Homework

As you post to this site, I’m assuming one or both of your daughters has a learning difference. As a teacher, I’ve never met the truly lazy child but I’ve met many whose learning differences make homework a very hard task. Any kind of attentional issue or reading/writing issue makes the independent work that homework is supposed to be laborious.

It’s also true that too many homework assignments are not well thought out by teachers. The instructions can be complex or confusing. Homework in these modern times usually involves complicated projects too often past any child’s ability to do independently.

Allowing a child to fail with their homework assumes the child is choosing not to do the work and will be motivated by failure. I don’t find failure a good motivator for most people -adults or children. In my experience, it seems to discourage people more than it encourages them.

If you’re not sure they can handle the homework, as you say, what will failing at it do for them?

In any case, it’s certainly true that after our long days, spending long evenings doing homework just isn’t possible for many parents. I’ve encouraged my fellow teachers to understand that and assign less homework but the trend these days is to assign more-not less- homework.

You’re certainly not the only parent asking this question at this time of the year. Good luck with it.

I agree that letting these children fail is not the solution. They are not struggling deliberately, right?

With the amount of struggling my boys do in the regular classroom, just to keep up, they are just plain exhausted when they get home.

I’m going out on a limb here (and I know there are not many who would agree with me) but I am not a believer in homework at all.

The work that I have seen come home is not worth our time. Okay, maybe it is review. But is that review truly worth the stress to all involved in getting it done? I would rather have them sit at the computer for that hour or sit down with me and play a game or an exercise that challenges their overall cognitive skills. Or better yet, GO OUTSIDE AND BE A KID!

Personally, I think that 7.5 hours in school is more than enough time to focus on the days work when you are ages 5-13. My belief is that if the homework that is coming home requires me to re-teach the lesson at home, then someone is not doing their job?

We talked to the teacher about it last year because the frustration level was just too much. We came to the agreement that if the assignment required more time than is reasonably necessary, it was to be sent back to school unfinished. The resource teacher was then responsible for making sure the material was understood and completed.

When the burden falls back on them, you would be surprised to see how the take-home work becomes a significantly lighter load and only the valuable review material comes home.

Well, I agree with you for what it’s worth. Much homework is useless if not actively counter-productive. I have seen studies that question whether homework improves learning at all — comparisons of schools with and without homework, and there is litle or no difference on test scores. Sorry I don’t have references but anyone interested can try ERIC research (and then give the paper to your principal and teacher!!)

A lot of homework is the so-called Puritan ethic in action — you have to work for hours and suffer because it is in some way good for you.

Consider the child making the same spelling errors at the end of Grade 5 as at the beginning — ummm, in any other job if you use a technique for three months (or less) and it continues to fail, you try a *different* technique. Schools are the only places where you blithely go on for years and years applying the same methods that are *proven* failures. We know memorizing spelling lists doesn’t work. We know nagging kids about being “bad spellers” doesn’t work. Just in case that teacher hasn’t heard the word, she has the proof in front of her nose on the girl’s papers. So why is the *teacher* continuing to send the same stuff home?? She is failing, much more than the child — the child doesn’t know the right way to spell and hasn’t been shown anything that helps her; the teacher does know and isn’t changing anyway.

As a teacher, I had a combined Grade 1/2 class one year. The class on average gained 1.3 years reading in one year. But many parents wer incensed because I didn’t send home homework — no worksheets to fill in, no spelling lists to memorize, no science projects for the parents to build because the kids can’t. They felt at a loss, that the kids should somehow be working harder. The fact that they were all *reading* and writing and adding and subtracting, and taking home books that they enjoyed and felt confident with — that didn’t matter; they had to be given more homework. The (so-called) Puritan ethic in action again.

Since my daughter was in gifted middle school classes last year, where 90% of the homework is projects and writing, I had written into her IEP no homework, except for math. She has Aspergers and severe problems with written work (the part of writing that is in your mind, not physical). Though the teachers were unhappy about it all year, and wouldn’t grade her or make other accomodations for assessments (such as giving tests) it saved us as a family by lessening the stress. My daughter did get lots of grief from her peers about it, but her peers give her grief anyway.
Homework on the elementary level is more useless than on the middle school level from my experience, but overall- it doesn’t add to the learning.
My favorite homework was the assignements of my child’s 1st grade teacher.
He assigned that every child should read 4 books a week. or the parent could read the books to the child. each child had one day in a week to report on one of the books (you made a worksheet—name of book, author, draw a picture, fav. character). So every week of the year, each child was exposed to 4 books, the homework turn in day stayed the same, and each child got up and gave a short oral report about one of the books. The class was taught about giving oral reports and about how to be a good audience. the reports got a little longer over the year. As a parent, you could plan the work around your schedule (esp when you have 2 other kids who need help on homework) and your child worked on the reading part all year, and no parents could do the homework for the child. It also accomodated all the non-english speaking families in the class.

