s​i​o​n​s​/​s​h​o​w​t​h​r​e​a​d​.​p​h​p​?​t​=​4​5​766

    or google “Do you do read­ing logs?” Pro­Teacher Community.

    It’s a bunch of teach­ers describ­ing what a fail­ure read­ing logs are. The kids who were already read­ing con­tin­ued to read, and the kids who weren’t read­ing con­tin­ued to not read. It was a lot of paper­work for no effect.

    October 13th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
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  288. PsychMom says:

    Most of the com­ments are pro read­ing logs though. It seems that it is far from being a “dead” topic.

    I guess you have to be a teacher to under­stand how read­ing logs boost read­ing. I do not get it. Some of them turn it into a con­test to see who reads the most in a year…

    October 13th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
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  289. zzzzz78759 says:

    I don’t really under­stand the point of read­ing logs. Are they sup­posed to instill a love of read­ing? Are they sup­posed to make read­ing a “habit”? Is it just a con­trol thing?

    What ever hap­pened to read­ing for the joy of it? Why do schools think we need to read on a schedule?

    October 13th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
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  290. Disillusioned says:

    Frus­trated in Cal­i­for­nia, you prob­a­bly have a right to be frus­trated. Even though I am dis­il­lu­sioned by the pub­lic school sys­tem, I believe the prob­lem is sys­temic and teach­ers “get thrown under the bus” along with stu­dents and parents.

    In my daughter’s “great” pub­lic school, there are no teacher’s aids assigned to class­rooms. I’ve often won­dered why since the cur­ricu­lum is very challenging.

    One com­mon theme that seems to thread through the teacher’s com­ments is “how busy” they are. I don’t doubt this. How­ever, as a busi­ness owner, if I laid out in detail every sin­gle thing I do in an hour, it would prob­a­bly make me seem over­whelmed as well (wait…I also have to help my daugh­ter with her home­work and nag her to fill out a read­ing log!).

    I fear many teach­ers’ lounges are filled with talk of “igno­rant and self­ish” par­ents who lay the “blame” for their spoiled, enti­tled kids lack of edu­ca­tion at the feet of the educators!

    October 13th, 2009 at 9:28 pm
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  291. Anonymous says:

    x

    October 13th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
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  292. Fed Up Dad and Teacher says:

    I do not know the Ed Codes for all the states but in Cal­i­for­nia you can opt out of the test­ing. If 5% of the stu­dents do not take the test then the scores for the whole school are nul­li­fied and all hell will break loose.

    http://​www​.cal​care​.org

    October 13th, 2009 at 10:07 pm
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  293. Fed Up Dad and Teacher says:

    Per­son­ally, I like the idea of mak­ing pretty pic­tures and play­ing dot to dot on the score sheets, espe­cially if the tests are linked to teacher pay. Then, maybe the teach­ers will orga­nize against the tests.

    Again, who really cares about the scores?

    October 13th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
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  294. Fed Up Dad and Teacher says:

    Oh, Poli­ti­tians and elected school board mem­bers are the ones who care. Why do they care about stan­dard­ized test­ing? Because they want to be elected or reelected and they resort to play­ing on people’s fears about our chil­drens edu­ca­tion like Bush played on our fear of WMD’s and Sadsam’s link to Al-Queda

    October 13th, 2009 at 10:21 pm
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  295. Fed Up Dad and Teacher says:

    Sorry about the typos

    As a teacher and a par­ent, I know these tests and much of what hap­pens in the class­room and home­work focuses on what mat­ters the least in edu­ca­tion. You have to learn this fact, on this day, because we tell you you have to learn it, and your value is based on that score. Such BS! That is not edu­ca­tion. That is being a sheep!

    October 13th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
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  296. Fed Up Dad and Teacher says:

    CO:www.thecbe.org
    MA:www.parentscare.org
    MD:www.geocities.com/stophsa
    NC:www.geocities,com/nccds/index.html
    OH:www.stophighstakestests.org
    NY:www.timeoutfromtesting.org

    October 13th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
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  297. Fed Up Dad and Teacher says:

    http://​www​.fairtest​.org

    http://​www​.susanohan​ian​.org

    http://​www​.pen​cils​down​.org

    http://​www​.nomoretests​.com (stu­dent site)

    October 13th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
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  298. Fed Up Dad and Teacher says:

    http://​www​.alfiekohn​.org/​s​t​d​t​e​s​t​.​h​t​m​#​n​ull

    October 13th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
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  299. -Frustrated in California says:

    I guess my frus­tra­tion really did build as I kept writ­ing. I just fre­quently feel very judged by par­ents, “com­pet­ing” teach­ers, admin­is­tra­tors, test results… Sorry about that! Hear­ing all of the com­plaints about teach­ers lit me on fire!

    I do teach. I work hard, and I work effec­tively. This being said, if the only edu­cat­ing that these chil­dren got was in my class­room, it wouldn’t be enough. I am so happy for chil­dren whose par­ents are involved in their edu­ca­tion because I sin­cerely love my stu­dents and I want what is best for them. Every­thing I do is with that inten­tion. (How­ever, I am not per­fect, and I have off days like any­one else.)

    “…nor do I agree that *most* Kinder­garten stu­dents can’t count to 10. I do agree that many, most likely, can­not write their names but, as a teacher, you must know that writ­ing is devel­op­men­tal and 5 year olds don’t have the small motor skills nor eye-hand coor­di­na­tion to write.”

    I have had the oppor­tu­nity to work in four dif­fer­ent schools. In the school with well-educated, well-off par­ents most of the stu­dents came into kinder­garten with the abil­ity to write their names, count to 10 and much more. The other three schools have had a 95% or higher rate of poverty; at those schools most stu­dents could not count to 10 or write their name. I under­stand that stu­dents are not devel­op­men­tally ready to read and write at 5, but they are required by the state to leave kinder­garten able to write a good, com­plete sen­tence. For stu­dents who can’t recite the alpha­bet or rec­og­nize their name, this can be a chal­lenge. In schools where stu­dents have had really good oral lan­guage devel­op­ment before kinder­garten and expo­sure to lit­er­a­ture, stu­dents are gen­er­ally very suc­cess­ful with the state’s require­ments. If I were in charge of the uni­verse (God for­bid!) I would make the state stan­dards aligned with devel­op­men­tal capa­bil­ity… but alas, no. :-)

    Back to home­work:
    A major study that I read in a train­ing in which I par­tic­i­pated 2 years ago dis­cussed home­work. (Blast! I wish I could remem­ber who did it!) It showed that well assigned home­work given on a reg­u­lar basis improved reten­tion of knowl­edge by 40%. Well assigned home­work was basi­cally defined as work that can be done inde­pen­dently as review of things already learned. I assign home­work not only because it is required of me, but I feel that I would be doing a dis­ser­vice to my stu­dents and all the effort that they put forth to learn some­thing if I do not give them some struc­ture to help them retain their knowl­edge. At the end of their packet I add a read­ing log. The read­ing log at a first grade level can­not be done inde­pen­dently. I obvi­ously can’t force fam­i­lies to read to/with their chil­dren. I think that the read­ing log reminds some par­ents about the impor­tance of read­ing with their chil­dren, and it reminds some stu­dents to ask some­one to read to/with them instead of imme­di­ately run­ning to the television.

    Some of my stu­dents do not have any­one at home who can help them. I under­stand. Some stu­dents have a par­ent sit­ting with them for every math fact. I think it’s great. I DO check who does home­work and dis­cuss what respon­si­bil­ity is. Those who don’t do their review at home, do it dur­ing recess. Review is impor­tant. I only care whether the read­ing log is com­pleted in that I know that read­ing at home is impor­tant. It serves as a tool. Do I think that some par­ents sign it with­out doing it? YES! … but at least they thought about it.

    I do my best to make a great edu­ca­tion avail­able to my stu­dents. It is up to the stu­dents to lis­ten and par­tic­i­pate to gain what knowl­edge they can. It is up to the par­ents to par­tic­i­pate to what­ever degree they can.

    I truly get that par­ents want to spend what lit­tle qual­ity time that they have with their chil­dren doing what THEY feel qual­ity time is. I think that that is very important.

    In my expe­ri­ence, teach­ers rec­om­mend to par­ents that they do things with their chil­dren that they know to be help­ful to chil­dren. No one knows a child bet­ter than their par­ent. Peo­ple should take teacher’s rec­om­men­da­tions for what they are and do what they know to be best for their children.

    Despite dif­fer­ent learn­ing styles and pref­er­ences, the more chil­dren there are in the class, the less flex­i­bil­ity a teacher has in terms of rules, restric­tions, con­se­quences… It would be too time con­sum­ing to make indi­vid­u­al­ized assign­ments or behav­ioral sys­tems. If your child’s teacher has put into place a sys­tem in which stu­dents who fill out their read­ing logs get a prize, okay. The teacher for some rea­son feels that that will help most chil­dren in the class. Don’t worry about it. If your child wants the prize, then they will do the read­ing log. Oth­er­wise, don’t worry about it.

    Just what I think…

    October 14th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
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  300. FedUpMom says:

    Frus­trated in Cal­i­for­nia says:

    *************************************
    A major study that I read in a train­ing in which I par­tic­i­pated 2 years ago dis­cussed home­work. (Blast! I wish I could remem­ber who did it!) It showed that well assigned home­work given on a reg­u­lar basis improved reten­tion of knowl­edge by 40%. Well assigned home­work was basi­cally defined as work that can be done inde­pen­dently as review of things already learned.
    *************************************

    Have you read The Case Against Home­work (Ben­nett and Kalish) and The Home­work Myth (Kohn)? Their research shows no advan­tage to home­work in ele­men­tary school. And you’re teach­ing 1st grade! There’s no such thing as “work that can be done inde­pen­dently” for such young children.

    The only way a 1st-grader’s home­work can get done is for Mom to turn into Home­work Cop.

    **************************
    Those who don’t do their review at home, do it dur­ing recess.
    **************************

    Do you under­stand how puni­tive it is for a young child, to lose their one oppor­tu­nity dur­ing the school day to run around and social­ize? Recess should never be taken away. And you should real­ize that you are pun­ish­ing the child for the actions or inac­tion of the par­ents. The chil­dren who got their home­work done have par­ents who made sure that it got done, or did the child’s home­work for them (much more com­mon than you might think). The chil­dren who didn’t get their home­work done have less atten­tive par­ents. Then they get pun­ished at school too.

    ***********************
    Do I think that some par­ents sign it with­out doing it? YES! … but at least they thought about it.
    ***********************

    What the heck? What pur­pose could pos­si­bly be served by par­ents sign­ing off on the read­ing log with­out read­ing to their child? “At least they thought about it?” What exactly did they think? “Here’s one more piece of paper the school wants me to sign … okay, done.”

    October 15th, 2009 at 11:11 am
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  301. bohoteacher says:

    Wow. After read­ing through these I had to com­ment or feel hor­ri­ble all day. I think that everyone’s emo­tions seem to be run­ning really high on this topic. I am a teacher and have taught 4th, 5th or 6th grade for the past 17 years. I love my pro­fes­sion and I truly love work­ing with chil­dren. That being said NCLB has made things harder for the teach­ers who care about more than test scores.

    I do give read­ing logs. I have many stu­dents who would absolutely not read if they had no account­abil­ity. But if I had a par­ent who came to me and told me that they wanted a dif­fer­ent plan for their child with the good rea­sons which you all list (child reads lots, trust, etc) I would hap­pily, joy­fully exempt that child. It doesn’t have to be one size fits all.

