How to Help Your Four-Year-Old With Homework

I didn’t know what to expect when I came across this blog piece, How To Help Your Four-Year-Old With Homework,” but it put a smile on my face when I read it.

Have a nice weekend.

How To Help Your Four-Year Old With Homework
by Who’s the Mummy

How to help your four year old with her homework

Regular readers will know Flea started big school this month. I definitely had mixed feelings about her starting full-time in a mainstream school only a couple of weeks after turning four, but she is thriving. It’s a lovely school, she loves the children in her class, and having a small group means she’s settled in and made lots of friends really easily.
But there’s homework. Seriously? Homework? For four year olds? Okay, so it’s not trigonometry but still.

Continue reading “How to Help Your Four-Year-Old With Homework”

Texas Math Teacher Makes Homework Optional and Only 5 of 45 Parents Request It

The other day, I was thrilled to receive an email from Jason, a 4th grade math and science teacher in Houston, Texas, who told me that, after doing a lot of research and thinking, he had decided to make homework optional in his class. This was quite a turnaround for the Jason who posted several comments on this blog last spring. (He also posts as ACP Texan.) In one of his early Comments in March, he wrote:

I teach 4th grade math and science. Much of what I teach is basic skills. As any athlete or musician will tell you, developing basic skills is about practice, practice, practice. If I assign my class to complete a sheet of two-digit by two-digit multiplication problems for homework, I do not care what their motivation for completing it is…. [T]the students will be better at the skill after having completed the work.

By May, he was really grappling with new ideas and he wrote in one of his Comments:

I want to assure you I do not have an ego attached to any of these ideas. I’m completely willing to throw away everything I’ve always thought and try to do better. I’m still new to this teaching thing so I was kind of operating on the, “just do what has always been done and make it through the day” approach. Now that I’m finishing up this year I think I’m ready to make some changes in the way I do things.

Jason told me that this summer he did more reading, including The Homework Myth, Understanding By Design, The Trouble With Boys, A Framework For Understanding Povertyand Getting To Got It. “As a result I asked my principal for permission to make homework optional for my students this year. To her credit, she had read Rethinking Homework and was very open to new ideas. Of my 45 students, only 5 parents responded asking that the homework continue to be sent home. Here is the letter that went home with my students at the beginning of this school year”:

Dear Parents,

I have asked permission from my administration, and have been granted the freedom to institute a homework policy for my classes that is more aligned with current research. I have done this for several reasons:

1. It has come to my attention that homework often encroaches on “family time.”
2. I understand that parents, after a full day of work, may not want to spend the limited time they have with their children acting as task masters to see that the homework gets done.
3. The frustration, anxiety, and fighting that often results because of homework outweighs any benefit homework might have.
4. Research indicates that group homework (same homework for all students) may have little to no academic value at the elementary level.

Here is how the policy will work:

· The district math and science homework will not be sent home except by parent request.
· Whether a student completes or does not complete the district homework will have no impact on their grade.
· There will be no rewards or negative consequences for completing or not completing the district math and science homework.
· All students will receive an “S” under the conduct heading “completes homework.”
· All district math and science homework will be available for download on my website at all times.
· On occasion students will be asked to finish, at home, assignments that were not completed in class.

Guest Blogger – A College Teacher’s Response to President Obama’s Idea of Lengthening the School Day

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

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

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

There are many problems with this.

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

Continue reading “Guest Blogger – A College Teacher’s Response to President Obama’s Idea of Lengthening the School Day”

An Eighth Grader Speaks Out

Kira, an thirteen-year-old eighth grader in a public school in Pennsylvania, sent me the following email:

I just want to say I support your website completely, and everything on it is true, and relates to my school experience. My family gets really stressed out, to the point of tears, screaming, or yelling, etc. at least 3/5 school nights, and I believe homework’s one of the reasons we are all often stressed and high-strung.

I think school is making everyone very unhappy and unsatisfied at my school. We often have very little time to socialize or have any fun (we are only 13!), and we are always doing our homework all night, and having to go to bed early. I go through the whole long day half falling asleep because I am so tired from getting up so early and staying up too late doing homework. Also, we carry extremely heavy loads in our backpacks. I have back pains now and am really tense from carrying that up and down stairs every day.

I think the system is ridiculous. School is already murdering my childhood, and giving me little time for fun, but with that little time I’m reviewing everything I learned in school until at least 8 PM. It’s depressing, insane, and, erm, yes. It makes me mad.

Let me say, I would have written a lot more and given a whole lot of points here, but I just finished my homework (its 9:00 PM), and I have to go to sleep by ten every night because I have to get up at 5: 45 AM to make it to the bus to school. And, oh, I just remembered some more homework I’ve got to get done.

Spring Branch, Texas, School Board Implements a New, Improved Homework Policy

On this blog last spring, I posted an interview with Mike Falick, a School Board member from Spring Branch, Texas (Houston), who had made homework his priority. Now, at the start of the school year, Spring Branch has implemented a new homework policy which, among other things, has teachers working together to coordinate their workflows, states that no homework will be given over holidays, and provides that each school has a consistent homework grading policy and provides differentiated homework, depending on the students’ needs. You can read about it here.