Can I (((((PLEASE))))))) get you a job in my school? If we had a sped teacher like you our lives would be so much easier and maybe my boys would be more successful. I really like your philosophies, your methods and your style.

The children under your direction are truly blessed. I hope they (parents and students) appreciate you.

Thanks for all you do!

Let’s clone Victoria.

Victoria -

I also wish you could come to my children’s school!!! I think that teachers are under so much pressure now. With all of the state standards and state tests their students have to pass, many teachers probably feel they have to assign homework. Many teachers seem to feel that they can’t really teach because they have to “cover” the curriculum as mandated by the state. I know many teachers in Virginia feel this way.

And then there are the parents (especially in wealthy counties) who practically demand teachers give more homework. Also, many parents insist their children are gifted and need the challenge.

Neither of my daughters have been labeled LD. I still find it ironic that her teachers (LD & regular ed) were concerned that she wouldn’t pass the state writing test (which she didn’t, not to mention she failed three others), when I had been saying for three years or more that she was having difficulty with writing. Her 5th grade teacher told me she gave my daughter a “D” in spelling first quarter because she thought my daughter might take more care with spelling in her writing. She even told me she thought my daughter could do the work, but was lazy. She is very hesitant to try new things and she does try to get me to do things that she doesn’t want to do. Recently she told her younger sister she didn’t have to do something (I forget what, something on the computer) because I would do it if she just didn’t do it. I was rather upset by that statement.

My younger daughter’s teacher gave her poor spelling and writing grades at the end of the year (2nd grade) because she also didn’t think my daughter was putting forth enough effort. She did say she wondered why my daughter was misspelling the same words in her writing at the end of the year as she was at the beginning of the year.

I have a difficult time getting either of my children to proofread their work. I also believe they would both benefit from doing so. I also know that my older daughter has flunked the proofreading sections on both the 3rd & 5th grade standardized tests. I don’t think proofreading comes easily to her.

Back to spelling — I would love to have a disscussion about how children can become better spellers and what teachers can do to help them. I do know that having children write spelling words five times and even writing the words in a sentence do little to help children internalize spelling patterns.

I am going to see my doctor on Wednesday and he may give me a moratorium on typing because I think I’m developing carpal tunnel from typing so much. I hope not — I think I’m addicted to the internet!!!

Anyway, thank you for all of your comments about homework!!

Sincerely,

Margo

I agree that letting these children fail is not the solution. They are not struggling deliberately, right?

Right.

With the amount of struggling my boys do in the regular classroom, just to keep up, they are just plain exhausted when they get home.

Sadly true of your boys and many other students these days.

I’m going out on a limb here (and I know there are not many who would agree with me) but I am not a believer in homework at all.

As a teacher and a parent, I agree with you. I’ve seen too much homework go home that’s poorly planned and WAY too time consuming. It’s sadly true that in our society right now homework is a ‘given’ but fortunately more and more people are beginning to question the value of it. If you want to read an author who agrees with you, get hold of a book called The End of Homework by John Buell.

Last year’s IDA annual publication had an *excellent* article about spelling — long and dense and scholarly, but chock-full of good stuff. Get this by joining the IDA, or ask your local library or university library to get it.

I love this phrase, academically but not intellectually challenging. I found it in a book called “The Shopping Mall High School” which analyzes the structure of the US high school and how you can “buy” various products, at the high end department store or the specialized boutique or the cheap and easy discount store.

The important point here is that work can be *academically* challenging without being *intellectually* challenging.

This is the big, big quesstion about 99% of the homework out there. It is *possible* to assign intellectually challenging homework — my own teachers did it — but it is rarer and rarer as administrations count value more and more by pounds of paper and less and less by those silly intangibles like scholarship and originality and depth of thought.

Academically challenging work is hard and long. It is a daily grind to keep up with the classwork and then a whole second day’s work to keep up with the homework. There’s a lot of reading and writing and math and memorization of facts. It is fatiguing and you know you are working. Definitely the (so-called) Puritan ethic in action — ten-hour days for ten year olds. But it doesn’t necessarily teach anything or do any good at all! Other than enforce the factory work ethic, that is.

