Letters to the Editor
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Parent whining a large part of broken US education system
This article is typical of the constant stream of complaints coming from students and parents that is constantly working to undermine education in America. Kids will always complain about homework and school work in general. It is not in most kids' nature to enjoy sitting down and doing homework. I remember hating homework at that age and fighting it every step of the way. The difference for me was that instead of enabling my whining by agreeing with me and lending credence to my argument that I shouldn't have to do 10 spelling words a week, my parents just told me to suck it up and deal. Which is the better lesson for kids? That they should constantly complain and try to avoid doing hard work by arguing or that they should do it because their education is paramount and worth the hard work it takes to get it?
As an educator, I have seen that with many of the older students I teach, any amount of homework/classwork is too much. Any task more difficult than a multiple-choice worksheet is considered cruel and unusual (God forbid they have to write an essay). This attitude, once again, is to be expected. Kids are kids. But when parents take the kids' side and start lobbying against spending time and effort on education, everyone suffers. The kids' standards for work are lowered, the educators lower their standards to accommodate parents, and the parents end up with whiny, lazy and willfully ignorant children.
The author should keep in mind that the workload for US students is relatively low compared with workloads for students in other countries. Not to mention that many kids don't even get the privilege of being educated at all and instead pass their days helping earn the family's living. Parents in this country need to realize that hard work and education is what got this country where it is and that abandoning that by lowering standards and reducing workloads to accommodate the puling of parents and students will only further erode the quality of American schools.
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Testify Sister!!!
Ayelet Waldman's article on her children's homework reminds me of why I am generally opposed to it.
Throughout school, I often received D's and F's for classes even though I often did A and B work on tests. Why? Because I wouldn't do homework.
I always felt it was an intrusion into families' and children's personal lives. Based on my own experience and what I see my nieces doing today, I could say it is quite easy and possible for a minor child to spend more than 40 hours each week between school and homework. Does that leave any time or energy for recreation or household chores?
With the current brouhaha over childhood obesity has anyone considered that homework might be a contributing factor? Time spend going over something at home that should have been taught in class could be spent running, jumping rope, shooting hoops, swimming, bicycling, playing in organized sports, etc.
And, as was pointed out in the book, "The End of Homework," assigning homework gets the teachers out of the job of teaching and allows them to dump that job onto the parents. Ayelet Waldman's article exactly describes that situation.
This dumping work onto parents explains why lower-income students generally don't do as well as those from upper-income families. It's hard to learn your reading, writing and 'rithmatic when the teacher doesn't do her job and the parents are too busy working overtime just to keep a roof over the kids' heads to try to teach the kids what they should be learning in school. A school which is supported by the tax dollars of those same overworked parents.
Several years ago, I read an article about the homework policies of the Piscattaway, N.J. school district. Under their guidelines, teachers were not only limited in the amount of homework they can assign, but they couldn't hold it against students if they didn't do it.
Doing homework would only count as extra credit when report cards came out. A student who did well on their in-class work would receive a grade based on that work.
But until such a system becomes the rule for all school systems, the concept of "unschooling" described in a recent Salon.com article is looking a lot like what I will do when I have children.
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Too much homework?
Perhaps if the author of this article had done just a little more homework when she was in school, she would now know that Nebraska is not a rectangular state or that the word she wanted was regimen and not regime.
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Geography is hell?
I fully sympathise with the overworked youngsters profiled in "Homework hell". However, Ms. Waldman incidentally notes that Carlie Williams' nephew "made a flat rectangle" as a relief map of Nebraska. I hope the boy wasn't too crushed when he received a failing grade -- Nebraska is, of course, not a rectangle. Maybe Ms. Waldman's generation just wasn't assigned enough geography homework?
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Amen to Homework Hell!
I can remember rubbing my son's back as he cried over the amount of homework he had to do in second grade. He was in three "gifted and talented" classes (read YUPPIE track), and we took him out of the math one because the homework was so age inappropriate. We figured that homework charts at seven was a little much. The best elementary homework my children ever had: our first graders were asked to read (or be read to) for twenty minutes every night and we signed a sheet verifying it had been done. This accomplished what Waldman's sources say is important: it made school (and reading) important and established a time for homework. It also helped us have quiet time together. The irony is that by the time my kids were in middle school, teachers were cowed by basketball and football coaches who demanded not only practice from the players, but wanted other students free to attend games. Therefore, homework was assigned when it was least age-appropriate and not only ineffective, but perhaps damaging. Then, when it would have done some good, students were allowed to sail through. Go figure.