found the courage to say ENOUGH. We will no longer be a slave to the threat of a bad grade for not doing meaningless homework over things we have already learned. We will concentrate on learning subject matter and learning the lessons of life we have abandoned along with our family life due to pointless homework.

I have repeatedly been told that my children need to do this homework to learn to follow the rules. There is a much better way to teach them the importance of respect and responsibility through the experiences of family life and having the time to talk and listen to my children. Is this an extreme reaction-maybe.

But do not worry that you have led me to this decision. Instead, you gave me the courage to to respond to the decision I had already made for the mental, physical and emotional well being of my children. Do not have a heavy heart or be burdened that you are responsible for my decision. Instead be proud that you have given me the much needed back up that I will need. Again — maybe extreme, but so is 4 and 5 hours of homework a night.

I really appreciated Laura’s email and I did feel proud that she had found the courage to stand up to her children’s teachers through reading an excerpt from my book. After all, that was precisely the reason I wrote it.

The following day, she sent me an email telling me what had happened when she went to her children’s school:

I got a call from the principal today. She said my children would not be penalized for not doing this work???? They will work around it????

That’s it, I just had to say enough.

I should have found your book sooner, or the courage. I didn’t even have to support my actions. “We are not doing it, it is negatively affecting my children and family life,” is all it took. While I am happy with the outcome, I am also dumbfounded.

Thank you. We had a great dinner and played games as a family. One son shared a devotional he will present to his friends in a devotional group the 8th grade boys have started together. The 5th grader, who had been struggling so much, smiled and relaxed for the first time in six weeks. And the 5 year old got his share of time that I previously had to spend helping the other two.

As I looked around the house and at all the daily chores that had had to be ignored, I knew it would wait one more day. Finally we had family time again.

I Got the Principal To Move My Daughter to a Second-Grade Class with a More Flexible Teacher
by Cynthia Schultz

For the first time all year, my daughter got off the bus smiling on Wednesday. Not the manic “I got my way” or “I’m so special” smile but the smile of an 8 year old who had a good day.

A happy smile may seem small but it was the culmination of 9 weeks of pain, frustration, tears, accusations, meetings and more meetings, doubts, fears, promises (broken and kept), and meltdowns (not all of them my daughter’s).

From the first, I felt that my daughter’s classroom assignment was wrong for her. The teacher was very controlling, causing my daughter to rebel. She came home with 40 — 50 math problems per night, 20 spelling words

(plus 5 bonus words) for the spelling test on Thursday (apparently so the teacher could make sure the tests got into their Friday folders), an AR book for reading each night, and homework from
the special ed teacher who seemed to have her own agenda. Curriculum Night revealed that any unfinished homework would be done in “study hall” when the others were at recess and children would only be allowed to check out books from the library that the teacher deemed “appropriate”. When I questioned anything, I was told “that’s how it is.”

By about the third week, I asked the principal about changing my daughter’s classroom assignment. Things were not pleasant at home. I was frustrated and overworked. My daughter was frustrated and
overworked. I couldn’t get the teacher to give on anything. The principal required a meeting. That wasn’t pleasant either.

What I found out was interesting. Apparently, it’s the parents’ decision to make, not the principal, teacher, or anyone else’s but the principal didn’t want me to know that.

I did play their game, I let them have two extra chances. After the second one, I was ignored. Guess they thought I’d given up. Then, one day, my daughter refused to go to school. The only way I could get her to go was to take her to school (she usually rides the bus) and promise to talk to the principal.

Three hours later, the principal knew I wasn’t giving up.

One week later, my daughter walked into a different classroom.

That afternoon, she got off the bus with the smile.

I saw the difference immediately. When she forgot her homework folder at school, the teacher called me and said, “Let’s just blow off the homework today.” The next day she had 5 math problems and 10 spelling words.

Friday I met with the new teacher. She’s kind, creative, flexible and seems to really love what she does. The kids have “Reader Theater” every week where they put on a little “play”. Nothing fancy, just
something fun to read every day then perform on Friday.

There are couches and a loft for independent reading time.

When I told her we may have days when we don’t get homework done, her response was, “That’s okay. We learn skills so we can use them in the real world.” Reading billboards and menus fulfills reading requirements and pricing things in the store and counting out money fulfills math requirements.

There was not one thing we didn’t agree on. Not one.

The most revealing thing, though, came as my daughter was telling me about her first day. She was very excited about the loft, the couches, the Reader Theater, the friends she was already making, the
running around the track (she loves to run) for a break in the morning. Then, with amazement she said, “And Ms. J. didn’t yell at us once today!” I didn’t know about the yelling but who yells at second
graders?

It’s only been three days and I’m trying to remain objective but I think, now that she’s in a nurturing environment, my daughter is going to blossom this year.

I can’t wait to see it.

In June, the school released the results of its homework survey of parents. A question on the survey asked if the time students spent on homework was “not enough,” “too much,” “about right” or “don’t know.” Out of the total number of parents who responded to the survey, the largest percentage, 42 percent, felt “too much” time was spent on homework. 38 percent of parents felt the amount of homework was “just right.” Sixteen percent felt there was “not enough” time spent on homework, while 4 percent selected “don’t know.”