Intellectually challenging work is *quite* different. It puzzles you and makes you think. It may annoy and irritate you until you have the new concept aligned with your old concepts, or until you have matured and discarded the old concept. It wakes you up at night, sometimes wondering what is going on, sometimes with a flash of insight. It takes days and weeks and months to get something right. It is very frustrating while you are searching for a handle on how to start. It may involve controversy or challenging, for example debating and logic. Intellectually challenging work *does* take time and work, often more time and work in total than the academic-but-not-intellectual kind, but it takes time in a different way. It takes hours of thought, research, investigation, and more thought before the results are produced. (This scares the pants off administrators who are not scholars themselves and want to do everything by business school methods)

Examples:

academic-but-not-intellectual: Use the sine law and cosine law (pages 211 and 215) to calculate the missing measures on these twenty traingles.
intellectually challenging: You have the proof of the cosine law for acute-anglesd triangles on page 110. Know it and be able to reproduce it (with different diagram and letters) for a test. Now, draw an obtuse-angled triangle and prove, by yourself, the cosine law for the obtuse angle.
(I had this assignment myself — in Grade 10) (In a working-class public school)

academic-but-not-intellectual: Write a summary of “A Tale of Two Cities” and hand it in on Friday. (To prove to a non-intellectual teacher who hates reading that you have actually forced yourself to read it, no doubt.)
intellectually challenging: Go through “A Tale of Two Cities” and find all the examples of *symbolism* you can. Bring your list to class, and be prepared to discuss and defend your examples.
(I had this assignment myself — in Grade 10) (In a working-class public school)

academic-but-not-intellectual: Memorize the list of the states (or provinces), capitals, and their major products. Memorize the dates of entry of each into the country. Test on Friday.
intellectually challenging: Name the two companies that were involved in the exploration and development of the fur trade in northern Canada. Compare and contrast their activities.
(I had this assignment myself — on a Grade 6 final exam) (working-class, public school)

academic-but-not-intellectual: Memorize this book and recite it back to the teacher to get a gold star in “reading”.
intellectually challenging: Learn the basic phonics rules and read any book of your choice independently, just for the fun of it.
(Guess which actually works to develop readers?)

Of course, intellectually demanding work is just that — demanding. It takes work for the teacher, and underprepared teachers are happy to fall back on rote memory which they understand. Rote memory is so much easier and faster to mark, too, and even professors of education are often misguided enough to recommend that as a good thing. Then administrators find it much easier to weigh the poundage of paper and the number of multiple-choices right than to allow some subjectivity into the system — that causes controversy, and their life’s goal is not to rock the boat. And debating controversial issues is absolutely out. And then there are the well-meaning parents who say the work is too difficult for their kids, the kids are complaining, and why can’t they just memorize the states like “normal” classes? And why can’t they show their knowledge in other ways without writing an essay? (of course, the skill of writing an essay is one of the things we want to teach — and then what?)
There is a choice —easy, boring, pointless, fatiguing, repetitive homework, assigned just to keep people thinking how much hard work is being done; or real challenging thinking assignments, which by their nature are going to demand higher-order thinking skills, brain strain, occasional (hopefully temporary) frustration, and other research and writing.
I think a lot more teachers would assign more productive homework if they dared. Being hauled into the principal’s office and threatened with firing a few times (yes, I have) because parents are threatening lawsuits will tend to limit the intellectual challenge you can offer.

Victoria is right again. Why make our kids hate school because of homework. They need time to be a kid and the parents need time to enjoy their kids.

I think for a bright child with LD, much of what they do may be academically challenging . But then how do you make the work doable, and still meaningful in an intellectual way? Just a question that keeps me up at night…

This is an interesting topic.

The thing for me is that the intellectually challenging work is easy for my son. It is where he thrives. Creativity is his strength. One piece of work he had to do was to look at various objects like a basket and a board and think of new uses for them.
He came up with some pretty far out stuff.
When he gets work like this he is excited and motivated. The problem areas like where to put the period and the capital are the areas he is asked to spend time with. I personally think he knows this stuff because when you quiz him on it he gets it right. He just doesn’t focus well enough to do it all the time. He is too busy thinking up new uses for that basket.

So what should he spend his time on. I think he needs to stay with his strengths. I think that he needs to continue to love to learn.

I want him to have homework that makes him come home and THINK!

Gee, I expected a lot more people to get mad at me over this one! Maybe it’s hidden too deep on the board by now.