I’ll Make My Reading Logs Optional Says Virginia Teacher

The post that has generated the most Comments ever is I Hate Reading Logs by FedUp Mom. If you scroll through, you’ll notice that teachers have chimed in, some rethinking their own homework practice, others defending it. I was particularly struck by the openness of a teacher from Virginia, who found the post while looking for a reading log, and ended up rethinking logs altogether.

I also thought the teacher made a very good point about the importance of keeping all discussions between teacher and parent as cordial and as respectful as possible.

I’ll Make My Reading Logs Optional
by a Virginia Teacher

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.

Is School Teaching Our Students Not To Think?

In the upcoming documentary, Race to Nowhere, one of the things I talk about is how some of my more recent law school interns have had more trouble taking initiative and thinking for themselves than my students of 10 years ago. A few weeks ago, I was talking to a former colleague who told me that, over the past few years, he’s noticed the same trend among law interns – an inability to write well, think analytically, and work independently and a real desire to be told exactly what to do.

Because I’ve spent the past five years being involved in issues of education, I attribute this phenomenon to schools. Students spend too much time answering rote questions, memorizing facts, writing 5-paragraph essays, and doing school-imposed work and not enough time reading, getting involved in activities of their own choosing, and learning for the sake of learning. My former colleague attributed it to the students having grown up using the internet for all of their research and using the “cut and paste” method of writing.

We’re probably both right.

After our discussion, I came across this article by a Canadian university professor on the same topic, Has Ontario Taught Its High School Students Not To Think.

Has Ontario taught its high-school students not to think?
Elementary and high schools spend so much time on the content-laden curriculum that students are unprepared for the analytic and conceptual thinking they’ll need at university
by Alan Slavin

Has Ontario’s educational system taught a decade of students not to think? There is growing evidence that the combination of standardized testing with a content-intensive curriculum that’s too advanced – both introduced by the Conservative government between 1997 and 1999 – has done exactly that.

Continue reading “Is School Teaching Our Students Not To Think?”

Moms and Dads on a Mission–Denver, North Carolina

Today’s guest blogger, Deidra Hewitt, lives in Denver, North Carolina, where she has two children in a public elementary school. A stay-at-home mom with a Bachelor’s degree in Communications and who took eight Masters classes in Early Childhood Education, she “would prefer that my children’s school stick to educating them. I do not feel that my children’s school has to educate me in the art of parenting, or that I should be doing half of my children’s teaching, at home!”

I once wrote about those pesky contracts that teachers expect parents to sign, but I never really noticed how many signatures teachers request, perhaps because elementary school is now a distant memory for me. Deidra gave me something new to think about.

My Children’s Teachers Require My Signature
More than 400 Times a Year
by Deidra Hewitt, Denver, North Carolina

I’d like to know when signatures on pieces of paper became equated to proof of good parenting. My children attend a public elementary school. I am required to provide between 400 and 500 signatures, per child, per year. For all of the chatter about parents being “partners” in their children’s education, and how many times we’re “invited” to “support” our kids in various ways, this is clearly not the case, when the school is requiring, not requesting, my signature.

I was informed this year, that the policy for my 5th grader included punishment for him, if I forgot or refused to sign things like planners, reading logs, and Friday folders. Apparently it doesn’t matter whether I agree with the policies, find them effective for my family, or see specific requests as redundant. Regardless of how involved I am in my child’s school and life, a signature is regarded as proof positive that I’m doing my job. If I don’t want to sign something, then my child will suffer the consequences.

I am treated like an errant student who must prove to the big, all-wise, all-knowing school that I’m aware of my children’s homework, make sure that they read, and look at their completed work. Not to mention the contract that I’m supposed to sign, at the beginning of the year, promising that I’ll do my job to provide a good home environment, and adequate rest for the children!

Of course the school kindly has the teacher sign that he/she will do the job that they’re being paid for, with my tax money. Isn’t that something that I ought to be able to take for granted?

I have worked with the principal to agree not to punish my child, if a signature is missing this year. My son will not face consequences (pulled slips, silent lunch, non-participation in Fun Friday) by not having a parent signature, but I still feel dejected and disappointed with the fact that the policy remains in place, at all. I have no voice in my school, and certainly do NOT feel like a partner with them.

Why I Hate Homework

I was really happy to discover that Rat Race Rebellion just reposted an interview it did with me last year. You can read it here.

And please try to listen to WHYY’s Voices in the Family today at noon. I’ll be one of the guests. Here’s how the upcoming show is described:

Homework causes conflict in many homes. It’s a source of frustration for parents and kids, and many feel there just isn’t enough time in one evening to get it all done. Join Dr. Dan Gottlieb for the next Voices in the Family when we’ll discuss homework. Does it help learning? And, how much is too much? Dan’s guest is Sara Bennett. She has written The Case Against Homework, and writes a blog called StopHomework.com. We’ll also hear from Dr. Stephen Soffer who is a staff psychologist at the Center for Management of ADHD at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.