As for the amount of time spent on homework, 28.05 percent of the respondents said their children spend between two to three hours on homework each night. The second highest response, 22.65 percent, said one to two hours. 21.95 percent said their children do three to hour hours of homework a night, and 15.68 said their children do more than four hours of homework. 9.58 percent, said their children do less than an hour of homework.

Almost 31 percent of parents with 11th-graders said their children do between three to four hours of homework a night. The second highest percentage, 24.56 percent, said their children do more than four hours.

I hope that, with 42 percent of parents thinking their children spend too much time on homework, the incoming principal will follow the lead of his predecessor and continue to look for ways to reduce homework and stress.

A reader who has been trying to get opt-out policies at her children’s Alberta schools recently sent me a link to an Alberta school with an opt-out policy.

It reads:

St. Andrew’s School staff and school council spent considerable time reviewing homework. The dialogue was in depth and revealed many ideas and points of view both with staff and with parents.

As a school community, we came to the following understanding. Parents are the prime educators for their children, and as such have important responsibilities as to the personal and educational growth of their children. Thus parents must decide what is in the best interest of their children in regards to home work.

Home work will continue to be offered by the school. The homework will be created with the express intent of supporting student learning. Should a parent wish to limit or eliminate homework for a child they are invited by teachers to meet to identify the level of homework that will be done at home.

Students are not to be penalized in any fashion for this parental choice. Student responsibility for assigned activities that can be completed in class will remain.

The One Reason Duncan’s “Race to the Top Will Fail
By Marion Brady
November 4, 2009

When “Race to the Top” fails, as it will, the main reason won’t be any of those currently being advanced by the corporate interests and politicians now running the education show.

It won’t fail because of lack of academic rigor, poor teaching, weak administrators, too-short school year, union resistance, differing state standards, insufficient performance incentives, sorry teacher training, or lingering traces of the early-20th Century Progressive movement.

It will fail primarily for a reason not even being mentioned by leaders of today’s reform effort: A curriculum adopted in 1893 that grows more dysfunctional with each passing year. Imagine a car being driven down a winding rural road with all the passengers, including the driver, peering intently out the back window.

The familiar, traditional curriculum is so at odds with the natural desire to learn that laws, threats and other extrinsic motivators are necessary to keep kids in their seats and on task.

It has no built-in mechanisms forcing it to adapt to change. Ignoring solid research about their importance in intellectual development, it treats art, music, dance, and play as “frills.”

It isolates educators in specialized fields, discouraging their interest in and professional dialog about the whole of which their specializations are parts. It fails to explore questions essential to ethical and moral development.

It neglects important fields of study, and has no system for determining the relative importance of those fields it doesn’t neglect.

Its failure to reflect the integrated nature of reality and the seamless way the brain perceives it makes it difficult to apply what’s being taught to real-world experience.
And that barely begins a list of the problems.

There’s no easy, quick fix, but one thing is certain.

Doing with greater diligence and determination what brought America’s schools to their present state will simply move forward the day when failure becomes obvious to all. There are, however, some things Congress and the administration could do.

First, they could stop basing education policy on the opinions of business leaders, syndicated columnists, mayors, lawyers, and assorted other education “experts” who haven’t passed the 10,000-hour test-10,000 hours of face-to-face dialog with real students in real classrooms, all the while thinking analytically about what they’re doing, and why.

“Experts” who see more rigor, more tests, more international comparisons, more “data-driven decision-making,” more math and science, more school closings, more Washington-initiated, top-down reform policy as the primary cure for education’s ills, are amateurs. And policymakers who can’t see the perversity of simultaneously spending billions on innovation and billions on standardization should consider finding other work.

Second, Congress and the administration could accept the fact that, in formal schooling, the curriculum is where the rubber meets the road.

No matter school type-public, charter, private, parochial, magnet, virtual, home, whatever; no matter the level-elementary, secondary, college, or graduate school; no matter first-rate physical facilities, highly qualified faculty, enlightened administrators, sophisticated technology, generous funding, caring parents, supportive communities, disciplined, motivated students, no matter anything else affecting school performance, if the curriculum is lousy, the education will be lousy.

Third, Congress and the administration could stop for a moment, think, then acknowledge what they surely must know, that the key to humankind’s survival is, at it has always been, human variability.

Trying to standardize kids by forcing them all through the same minimum standards hoops isn’t just child abuse. It’s a sure-fire way to squeeze out what little life is left in America’s public schools after decades of appallingly simplistic, misguided, patchwork policy. Maximum performance, not the minimum standards measured by tests, should be the institution’s aim.

Anything less invites societal catastrophe.

If Congress and the administration are wise, they’ll use their levers of power not to tighten but to loosen the rigor screws and end the innovation-stifling role of Carnegie Units, course distribution requirements, mandated instructional programs, and other curriculum-standardizing measures.