How to get people able to do intellectually challenging work — well, you work up to it bit by bit. In Grade 1 you give math problems with four-word sentences, in Grade 2 you use more vocabulary and longer sentences and two-step problems, in Grade 3 you give decision-making problems and why and how questions, and so on. What does NOT work is the present system of hiding all the problem-solving in one shapter which the teacher skiips over because she “doesn’t have time” and then throwing an advanced “thinking skills” book at the kids all at once in the higher grades — too little, too late, and too big a pill to swallow at once. It takes those two/three dirty little four-letter words, time and hard work, over a lon period of time.
Most kids of normal intelligence can handle far more intellectual challenge than they are getting. There is a problem with the slower learner, and I don’t have any easier answer for that. But the entire class shouldn’t be held back to the pace of the lowest 10% either.

As far as the kid who revels in the hard stuff and fights with the basic skills, well, welcome to my world. No easy answers there either, but if you teach thoroughly at the beginning (eg punctuation is *part* of reading and writing, not an afterthought) you can avoid some of these issues although certainly not all of them. You need to get the student’s pride involved — I can read Tolkien and do algebra, of course I can spell my book reports properly and hand in work that is at least readable, and I would be ashamed to do any less, for my *own* sake, not the teacher’s. When teachers tell a student “You can do better than this” they are hoping to access that personal pride in achievement. I always worry when parents complain bitterly about this — don’t they want the teacher to have high expectations and to encourage the student to the highest possible level? Yes, there are reasonable limits and I have seen and heard teachers passing them, but there is also the internal effort to change that we all have to make on occasion. There must be a happy medium here.

Victoria you did not outrage me and I am the parent of two special needs boys, but I also have a daughter who complains that “school moves to slow”. She complains about the teachers always having to repeat things and relearning stuff from year to year. She finds most homework boring such as read this book and write an outline. I remember growing up as a kid being told read this book, then answering a qustion. For example we read To Kill a Mockingbird and then had to write about how the statement “a small child shall lead them” applied to the book. You needed to read the whole book and understand it in order to answer the question. My own freshman son has to read the book this year, it will be interesting to see what assignments he has along with it.

I agree. It seems that for my son the methods being empoyed to teach him the basics weren’t working. They couldn’t seem to teach him to read and he struggled with math.

Yet, for some reason I have been very successful in teaching him the basics. Thanks to methods you shared he now knows his times tables up to 5 and no longer uses his fingers to count. I think they try to do too much in the sense that they mix the basics in with the complex esoteric stuff. It is not straight forward. It add complexity where there should often be simplicity. (I am a follower of the KISS principle in all areas of life, Keep it Simple Stupid)

So when they try to mix it all together it just doesn’t work for my son. He comes away with nothing, confused by the basic and then not able to think about the complex.

I think what I am describing is part of the whole language method. I think that when the teach basics they should just teach basics, teach phonemic awareness, teach multiplication, teach punctuation. Does it always have to be embedded in a lesson that requires mulitiple skills to be present? I sometimes even get confused by the things they are asking. It sometimes seems just so convoluted. Instead of thinking he just sits there confused.

I agree totally. There are always fads and movements in education. And let’s face it, *teaching* the alphabet or the times tables is downright boring for an adult. What a very large number of so-called teachers and writers and professors of education have forgotten is that *learning* and *mastering* a new skill, even the alphabet or the times tables, is tremendously exciting for the student. Just think how excited you still are when you learn a new skill like throwing a pot on a wheel or saying a sentence in Japanese or mastering a karate kick for the first time! In order to get over their *own* boredom with what seem to them to be repetitious tasks, people have invented these mixed-up programs that try to do everything at the same time and succeed all too often in doing nothing. The kids lose the excitement of learning because they never really learn and master something — just hack away at it for many years faking and imitating until they can sort of kind of do it. They also lose the excitement of moving on to work in more depth and doing the advanced levels, because the advanced level work has been dragged down to the beginning and chopped up into bitty pieces for little kids, so by the time they get to the level where it should be new and a wonderful step ahead, it’s old hat and a source of years of frustration. Anybody else there old enough to remember the excitement of being old enough to pass out of arithmetic and move into real mathematics and take algebra? Now it’s all called math and algebra is pushed down to the primary grades — but why, if kids are doing algebra in primary, are the national scores still bottom of the barrel? Somehow eight years of repetition is leading to less mastery than one or two years of fresh teaching used to. — must be a message in there. And the same for reading — remember when you were old enough and knew enough to write an essay or do a book report on a real novel from the library? And how it was scary but you were proud to be doing big kid things? Now you do book reports from Day 1 of Grade 1 — so why are the reading and writing scores dropping instead of rising?

Yes, Victoria. My son is OH SO PROUD of his times tables. It is like lighting the fuse for further learning. I can say, “See how well you did with those times tables”

Mel Levine always says, “Success is a vitamin.”

I really have you to thank for this. Where do I send the check?

Too bad this message is lost so many pages back. This is such an important concept.