    I’d like to ask all of you a sin­cere ques­tion and *please* don’t flame me I just want con­struc­tive opin­ions. I teach 4th grade. This is the home­work that I give weekly – packet goes home Fri­day & is due next Fri­day: ONE essay prep activ­ity (brain­storm topic, make an out­line, etc), ONE read­ing com­pre­hen­sion activ­ity, read­ing log for 100 min. weekly (done at any time), nightly math (about 10 prob­lems). Now most of my stu­dents if not doing home­work are not involved in enrich­ing activ­i­ties – they mostly play video games or watch (really vio­lent) movies. If any par­ent were to come to me with the same con­cerns as listed here I would be a) thrilled to death b) happy to modify.

    So, what do you think?

    October 15th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
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  302. PsychMom says:

    Wel­come bohoteacher!

    This dis­cus­sion has been going on since Jan­u­ary and yes at times it gets heated.…but that hap­pens when peo­ple are pas­sion­ate. I think it’s mar­vel­lous we live in a cul­ture that can han­dle this kind of debate and that we have the medium by which to carry it on.
    I hope both teach­ers and par­ents respond.
    The home­work you described was writ­ten in teacher terms and you know what it is you are try­ing to “teach” by giv­ing that home­work. But I’m not a teacher, I don’t know what “essay prep activ­ity” is. Could you give a bit more detail about what it is you are assign­ing and what the pur­pose of it is? What are the chil­dren sup­posed to get out of it? Do you expect par­ents to do anything?

    October 15th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
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  303. -Frustrated in California says:

    I read that book by Kohn and also his book, “Pun­ished by Rewards,” on the use of incen­tives in the class­room in my techer book club. We gen­er­ally found his books to be thought very thought pro­vok­ing. We had some great dis­cus­sions, but ulti­mately found them lack­ing in prac­ti­cal alter­na­tive measures.

    I have been teach­ing first grade for 5 years and also taught kinder and sec­ond. First grade stu­dents ARE able to do many things inde­pen­dently. This has been evi­denced by my own obser­va­tions in my class­room, in addi­tion to the fact that most of the par­ents of my stu­dents don’t speak Eng­lish and can’t help them at home with most things. At the begin­ning of the year I usu­ally have 2 or 3 stu­dents who don’t turn in their home­work at first. After miss­ing a cou­ple of recesses, they make bet­ter choices and I pretty much get 100% home­work for the rest of the year. I don’t like tak­ing their recesses away from them or miss­ing my breaks, but other mea­sures have not been suc­cess­ful. My ulti­mate goal is that they learn; as their teacher I make the choice that I feel is for the greater good.

    There is no pur­pose to sign­ing off on home­work undone. The only pos­si­ble lit­tle ben­e­fit would be that at least the idea of read­ing to/with their child crossed their minds for a milisec­ond. Doesn’t do much, but not much harm done either.

    October 15th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
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  304. PsychMom says:

    Frus­trated in Cal­i­for­nia said:

    “After miss­ing a cou­ple of recesses, they make bet­ter choices and I pretty much get 100% home­work for the rest of the year. I don’t like tak­ing their recesses away from them or miss­ing my breaks, but other mea­sures have not been successful”

    You really didn’t get any­thing out of Kohn’s books.

    “This all hurts me more than it hurts you”.…

    I get a chill.

    October 15th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
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  305. bohoteacher says:

    Exam­ple of Essay activ­ity: In class we work on 3 things you like about our school and write 3 detailed sen­tences about each one. At home you are expected to write 3 things you like about our state and write 3 detailed sen­tences about each one.

    I have also read Alphie Kohn’s books and even cor­re­sponded with him by e-mail on some ques­tions. Not giv­ing home­work is not an option for me at our school/district, but I try to make it rel­e­vant as possible.

    October 15th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
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  306. FedUpMom says:

    From “Bad Teach­ers”, by Guy Strickland:

    “… approved teach­ing method­ol­ogy does not equal stu­dent learn­ing, and there are many rea­sons. The biggest rea­son is that approved teach­ing method­ol­ogy is not even aimed at stu­dent learn­ing; its goal is class­room man­age­ment, which is a whole lot dif­fer­ent from learning.”

    “…Lis­ten to the teacher talk. If she talks about what she is doing rather than what the teacher is doing, gen­tly bring the focus back to the chil­dren. Ask how the teacher knows how the meth­ods are work­ing; ask for evi­dence that the chil­dren are learning.”

    October 15th, 2009 at 11:32 pm
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  307. FedUpMom says:

    Frus­trated in Cal­i­for­nia writes:

    *************
    At the begin­ning of the year I usu­ally have 2 or 3 stu­dents who don’t turn in their home­work at first. After miss­ing a cou­ple of recesses, they make bet­ter choices and I pretty much get 100% home­work for the rest of the year.
    ***************

    I agree with Psy­ch­Mom. That’s pretty cold. I don’t sense a lot of sym­pa­thy for the kids here.

    Frus­trated, I posted the above excerpt about method-obsessed teach­ers because your com­ments reminded me of it. In your com­ments, I read a lot about you and how hard you work and how you achieve 100% home­work com­pli­ance. But I don’t see much about the kids. Do you see the light of curios­ity in their eyes? Who are they? What do they care about? You know what you’re teach­ing, but what are the kids learning?

    October 15th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
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  308. FedUpMom says:

    Whoops, I put a typo in the Guy Strick­land quote. It should have said,

    “If she talks about what she is doing rather than what the CHILDREN are doing …”

    October 15th, 2009 at 11:49 pm
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  309. PsychMom says:

    To bohoteacher.…Ok that’s a start but you didn’t tell me any­thing about what you think the kids get out of this exer­cise. What are they sup­posed to learn?
    And you just told me about the essay prep (I think)…you men­tioned two or three other things that are expected each week but didn’t elab­o­rate on that.…

    How can we com­ment (you asked for com­ments) if we don’t know what you’re doing and why you think it’s important?

    I was at a cur­ricu­lum meet­ing for my daughter’s class last night and the teach­ers just breezed through the list of math goals, mostly writ­ten in teacher-ese. It was only when I asked spe­cific ques­tions about what things meant, that I under­stood what exactly she was teaching.

    October 16th, 2009 at 7:59 am
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  310. PeggyinMA says:

    The dis­tinc­tion (referred to above) between “class­room man­age­ment” and “stu­dent learn­ing” is a cru­cial one in this discussion.

    Think­ing about this fur­ther: How much of the home­work stu­dents (espe­cially younger than high school-aged) receive is intended to address per­ceived social issues rather than aca­d­e­mic ones? Teach­ers here fre­quently reit­er­ate the belief that too many par­ents are unin­volved, that chil­dren are unmo­ti­vated to read out­side of school, there­fore work must be assigned to all stu­dents to be done out­side of school.

    As a par­ent, I can­not stress enough to teach­ers that, first of all, such well inten­tioned home­work may not be the answer to those con­cerns and, sec­ondly, it cer­tainly is not benign to stu­dents who are already curi­ous, love to read and are self moti­vated to learn. The drudgery of home­work for the sake of home­work is demor­al­iz­ing and de-motivating. It doesn’t build char­ac­ter, it builds resent­ment and hos­til­ity to school. Par­ents who send happy, curi­ous chil­dren off to school can­not be expected to stand by and watch help­lessly as the love of learn­ing is drilled out of them.

    We’re just ask­ing our lead­ers, our admin­stra­tors and our teach­ers, with all due respect, to please recon­sider this ingrained approach.

    October 16th, 2009 at 9:07 am
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  311. Disillusioned says:

    Peg­gy­inMA– Bravo, well stated.

    October 16th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
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  312. Matthew says:

    bohoteacher said: “Exam­ple of Essay activ­ity: In class we work on 3 things you like about our school and write 3 detailed sen­tences about each one. At home you are expected to write 3 things you like about our state and write 3 detailed sen­tences about each one.”

    I find (now for my kids and the same when I was in school…things don’t ever seem to change) this kind of assign­ment really frus­trat­ing. The con­cept is OK, but why force the kids to say the like some­thing if they don’t? Leave it a lit­tle more open ended and see what you get. You may even get some valu­able feedback.

    Reminds me of the awful school song that our ele­men­tary school music teacher tried to force the kids to sing a few years ago (“Wor­thing­ton is great, Wor­thing­ton is grand, Wor­thing­ton is…the best school in the land” and so on…). The fifth graders (includ­ing one of my sons) would have noth­ing to do with it and put a great deal of cre­ative energy into com­ing up with a scathing ren­di­tion of their own. The school learned their les­son and the offi­cial ver­sion has never been heard again.

    Treat kids with the same dig­nity you’d give adults and let them hold and express their own opin­ions and you’d be amazed at what kids can do – and learn.

    October 16th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
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  313. -Frustrated in California says:

    “I read a lot about you and how hard you work and how you achieve 100% home­work com­pli­ance. But I don’t see much about the kids. Do you see the light of curios­ity in their eyes? Who are they? What do they care about? You know what you’re teach­ing, but what are the kids learning?”

    I wish you could come to my class­room to see for your­self… My stu­dents are excited to come every morn­ing. They are joy­ful par­tic­i­pants in what we do. They know that when they step into the class­room, they are in a safe, fun place to learn. If I didn’t see the light of joy and excite­ment at learn­ing new things in their eyes, my efforts wouldn’t be worth it.

    Other teach­ers ask to observe my class to learn how to build com­mu­nity in their class­rooms. I am a cer­ti­fied TRIBES trainer who pro­vides train­ing to other teach­ers, adi­min­is­tra­tors and psy­chol­o­gists who look to cre­ate nur­tur­ing learn­ing com­mu­ni­ties in class­rooms o school-wide.

    October 16th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
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  314. zzzzz78759 says:

    Just an observation…when I googled “TRIBES Trainer” to find out what PARENTS think of it (not good), I came up with a bunch of hits for “Lemmings”.

    Is it just me or does that say it all? :-)

    October 16th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
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  315. Anonymous says:

    zzzzz78759,

    I was sur­prised that you had found such neg­a­tive par­ent responses to TRIBES. I googled “TRIBES Trainer” to see what you might be see­ing. I only found one par­ent review posted within the first cou­ple of screens; it was very pos­i­tive. I also found arti­cles: “TRIBES Trainer wins Awards,” “Build­ing Com­mu­ni­ties of Learn­ers,” “Mak­ing a dif­fer­ence in the lives of chil­dren and their fam­i­lies,” etc.

    It appears that there is an online game about Lem­mings. If some­one wants to, they can down­load some train­ing for their online lem­mings tribe… I don’t think that the exis­tence of this game should affect your opin­ion of some of the things that hap­pen in classrooms.

    October 17th, 2009 at 10:27 am
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  316. FedUpMom says:

    Yes, zzzzz7859, could you post links to par­ent com­ments? I couldn’t find much either.

    I get the impres­sion that “TRIBES” is mostly used with low SES kids, whose par­ents don’t have so much of an inter­net pres­ence. The par­ents of Frustrated’s kids mostly don’t speak Eng­lish, so I wouldn’t expect to see a lot of their com­ments on the web (and I couldn’t read them anyway!)

    There’s an enor­mous gulf between teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors on the one hand, and par­ents and stu­dents on the other. Pro­grams that appear to be fab­u­lous to teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors are rou­tinely panned by par­ents and stu­dents. Spend 5 min­utes at kitchen table math for more on this.

    http://​kitchentablemath​.blogspot​.com/

    For Frus­trated, if your par­ents don’t speak Eng­lish, how do you com­mu­ni­cate with them? Do you pro­vide a trans­la­tor for parent-teacher con­fer­ences? What’s their language?

