Moms (and Dads) on a Mission–Brooklyn, New York (Part 1)

Today’s guest blogger, Aurora DeMarco, lives in Brooklyn, New York, where her 10th- and 1st-graders attend public school. Aurora recently decided to get together some of the first grade parents to see whether they could change homework policy at her school.

My First Grader is Overloaded with Worksheets
by Aurora DeMarco

I was shocked at the increased homework load of my 6 year old compared to the homework load 10 years earlier of that of my 16 year old. My older daughter did not get homework until second grade and even then it was one sheet a night and a requirement that the child read to their parents for 15 minutes. Meanwhile my younger daughter started being assigned homework in kindergarten and by first grade was overloaded with worksheets. A typical night involved, reading, filling out the reading log, two math sheets, a word study sheet and flashcards for her weekly spelling test.

A friend suggested I read The Case Against Homework. Just by chance, while I was reading the book, I saw Sara Bennett in the hallway at parent/teacher night at my older daughter’s school and I talked to her about my frustrations.

As a result I was inspired to organize the parents at my younger daughter’s school. It turns out that many other children and parents were frustrated. We found out that the stated policy of the school was that homework in the early grades should take 20 minutes (10 minutes of reading, 10 minutes of worksheets) per night. Unfortunately, the practice was not in keeping with their stated homework guidelines. Many of us were spending an hour

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High Standards for Nurturing Human Diversity

I try to keep up with the conversations at Education for Human Greatness. Here’s a recent post by Lynn Stoddard, a veteran public school teacher/administrator/author, who is always worth reading.

Those who are trying to destroy public education are very clever with words. “No Child Left Behind” was a powerful slogan for the Bush administration. Now we are getting hit with the word, “standards.” Who can be against “high standards” in anything? “National standards” sounds like a good thing, but it is just as insidious as NCLB has been. If you are against “national standards” you are unpatriotic. This is the implication.
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Fourth Grade Teacher: “I Did Away With Reading Logs”

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

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

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

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

Moms (and Dads) on a Mission–Halifax, Nova Scotia

Today’s guest blogger, the mother of a second grader, lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She holds a masters degree in psychology and works full time doing psychometric testing of adults. She says that “these credentials did not prepare her for second grade homework.”

Why My Second Grader Won’t Be Doing Any More Projects
by Psych Mom

I think it bears emphasis that the frontal lobes don’t even start making a lot of connections until the second decade of a human being’s life. Our frontal lobes control planning functions, our ability to anticipate, organize, and to control our behaviour. One of a parent’s key roles in their child’s life is to be their frontal lobes for them, until such time as they have the capacity to think for themselves, quite literally. We don’t expect that our 5 year olds can make decisions about walking across the street on their own. We don’t send them into a toy store with a gift card and expect them to make rational choices. We download responsibility to them gradually over the 18 years we’re responsible for them.
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Do Business Schools Need to Think about What They’re Teaching?

There was an interesting article in The New York Times on Sunday about whether the way business students are taught contributed to the economic crisis. According to the article, “Critics of business education have many complaints. Some say the schools have become too scientific, too detached from real-world issues. Others say students are taught to come up with hasty solutions to complicated problems. Another group contends that schools give students a limited and distorted view of their role — that they graduate with a focus on maximizing shareholder value and only a limited understanding of ethical and social considerations essential to business leadership.”

Read the article here.

Students’ Expectations Cause Grade Disputes in College

A recent article in The New York Times quoted a number of college professors who find that their students expect good grades if they attend lectures and do their out of class work. The associate dean of the Peabody School of Education at Vanderbilt University, said: “Students often confuse the level of effort with the quality of work. There is a mentality in students that ‘if I work hard, I deserve a high grade.’ “ The vice provost for teaching and learning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, stated, “I think that it stems from their K-12 experiences. They have become ultra-efficient in test preparation. And this hyper-efficiency has led them to look for a magic formula to get high scores.”

Read the story here.

Why Play is Important for Children’s Brains

Here’s an excerpt from an interview in U.S. News and World Report with Stuart Brown, author of a new book, Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul.

Schools are eliminating recess and piling on the homework, too. But you say that there’s lots of evidence that kids actually do better in school with more play, not less. How’s that?

The evidence is solid and growing that not only academic performance but [also] attention span is improved in direct correlation to the amount of play. Just get kids doing rough-and-tumble play, and their mental health improves.

But the No Child Left Behind mandates have put a lot of pressure on teachers, and that has meant less recess, less PE time, which means more sedentary kids with less playtime. The illusion that playtime hampers academic performance is one that has to be dispelled by the evidence of what play does.

Read the rest here.

We Need More Teachers Like This Fifth Grade Teacher

I was happy to receive this email from a 5th grade teacher from Colorado:

Thank you, thank you, thank you for your wonderful book! As a parent of two middle school kids and a fifth grade teacher myself, you have provided me with much needed motivation and ammunition to make some changes in my school district.

The biggest problem I am facing right now is how to handle the transition from elementary to middle school. How can I prepare my students for the homework demands they will face in the future if I am not giving them any homework now? I do expect my students to read (of their choice) and do a couple of math problems a night, but that’s it. I encourage them to spend time with their families, play sports, board games, cook dinner and the like, but not a structured hour of sit-at-the-counter homework (25 math problems) that they will face next year (my 6th grade daughter sometimes has 3 hours a night). My dream is that one day everyone in our district will examine the homework policy and make some drastic changes, but for now we are stuck with the same old thing and I don’t like the thought of throwing my students to the wolves without some preparation. Do you have any ideas or should I just let it go and let this be the problem for the sixth grade teachers?