They’ll do what enlightened school boards have always done and say to educators, “We want you to unleash creativity, ingenuity, resourcefulness, imagination, and enthusiasm, and send the young off with a lasting love of learning. Tell us what you need in order to make that happen, and we’ll do our best to provide the necessary support.”

Even the suggestion of such a policy will appall many.

We say we’re big on freedom, democracy, individualism, autonomy, choice, and so on, but advocating aligning our schools with our political rhetoric invites being labeled as too radical to be taken seriously.

Such a policy, most are likely to believe, would trigger chaos, pandemonium, anarchy.

Not so. Two things would happen.

In most schools, institutional inertia, entrenched bureaucracy, and pressure from powerful corporate interests, would maintain the status quo.

In most schools, but not all. A few would point the way to a better-than-world-class education by demonstrating what experienced teachers have always known, that the traditional curriculum barely scratches the surface of kids’ intellectual potential.

Some of the things that I particularly like about the policy:

• the homework must be differentiated
• teachers must keep to a minimum the number of assignments that are due the following day so as not to interfere with extra curricular activities and “activities that support personal and family wellness”
• homework shouldn’t be due immediately after holidays, significant faith days, or lengthier school breaks (December or March Break)
• group projects must be worked on at school during the school day

Read the policy here.

And a big congratulations to the principal, Jan Olson of Barrie, Ontario’s Prince of Wales elementary school, who started homework reform in his District.

Why Homework Doesn’t Work
by Psych Mom

I’ve become a believer in the last year that homework is not the way to go. Despite this, my 8 year old started Grade 3 this year and serious homework is a part of that at our school. We parents got the schedule from the teacher of when various tasks were being assigned and when that’s all due, the implication being that we would be monitoring and reminding, I guess. It was expressly written that the work is the child’s responsibility. It was not expressly implied what my duties were but informing me, I assume, is tantamount to making me a part of it all. This weekend I knew there were things my child had to do for math homework. She never talked about them.…the sheets sat on top of her binder all weekend. Sunday afternoon, against my better judgment, I suggested that she get those sheets and we’d take a look. She did. This is how it unfolded. It wasn’t pretty and I freely admit that it was all, my fault. I am not a good teacher.

She couldn’t read all of the instructions….she needed me to read some of the words. She only read the top part.…nothing of the bottom of the page instructions. The instructions were confusing because she was to make a
graph, but there was a sheet of paper with a grid on it attached, as well as space on the front instruction sheet, that said, “Graph here”. No mention of the grid was anywhere or what to do with it. So I suggested she use the grid on the next page for her graph. Labeling the graph was a nightmare. We were measuring the height of family members…all two of us. She knew I was over a hundred centimeters so she started her vertical axis with 100 at the bottom.….…(My blood is starting to simmer because now I’m into teaching about scaling). We erase all the numbers and she writes “0” on the horizontal axis…“No, it has to go on the other side, sweetie and count by 10’s up the side.” How else were we going to decide on what scale to use?…I’m sure a teacher would have known how to help a child figure out what units needed to be on each axis…..but not me. I told her what to do. Then when she’s plotting the two numbers she colours in the one square that is closest to each of our heights…no bar graphing is happening here. About 7 minutes after we began, I’m saying, “Come on, I’ve seen your work since Kindergarten …you’ve done a graph before”. Half a minute later, she’s throwing the papers out in front of her and declaring, “I hate HOMEWORK” and “YOU are so mean” and “I have my own ways of doing things, you know”

So I said,” Pack it up please, put it in your binder…put it away.”

We could have sat together at the table and I could have gone through it one step at a time (i.e. do it for her) or I could have spent half an hour teaching her about graphs. But why should I be doing that? She tells me she doesn’t like grade 3 because the homework is hard.…after 4 weeks of school. She’s mad at me for not helping her. I’m mad because I caused the fight we had. I’m not a teacher. I don’t want to teach her about graphs. I don’t have the patience. There shouldn’t be the assumption that parents corral and organize the homework, sit and teach their children and create this “special” time.….perhaps some parents want to spend their time with their children this way. I don’t. I send my child to school for that. It’s my job to get her to clean her room and pick up after herself. I’m not qualified to be her teacher. I’m more likely to damage her feelings, and then in turn feel guilty and remorseful myself for being an inadequate parent. Aside from the emotional upheaval homework can cause, shouldn’t we also consider how we might also be sabotaging the teacher’s work when we do things we shouldn’t because we’re not teachers? And do they really want me to do things my way? My way involves making it as painless as possible for myself and my child….I could have drawn a wonderful bar graph, with labels and colour-coding…means and standard deviations too.
But what am I teaching her then?

1. I am sooooo aggravated about my homework situation that I can’t think of anymore sentences.
2. I want to decline this homework so badly.
3. I despise my homework situation.
4. My homework situation is disturbing me.
5. My second encounter with homework is sickening.
6. I wasn’t to establish an anti-paper club, A.P. for short.
7. I want to forbid homework after 8:00 p.m.