    October 17th, 2009 at 11:07 am
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  317. zzzzz78759 says:

    Dang, I can’t find it again. There was a cou­ple of com­ments from par­ents who felt that the “Tribes” pro­gram was forc­ing chil­dren to fit into the “cul­ture”, ignor­ing the fam­ily culture.

    If I find the link again, I’ll post it. But once I got around the Native Amer­i­can (and other tribes) and the Lem­mings (which I still think is funny and yes, I know it’s a game) and the pro­pa­ganda posted by Cen­ter­Source Sys­tems, it was dif­fi­cult to find. And yes, I agree, the par­ents of chil­dren tar­geted by Tribes, have lim­ited access to the Internet.

    October 18th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
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  318. FedUpMom says:

    Peg­gy­inMA — I wanted to respond to your com­ment about the dif­fer­ence between class­room man­age­ment and learn­ing. I posted the Guy Strick­land quote because it made a lot of things clear to me.

    Once you real­ize that most of the things that go on in school are about class­room man­age­ment, not learn­ing, you can bet­ter under­stand the garbage that gets sent home as home­work. It’s an exten­sion of the prin­ci­ples of class­room man­age­ment into the home. Sure, mak­ing that umpteenth poster might not teach your child any­thing worth learn­ing, but it’ll kill a half hour (or more!) and demon­strate your child’s com­pli­ance with school rules.

    This is why the home­work issue is the tip of the ice­berg. There is so much more going wrong.

    October 20th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
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  319. PsychMom says:

    Peg­gy­inMA also said:

    “Par­ents who send happy, curi­ous chil­dren off to school can­not be expected to stand by and watch help­lessly as the love of learn­ing is drilled out of them.”

    This state­ment defines clearly why I’m com­ment­ing on this site fre­quently. I’m watch­ing, I’m pay­ing attention…and not want­ing to ever hear from my child:.…..“ohhhhhh do I have to school today?, it’s so boring”.

    The day I hear that, my heart will break. Because where do you go from there, when you’re in Grade 3?

    October 20th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
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  320. CLT says:

    I haven’t been able to go through and read all of the com­ments here, so sorry if some­body has already brought this up. But sev­eral of the teach­ers com­ment­ing have lamented that par­ents are not involved enough, and so they have to had read­ing logs, etc, to force that. It seems to me that that is going about the prob­lem the wrong way. What bet­ter mes­sage could you send a child than to say “hey, I know your par­ents may not be too into this par­ent­ing gig, but they don’t con­trol your des­tiny. You do, and I’m not going to assign any­thing that I don’t think you could do on your own.” It’s another rea­son to try to avoid send­ing any­thing home at all, know­ing that the home sit­u­a­tion may not be con­ducive to learn­ing. And at the other end of the spec­trum, hav­ing home­work that requires parental involve­ment is license to the heli­copter par­ents you com­plain about to be over-involved and cod­dle their kids. Expect­ing inde­pen­dent achieve­ment is a win-win.

    October 20th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
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  321. PsychMom says:

    To CLT:

    OK, who let the really smart per­son in? You are absolutely right. That sense of inner accom­plish­ment is what I’m try­ing to give my daugh­ter by NOT run­ning her sched­ule for her. If I remind/hound her every day to do what’s assigned, how does she ever feel in charge. But by the same token, if she’s too young to be able to keep it all straight, and she is given things she can’t do on her own, the teach­ers are set­ting her up (and me) to fail.

    What I think hap­pens is that the teach­ers who insist a) that they have “no choice” and b) insist on assign­ing read­ing logs and other mech­a­nisms of parental con­trol, sim­ply want con­trol. They have too many kids to deal with, are squished between par­ents and admin­is­tra­tors and feel no inner sense of self des­tiny, and feel they must exert con­trol somehow.…

    Oth­er­wise why insist on some­thing that sim­ply doesn’t work for all kids and fam­i­lies? Why the rigidity?

    October 21st, 2009 at 8:00 am
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  322. Disillusioned says:

    Psy­ch­Mom– I agree. In my utopian pub­lic ele­men­tary school, the student-teacher ratio would be about 5 – 1,
    there would be no home­work and no pedan­tic focus on busy work.

    October 21st, 2009 at 12:47 pm
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  323. Disillusioned says:

    One more thought.……it seems to me (at least at my daughter’s school where all of the teach­ers are women) that many have a sort of passive-aggressive per­son­al­ity type. So many of the moth­ers are rev­er­ent towards them and rather naive to the manip­u­la­tive tac­tics the school employs.

    October 21st, 2009 at 1:36 pm
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  324. CLT says:

    Been read­ing through more com­ments, and have some more. I was really dis­turbed by Frus­trated in California’s orig­i­nal state­ment that most kinder­garten­ers don’t start school able to count to ten (non­sense) and write their names (so what?). I was even more dis­turbed by her follow-up post where she says “I under­stand that stu­dents are not devel­op­men­tally ready to read and write at 5, but they are required by the state to leave kinder­garten able to write a good, com­plete sen­tence. For stu­dents who can’t recite the alpha­bet or rec­og­nize their name, this can be a chal­lenge.” (#299). Now, this deplorable state of affairs isn’t Frustrated’s fault, but where is her out­rage about it? The state shouldn’t:

    A) have require­ments that are devel­op­men­tally inap­pro­pri­ate, or
    B) have kinder­garten require­ments that are not attain­able by true aca­d­e­mic begin­ners in one year.

    It frus­trates me that this sort of mis­match is going to fuel the push for start­ing kids in school ear­lier, when it would prob­a­bly actu­ally ben­e­fit them to start later.

    October 21st, 2009 at 3:21 pm
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  325. CLT says:

    I taught math and read­ing in a Title One school. It was a pull-out pro­gram, so I had the lux­ury of hav­ing my stu­dents one-on-one. What I noticed– and it was even more strik­ing with the fifth and sixth graders than with the younger kids, was that they actu­ally were fairly good read­ers. They could sound words out, many of them had decent flu­ency, etc. What they lacked was the life expe­ri­ence to make the sto­ries have any mean­ing to them. I’m not talk­ing about com­plex adult themes. They couldn’t relate to sto­ries about kids who went out and had adven­tures or used their imag­i­na­tions or cooked or inter­acted with fam­i­lies or ran into bul­lies on the play­ground. As had been pointed out on this site, home­work often takes away from oppor­tu­ni­ties for the child to develop in other areas, and so had the poten­tial to keep these kids back from read­ing comprehension.

    On a tan­gen­tially related note, as a fairly intro­verted per­son, I would have ben­e­fited as a child from hav­ing some­one try a lit­tle harder to draw me out of my book-induced inner world. Read­ing is a great learn­ing tool, but it’s not the only one, and it shouldn’t be used to the exclu­sion of all other experiences.

    October 21st, 2009 at 3:34 pm
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  326. Courtney says:

    I am in school now learn­ing to be a teacher and came across this web­site while look­ing for infor­ma­tion on read­ing logs. I have already noticed many par­ents that make it so dif­fi­cult to teach their chil­dren. Thank­ing you for your part­ner­ship in your child’s edu­ca­tion is more of a plea. Please par­tic­i­pate in your child’s edu­ca­tion. Don’t you want your child to grow up very intel­li­gent with every oppor­tu­nity in the world at their fin­ger­tips? Then you need to part­ner with the teach­ers. They can­not do it on their own and you tak­ing a stance against them, your unwill­ing­ness to help the teacher do his/her job will in the end hurt your child. Yes, teach­ers get paid… but not much. Not enough that they chose the job for the money. They choose the job to make a dif­fer­ence. It really does bug me when a par­ent, just because they feel the need to make an issue out of every small thing, gets their chil­dren out of doing the assign­ments that every­one else has to do. You are only hurt­ing your kids. The only time a par­ent should really fight a teacher is if the teacher is doing some­thing uneth­i­cal. Ask­ing your child to read and ask­ing you to help your child read is in no way uneth­i­cal. Chil­dren can­not be with their teacher 24/7 and must rely on their par­ents’ assis­tance at home. I used to be an oppo­nent of home­work, I used to think that school work should only be done at school and not be brought home to infringe on my time with my kids, Let me tell you though, that I have since changed my mind. After see­ing how hor­ri­bly stu­dents are doing in US schools I began to think maybe 8 hours a day is not enough time to cover a mul­ti­tude of sub­jects. I want my kids to have every­thing life has to offer, but if I try to get them out of doing their home­wrok by cry­ing foul every­time I would have done some­thing in a dif­fer­ent way than the teacher chose, my kids will fail at life. The teach­ers have been trained at using these tools to help your child, not to brand them liars. They have you sign the paper so they know that you are par­tic­i­pat­ing in your kid’s read­ing, not so they know the kid did the read­ing. You just showed the teacher that you are a com­bat­ive par­ent and that they can­not count on you to par­tic­i­pate in your child’s learn­ing. Your child will prob­a­bly have to receive more help at school and it will go in her records that her par­ents take no inter­est in her school work. A good teacher will try to help her more becuase of this, a bad teacher will give up on her. You should always try to part­ner with the teacher if you care about your child’s school. Take an inter­est, make friends with the teacher. Talk to the teacher if something’s being done that you don’t quite like and see if it can be resolved. That’s the way to han­dle the rela­tion­ship with the per­son con­trol­ling your child’s edu­ca­tion… don’t fight them… they fight 20 – 30 kids every­day and do to need to fight and addi­tional 40 – 60 par­ents. You don’t need to make every issue a fight or a tell all book when you could sim­ply have a meet­ing with the teacher. The good ones are always more than happy to meet with you and the bad ones. well you can go above them…

    October 24th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
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  327. HomeworkBlues says:

    Court­ney, I have two things to say to you. You have a lot to learn and I am thank­ful you are not my daughter’s teacher. What­ever makes you think I don’t care about my child’s edu­ca­tion? Or that she does not read, was not read to, or that we don’t care about read­ing. Lit­tle do you know that read­ing is the most impor­tant activ­ity in our household!

    Let me give you some advice. You might try break­ing up your essay into proper para­graphs. I found it very dif­fi­cult to read, so I must con­fess, after the first few bars, I just gave up.

    Court­ney, you are still young. You might start with some humil­ity. We’ve been doing this a lot longer than you and you could learn a lot from us just by patiently lis­ten­ing. We are par­ents. We are wise and sea­soned and are extremely good at what we do best here, par­ent, nur­ture, guide, inspire and yes, edu­cate our young. If you do plan on pur­su­ing a career in edu­ca­tion, you might start by respect­ing the very peo­ple who send their chil­dren to you. After all, as you said, it’s a partnership.

    October 24th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
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  328. FedUpMom says:

    Court­ney says:

    **************************
    After see­ing how hor­ri­bly stu­dents are doing in US schools I began to think maybe 8 hours a day is not enough time to cover a mul­ti­tude of sub­jects.
    ***************************

    Kids aren’t doing hor­ri­bly because 8 hours a day isn’t enough time. They’re doing hor­ri­bly because schools waste those 8 hours a day with point­less non­sense. More hours of point­less non­sense won’t solve the problem.

    *****************************
    The only time a par­ent should really fight a teacher is if the teacher is doing some­thing uneth­i­cal.
    *****************************

    Nope, I don’t agree. I think I have a right to fight the teacher if she’s mess­ing up my daughter’s edu­ca­tion, for instance by turn­ing read­ing into a chore.

    *****************************
    Ask­ing your child to read and ask­ing you to help your child read is in no way uneth­i­cal.
    *****************************

    Right. The uneth­i­cal part is telling me to sign my child’s read­ing log every night, thus mak­ing me an enforcer of a scheme that I’m opposed to.

