Stop Homework

The Book Whisperer Makes Fun of Teaching to the Test

I love Donalyn Miller’s blog, The Book Whisperer, as well as her book with the same name.

Her most recent post, Best Book Awards for Teaching to the Test, satirically offers an award to the writer whose book most effectively will help teachers prepare their students for tests:

Best Book Awards for Teaching to the Test

The Roots and Stems Award: Throw away your dictionary and consider using the SAT vocabulary lists as your guide. The more obscure words you use in your book, the better. After all, words like “iconoclast” and “venerable” are hard to find in context at school.

The Venn Award: Can students compare and contrast the characters in your book using a graphic organizer? Will your plot fit nicely on a pyramid? If my students can record everything they need to remember about your book onto one worksheet, you are a frontrunner for this award.

The Field Trip Award: Can I use your book to show my students what a zoo, museum, or concert hall really looks like? How about recess? With budget cuts and a focus on standards-based curriculum, the only way my students might have these experiences is if you write about them.

The Marginalia Award: If my students can write reams of annotation while reading your book, this is the award for you. Talk to your publisher and ask them to widen the margins. Two inches–the width of a small Post-It note– would be best.

The Diorama Award: Open House is just around the corner, and I need something to hang on the walls. Besides, knowing that a project is due is the only thing that motivates my students to read. Does your book lend itself to a wanted poster, cereal box, or paper bag report? If I can integrate technology by assigning a power point project, I will use your book every year. Since all we do in class is drill on test-taking skills, students will have to complete this project at home. Consider including instructions for parents.

Moms and Dads on a Mission – Sharon, Connecticut

Fred Baumgarten, the father of two daughters in public school in Sharon, Connecticut, began talking to other parents in his daughter’s fifth grade class about homework after he read The Homework Myth, by Alfie Kohn, a college classmate. Fred, who has a M.S. in Education from Bank Street and is currently a director of Foundation, Government and Corporate Relations at Sarah Lawrence College, has a blog, Homework Headaches, where he recently posted the letter he wrote to the Fifth Grade parents at his daughter’s school. In addition to reading his letter, you should visit his blog, where you can follow his organizing attempts.

Dear Fifth Grade Families & Friends:
by Fred Baumgarten
Sharon, Connecticut

I’ve spoken with a number of you individually in the last few months about problems with fifth grade homework that have had an impact on our family and on our daughter’s attitudes toward school. Many of you have shared similar stories.

Recently the Principal sent out a letter addressing some of these concerns and reiterating the school’s homework policies and attitudes, but this letter proposes no substantive changes and fails to get at the heart of the problem.

There are really three homework problems, in my view:

(1) Quantity: Even if it’s true that our students are spending an average of an hour a day on homework assignments, it would still be too much; it means that some days it takes a lot longer; it doesn’t take into account afterschool activities; and it takes away from time legitimately spent in family activities, relaxing, reflecting, reading for fun, going outdoors, etc. Most of all there is the relentlessness of homework – every night, and on weekends too, which also relates to the second point, below.

(2) Content: With very few exceptions, fifth grade homework assignments have been repetitive, unengaging, and one-dimensional – literally the same thing, night after night.
Continue reading “Moms and Dads on a Mission – Sharon, Connecticut”

“I Have Banned My Child from Doing Homework,” says English Mum

Rosie Scribble, a freelance writer in the U.K. who specializes in mental health issues and blogs about life with her 6 year old, wrote a wonderful piece about why she doesn’t make her daughter do homework. Many of the commenters also wrote that they didn’t make their children do homework, either. Now, if they could all inspire their friends and their friends’ friends, etc., homework for young children would no longer exist (after all, most elementary school children require some kind of parental involvement to get their homework done).

I Have Banned My Child from Doing Homework
by Rosie Scribble

Sometimes I get a bit hot under the collar, stamp my foot and decide that whatever I have been told to do – I’m not doing it.

Then I wonder why my six-year-old daughter does the same.

However today, once again, I have decided there are a few things that our little family will not be doing, for one day at least.

Here’s the list:

Because a mother knows when her child is under stress, when she has had enough and is over-tired and over-sensitive, when being asked to watch the news will only add to her current anxieties, when number work at school is getting her down to the point where she can’t sleep at night, when the pressure to practise her reading every night is getting her down, when it is all becoming too much.

