Mom Is Teaching

This next scrawl of mine assumes that you guys have either not read the book (The Case Against Homework by Sara Bennett Nancy Kalish), are reading the book now or are waiting to win the book in the contest. 

There were places in the book where she took answers from various teachers, parents, students and innocent bystanders and quote them.  It is obvious that they feel much the same I do about these quotes but they were much nicer than I’m going to be.  And, for those of you are thinking about homeschooling but haven’t yet decided, you are teetering on the fence, waiting on something to convince you that one way is better than that the others, this is a section that may send you running to the school to retrieve your children. 

Like I said, the quotes come from the book, but the co-authors were kind in their shock over these answers.  Some relate, some don’t, but either way, they are all shocking in much the same way.

The discussion here is how a teacher comes up with homework assignments.  We’ve already discussed that there is no class in college that teaches you this.  I’m not even going to label the quotes with the person who made the statements, just my true feelings.

1.  “I see how much time it takes the slowest child and the quickest workers, divide that in half, and then assign work that should take from one to two hours.

Pardon me here but what the hell kind of method is that?  That’s how you decide which kid has to sweep and which one has to wash dishes, not how an entire class of kids are affected. ……grrrrrrrrrrrr

2.  I base it on how long it takes my own daughter (who is in the same grad as I teach) to complete her assignmetns in a focused and uninterrupted manner.

And, does this teacher actually believe that these children are being sent home to a focused and uninterrupted place.  In any way possible?  This is nuts, her daughter could be a genius or border line mentally retarded, she doesn’t say but either way, what kind of gauge is that?

3.  I just plain guess.

I would like to say that this is the method that most of my teachers through the years used.

I’m going to leave this one at this point because I had the beauty of small schools where the teachers worked together, they took into consideration church nights and extra-curricular activities and worked our homework around that.  That doesn’t mean it was any better than anything else, it just means that they used the “I just plain guess” method and they tried to take a few of the communities issue into considerations.

Discuss.