    ****************************
    Chil­dren can­not be with their teacher 24/7 and must rely on their par­ents’ assis­tance at home.
    ****************************

    This would almost make me laugh if I wasn’t so busy cry­ing. You think my child would learn more if she was with you 24/7? After you’ve failed to teach her any­thing in the 8 hours a day she was in school?

    Actu­ally, there’s a really impor­tant point in here. You think the child will not learn unless you, the teacher, are involved, either directly in the class­room or indi­rectly through your parent-assistants. Think how very patron­iz­ing your atti­tude is. We par­ents know our child bet­ter than you ever will. We know what she needs, we know what our goals for her are. Allow us to spend our time with our chil­dren as we see fit. I guar­an­tee that my chil­dren have learned more from their par­ents than from any teacher they will ever have.

    ***********************
    They have you sign the paper so they know that you are par­tic­i­pat­ing in your kid’s read­ing, not so they know the kid did the read­ing.
    **********************

    It’s not your place to tell me what to do, or to make me prove to you that I’m rais­ing my kids the way you want me to. It’s really none of your business.

    And if my kid does the read­ing with­out my par­tic­i­pa­tion, isn’t that the best pos­si­ble out­come? It’s her edu­ca­tion, right?

    ***********************
    The teach­ers have been trained at using these tools to help your child,
    ***********************

    No, they haven’t. Have you been fol­low­ing the news about our mediocre teacher edu­ca­tion? Even Arne Dun­can says teach­ers are badly trained. From this article:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/education/23teachers.html?scp=2&sq=arne%20duncan&st=cse

    “A report by a for­mer pres­i­dent of Teach­ers Col­lege, Arthur Levine, found that roughly 60 per­cent of edu­ca­tion school alumni said that their pro­grams did not pre­pare them to teach.”

    *********************
    It really does bug me when a par­ent … gets their chil­dren out of doing the assign­ments that every­one else has to do.
    **********************

    The pur­pose of school should be learn­ing. The more you make school about “doing what every­one else has to do”, the more you have missed the boat.

    *********************
    Your child will prob­a­bly have to receive more help at school and it will go in her records that her par­ents take no inter­est in her school work.
    *********************

    Oh, please. The old “it will go in your records” dodge? I am so beyond that.

    October 25th, 2009 at 9:39 am
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  329. Disillusioned says:

    A few more notes.…Courtney pro­poses; “Take an inter­est, make friends with the teacher.” I see the very weird dynamic that plays out when moth­ers “make friends” with their kids’ teach­ers. My “friends” do not make sub­jec­tive judge­ments about my daughter’s abil­ity to learn and her behav­ior. Fur­ther, my “friends” do not use manip­u­la­tive tac­tics to “engage” me in my daughter’s edu­ca­tion. My rela­tion­ship with my daughter’s teacher is a pro­fes­sional one at best. Unlike a doc­tor I am unhappy with, I can­not sever this rela­tion­ship if I am unhappy with the teacher and her methods.

    Also, I have found the bad ones are vin­dic­tive and the prin­ci­pal will advo­cate for them no mat­ter what.

    October 25th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
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  330. FedUpMom says:

    From “Bad Teach­ers”, by Guy Strickland:

    **************
    The prin­ci­pal is the “head­mas­ter” or “head teacher” of the school. As such, he is respon­si­ble for teacher morale and enthu­si­asm. These teach­ers are tenured, so the prin­ci­pal knows they are going to be around long after Johnny is a fad­ing year­book photo. He must defend the teach­ers, right or wrong, so that other teach­ers know that they will be defended, too. Bas­tions of igno­rance aren’t bas­tions for noth­ing.
    ***************

    October 25th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
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  331. Disillusioned says:

    FedUp­Mom– Agreed. Bad teach­ers are allowed to abuse their power with lit­tle (if any) consequence.

    October 25th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
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  332. HomeworkBlues says:

    Agreed, FedUp and Dis­il­lu­sioned. Excel­lent points. Very impor­tant to dig beneath the sur­face or we will never get anywhere..

    Dis­il­lu­sioned, you wrote about how most teach­ers are women and thereby many of them are pas­sive aggres­sive. Women are social­ized to supress their true feel­ings so they become con­niv­ing. The Step­ford Wives you describe, Dis­il­lu­sioned, try to curry the teach­ers’ favors by being all smil­ing, con­niv­ing, servile. The teach­ers in turn manip­u­late that con­trol by send­ing out sig­nals that their chil­dren will be rewarded for all that com­pli­ance and brown nos­ing. No where do you see this power play acted out more than in the home­work arena. Com­pli­ance buys your child teacher’s pet, lead role in play, choice teams, cov­eted projects, pre­ferred seating.

    In the end, each group manip­u­lates the other and it leads to a con­stant under­cur­rent of dis­trust and sim­mer­ing resent­ment. The moth­ers, of course, have the most to lose. They have no power although they think they do because they have com­man­deered the PTA. As Dis­il­lu­sioned wrote, they treat par­ent­ing like a job and they are over-invested in their child’s achieve­ments. The smil­ing, sweet, impec­ca­bly dressed wealthy women who don’t work are keenly aware the teacher has their child all day and it puts the moth­ers in a pre­car­i­ous posi­tion of pow­er­less­ness (love allit­er­a­tion!) and fear.

    And I don’t even have a psy­chol­ogy degree.

    October 25th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
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  333. HomeworkBlues says:

    Cor­rec­tion: I just wrote: “No where do you see this power play acted out more than in the home­work arena.”

    Ooops. NOWHERE, meant to write. I hate mistakes!

    October 25th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
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  334. Disillusioned says:

    Amen. Indeed, “each group manip­u­lates the other and it leads to a con­stant under­cur­rent of dis­trust and sim­mer­ing resent­ment.” I have also noticed the PTA moms are clas­sic enablers. They vol­un­teer in the front office, grade the teach­ers’ papers and home­work, buy lav­ish presents for teacher birthday’s, copy weekly home­work assign­ments for the whole class, etc. (By the way, the copy machine is in the teacher’s lounge and if the lowly moms are mak­ing copies when a teacher comes in, they must stop copy­ing and leave!)

    I am always struck by the illu­sory “sto­ries” these PTA moms tell them­selves. If my child’s teacher doesn’t like me, my child will not get the same level of atten­tion from the teacher and will not be ready for next year. I have heard PTA moms con­demm a kind hearted, nur­tur­ing first grade teacher (whom I thought was great because she saw the best in the chil­dren) because she “didn’t get them ready for sec­ond grade.”

    October 25th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
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  335. PsychMom says:

    Wow…I have things to say to teacher Courtney…but you guys have cov­ered the high points. I agree with both FedUp­Mom Home­work­Blues, the dis­cus­sion has gone way past this level of dis­course. This young teacher needs to do some seri­ous read­ing and research. My biggest rebut­tal would cen­ter around the sub­servience she seems to think par­ents should fall into. She’s plac­ing her­self cer­tainly as lead dog on the sled race to nowhere and we’re all sup­posed to be help­ing her!!! Not this Momma. And my kid is not get­ting on that sled.

    It’s Ok…we’ll all prob­a­bly still be here 5 years from now when she’s got some real expe­ri­ence and maybe, hope­fully, has changed her mind.

    October 26th, 2009 at 7:56 am
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  336. FedUpMom says:

    Home­work Blues — are you a fan of the “God­fa­ther” movies? Your attempt to take a break from this blog reminds me of this moment:

    http://​www​.youtube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​U​P​w​-​3​e​_​p​zqU

    October 26th, 2009 at 7:57 am
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  337. PsychMom says:

    I know which clip she means even before I look.…it’s made for a bril­liant morn­ing chuckle.…Thanks FedUp Mom…

    October 26th, 2009 at 8:18 am
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  338. HomeworkBlues says:

    You guys are the best! FedUp, I laughed so hard, I had tears run­ning down my cheeks. Yes, I’m a fan of the God­fa­ther movies and my hus­band and I quote clas­sic lines from them all the time.

    You have no idea how much I needed this comic relief this morn­ing. Just had a meet­ing with the school over some lin­ger­ing some­thing. Oy, vey. They for­got we even had the meet­ing and we lost pre­cious min­utes hastily orga­niz­ing it. We woke daugh­ter up even ear­lier so we could make it. I hate meet­ings before school offi­cially starts.

    October 26th, 2009 at 10:23 am
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  339. HomeworkBlues says:

    I posted what I think is one of my all time best responses last night. It was a fol­low up to Court­ney, as I con­tin­ued to read reac­tion. And then my com­puter went BBBZZZZZZZZZ and I lost the whole darned thing. I’ll try to recre­ate and repost.

    October 26th, 2009 at 10:25 am
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  340. PsychMom says:

    Court­ney said so many things that made me wince but this is one of the biggies:

    ” I want my kids to have every­thing life has to offer, but if I try to get them out of doing their home­wrok by cry­ing foul every­time I would have done some­thing in a dif­fer­ent way than the teacher chose, my kids will fail at life”.

    I don’t under­stand how you can claim to have been read­ing this thread on this site, and deduce that par­ents here “try to get” their kids out of doing their home­work, as if we’re sign­ing notes that say “please excuse MY child from what every­one else is doing.”

    We’re not try­ing to excuse kids from work.…we’re say­ing that ask­ing all chil­dren to engage in tasks that are point­less and have noth­ing to do with learn­ing to read…is detri­men­tal to the learn­ing process. We’re say­ing 6.5 hours of school a day is enough for young children.

    And then you assume that those shirk­ing kids, whose par­ents excused them­selves from sign­ing read­ing logs, will have mis­er­able lives, amount­ing to noth­ing. You know, when I was in ele­men­tary school, Grade 3 was not a good year…the teacher was con­tin­u­ally sick, and when she was there she wasn’t par­tic­u­larly engaged with the kids. What got me though that year was my mother. Down­play­ing the teacher’s neglect, she kept me feel­ing OK about school…and she also taught me that year, and many other times, that some­times what you get fed is just non­sense. See it for what it is and move on.…

    October 26th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
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  341. mike says:

    I strug­gle to see how any of you have any time to do any­thing with your kids or per­tain­ing to their edu­ca­tion when you have seem­ingly end­less time to write these elo­quent posts. Stop whin­ing, do the work, and be done with it…
    Please ladies, grow up.

    October 26th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
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  342. HomeworkBlues says:

    Mike, we write these com­ments when our kids are in school and when they are asleep. Which is my home is too much of the fomer and too lit­tle of the latter.

    Stop whin­ing and do the work, you say. Sure, no prob­lem. My high schooler logged a 24 hour home­work week­end. Enough for you? Or do you think she should have done more? Because this was light in com­par­i­son. Last week, from the moment she got home on Fri­day to when she bed to bed at 2am Mon­day, she did home­work non stop except for an hour to go to a choral practice.

    See why I’m whin­ing? Get the picture?

    October 26th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
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  343. HomeworkBlues says:

    Which IN my home, meant to say.

    October 26th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
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  344. HomeworkBlues says:

    Mike, to add, you must labor under the illu­sion that the home­work amount is rea­son­able and doable. Stop com­plain­ing, do it and be done. I might com­plain less if it was ever done but it never is. There’s always more and more. There’s no free time. What is the point in all that? If my writ­ings can change it for just one child, give just one par­ent some aware­ness and sup­port to go out there and change things, I will have more than done my job here.

    I hap­pen to have an extremely bright, highly moti­vated child. With ADD. She gets the gold star. Not the school. She and her par­ents. She is as well read as she is, as intel­lec­tu­ally curi­ous as she is, not because of her years in pub­lic school but in spite of it. She gets all the credit.