A mother knows when her child needs a night off, a break from it all, and when a dose of fun takes priority over homework.

So here’s what we will do instead:

(Read the post and the accompanying comments here.)

Playing to Learn

Yesterday’s New York Times had a wonderful op-ed by Susan Engel, Playing to Learn, about the pressing need to completely overhaul the education system. Instead of schools focusing so much on standards and facts, the author writes:

So what should children be able to do by age 12, or the time they leave elementary school? They should be able to read a chapter book, write a story and a compelling essay; know how to add, subtract, divide and multiply numbers; detect patterns in complex phenomena; use evidence to support an opinion; be part of a group of people who are not their family; and engage in an exchange of ideas in conversation. If all elementary school students mastered these abilities, they would be prepared to learn almost anything in high school and college.

With that in mind, schools could be an engaging place where students read for 2 hours a day, write about subjects that are meaningful to them, practice the math basics (and then go on to activities that are equally essential for math and science such as devising original experiments and observing the natural world), and have plenty of time to play.

Is anyone listening?

Read the piece here and then copy and send it to the principal of your child’s elementary and middle school.

A Blast from the Past

I love this editorial from 1910, posted in yesterday’s Calgary Herald. (Thanks to Vera Goodman, author of Simply Too Much Homework, for sending it to me.)

Hope For The Children
published in the Calgary Herald on January 26, 1910 and reprinted on February 2010

The Herald has frequently urged the abolition of home work in the public schools, at least in the lower grades. It believes that little children of from seven to twelve years of age do not need to study at home in order to learn as much as their brains are properly capable of carrying during that period.

It is a pleasure now to be able to quote one of the leading authorities in Canada in support of this view. Inspector Hughes of Toronto, whose name is known wherever education is discussed, will recommend to the board of education of that city the abolition of homework in all the classes below the senior third. His example will probably be followed by other similar officials and may perhaps in time reach Calgary.

There is hope for the children in this news. Home study, as an eastern paper recently put it, is the Jack-the-Giant-Killer of primary education. “It kills,” says the Toronto Star, “the giant in the making, catches the bright boy, who ought to become the big virile man, and smothers him under blankets of books. It stunts his intellect by making him work when he should be resting. It puts his eyes out with night work, rounds his shoulders, leaves him a hollow chest.”

The Herald cannot too strongly impress on the parents of Calgary the far greater importance of healthy bodies to crammed minds. Calgary’s schools are well equipped with play grounds. Calgary’s children, as a rule, are a healthy lot. Calgary’s climate is perfectly adapted to the moulding of vigorous bodies. We do not want them spoiled for the sake of a few lessons or a little more rapid advance in some branch of study. The example of Inspector Hughes is a strong one. The public school board of this city might well consider it carefully with a view to abolishing home study in the lower grades of the schools under their charge.

ADHD – Medical Problem? Parenting Problem? Teaching Problem?

Listen to this interesting discussion on ADHD on BAM! Radio.

Interview with Alan Shusterman, founder of School for Tomorrow

(This is the latest in a series of interviews I’ve conducted with educators and activists around the country who are on my radar as people who are doing their best to change policy and practice in their communities.)

Alan Shusterman, who lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland with his wife and three children, is the founder of School for Tomorrow (SFT), an independent nonprofit secondary school (grades 6-12) located in Rockville, Maryland which opened this Fall with 18 students, 3 full-time teachers and 6 part-time teachers. Its website describes the school as a “one-of-a-kind, cutting edge, student-centered education model designed in and fit for the 21st century.”

I was intrigued by that description, and by the fact that the school stated up front that research shows little value to homework, so I interviewed him to find out more about SFT and his inspiration for starting it.

Interview with Alan Shusterman
by Sara Bennett

Can you tell me a little bit about your background and why you decided to start a school?
I was a public school kid, always a good student but never particularly engaged in school. I was able to get As despite myself. Growing up I loved hanging out with kids younger than me, I set up school for my younger sister and taught her how to read, and I always had the teaching bug.

But because I was a good student, I ended up at the University of Pennsylvania, and becoming a teacher was never on the horizon. Back then, before Teach for America, it wasn’t culturally acceptable for someone graduating from an Ivy League school to go into teaching. So, instead, I went to Harvard Law School. As history would have it, Barack Obama was in my class at Harvard; as luck would have it, I didn’t befriend him.