Or, take inspiration from Kerry Dickinson, a parent from Danville, California, who successfully changed homework policy in her community and is still advocating on her children’s behalf. Here’s what she did recently:

Advocacy is an Ongoing Process
by Kerry Dickinson

This year after Back to School night at both the middle and high schools my boys attend, I sent each of their teachers an email. In the email I said I had just read a really interesting book called “Rethinking Homework” by Cathy Vatterott and I had some extra copies I’d like to share with anyone interested.

To my surprise I got a few emails back right away from teachers at both schools saying “sure, I’d like to borrow the book.” Well, just last week I got a nice letter back from my 10th grader’s geometry teacher. I received permission from him to reprint it:

Hi Kerry,

Thanks for the loan of the book. It generated much “rethinking” at lunch in the math dept. While many of us were initially skeptical about a new homework paradigm, we found ourselves agreeing with much of the book. We are opposed to “busy work” and grading homework for accuracy. I hope that my assignments are appropriate, both as regards length of time and amount of practice. In Calculus, I think it appropriate to give homework no weight, but in my classes, I need to reward the effort – about 10–15% seems right.

I feel bad when I see my students losing sleep to do projects of questionable value, and pledge that I will never do this. Sometimes, if I must spend more time on questions than I planned, or there is a short period for some forgotten reason, I may give more homework than you feel appropriate. If so, I apologize.

Thanks again

This particular teacher has been teaching at the high school for over 20 years. I was pleasantly surprised (and told my son so) that he was open to reading a book on homework and took the next step by sharing and discussing it with his colleagues.

My son hasn’t complained about his math homework this year, he just accepts it as a fact of life, but there have been years that math has been a real struggle for him. Even so, I think it always encouraging when a teacher (especially one who has been teaching for so long) is willing to re-think the homework he/she is assigning.

So what did I do after I received his letter? I emailed the principal letting him know how pleased I was that this teacher took the time to read and think about this book. I also sent another book to school with my son for the same teacher. This one is called “The Mathematician’s Lament.” It discusses how we kill the love of math by teaching it the way we do. It also gives suggestions for ways to teach it better.

(You can read more about what Kerry does and thinks on her excellent blog, eastbayhomework.blogspot).

After reading the piece, I sent Mr. Mathews the following email and posted it as a comment as well. I encourage you to post your own comments.

I read your recent piece in the Washington Post and, of course, I’m delighted you’re always rethinking homework.

I’m glad that the teachers you’re talking to are also thinking more about homework. One of the biggest issues missing from the homework debate, in my opinion, is the quality of the homework. If my memory is correct, you no longer have any children in high school, so maybe you haven’t had a chance to take a look at the kind of homework most kids are getting.

I do still have a child in high school, so I get to see, on a nightly basis, the homework that teachers give and that society still thinks is so important. And I’m pretty sure my daughter’s New York City public high school is typical of any large school.

I don’t think my daughter has yet had one homework assignment last year or this that was worth any time at all. Nevertheless, most of her teachers assign homework every night, and homework counts toward her grade. Most teachers provide no feedback on the homework whatsoever; they mainly spot check to make sure the students have complied with the requirements. None of it requires original thinking, there is very little writing or reading, and there are a lot of projects similar to the posters and “characters in a can” that she did in elementary school.

Whenever I’m on a talk show, there’s always someone who claims that homework is very important, as though students are being assigned interesting, challenging work that involves creative and analytic thinking. Neither in 9th grade, nor so far this year in 10th, has my daughter written an essay that was returned with any feedback. So the one skill that students really need, writing, isn’t being taught at all. It’s no wonder that when I taught writing to first year law students, I had to do so much remediation.

The real problem, in my opinion, is that education in general isn’t very good. Sure there’s a school here and there where students are involved in thrilling discoveries, sit in small seminars, have interesting and engaged teachers, and get a fantastic education. But the majority of kids sit in classes where teachers drone on and on from outdated textbooks and give the same tests they’ve been giving for as long as they’ve been teaching. (Have you read The Global Achievement Gap? The author takes “walking tours” of schools and explains what he sees going on in the classroom.)

As I stated at the outset, I’m glad to see you’re still thinking about homework and not taking it at face value. May I suggest that you take a look at the assignments the kids in your local public high schools are getting and see whether you think they’re worth spending any time on. (Or, if you’d like, I’d be happy to describe the work my daughter receives on a nightly basis.) I stand by my longstanding advice: Let students of all ages read, rather than inundate them with busywork. They’ll all end up more literate and able to think.

All best,

Sara Bennett
co-author, The Case Against Homework
founder, Stop Homework

Operation Daddy to the Rescue
by Rafael Ortiz

Since last year, when my daughter was in first grade, she started to question me about why she had to do homework. She told me that she went to school the whole day and then still had school work to do at home, but her mom didn’t have to bring her work from work. I would tell her it’s because that’s what everyone does– it’s school.