    This is a kid, who despite a dis­abil­ity, adver­sity, hauls her­self out of bed seri­ously sleep deprived every morn­ing despite my entreaties to get to bed ear­lier, puts a smile on her face, and goes out there valiantly, know­ing the day will throw her obsta­cles, to take dif­fi­cult courses because she is curi­ous and excited about her world. That her pas­sion has not been drummed out of her is indeed a miracle.

    “It is a mir­a­cle cre­ativ­ity has sur­vived for­mal edu­ca­tion“
    Albert Einstein

    October 26th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
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  345. FedUpMom says:

    Mike says:

    *******************
    I strug­gle to see how any of you have any time to do any­thing with your kids or per­tain­ing to their edu­ca­tion when you have seem­ingly end­less time to write these elo­quent posts. Stop whin­ing, do the work, and be done with it…
    Please ladies, grow up.
    ********************

    I couldn’t let the casual misog­yny of this post pass. If we were men, would you accuse us of “whin­ing”, and advise us to “grow up”? Nope, thought not.

    Maybe it doesn’t take us so long to write these posts because we’re nat­u­rally eloquent.

    It’s worth it to us to do what­ever we can to improve our children’s school expe­ri­ence because we are pas­sion­ate about our chil­dren, and pas­sion­ate about their edu­ca­tion. I don’t want to see my kids’ child­hood fly by while they waste their time with crummy home­work. If the home­work is actu­ally bad for them, because it shuts down their inter­est in learn­ing, I would rather speak up for an hour than have them waste 10 min­utes on it.

    Mike, sweetie, your testos­terone has addled your nerves. Take a val­ium and calm down.

    October 26th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
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  346. HomeworkBlues says:

    Thanks, FedUp­Mom, for catch­ing that casual misog­y­nous line. I’m usu­ally so astute, yet I missed it.

    Yes, Mike dar­lin’, do calm down and go shoot some hoops with your kid.

    October 26th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
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  347. HomeworkBlues says:

    Clar­i­fi­ca­tion: I didn’t see that line at all until FedUp high­lighted it. That wouldn’t have passed my radar, had I seen it initially.

    October 26th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
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  348. Disillusioned says:

    Mike– I grew up along time ago. That’s one of the points we are all mak­ing. As a grown up, I con­sider myself capa­ble of cre­at­ing a worth­wile and enrich­ing fam­ily envi­ron­ment free from school work at home.

    You “strug­gle to see how any of you have any time to do any­thing with your kids or per­tainig to their edu­ca­tion.” Hon­estly, I really don’t care if you see or not. How­ever, like most men who do not nav­i­gate the grind­ing school world, fathers are usu­ally left unscathed by home­work and the oppres­sive school scene.

    Lastly, free and open dis­cus­sion about a topic near to our hearts (our chil­dren) is not whin­ing. Your tone is almost as con­de­scend­ing as the edu­ca­tional sys­tem we moth­ers and chil­dren nav­i­gate on a daily basis.

    October 26th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
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  349. HomeworkBlues says:

    Court­ney, you are very con­cerned about how “hor­ri­bly stu­dents are doing in US schools.” If you teach as well as you write, you are right. Your stu­dents will have plenty to worry about. I don’t think the solu­tion would be spend­ing more than eight hours with you.

    Spend some time dur­ing the next sev­eral years of your higher edu­ca­tion brush­ing up on your writ­ing, gram­mar syn­tax, com­po­si­tion and sen­tence struc­ture. You’ll do more for those unfor­tu­nate US chil­dren than all the use­less class­room man­age­ment courses you are bound to take.

    And while you’re at it, take a course on home­work. If you can find it. Because stud­ies show many teach­ers never took a sin­gle course in home­work and have no idea how to imple­ment it, what ben­e­fits it yields (hint: none in ele­men­tary) and how long it truly takes a child to com­plete, after a long day sit­ting still at school. Many assign it as a knee jerk reac­tion, it’s what our grand­moth­ers had to do, and because the prin­ci­pal insists.

    October 26th, 2009 at 9:17 pm
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  350. awesome says:

    i am the kid that is in all of the hon­ors classes and i for 1 hate every­thing they assighn for home­work. work is for school. not to bring home to hate just as much!

    November 5th, 2009 at 8:24 pm
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  351. Anonymous says:

    Get over it

    November 10th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
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  352. Ms. N says:

    All I give for home­work every night is a read­ing log. Due weekly with a book of choice.

    HOW will a teacher know that the stu­dent reads unless a par­ent supervises?

    Claps to you on your amaz­ing ablity to see what goes on in your home. A teacher can not see that your child reads. A read­ing log is the proof to show that your child is read­ing at home. And if putting your name on it is too hard for you, I emplore you to find a bet­ter way for a teacher to prove their efforts in reading.

    SOME KIDS… can read and read and read and never under­stand a thing they read. YOUR KID I guess is spe­cial and not expected to do what every kid was told to do.

    As for teach­ers work­ing for you, they do not. They work for your kids. They work for Prin­ci­pals who make demands on them to back up their work with records. They work every day with heart and ded­i­ca­tion to get your kids to learn. You have already passed your classes. We do not teach for YOU.

    We teach for your KIDS. We have bosses too. You are not a teacher and you did not choose to be a teacher. Stop act­ing as if you know what a teacher should or should not do.

    Stud­ies have been done that show that the best way to get a child’s read­ing level to go up is to have them read.

    Do you know that there are kids who have never heard a bed­time story? Count your kids as lucky to have a par­ent period. LOGS and HOMEWORK, are for ALL. AGAIN, you and your child are no excep­tion. Let your teach­ers teach. YOU can be a part­ner in that, or you can be a PAIN IN THE NECK!

    November 29th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
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  353. FedUpMom says:

    Ms. N. asks:

    ***********
    HOW will a teacher know that the stu­dent reads unless a par­ent super­vises?
    **********

    You need to accept that you don’t know what your stu­dents do at home. Even if they turn in a read­ing log, it may have been faked.

    *********
    A read­ing log is the proof to show that your child is read­ing at home. And if putting your name on it is too hard for you, I emplore you to find a bet­ter way for a teacher to prove their efforts in read­ing.
    *********

    Again, read­ing logs prove noth­ing. And why are you look­ing for proof any­way? (BTW, it’s “implore”.)

    **********
    YOUR KID I guess is spe­cial and not expected to do what every kid was told to do.

    LOGS and HOMEWORK, are for ALL. AGAIN, you and your child are no excep­tion.
    **********

    Why should every child in your class be made to do the exact same thing? You prob­a­bly have a wide vari­ety of kids in your class, with dif­fer­ent read­ing abil­i­ties, dif­fer­ent back­grounds, dif­fer­ent interests.

    ***********
    Let your teach­ers teach.
    ***********

    OK, I’ll let you teach, if you let me par­ent. Stop telling me what to do with my own child in my own home. I will sup­port my child’s read­ing in my own way.

    ************
    YOU can be a part­ner in that, or you can be a PAIN IN THE NECK!
    ***********

    Again, how does fol­low­ing your direc­tions make me a part­ner? Part­ners make deci­sions together. Do you ask your stu­dents’ par­ents for ideas about how to work together? Do you show any inter­est in their point of view?

    November 29th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
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  354. HomeworkBlues says:

    Ms. N. writes: “You are not a teacher and you did not choose to be a teacher.”

    I’m so relieved. Can’t wait to tell my hus­band. Wish I could turn the clock back. WE AREN’T TEACHERS!!! Yay! Does that mean four hours of home­work in sixth grade won’t come home any­more? Because seems to me we some­times had to teach con­tent. Um, it was often not hap­pen­ing in school. We checked. Other par­ents were report­ing the same thing.

    Teach­ing was the least of it. My daugh­ter has been able to teach her­self a great deal. But you say we par­ents aren’t teach­ers. You are.

    Bravo. Because we want you to to han­dle the teach­ing. So we can han­dle the parenting.

    I have no qualms with learn­ing at home. We want you to teach so we can after school at home. We like com­ple­ment­ing what you do at school. You’re build­ing the Great Wall of China in sec­ond grade? We’ll take her to Chi­na­town for some lo mein. You’re study­ing Africa in 4th grade? We’ll take her to the African art museum. You’re learn­ing geom­e­try in 5th? We’ll take her to the Build­ing Museum to study shapes and angles.

    I can do that. I can do that well. I love learn­ing with my child. I love curl­ing up with her in bed to read to abandon.

    I can do that. What I can­not do is send her to school for six and a half hours, only to home­school another four. She does it her­self. But if we are stuck in the house, if it falls on us par­ents to teach her time man­age­ment skills, if we we are forced to give up vast chunks of pre­cious fam­ily time, if my child is not play­ing or read­ing enough, then we are your invol­un­tary unpaid teacher’s aides. You say we aren’t teach­ers. You could have fooled me.

    My advice? Chuck those read­ing logs. You want to know if my child is read­ing? Just ask. Wait. Don’t you see her with a book all the time? Didn’t you take away book after book after book because she was read­ing in class? She’s read­ing! You know she’s read­ing. You don’t need a log.

    Lose those logs. In the time you are check­ing them, you could be plan­ning a scin­til­lat­ing les­son. Wouldn’t you rather do that?

    As for your boss mak­ing you do those logs, we’ve cov­ered that here before. There are no easy answers and we feel for you. But at the end of the day, our chil­dren need an edu­ca­tion, not an excuse.

    November 29th, 2009 at 11:19 pm
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  355. HomeworkBlues says:

    “A read­ing log is the proof to show that your child is read ing at home.”

    Not nec­es­sar­ily. Many of those logs are faked. And espe­cially for younger kids, mom’s fill­ing out the log, not the kid.

    I’m curi­ous. How do you use the logs? Do you talk to the kids about them? Do you truly feel they are nec­es­sary? And why do you need a win­dow into a child’s home? We don’t send you a log. We trust you’ll teach our kids. We want the same trust. We want our fam­ily time. My daugh­ter will read. And be read to. We’ll see to that.

    “SOME KIDS… can read and read and read and never under stand a thing they read.”

    And how does a read­ing log change that? And most chil­dren will not read and read and read a book if they don’t under­stand a thing they are read­ing. Would you?

    “YOUR KID I guess is spe­cial and not expected to do what every kid was told to do. ”

    No, my child is not spe­cial. But she is unique. As each child is. You are attempt­ing to cre­ate a one size fits all, to make every­one aver­age. Sounds like your read­ing home­work is more about sim­ple com­pli­ance than pro­mot­ing reading.

    “As for teach­ers work­ing for you, they do not. They work for your kids.”

    No argu­ment there.

    “Stud­ies have been done that show that the best way to get a child’s read­ing level to go up is to have them read.”

    Again, no argu­ment there. We aren’t say­ing no read­ing. I don’t like home­work in ele­men­tary and resent home­work over­load in the later years because it inter­feres with read­ing! We are say­ing no read­ing logs so our kids can use that time to read even more.

    November 30th, 2009 at 6:54 am
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  356. FedUpMom says:

    Ms. N. says:

    **********
    I emplore you to find a bet­ter way for a teacher to prove their efforts in read­ing.
    **********

    Now I real­ize what this means. You use read­ing logs as a way to “prove” to the prin­ci­pal that you are teach­ing read­ing! Give me a break.

    Your job is in the class­room, and your prin­ci­pal should assess you based on what you do in the class­room. The idea that your prin­ci­pal will assess the job you do based on how well you get par­ents to com­ply with your read­ing log is ridiculous.

    I’ve won­dered this many times. What goes on dur­ing the school day? What does the school actu­ally con­tribute to our kids’ learning?

    November 30th, 2009 at 9:30 am
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  357. HomeworkBlues says:

    FedUp­Mom writes: “I’ve won­dered this many times. What goes on dur­ing the school day? What does the school actu­ally con trib­ute to our kids’ learning?”