Every little aspect of my life story has informed my philosophy of education, including having gone to Penn and Harvard and seeing firsthand what the best and brightest secondary school graduates are like and do. Of course this is an over-generalization, but, in general, the students who succeed in high school arrive to college narrow-minded, conformist, and supporters of the status quo. That President Obama, for one, has turned out to be a rather conventional politician, especially with respect to education, has not surprised me, given his educational pedigree.

Continue reading “Interview with Alan Shusterman, founder of School for Tomorrow”

Recess Before Lunch

Yesterday’s New York Times had a piece Play, Then Eat: Shift May Bring Gains at School about the importance of having recess before lunch. I couldn’t help but wonder, once again, why something so commonsensical requires experts to weigh in. And, even more, I couldn’t help but wonder why so many kids don’t get recess at all.

Can something as simple as the timing of recess make a difference in a child’s health and behavior?

Some experts think it can, and now some schools are rescheduling recess — sending students out to play before they sit down for lunch. The switch appears to have led to some surprising changes in both cafeteria and classroom.

Schools that have tried it report that when children play before lunch, there is less food waste and higher consumption of milk, fruit and vegetables. And some teachers say there are fewer behavior problems.

“Kids are calmer after they’ve had recess first,” said Janet Sinkewicz, principal of Sharon Elementary School in Robbinsville, N.J., which made the change last fall. “They feel like they have more time to eat and they don’t have to rush.”

One recent weekday at Sharon, I watched as gaggles of second graders chased one another around the playground and climbed on monkey bars. When the whistle blew, the bustling playground emptied almost instantly, and the children lined up to drop off their coats and mittens and file quietly into the cafeteria for lunch.

“All the wiggles are out,” Ms. Sinkewicz said.

Read the entire article here.

Video Op-Ed on AP Classes

Vicki Abeles, the filmmaker of Race to Nowhere, had an excellent video op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times about the problems with Advanced Placement Classes. Watch it here and then let me know what you think.

If you’re a parent of a high schooler, or a high schooler, I’m curious to know what, if anything, you do about AP classes. I, for one, discourage my high schooler from taking zero period classes (those that start at 7:10) and from taking honors or AP classes. While her teachers (and other parents) often look at me askance, I think her free time is better spent on activities of her own choosing (and getting a good night’s sleep) than on doing the extra homework that comes along with those kinds of classes. And although the video doesn’t really get to it, AP classes in particular don’t require more advanced or creative thinking. They do, though, require an awful lot of memorization.

(You can see Race to Nowhere on Thursday, January 28, in Salt Lake City, Utah at 7:30 p.m. at the Megaplex Theater).

The Trouble with Kindergarten

If you’re not aware of what students are required to do in kindergarten these days, be sure to read this article in Rethinking Schools titled “Testing Kindergarten: Young Children Produce Data, Lots of Data.”

A teacher with 6-years’ experience in the Milwaukee Public Schools writes about how little recess and nap time her students get and describes in great detail the amount of testing she is required to administer:

I have seen a decrease in district initiatives that are developmentally appropriate, and an increase in the amount of testing and data collection for 5-year-olds. Just when I thought the district couldn’t ask for any more test scores or drills or practice, a new initiative and data system pops up for my school to complete. My school has not met our Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for the past three years. Due to our failure to meet AYP, we are now a School Identified for Improvement (SIFI), with Level Two status.

The students in my classroom during the 2008-09 school year completed more assessments than during any of my prior years of teaching kindergarten:

Milwaukee Public Schools’ 5-Year-Old Kindergarten Assessment (completed three times a year)
On the Mark Reading Verification Assessment (completed three times a year)
A monthly writing prompt focused on different strands of the Six Traits of Writing
28 assessments measuring key early reading and spelling skills
Chapter pre- and post-tests for all nine math chapters completed
Three additional assessments for each math chapter completed
A monthly math prompt
Four Classroom Assessments Based on Standards (CABS) per social studies chapter (20 total)
Four CABS assessments per science chapter (20 total)
Four CABS assessments per health chapter (20 total)

I recently learned that my students will also be expected to complete four benchmark assessments beginning in the 2010-11 school year.

Read the article here.