But then I started thinking about it and realized that all this homework gives little time to explore out of the box. My daughter used to asked about underwater life, what’s out in space, loved to solve riddles and liked to invent stuff. But homework is burning her out.

My daughter has been bringing home homework since kindergarten. All of it seemed to be a waste of time; none of it was challenging or interesting. Now, in second grade the homework is still not challenging BUT rather longer. It takes my daughter about one hour and 30 minutes some days. She has lost that happy spark she had and she has started complaining that it’s too long.

I discussed it with the teacher and asked her to show me research on how long homework should be because I felt that my child was getting too much homework. Her response was that it’s the district policy that second graders need to spend 30–35 minutes and that if the student spends more time than that they should not advance to second grade. Knowing my kid I knew right away that this second grade teacher took it personally, but I held my ground and told her that it should be quality rather than quantity. She then said that she had been approached by other parents where they demanded that she give more homework. So I told her then to go ahead and give them more but that I was requesting less for my kid.

So this is the 8th week and we still go back and forth on the homework issue. The teacher still hasn’t modified my kid’s homework, so I took what I called “Operation Daddy to the Rescue,” where I looked at the homework assigned for that day and I choose a few problems (math, English , vocabulary, etc) and I tell my girl to do for example 5 out of 20 math problems and the rest I give her the answers. It seems to be working because her so called weekly test scores have not gone down.

The reason why her teacher says she gives the students a lot of homework is because of some number that schools get assigned every school year by some government test. The higher the number, the more prestigious the school is. Who cares!!! They are using my daughter like a robot — they want output and zero creativity.

For her x-mas vacation I plan to let the teacher know that my 2nd grader has plans and will not do HOLIDAY HOMEWORK!

Advocacy Can Make a Difference
by Deidra Hewitt

I emailed a letter to the school Superintendent and the Board of Education, regarding the “sign or your child will be punished” policies, that I find so offensive. The Superintendent contacted me for a meeting. I was really pleased with the outcome of this encounter. The Superintendent of Schools completely agreed with me, about parent signatures being voluntary. He was against children being held accountable for parent behavior. He indicated that changes were in the works. Starting at the county level, he advised me that the “accountability agreements” were being phased out, and that they will be gone next year. He stated that he is actively searching for ways to engage parents of disadvantaged students. He agrees that countless signatures do not accomplish this goal. He is prepared to investigate the objectives of requests for parent signatures, and certify that signatures are voluntary.

In an interesting side note, the Superintendent informed me of a parent committee, that meets with him, once a month, regarding parent issues. There is, apparently, a parent representative, from every school. I am a parent who does my research, and I was shocked that such a committee existed! It seems that the parent rep. is chosen, by the Principal. The Superintendent printed me a schedule, and advised me that the meetings are open, and I am welcome to attend. I will, most assuredly, be there!

My advice to everyone is to never give up! If you cannot get satisfaction, from teachers or principals, utilize the resources of Superintendents and School Boards. They are not just there for educators, they are there for parents, too!

The parents banded together, set up their own website, Parents for Educational Reform, and more than 1,000 parents and teachers packed the School Board meeting last week to protest and voice their concerns.

The upshot: school control has been returned to the individual schools, which will get to decide whether they want to implement any of those policies.

The lesson to be taken: there’s strength in numbers and we should all organize in our own communities.

Read more about the program here and then let them know what you think of it.

Experiences in Homeschooling
by Tracy Stevens

I got laid off in July of this year and after not finding any jobs that could keep our two kids in private school, I decided to homeschool. My older son is 8 and he did first grade at a public school two years ago. It was a very difficult year as he, one of the youngest boys in the class, struggled to learn to read at the pace they set for him. To “help” him learn to read, they kept him from recess to do more worksheets. This was in addition to the tutoring and the ridiculous load of homework.

So we decided to repeat fist grade, but this time in a private Waldorf school. The year went much better. There was no homework, plenty of art and nature, and the expectations of reading come much later in a Waldorf school.

I knew when I lost the ability to pay for a Waldorf education that he would be even worse off in a public school than the previous year, because now we were on the Waldorf reading schedule, making him even further behind the public school reading demands. This lead to my decision to homeschool my four and eight year old sons this year and surprisingly it has been an outstanding experience so far.

I take an eclectic approach, with influences from Waldorf and Democratic schools. We work on reading through art, stories, and manipulatives like magnet letters, in addition to old fashioned paper and pencil. We do math

mostly through stories and hands on (like cooking and measuring), but with addition and subtraction as well. Not only has my older son’s literacy progressed fantastically this year, we have balance. We study a country each month, including food, movies, books, artists, and customs, including any field trips I can think of that go with that country. This month is Spain and Picasso. We learn about and celebrate holidays as they come up, doing arts and crafts according to the season. We have a character theme of the month — this month’s theme is compassion, so we have studied Mother Teresa and we will see the play “The Ugly Duckling” in addition to the many other stories and movies we have covered on that subject so far. We also do a science experiment every day and a community service project once a week. When they become fascinated by ladybugs or frogs or kangaroos in our experiences, we get books on those subjects.