    That’s the crux of the ques­tion. We aren’t finally putting our feet down because we want to be a “pain in the neck” or raise, as has so often been sug­gested here, inso­lent, ungrate­ful and self­ish children.

    It’s a new day. It’s the 21st cen­tury. And I’m still hear­ing about the same home­work today I received as a child. It didn’t work forty years ago and it still doesn’t work today. How would you feel if your physi­cian still relied soley on old method­olo­gies and refused to embrace new research?

    Ms. N, your job is in the class­room. We need to know what you are doing there. We’d rather you spent less time mon­i­tor­ing us and more time using those six and a half hours as wisely as you pos­si­bly can. You say you only assign read­ing logs so kudos to you, you don’t over­load. But that was not our case. Read­ing logs were just one piece of paper in the pile.

    I’m sorry about NCLB. I hate it as much as you do. I’m sorry your prin­ci­pal is breath­ing down your neck. But as FedUP says, you are using read­ing logs to CYA. You say we are not teach­ers. If we wanted to han­dle all the aca­d­e­mics, we’d be home­school­ing! We resent work sent home, and resent being told we are anti-education or don’t want our kids to read.Surely you know that’s not the case. It’s just a means of dis­arm­ing us.

    Your job is to teach. Not to send it all home. Lit­tle by lit­tle, home­work has crept into home life to the point where it has more than crossed the line. It’s out of con­trol and needs to be reined in. There doesn’t seem to be any sep­a­ra­tion between the school day and free home time anymore.

    The few hours work­ing par­ents have to par­ent each day are gob­bled up by home­work. Par­ents who, on top of get­ting din­ner on the table and clean laun­dry in the draw­ers and dri­ving their chil­dren to one activ­ity (we don’t over­load), are also forced to be after­noon and evening teach­ers. Which leaves us no time to be par­ents. To instill val­ues and respon­si­bil­ity, to read to our chil­dren, to com­fort them, to teach them dis­ci­pline and restraint, to play with them, to enjoy them, to revel in the grace and beauty of their childhood.

    Ms. N, please spend less time peer­ing into our liv­ing room win­dows and more time fig­ur­ing out how to use those pre­cious day time hours. We send our chil­dren to you every day. Please use their time and yours in the best and most effi­cient way possible.

    November 30th, 2009 at 9:58 am
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  358. FedUpMom says:

    Home­work Blues says:

    ***********
    You say you only assign read­ing logs so kudos to you, you don’t over­load.
    ***********

    Not so fast, HWB! How much do you wanna bet that the rea­son Ms. N only assigns read­ing logs is because read­ing is the only sub­ject she teaches?

    ************
    It didn’t work forty years ago and it still doesn’t work today.
    ************

    You know, I hated school forty years ago, but I actu­ally think it’s worse today. It’s not so much that what didn’t work then is still being done — we’re actu­ally doing more of the stuff that didn’t work then, and with much more pres­sure and stress on the kids.

    November 30th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
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  359. HomeworkBlues says:

    FUM, you have a point. Two in fact. (Notice FUM sounds like FUMING?!!!)

    You’re right about the read­ing logs, come to think of it. Only those come home because that’s where the test empha­sis lies. The prin­ci­pal is breath­ing down Ms. N’s neck and she in turn leans on the par­ents. It’s not about read­ing, it’s about rais­ing test scores. So what do you do with the kid who’s already acing the tests? Ignore them, they become incon­se­quen­tial. Like all those other sub­jects that will not be on the test..

    As for still doing what didn’t work forty years ago, I’ve said it before. Right now edu­ca­tion has all the dis­ad­van­tages of the 1950’s and none of the advan­tages (chil­dren play­ing, lit­tle home­work). As you’ve said, we’ve got­ten the worst of all pos­si­ble worlds.

    No ques­tion it’s much much worse for chil­dren today. One heart­break­ing hint is how dis­af­fected kids seem from their learn­ing. You ask them their favorite sub­ject and they stare at you blankly. It’s as if they didn’t real­ize they were sup­posed to like ANY of it.

    I thought of some­thing else today. I thought of those lit­tle notes I would get in 5th grade (pri­vate didn’t send them). The ones that read, “your child didn’t fin­ish this sheet in school today. Please see to it that it is done at home.”

    And it occurred to me. This is how you talk to an under­ling. I put myself through col­lege by work­ing as a lowly sec­re­tary. The bosses in those early days tended to be mostly men. Big pow­er­ful men. I was noth­ing on their totem pole, just an inno­cent col­lege stu­dent, mak­ing ends meet. They would leave lit­tle notes: “please see to it that it gets done by tomorrow.”

    This is not the way you speak to an equal, in a part­ner­ship. “Please see to it that it gets done by tomor­row” is an order, not a dialog.

    November 30th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
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  360. PsychMom says:

    And isn’t it inter­est­ing that “school” and “home­work” are now syn­ony­mous, and that both are dreaded by chil­dren and teens alike?

    There was an arti­cle in the Globe on the week­end about Roald Dahl and how he under­stood this sense that chil­dren have that adults don’t actu­ally like them. I don’t know much about the man but I have a sense that were he alive today, he’d see things the way we do about children’s lives.

    The stress of adult lives in North Amer­ica have left their mark in our chil­dren, and not in just the har­ried sched­ules we inflict on them.

    November 30th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
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  361. HomeworkBlues says:

    Psy­ch­Mom, chil­dren really do feel pow­er­less. But unlike the 1950’s, they do have a lin­ger­ing doubt that adults don’t like them. I asked my daugh­ter why the kids in her school don’t some­times speak up about the home­work over­load and result­ing sleep depri­va­tion. She said, we’d be then labeled as trou­ble makers.

    When a teen screws up the courage, musters the strength, and approaches the teacher, qui­etly, respect­fully, that he is hav­ing trou­ble man­ag­ing the home­work, the teacher may blow him off with, “it’s not too much, it’s time management.”

    That one lit­tle phrase. Stu­dent scur­ries away, never to dare speak up again. What’s the dam­age here? Stop and think. The child learns he is pow­er­less and adults don’t care about him. So what hap­pens to him when HE becomes the adult? Will the oppressed become the oppressor?

    So much bet­ter to take the time. Talk to the kid, explain, show you care. Why don’t high school teach­ers do more of this today? Was is the fear? That anar­chy will result? That the kids will stop respect­ing you? Just as in par­ent­ing, respect­ful rela­tion­ships breed respect. Dis­re­spect­ful ones breed resent­ment and fear. What price power?

    November 30th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
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  362. HomeworkBlues says:

    Cor­rec­tion: WHAT is the fear? Not WAS.

    November 30th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
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  363. PsychMom says:

    And the sleep depri­va­tion and over­work has just become accepted, as if they were med­ical interns and res­i­dents. You don’t com­plain because every­one must go through it. And you must go through it and excel despite it because that will mean you’re qualified.…to.…. do.….…..mmmmm.….hang on…it’s com­ing to me.……to do what exactly?

    I think what I’m try­ing to say is that high school, and espe­cially mid­dle school, are not sup­posed to be train­ing grounds for some crazily sched­uled adult work life, or uni­ver­sity for that mat­ter. They are sup­posed to be places that teach you how to han­dle life amongst other human beings. I dare say that if the premise of edu­ca­tion was changed, we’d all be a lot hap­pier. Sud­denly the pres­sure would be off every­one and young­sters could get on with learn­ing and teach­ers could get on with teaching.

    November 30th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
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  364. Disillusioned says:

    Home­w­work­Blues, Psy­ch­Mom and FedUp Mom– Bravo for your well rea­soned respones. In my expe­ri­ence, the “I work for your kids not you” line is jus­ti­fi­ca­tion to vil­ify any mother who even remotely ques­tions a teacher’s agenda. Last I checked, my child doesn’t pay my rather sub­stan­tial prop­erty tax bill (with many bond issues attached to sup­port the school dis­trict). There truly is a dis­con­nect for many work­ing in pub­lic edu­ca­tion regard­ing this fact. Ms. N– your principal’s salary is also funded mainly through prop­erty tax and bond issues (paid for by the home­own­ers in your district).

    November 30th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
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  365. HomeworkBlues says:

    Well put, Dis­il­lu­sioned. I was wait­ing for you, glad you jumped on this discussion.

    Sara, I’m sure you must some­times wish a lot more peo­ple chimed in. To all those read­ing and nod­ding their heads, please come in. We are not a clique! It’s not a zero sum game. There’s room for everyone.

    Yet I find myself hop­ing Psy­ch­Mom, FedUp­Mom and Dis­il­lu­sioned will com­ment because I love read­ing their thoughts. And to all the oth­ers like zzzzz and K and a host of other equally nter­est­ing folks. It’s no longer just post­ing onto an anony­mous blog, there is a sense here of shared insights and delv­ing deeper and deeper into the root causes of this mess.

    And of course we wel­come the oppo­si­tion too. Sun­shine is a good thing. The more light shed, the more change might even be pos­si­ble. Hope­fully in my lifetime.

    November 30th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
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  366. HomeworkBlues says:

    Oh, gosh. Mary, Mary. Mary Sul­li­van, thank you too. Didn’t meant to leave you out. And there are oth­ers too.

    November 30th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
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  367. Educ8 says:

    I’ll be short and cut to the chase…hopefully. Edu­ca­tion is a del­i­cate com­bi­na­tion of art and busi­ness. That being said there are expec­ta­tions from the stu­dent on the education/art side and there are expec­ta­tions of the teacher on the busi­ness side. An expec­ta­tion of the teacher is to ensure that stu­dents are per­form­ing well. This means that stu­dents meet expec­ta­tions of the com­mu­nity on stan­dard­ized tests. Now, many schools (such as mine) REQUIRE I send a read­ing log home at night as home­work. I am OBLIGATED. The realy cul­prit would be the weight placed on stan­dard­ized tests, not defense­less teach­ers who don’t need another use­less bat­tle with par­ents. If there were less pres­sure to “per­form” I know my school wouldn’t REQUIRE home­work.
    So, when I read your curt e-mail to the teacher need­less to say it upset me. I feel sorry for her/him. He or she’s doing their job (whether you think so or not) and isn’t it always nice when a par­ent makes it even harder to do so? I think it’s great. I can’t fathom why stu­dents come to school and feel like they don’t have to lis­ten to the teach­ers either, I would assume that’s not from any­thing they’re learn­ing at home.
    Cut us a break. Most of us became teach­ers because we wanted to change lives. I didn’t wake up one day and say to myself, I’m going to give a point­less read­ing log to my stu­dents and wait for those e-mails to come rolling in. Be a part­ner and approach a teacher in a dif­fer­ent way and if you really have a prob­lem with homework/curriculum go to the board .… you know the ones who dic­tate what a lot of us do and leave the teach­ers alone in the trenches.

    February 1st, 2010 at 1:52 pm
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  368. HomeworkBlues says:

    So your point being, Educ8, it doesn’t mat­ter if the edu­ca­tion is medicore? You’re just fol­low­ing orders, the good pub­lic ser­vant that you are. So it affects your kid in a very pro­found way? Suck it up.

    In the end, you at least got paid. What did we get?

    As for curt emails, mine hap­pen to be respect­ful. Prob­a­bly doesn’t mat­ter. I’m sure I’m no more liked than if I was curt. It’s not about the emails.

    February 1st, 2010 at 4:10 pm
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  369. HomeworkBlues says:

    MEDIOCRE. I hit Sub­mit by mis­take and it went out before proofing.

    February 1st, 2010 at 4:12 pm
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  370. FedUpMom says:

    Educ8 — as I’ve remarked before, this inci­dent took place at a pri­vate school. The teacher absolutely had a choice about whether or not to assign a read­ing log.

