Random screams and shouts signal that the school bus has let the children out at the corner. I pull myself away from the computer and holler out the door, "Joooo-naaaah!" He says good-bye to his buddies and dumps his backpack at the front door. Thus begins the long march of homework, sports activities, and dinner before bed.
I have to brace myself for homework activities. I’m always a bit tired by that point, because I’ve put in a full day at the college, but there are worksheets that have to be completed and spelling words to be memorized. Jonah’s brain is all rattled from the state of nature on the school bus and isn’t ready for neat, orderly homework. His teacher puts smiley faces on his work without checking it, so I have to make sure that he really gets the work.
Two hours.
We’ll spend two hours doing his homework. He’ll write a sentence
with his spelling word. The sentence will be imaginative and
interesting, but very sloppy. He knows that he’s good at coming up with
cool sentences and will want to breeze through the exercise. But he’ll
misspell half the words. His handwriting is extremely messy. So, we’ll
have to erase those sentences and do it over and over and over again.
Holes appear in the paper from over erasing. The paper is already
wrinkled, because he shoved it into his backpack as he was running out
of school.
Ian is only in Kindergarten, but he has homework, too. In the
beginning of the school year, he was refusing to do it. Not because he
didn’t understand it, but because he was too hyper to sit down and
because Ian likes to say no. His school has whipped that out of him, so
he sits down nicely now and finishes off his worksheets in two minutes.
He’ll wander away from the table and play games on the computer.
I wonder which kid is going to have the edge in the future.
Despite his speech difficulties, Ian seems to breeze through his
academic work. He’s a self taught reader and is able to memorize vast
quantities of visual material. His speech problems and hyperactivity
make it impossible to test his IQ, but it must be up there.
Jonah is smart, too, but in a different way. He’s creative and day
dreamy and scattered and enthusiastic and dramatic. He’s like me. He
has to put effort into his work, because he’s thinking too much about
the weight of the sperm whale’s tongue and not about regrouping math
problems. I barely remember elementary school, because my mind was
elsewhere most of the time.
So, Jonah has to work. Ian has to work, too, but not on academic stuff. He has to work at speech and on his behavior. The latest studies show
that kids that believe that hard work makes them smarter and not
effortless brilliance have an edge in life. Maybe those two gruesome
hours of homework time are going to pay off down the road.
Apt. 11d 
“His teacher puts smiley faces on his work without checking it, so I have to make sure that he really gets the work.”
Speechless.
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“His teacher puts smiley faces on his work without checking it, so I have to make sure that he really gets the work.”
Speechless
I hear about this frequently, so I’m not speechless. Just disgusted.
And, I presume you live in a “good” school district. I wish teachers would get back to teaching, instead of concentrating on having so much “fun” with the kids.
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I have two kids, also. One is a “smart slacker” and the other has APD & ADD but is a much harder worker. The smart slacker doesn’t believe that his own effort will make much of a difference in his success. Never learned that lesson. The other child has learned that her hard efforts pay off.
When I allow myself to worry about them, I do worry more about how the “smart slacker” will fare in life.
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Teachers probably wish that about parents, too: that they’d get back to parenting and not concentrating on having so much “fun” with their kids.
Your homework grind seems icky to me. It’s not how it works in our first grade.
Maybe J. could keyboard the sentence? and then copy it onto the form? My daughter seems to get a kick out of the neatness requirement, but it drove me crazy as a kid.
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A very wise Russian teacher once told me that grades are like paychecks for kids, and not giving grades is like not paying them. In the situation Laura describes, the kids are getting paid, but in obviously fake currency. Also, this set-up creates a wedge between home and school. Surely a lot of kids are going to wonder, if nice Mrs. Friendly is giving me a smiley-face for my work no matter what I turn in, why is my mean mommy making me sweat over it? This practice seems to undermine the home-school connection.
In high school math, I know a lot of teachers don’t correct homework, but go over the work at the beginning of class. I think that’s defensible or even a good idea with teenagers who will have a very similar set-up in college, and need to get used to college-level freedom and responsibility. However, I don’t think 8-year-olds are going to benefit in the same way, especially if the class doesn’t go over the answers as a group. Anyway, what happens to children from less privileged families who also have teachers who don’t correct assigned homework? Their parents can’t help them and their teachers won’t. (A number of years back, a friend was a rookie English teacher and was sharing with us some neat skills he had learned at a workshop. Apparently at the time, the cutting edge in writing pedagogy was to grade based on only reading the first page of a student’s composition. There’s a lot of this going around.)
In a different thread, bj was saying that she felt judgemental of homeschoolers. If fewer schools used these “methods” there’d be a lot fewer homeschoolers to be judgemental of.
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I know a family who went to homeschooling just because of the homework burden at their private school which they otherwise loved. They couldn’t do the homework, do activities, and have a normal, happy, family life, so the school had to go. (Incidentally, I think partial-homeschooling is a fantastic idea, and more schools should offer it. My daughter’s private school offers it: homeschoolers do the core subjects themselves, and then bring their kids in for “enrichment” subjects like Spanish and art. There are also homeschool co-ops that offer something similar.)
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“Why I Don’t Assign Homework” is the top post at kitchentablemath.blogspot.com now, by the way.
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“the cutting edge in writing pedagogy”???
Reading the first page only? Cite, please? I think your friend was either incompetent, totally confused, or pulling your leg. There is a common practice of ungraded writing as a *part* of teaching writing, but not graded writing.