This has been a great experience for our family in many ways. The pace of our lives has slowed to not only manageable but enjoyable. We have time to play games, ride bikes, and fly kites. We are not always in the car doing drop offs and pick ups. We are not scrambling for childcare on the myriad days off. Because we are all studying what we are curious about, there is genuine attention and interest — even njoyment! The one-on-one attention has been a balm for my kids, especially in a school district that caps the classroom capacity at 35 kids. I can customize the learning experience each day for them, based on what their proficiency and interest is.

We have all learned a lot this year and have never felt closer to each other and more involved with our community. You can read about our experiences all year at abettereducation.

Too Much Homework
by Mary Sullivan

Like many parents here, I’m proud of our district and appreciate that teachers care and work hard. But in terms of homework, there are issues with both volume and consistency. Parenting twins has been revealing over the years, as the amounts (not to mention types) of homework they’ve received from different teachers within the same grade has varied dramatically. Other parents of multiples I know locally have said the same thing. Through the PTO we did some research last year with families and found the inconsistency is system wide, especially in about grades 4 and up. Part of this, of course, is that some students take much longer than others to do the same amount of work. But that can’t be the whole explanation.

I still don’t think many teachers know about Harris Cooper’s 10-minutes-per-grade-level rule, its basis in meta-analysis of 40 years’ worth of well-crafted homework studies, and the science behind moderation as the most effective approach to homework. I’m sure many parents don’t know, either, and feel confused and helpless when their kids are overwhelmed and missing out on adequate sleep, exercise, reading for pleasure and other essential “nutrients” for developing minds and bodies. Hoping to reach both parents and teachers, I wrote the Squidoo article based on our family’s experiences and on what I’ve learned over the past several years about homework–from The Case Against Homework and other sources.

Something else we learned through the PTO research is that a large percentage of parents feel their kids should be spending more time on “chores” and “helping others”–which to my mind are closely related. Both household chores and service/volunteerism are “other directed” activities, unlike something like homework, which requires much effort but is ultimately self-directed. (The only beneficiary is the student, through good grades, praise, etc.) I tried to touch on this in the Squidoo article through the box on “what kids could be doing if they had less homework.” Life skills like taking responsibility and acting as a contributing member of a community need to start at home. With hours of homework, kids have no time for chores, or parents take pity and just do things for them. As parents we need to run a “gut check” on all this and speak up when it doesn’t feel right. Kids should work hard, but in a *balanced* way that makes intuitive sense.

* * * * * * *
Be sure to visit Too Much Homework.

The community where my school sits has the lowest parental educational level of any community in LA. And yet, many teachers at my school pile on the homework! Homework is often 20% of a student’s final grade. When I began noticing how low our students’ grades were, I did a little research and found that the reason the grades were so low was not because their test or classwork scores were low, but because they had 0s for their homework grades.

I think homework’s impact on students’ final grades is a wide spread problem related to homework and rarely discussed. If students are able to pass class tests and complete classwork why should their homework grades be factored into their final grade? I would like to hear from your readers about this issue. Have your kid’s grades been lowered because they fail to complete homework? Do you know anyone who has challenged this practice and won? Please let me hear your stories.

Please send Etta an email with your stories and post them in the Comments as well. Tell her I sent you her way. And please take the time to do this. It’s very important.

The conclusion I’m most interested in is the one suggesting raising the starting age of school to age 6. The authors found that introducing children at the age of five into the constraint and discipline of a classroom – a throwback to Victorian days – provided little benefit and could even be harmful. “They are not going to learn to read, write and add up if you have alienated children by the age of four and five,” said Gillian Pugh, chairwoman of the Cambridge Primary Review’s advisory committee.

“That’s the stage at which we are tuning children into learning … If they are already failing by the time they are 4 1/2 or five, then it’s going to be quite difficult to get them back into the system again,” she added.

Sadly, the English government disagreed with the Review and called its conclusions “disappointing” and out of date.

Read the report and the surrounding commentary here.

A few weeks ago, Stan interviewed me via skype for his new video series. Since he hasn’t written a guest blog entry on this blog for a few years, I asked him to let us know what’s on his mind. Read his previous guest blog entry here.

Senior Dad Speaks Out
by Stan Goldberg

I first started looking at homework when I read your book, The Case Against Homework. It started me down a path that I didn’t expect. Last week we did a video about homework, (posted on YouTube in two parts and in the Homework Briefing Room ), where we discussed our homework breakthrough and your views on homework reform today. That’s not the only good news that I can share with you. Several families at the school my daughter is attending have now embraced homework as the parent’s tool. Armed with homework they are trying different strategies to see what works best for their family and their child. A friend who has a child at another school reports that this year’s second grade teacher told the parents of the class that she is ambivalent about homework. She will continue to issue it but is up to the parents whether the child does it or not. The teacher will not grade homework. No issues either way whether the homework is returned or not.