    Your note is a sad one, and paints a depress­ing pic­ture of our pub­lic schools. You are a defense­less teacher, con­demned to do what­ever the prin­ci­pal tells you and have use­less bat­tles with par­ents as a result. Unlike a pre­vi­ous poster, you don’t even claim to be work­ing “for the kids”. No, you work for the prin­ci­pal. Par­ents are a nui­sance and the kids are inter­change­able wid­gets who must meet com­mu­nity expec­ta­tions on stan­dard­ized tests. Really, the school would run a lot more smoothly if the kids and par­ents weren’t involved.

    *****
    I can’t fathom why stu­dents come to school and feel like they don’t have to lis­ten to the teach­ers either,
    *****

    What do you mean “either”? You think the par­ents have to lis­ten to you? Par­ents are not your employ­ees or assis­tants or under­lings. You may enjoy boss­ing lit­tle kids around, but you’ve got no right to boss Mom around.

    *****
    Be a part­ner and approach a teacher in a dif­fer­ent way …
    *****

    And what way is that? How much bow­ing and scrap­ing would I have to do to be taken seri­ously? I’m tired of being told I wasn’t def­er­en­tial enough. The bot­tom line is you just don’t want to hear from par­ents, unless they’re telling you how won­der­ful you are. As far as you’re con­cerned, there is no accept­able way for a par­ent to complain.

    I’d like to see teach­ers treat par­ents with some def­er­ence, for a change. I never again want to get a let­ter from a teacher that says, “Do this. Do that. Sign here. Thank you for your partnership.”

    February 1st, 2010 at 4:13 pm
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  371. HomeworkBlues says:

    Bravo, FedUp. So Educ8, you only want to hear from us when we tell you how great you are. Even when you’re not. And you want our cook­ies and chap­er­on­ing and clean­ing up. Beyond that, your day would go a lot bet­ter if you never had to deal with us pesky par­ents. And as FedUP says, you can’t pos­si­bly like your lit­tle charges any more.

    I agree. What a sad depress­ing list­less joy­less pic­ture of class­room you paint. All gray and dull and washed of all color. You do what you’re told whether you like it or not. You fume and suck it up because that is what good lit­tle women do. Which makes you won­der why moms can’t do the same. Since your unions are inef­fec­tive, you want the par­ents to run all your bat­tles for you. All this with­out a peep.

    Except for one prob­lem. It’s the 21st cen­tury. It isn’t 1955 any­more. And moth­ers man­aged to get quite an edu­ca­tion along the way. Your fac­tory style top down model just doesn’t work anymore.

    We’ve upgraded. What about you? Get a back­bone. Or get out.

    February 1st, 2010 at 4:49 pm
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  372. Matthew says:

    I agree with the oth­ers here about hear­ing from teach­ers who com­plain we don’t treat them as pro­fes­sion­als, yet any time we go to them with a prob­lem they push the blame to others.

    Don’t like a pol­icy? Then how about actu­ally try­ing to do some­thing about it…use your union for some­thing other than guar­an­tee­ing jobs for life, talk to the PTA about get­ting par­ents to sup­port pol­icy change, etc.

    As I wrote a note to school last week, I was reflect­ing on how my tone has changed over the years as I have got­ten more and more frus­trated at my inter­ac­tions with teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tion. The first few years I asked for help and clar­i­fi­ca­tion and I was very deferential.

    My most recent note: ” will not be doing this assign­ment. It is tedious, and I can­not see any edu­ca­tional value in it. ”

    February 2nd, 2010 at 7:26 am
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  373. Matthew says:

    Sorry, I for­got the site doesn’t like greater than/less than sym­bols. My “note” should read:

    (Son’s name) will not be doing this assign­ment. It is tedious, and I can­not see any edu­ca­tional value in it. (my name)

    February 2nd, 2010 at 7:28 am
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  374. FedUpMom says:

    The com­plaint from teach­ers that par­ents aren’t def­er­en­tial enough just burns me up. And I am mys­ti­fied that par­ents put up with this. We are not the teacher’s sub­or­di­nates! We are all adults, let’s speak to each other as adults.

    It’s all about power, it’s all about con­trol. Just telling some­one “you weren’t polite enough” is send­ing a huge honk­ing sig­nal about who goes where in the hier­ar­chy. No one addresses an equal this way. No one.

    And if you think the e-mail I sent to the teacher about read­ing logs was curt, you should have seen the rough draft.

    February 2nd, 2010 at 8:17 am
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  375. Anonymous says:

    Bravo FedUp­Mom and HWB! The default posi­tion of ” I became a teacher to change lives” is tired. Once again, why must we be part­ners when I have no choice in the mat­ter? (Not much of a part­ner­ship). More­over, your “alone in the trenches” line is also tired. How about you cut­ting us a break? Respect is a two way street and most peo­ple that blather on about it usu­ally have no self respect.

    February 2nd, 2010 at 5:48 pm
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  376. Disillusioned says:

    HWB– I agree with your get a back­bone or get out. How­ever, it is shock­ing how much the stay at home moth­ers take from the teach­ers. Indeed, they are clas­sic enablers. In order to get us out of the fifties, the peo­ple pleas­ing stay at home moms also need to get a backbone.

    February 2nd, 2010 at 6:35 pm
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  377. FedUpMom says:

    Dis­il­lu­sioned — please, let’s not get trapped in the stay-at-home vs. work­ing mom wars! There are enabling SAHMs and enabling WOHMs, too. And, for rea­sons that escape me, they all wind up in the PTA.

    February 2nd, 2010 at 6:51 pm
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  378. HomeworkBlues says:

    You’re right, FedUP. But I have to agree with Dis­il­lu­sioned. Dis­il­lu­sioned, I enjoyed read­ing your tales of the moms at your school. Care to share some more? You were run­ning some great essays there, vignettes of your school, the moms, your take, the fly on the wall as you vol­un­teer, and then you stopped. I’d love to hear more. Write away!

    Yes, FedUp, we don’t want to start the mommy wars but if some of these moms got a spine, we’d be well ahead by now. And too many of those Step­ford Wives com­man­deer the PTA. Which in the end, winds up just being an apol­o­gist for the school system.

    February 2nd, 2010 at 7:02 pm
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  379. HomeworkBlues says:

    Anony­mous, I want to tie your com­ment in with Mathew’s. I was afraid I’d have my fin­gers slapped for being too harsh on Educ8 so thanks for the validation.

    Like Mathew, I started off far more def­er­en­tial and respect­ful. I reserve my anger for those two ele­men­tary pub­lic school years. Much of the time, the respect was not returned and I was treated with con­de­scen­sion and dis­dain. At best, I was patron­ized (read: you’re an idiot and school knows best).

    I know bet­ter now and I’m much more firm. And like FedUp, I will not be lec­tured to about my “curt” email. I was at least respect­ful and could write a decent sen­tence. Wish I could say the same for some of the responses. It’s a two way street. If you want respect, you have to earn it. We’re not puppets.

    I like Mathew’s approach. “Emily” will no longer be doing text­book chap­ter out­lines because they have no edu­ca­tional value and merely suck up pre­cious time. And besides, that’s what the Table of Con­tents are for. In the time she’s sweat­ing over out­lines, she could be read­ing about history.

    February 2nd, 2010 at 7:10 pm
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  380. Disillusioned says:

    Hi FedUp­Mom– Not really try­ing to fuel the SAM vs. WOHM war (and meant no dis­re­spect). Yet.….I do see the SAMS in my ‘hood as unem­pow­ered. It seems as if the SAMS and teach­ers bat­tle it out in an illu­sory power strug­gle and the PTA SAMS OBSESS about whether their child will get a “good” teacher. Most join the PTA to “play the game” not real­iz­ing that the game is all in their heads.

    February 2nd, 2010 at 8:16 pm
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  381. FedUpMom says:

    Hoo boy, the PTA. One of the things I’ve noticed is that the PTA rou­tinely sched­ules its meet­ings at times that a mother with a job couldn’t pos­si­bly attend. 8:30 a.m. seems to be a favorite. I don’t work full time and I don’t attend the meet­ings either, because I’d have to give up pre­cious “me time”. How about the occa­sional evening meet­ing? BTW, this is true at both the pub­lic and pri­vate schools I’ve been involved with.

    February 3rd, 2010 at 9:05 am
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  382. HomeworkBlues says:

    FUM, I’ve heard that com­plaint from many par­ents, that the meet­ings favor SAHMs. I will say this. At my daughter’s school, most meet­ings are in the evening because many of the moms work. Occa­sion­ally they’ll run a morn­ing meet­ing which I actu­ally pre­fer. But I’m not com­ing to one that starts at 8:30. Ours has the good sense to give par­ents time to park.

    February 3rd, 2010 at 10:50 am
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  383. Disillusioned says:

    I stopped going because in our school it turns into a pity party of; ” the poor teach­ers do so much with so lit­tle.” I find it inter­est­ing that the per­son in charge of the paid employ­ees (the prin­ci­pal) vents to the unpaid vol­un­teers about how dif­fi­cult it is for the paid employ­ees to do their jobs.

    February 3rd, 2010 at 11:49 am
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  384. FedUpMom says:

    The last PTA meet­ing I attended was at my daughter’s pub­lic school. I brought my copies of The Case Against Home­work and The Home­work Myth. I pre­sented my con­cerns about home­work over­load in ele­men­tary school, which led to the fol­low­ing dialogue:

    Oth­er­Mom: “My son is in high school. He wakes up every morn­ing, gets on the bus, goes to school, comes home and does home­work until 1 a.m. Then he gets up at 6 the next morn­ing and does it all over again.”

    Me: “Doesn’t he get burned out?”

    Oth­er­Mom: “Oh no, he’s fine.”

    Oth­er­Mom sin­cerely believed that she was show­ing why they needed so much home­work in ele­men­tary school; as we’ve all heard, it’s to pre­pare the kids for the ulti­mate trial called high school. This argu­ment is sup­posed to shut up all the com­plain­ers. For me, it was just one more arrow point­ing the way out of the pub­lic schools.

    February 3rd, 2010 at 12:06 pm
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  385. Sarah Pak says:

    I have read all the com­ments with great inter­est because I have just com­pleted a study on the effect of read­ing logs on intrin­sic moti­va­tion to read.

    I’m cur­rently a high school junior in New York, and have had the bless­ing to live in a dis­trict with one of the strongest behavioral/social sci­ence research pro­grams in the coun­try. I’ve been a vora­cious reader since ele­men­tary school, a self-described book­worm, if you will. How­ever, many of my friends don’t share my sen­ti­ments — they regard read­ing as a bor­ing, obnox­ious chore. And none of them looked back on read­ing logs fondly; in fact, I would say around 9 out of 10 of my peers out­right lied on their read­ing logs. I myself lied — even though I read for hours at a time, I didn’t care to actu­ally log it right after (I read in bed, and most times I fell asleep read­ing at night), so when the log was due at the end of the week, I would make up num­bers (I rarely remem­bered how long I had read that week — time flies when you read!). How­ever, things started to come together when I took AP Psy­chol­ogy. We learned about moti­va­tion and the over­jus­ti­fi­ca­tion effect, which states that exter­nal moti­va­tors decrease intrin­sic moti­va­tion. With that, my research advi­sor and I began to flesh out the begin­nings of a real project on moti­va­tion and reading.

