Mom Is Teaching

Ok, enough with the prolonging and introducing you to what I am going to talk about next.  The time is now…. it will probably take several posts but I’m ready to read the rest of my book, The Case Against Homework by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish, and take some action, but as I said before, I want it to be fresh in my mind.

One thing that caught my attention and a few people mentioned in comments is the beauty of a small school.  I attended a really small elementary and junior high school.  Normally there were between 15 and 18 students in my class, I loved it.  There was one class of each grade and at one point, a couple of grades were combined to maximize teachers. 

I would love my children to have that opportunity, however, even right here where I grew up, small schools like that simply can’t make it.  And, so they close and other schools get the overflow even when their building and equipment aren’t prepared to handle. 

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There’s a quote in the book, TCAH, that reads almost like a quote I received from a friend who is a reading coach.  This is it, and this should be the end of it…but it isn’t…

“Homework is designed to reinforce the concepts taught in school, not manipulate people’s schedules.”

Enter problem:  teachers lose track of that train of thought and people’s schedules are messed up and kids free time is wasted, sorry to be so blunt, but it is the truth.

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This is the part that every parent needs to commit to memory (you know, like homework, haha, I crack  myself up),

“As LeTendre wrote in his 2007 report, A Nation Spins Its Wheels:  The Role of Homework and National Homework Policies in National Student Achievement Levels in Math and Science, “when schools are effective, students gain little from doing more homework.”"

Therefore, it would be safe to say, maybe someone somewhere (especially in the realm of education in my world), that possibly some schools feel that what they do during the day is inadequate and thus homework becomes necessary to finish what they should have handled during the day.

End of sentence.  End of thought.  End of it.  Period.

And…I know, I said end of it but …..another thought goes like this, “do teachers actually grade all that work?”  Of course not, so why keep assigning it? 

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I have repeated this next sentence over and over and obviously other folks out there feel the same,

“Few people over forty can even remember their parents asking them if they had homework, let alone supervising their assignments.  And, doing work for your child - a common practice today - was unheard of.  Partly, this was because homework was seen as the child’s job and the amounts were so manageable that it could stay that way.”

I honestly felt that my parents viewed school work in that very manner.  And I hear parents all the time talking about doing their child’s homework for them.  I want to eat their head off, I mean gently tell them what a mistake their are making.