So I view this as another breakthrough. I find that growing awareness among educators in giving homework as a parent’s tool will ultimately benefit the child. You and I share similar parenting styles. We want our children to be in charge of themselves early on as possible, so that they have comfort in making decisions. Placing a child in charge of his or her own homework is a reasonable step towards those goals.

I believe that the homework reform movement is growing as more people become aware that each child must be treated individually. As more educators embrace this point of view the attitudes towards homework will gain greater momentum.

“Duncan’s [Race to the Top] plan is cut from the same cloth as the education policies of the Bush administration,” said Sara Bennett after watching the show from her Park Slope home. “It is misguided, disastrous for schoolchildren, and has no basis in sound research.”

When I googled the reporter, Thaddeus Russell, I came across a piece he wrote a few years ago, contrasting workaholic Bob the Builder with his long ago slacker cohorts, Fred Flinstone and George Jetson.

Read the New York Magazine piece here. Read the Bob the Builder piece here.

And, while I’m on the topic of Arne Duncan, here’s another unflattering piece about him in Edweek.

What to do about Race to the Top? Take a look at Stop National Standards, a group of concerned educators and parents (of which I am one), which came together to figure out ways to be vocal about the harms of standardized testing. We have a campaign, the Say Yes card, which we urge people to print out and leave around their community and schools.

I’ve seen your website, and I just want to say how grateful I am that someone out there besides my friends and I understand how awful homework is and how it really doesn’t help us learn at all.

I’m a freshman at a competitive public high school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I’ve always spent large amounts of time on homework; last year, I spent maybe 2 1/2 hours on homework on average. This year, it’s much worse. On good nights, I spend maybe 3 1/2 hours on homework. On especially bad nights, I spend up to 4 1/2 hours doing homework.

All my teachers give horrible amounts of work; my math teacher gives us up to 30 long, complicated math problems, which takes me a while because I’m not particularly good at math, and I check my work because I’m afraid he’ll give us a pop quiz on it the next day. My history teacher gives long, grueling assignments, mostly involving reading long textbook chapters and then doing worksheets on them. My English teacher gives huge amounts of work; we have to memorize 200 vocabulary words a month, complete terribly long essays he grades meticulously, do worksheets on a novel we’re reading exclusively in class, AND read a novel that’s supposed to be read exclusively at home. It’s horrible, because English has always been my favorite subject, and now I dread

going to class every day because I’m afraid of the mountainous pile of work he’ll give us that day. I’m in three advanced classes; English, history, and Spanish. Most of my friends are in all advanced, which means they have even more homework than I do. One of my friends goes to school, goes to sports practice and gets home by 7:30, then does homework until midnight and has to wake up at 6 o’clock in the morning to get to school on time. Another one of my friends told me she stayed up until midnight working on one essay. An essay! Essays should be challenging, but not so challenging that they take 3 hours to do!

Most of my homework, truthfully, is studying. I usually have at least three tests every other week. I have two next week, one Monday and one Tuesday. I’ve always done well in school, and now that I’m in high school, I have to work even harder to get the A’s that came so easily in middle school. I study all my class notes maybe for 20 minutes each. Then I have to do the written homework, which takes forever because I like to do a thorough job.

If something is worth 4 1/2 hours of my time, it should be useful, right? It should help me in some way. But homework has never helped me. In 7th grade I spent an hour a day filling out math worksheets my teacher gave us; they were essentially 50 of the same math problem. But I did it all, because if I didn’t, I would get a zero which would kill my grade. But the thing was, usually after the 5th problem I got the concept. So why should I have to do 45 more?

Every time I talk to one of my friends–which isn’t often, because we all have the same ridiculous amounts of homework–all I hear is, “I’m so overwhelmed,” “I had so much work last night!”, or “I forgot to study for the vocab quiz today because I had so much science homework last night!”.
It’s just terrible, how we never have time to do what we want to do. How I don’t have time to hang out with my family, see my friends, write, read, or do anything I love to do, because I have so much work every night. School should be about learning. And I am learning. But the 4 1/2 hours I waste every night does not help me learn in the slightest.

I’ve played hockey for the past year and a half or so, and I love it. But I recently had to quit because practices went on too long and I was up too late doing homework. I’ve always loved creative writing and I joined a literary club at my school–one of the few things I like about high school–and I had to skip the meeting yesterday because I just had too much work.

You have weekends, my mom tells me every time I complain to her about how much homework I have. The thing is, I don’t. I usually have Friday nights and Saturdays, but then on Sunday (which should be the day of rest!) I sleep in until about 10, exhausted from how little sleep I get every week, and then do homework on and off all day.

I’m 14 years old. I should be allowed to be a teenager! It’s so unfair. My friends who go to other public districts near me don’t have nearly as much homework. I hate it.

Thank you so much for speaking out and taking a stand. Everyone should know how useless homework is and how it just consumes the lives of kids who are still just that–kids. And we should be allowed to be kids.

If you’re a teacher, you can follow the lead of Seattle middle school teacher, Carl Chew, who refused last year to administer the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL).