    As I quickly learned from read­ing back­ground lit­er­a­ture, moti­va­tion lies at the heart of read­ing. Specif­i­cally, it is intrin­sic moti­va­tion, or the pur­suit of an activ­ity for inter­nal sat­is­fac­tion of the activ­ity in itself, that strongly pre­dicts time spent read­ing, read­ing abil­ity, enjoy­ment, inter­est, and atti­tudes. In addi­tion, another the­ory of moti­va­tion, called the Self-Determination the­ory, states that indi­vid­u­als require a sense of auton­omy (defined as the abil­ity to choose one’s own actions) in order to be intrin­si­cally moti­vated. How­ever, because read­ing logs are exter­nal moti­va­tors, and because they strip away children’s sense of auton­omy (they are unable to choose how long they read for, and when they want to read), I hypoth­e­sized that read­ing logs would decrease inter­est and atti­tudes towards read­ing. I used 2nd and 3rd grade stu­dents from two local ele­men­tary schools, and teach­ers were ran­domly assigned to give either manda­tory read­ing logs or vol­un­tary read­ing logs.

    Manda­tory read­ing logs required that chil­dren read for at least 20 min­utes each night, while vol­un­tary read­ing logs were given to chil­dren and were entirely optional.

    I gave stu­dents a sur­vey mea­sur­ing moti­va­tion in Octo­ber, and then sur­veyed them again in two months to mea­sure any changes. My results were sur­pris­ingly con­cur­rent with my hypothe­ses. I found that inter­est in read­ing decreased in the manda­tory log con­di­tion, and inter­est increased in the vol­un­tary log con­di­tion. The dif­fer­ences in inter­est between the manda­tory and vol­un­tary read­ing logs were sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant, p < 0.05. Atti­tudes towards recre­ational read­ing decreased in the manda­tory con­di­tion, and increased in the vol­un­tary con­di­tion. These dif­fer­ences were also sta­t­i­cally sig­nif­i­cant. The increases in inter­est and atti­tudes were prob­a­bly a result of increased read­ing pro­fi­ciency over the two month period dur­ing which the study was con­ducted. Another expla­na­tion may be that teach­ers in the vol­un­tary read­ing log con­di­tion may have made more of an effort to frame read­ing as a fun activ­ity, although that would sim­ply sug­gest that there are bet­ter ways to pro­mote read­ing than through read­ing logs. The decline in inter­est and atti­tudes, on the other hand, was prob­a­bly a result of a decrease in intrin­sic moti­va­tion. These results strongly sug­gest that read­ing logs erode children’s intrin­sic moti­va­tion to read. This has real con­se­quences for children’s read­ing future, espe­cially at a time when read­ing faces com­pe­ti­tion from com­put­ers, TV, and cell­phones. I am enter­ing this project in the Long Island Sci­ence and Engi­neer­ing fair, and hope to spread the word about these results to change the opin­ions of ele­men­tary school educators.

    February 6th, 2010 at 8:19 pm
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  386. PeggyinMA says:

    Sarah Pak:

    Wow. What a truly thought­ful and timely effort. Good luck in the competition!

    Why does it seem so dif­fi­cult for our edu­ca­tion pro­fes­sion­als to do like­wise? We need more peo­ple who are will­ing to ask basic ques­tions about the premises behind com­mon teach­ing prac­tices, such as manda­tory read­ing logs and homework.

    February 6th, 2010 at 9:55 pm
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  387. FedUpMom says:

    Sarah Pak — excel­lent! I hope you’ll be able to post more about your work.

    I’m inter­ested in what you say about 9 out of 10 stu­dents lying on their read­ing logs. So much home­work, espe­cially at the ele­men­tary level, is fake. I wish teach­ers would under­stand this.

    February 7th, 2010 at 11:06 am
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  388. PsychMom says:

    To Sara Pak:

    Read Dan Pink’s book “Drive” …you have just proven his drive the­ory in spades.

    And my point about the demo­ti­vat­ing effects of logs! As soon as peo­ple HAVE to do some­thing, they don’t want to, or at least their inter­est in it decreases almost imme­di­ately. That’s why home­work, on the whole, is a bad way to start kids off in the ele­men­tary grades. You are train­ing them early.…..to HATE school. All the other draw­backs are on top of just a fun­da­men­tally de-motivating tactic.

    February 8th, 2010 at 8:31 am
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  389. Anonymous2010 says:

    I am an edu­ca­tor, and while I agree with some com­ments made by both par­ties on this web­site, I truth­fully feel that if a par­ent has tremen­dous issues with pub­lic edu­ca­tion, they should sim­ply edu­cate their chil­dren at home. That com­ment is not meant to be mean or harsh. I cur­rently teach mid­dle school spe­cial edu­ca­tion, but I plan on stay­ing at home with my chil­dren through their ele­men­tary school years. I don’t have any chil­dren yet (I’m 26,) but I know that pub­lic school can only pro­vide so much indi­vid­ual atten­tion towards each child in one day. If I want my child to have the oppor­tu­nity to play, explore, be cre­ative, and have time to truly inves­ti­gate all the ques­tions they have about the world, I will have to make it my job to stay home and pro­vide that sort of edu­ca­tion to them.

    The sys­tem has changed tremen­dously since I was in ele­men­tary school. I remem­ber my 3rd grade teacher mak­ing apple­sauce after we picked local apples. I also remem­ber hav­ing eggs hatch in our class­room, and that same teacher played her gui­tar to us every after­noon. I was left in won­der and awe on many days, but now these same teach­ers (who have not retired) are required to give 2nd and 3rd graders daily geog­ra­phy work­sheets and do DIBELS test­ing every few weeks. I also believe that chil­dren are being “work­sheeted to death,” but if the prin­ci­pal tells a teacher that they must do cer­tain things or get fired, a teacher only has so many options. It is one thing to tell a teacher to say “Just don’t take the stan­dard­ized test.” You could tell your child to do that, but if a teacher did the same thing, they would be forced to resign that very day. Pub­lic edu­ca­tion is more polit­i­cal than work­ing for the gov­ern­ment. (Edu­ca­tion is a sec­ond career for me, as I ran a gov­ern­men­tal pro­gram pre­vi­ously.) I thought I would have the chance to “change lives” and inspire kids to love read­ing and writ­ing. But in all actu­al­ity, I less say on what I do in my job in my own pri­vate class­room than when I was under the direct line of fire from a politician.

    The pub­lic edu­ca­tion sys­tem requries teach­ers to spend 90% of our time work­ing with the 10% of stu­dents who per­form the low­est. It’s drain­ing work on the teach­ers, and the most hard-working, inquis­i­tive, and ded­i­cated chil­dren often spend a good por­tion of their 7 hours at school doing their own thing. I apol­o­gize that your child has not got­ten what they deserve from pub­lic schools, but it is your right as a par­ent to pull them out of pub­lic schools and pro­vide a dif­fer­ent learn­ing envi­ron­ment at home. Again, home­school­ing has been in my long-term plans since I decided to become an edu­ca­tor. Home­school­ing is a free­dom and a right that you have as well.

    February 8th, 2010 at 7:25 pm
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  390. Anonymous2010 says:

    This part of my post” But in all actu­al­ity, I less say on what I do in my job in my own pri­vate class­room than when I was under the direct line of fire from a politician.”

    should have read ” But in all actu­al­ity, I HAVE less say on what I do in my job in my own pri­vate class­room than when I was under the direct line of fire from a politician.”

    Sorry for the typo. I had three IEP meet­ings today, and I am exhausted. :)

    February 8th, 2010 at 7:59 pm
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  391. Disillusioned says:

    Anonymous2010– I think all of us who post on this blog would not dis­agree with what you are say­ing re: pol­icy in pub­lic school. You state that pub­lic edu­ca­tion is more polit­i­cal than work­ing for the gov­ern­ment. I think you missed the point.….work-ing in pub­lic edu­ca­tion IS work­ing for the gov­ern­ment. As some­one who pays a hefty prop­erty tax bill with many school bonds attached, it is very frus­trat­ing to not to have a voice within the school system.

    Home­school­ing should not be the default posi­tion because the sys­tem is bro­ken. Many work­ing par­ents do not have this option (nor do they want it). What they do want is a school sys­tem that does not erode their qual­ity of life every day with sub­stan­tial amounts of home­work (you won’t fully under­stand this until you have kids).

    If the pub­lic school sys­tem were a pri­vate enter­prise, the teach­ers would have to be more respon­sive to their clien­tele. I think you have hit on the crux of the prob­lem As I think FedUp Mom stated; who do the teach­ers serve? From my expe­ri­ence, teach­ers seem to have much more lat­i­tude re: home­work than you state. It seems as if the older, tenured, burned out teach­ers often give the most home­owork. In afflu­ent sub­urbs, they know they can scare the par­ents into get­ting a tutor if they don’t want to teach. Who speaks for the chil­dren and par­ents when this hap­pens? Why must chil­dren and par­ents put up with lazy, hos­tile teach­ers who know they have a job as long as they can pass of their job to the par­ents and still achieve high test scores? I have seen this hap­pen first hand and it is very frustrating.

    The bad teach­ers know how to manip­u­late the par­ents and bully the kids. Yes, we can take our kids out and home­school for a year if we get a bad teacher but why should we have to?

    I think we all agree the sys­tem has changed for the worse. Adding home­owork over­load to a bad sys­tem doesn’t make it bet­ter. If the kids are “work­sheeted to death” dur­ing the school day, why do they have to be “work­sheeted to death” at home. When is enough enough?

    February 8th, 2010 at 8:33 pm
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  392. Disillusioned says:

    Sorry for all the typos and bad syn­tax today. Too many to fix.

    February 8th, 2010 at 8:38 pm
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  393. Anonymous2010 says:

    It is sad to say, but the sys­tem is beyond repair. I’m new to my cur­rent school, and every­time I voice a con­cern or sug­gest some­thing research-based to another teacher, they report me to the prin­ci­pal. He tells me to just go along and play nice, even stat­ing that the other teacher is wrong, but they have clout, etc. I strug­gle daily with the sys­tem, and though I love teach­ing kids, the adults in my pro­fes­sion make me mis­er­able, depressed, and leave me drained. Since I am in the sys­tem and real­ize I can not change it, I know I will have to stay at home and run a home­school pro­gram one day. At least at home I will not have to cower and hold in every opin­ion because I am afraid of los­ing my job. Stand­ing up for what is right is dif­fi­cult– school super­in­ten­dents do not like adults or kids who are free thinkers. I am con­stantly reminded that they could revoke my license at any time (thus no teach­ing jobs any­where after that) due to non­com­pli­ance and “insub­or­di­na­tion.”. It makes me sad to imag­ine my future chil­dren tak­ing any class that isn’t with me or my hus­band (who is also a teacher) because a large por­tion of these teach­ers have no clue what they are doing, nor do they want to buck the system.

    February 8th, 2010 at 9:33 pm
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  394. Anonymous2010 says:

    In regards to my last post, I should restate that a large por­tion of the teach­ers at MY PARTICULAR SCHOOL (not all schools) have no clue what they are doing, nor want to buck the sys­tem. The school I taught at last year was a com­pletely dif­fer­ent world (and in a dif­fer­ent state with dif­fer­ent stan­dards.). I am sorry if I acci­den­tally offended any other teach­ers out there. I’m in a very small dis­trict sur­rounded by peo­ple with tenure who refuse to try new things.

    February 8th, 2010 at 9:43 pm
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  395. Disillusioned says:

    Anonymous2010– I feel for you. This type of oppres­sive­ness in the work­place can lead to burn-out and self-loathing. When­ever I inter­act with the pre­dom­i­nately older teach­ers at our school, I am struck by how can­tan­ker­ous they are (must not be a pleas­ant work place). In addi­tion, the office staff is rude and offen­sive. It seems as if many pub­lic ele­men­tary schools are stuck with teach­ers way past their exper­a­tion dates.

    February 8th, 2010 at 10:46 pm
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