Writing pedagogy is kind of my thing, and I’ve never heard this.
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I wasn’t there obviously, but my friend was a newly minted teacher who had just been to this workshop (2001 or 2002), and he was very excited about this new technique of only correcting errors in the first page, which would be very helpful in dealing with the mountains of compositions that he was facing. Maybe my friend misunderstood the idea (he was a rookie), but if he misunderstood it, I bet he wasn’t the only one.
I’m perfectly OK with assigning unstructured assignments for writing fluency, but I’m adamant that teachers shouldn’t be assigning work that they don’t either check or hold students accountable for. It’s much better to assign no homework at all rather than to inculcate the idea that homework is pointless make-work.
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I think your friend misunderstood and/or miscommunicated the technique to you. It’s not that the teacher does not read the rest of the essay/composition. It’s that the teacher doesn’t correct everything past the first page or so. Writing pedagogy today treats writing as process as well as product. The student has to take responsibility for learning to edit his or her own writing. The student will learn better how to correct his or her own writing by noting the pattern of errors s/he tends to make, learning how to identify and edit the error, then applying that knowledge to their own writing. They have to develop the ability to self-edit their own writing.
This technique works better with older students. Your use of the term “mountains of compositions” strongly suggests that your friend is a HS teacher, and such a technique would be effective on that age group. It’s not quite the same thing as correcting the first page of an 8 year old’s assignment and ignoring the rest!
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It was probably high school, although it might have been later middle school. On the other hand, the school was nearly all disadvantaged and minority (Native American).
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He’ll write a sentence with his spelling word. The sentence will be imaginative and interesting, but very sloppy.
I had one of those, too. Solution:
Cheap whiteboard
Sharpie
erasable markers
OR
Not so cheap whiteboard
“ruling tape” (don’t know what it is really called, like electrician’s tape, only rather thin)
erasable markers
Make rules on the whiteboard, just as there are on the papers Jonah’s using.
Procedure
Child writes first draft of sentence on whiteboard, corrects spelling and so on, then transcribes correctly formulated sentence onto homework sheet.
Advantages — no time wasted in erasures, not distracted by the different texture of erased paper, gives the idea of drafting and revising.
There are variations on this, given your kid’s issues. For example, my oldest, were he born in 1982 instead of 1987, would probably have services (occupational therapy) for hand fine-motor issues. Handwriting was torture. So he would say the sentence, which I’d scribble down on a piece of paper, then he would spell each word out for me as I wrote it on the whiteboard. Then we’d read it out loud together (Me: “Hmmmn. taht. Have the letters jumped around? OOOHH. good catch. that.”) Then he would transcribe the correctly-spelled sentence onto his homework.
Eventually Jonah’s writing his own sentences on the board (hence the taped rules) and copying the correct sentences by himself. But scaffolding’s a good thing — make the most important goal (vocabulary acquisition) the first thing, and the secondary goal (accurate word production while handwriting) a more supported goal, and the tertiary goal (tidiness and automaticity in handwriting) the least burdened.
Remember, it isn’t practice makes perfect — it is only correct, accurate practice that counts. Anything else is hardwiring inappropriate patterns.
Another way of putting this: we adults forget how much cognitive capacity it takes to write by hand, because it is so automatic for us.
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Liz D.,
That was very helpful.
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As a Jersey Girl, you gotta be with Edison, right?
‘Edison famously said, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
Tesla’s response, recalling the time he spent working for Edison, was, “If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety percent of his labor.”‘
I think Edison NOTICED the work, so he thought it was the biggest thing, but that no amount of diligence would have gotten him there without a good amount of horsepower. It’s good for kids to believe in hard work, but it’s only part of the answer.
Our #2 has ADD, and it takes a LOT of wrangling to get him through his schoolwork. He clearly does not intend to put a speck more hard work into this than is extracted from him by Mom and Dad. Plenty of horsepower, but no internally generated impetus to learn or do. We are trying to help him learn self-motivation.
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Do you feel the homework is useful? My second grader has been assigned daily homework since kindergarten, and most of it is pretty pointless. I don’t bother making him do it- I see it as an issue between him and his teacher. (If he asked for help doing it or negotiating it with his teacher, I would- but he hasn’t.) I can’t see the value in spending what little time I have with him after school forcing him to do something that someone else thinks is important.
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I’m another parent whose kid with ADHD lacks motivation. There’s an interesting new book which has given me some insight into this. It’s called “The Motivation Breakthrough” by Richard Lavoie. You might check it out, dave s.
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Amy P — thanks. I’ve got a lot more tricks up my sleeve, which is why I’m becoming an educational therapist. The perspective of task analysis is very helpful — what is going to get you the most bang for your buck?
Dave S. — Rick LaVoie has a new book out on motivation. The Dyslexia Tutor has a review:
Sarah–in the LizWorld, there’d be no school-assigned “homework” before the middle of 3rd grade, other than shared reading (ie, kindergarten & first grade parents read to kid, mid-first grade, parents listen to kid read aloud, and so on). The rest is just useless IMAO.
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Two hours for homework in the primary grades? It often doesn’t take that long for me to get through a full day’s worth of lessons in our homeschool. Young children need unstructured free time to just play and be kids.
If I were you, I’d seriously look into homeschooling. It can be done without giving up your job if you’re unable to or uninterested in staying home full-time. Plenty of single parents and dual-income families HS very successfully.
There’s also hybrid education, mentioned by another poster where you HS some subjects and enroll your child part-time in a private, co-op, or public school for others.
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