If you live near Mill Valley, California, you should try to see the film either at Saturday’s premier or on October 18. If you don’t live near Mill Valley, you can view the trailer here. And you can listen to the filmmaker, Vicki Abeles, talk about the movie on BAM! Radio.

I also highly recommend you contact Vicki and set up a screening. Tell her I told you about the film.

My favorite part of the book is her Bill of Rights for Homework. She suggests that all teachers implement the following 6 “rights”:

1. Children shall not be required to work more than 40 hours a week, when class time is added to homework time.

2. Children shall have the right to homework they can complete without help. If they cannot complete homework without help, children shall be entitled to reteaching or modified assignments.

3. A child’s academic grade shall not be put in jeopardy because of incomplete homework. Children shall be entitled to an in-school or after-school homework support program if they are unwilling or unable to complete work at home.

4. A child’s right to playtime, downtime, and adequate sleep shall not be infringed upon by homework.

5. Parents shall be entitled to excuse their child from homework that the child does not understand or is too tired to finish.

6. Families should be entitled to weekends and holidays free from homework.

Next time you want to give your child’s teacher a gift, how about a collection of books including The Case Against Homework, The Homework Myth, and Rethinking Homework.

A Math Teacher Speaks Out – Why I Stopped Assigning Homework and Am Petitioning for a Homework-Free Week
by Jeff Valure

The past few years I’ve been experimenting with my little guinea pigs – er – students. Three years ago I decided that so much time was spent on homework, checking it, reading answers, going over problems, that I would be able to get much more done in class if I did away with it. After all, I get a precious 46 minutes a day with these kids. Do I want to spend that time on bookkeeping or do I want to interact with them in a more educationally profound way? How often do you get to work with the guidance, aid, and encouragement of an “expert” in the field? Why waste that time?

Of course my students are used to homework, they barely grumble when they get an assignment over the weekend. The idea of not having homework is as scary as it is exciting. There are lots of uncertainties. Will they be able to keep up with the coursework? Will their grades be impacted? How will it affect their performance on standardized tests?

They were concerned and rightly so. This whole thing is to do what is best for them. Sure, maybe I put making them better people above making them experts at applying the Pythagorean Theorem, but I mean which would you rather inherit the world?

To allay their fears I talk to them about my reasoning and my ideas. I explain what I believe will be accomplished. I show them some articles on the topic. We go over the research. Now that I’ve done it a few times I can bring in former students to share their experiences. See, not only am I trying to teach them math more efficiently, but I want to teach them how they can affect their world and how to deal with contrary beliefs in a fairly rigid and established system. I want to teach them that they are not small.

But let’s put that aside because what you really want to know as parents and educators is how does not having homework affect students’ grades? Did their grades improve or decline?

Well as much as I wish I could say definitively that they improved, I cannot. For one, any evidence I have is anecdotal. This was not a scientifically designed and controlled experiment. These are students – not guinea pigs after all. Secondly, giving students no homework in one class will not have enough impact on their free time to really affect change. Students will not be able to fully explore their world, their relationships, and themselves because they didn’t spend twenty minutes on math homework. In fact when I shared with my plan with colleagues, another teacher was happy that our students would have time to tackle additional homework for him. I believe he was joking but you wouldn’t put it past him if you knew him.

So did they improve at all? No. Not their grades — but possibly their quality of life and then indirectly their quality of character. And isn’t that the ultimate goal? Chances are the quadratic formula is going to play no role in their life but the intangible things they learn in school, it’s those things that will shape them into adults that thrive.

Here’s the thing though. Their grades didn’t decline either. Mostly. What I found is for the majority of students, homework had no bearing on their grades. C students remained C students. A students continued to get A’s. And the D– students, those that really could use the practice? They weren’t doing homework anyway.

Now there were a handful of students whose grades slipped. Some students slack off towards the end of the year anyway so I can’t say for sure it was the lack of homework, but I can’t say it wasn’t. Comparison to a control group would be helpful but how controlled can a group of adolescents be anyway?

I had a few students say they wanted homework, that they wanted to make sure they knew the material. And in that statement lies my point. I told my students that just because I didn’t assign homework doesn’t mean they can’t do work at home. They have a workbook, they have a textbook. They could open up either and do some problems. I’m not telling anyone not to do work. I’m just not telling them they have to do work.

You see, by taking control of our kids’ time we’re really stealing their lives. We’re keeping them from being self-sufficient, from learning how to survive in the world, from being able to decide for themselves what needs to be done and what is worth doing.

Is tonight’s homework worth doing? Are you going to get something out of it? Is it going to enrich your education or better you as a person? Is there something more worthwhile you could be doing with your time? If there is, do it. Then tomorrow explain to your teacher what you decided and why. And if they had a good solid childhood, having been buried in homework or not, they will be able to look past the perceived slight and congratulate you on a life well led. I know I would.

Please visit HomeworkFree.org if you’d like to learn more and help petition congress for a National Homework Free Week. Sure it’s not much, but it’d be a start.

Homework Is an Elaborate Charade–Lots of Quantity and No Quality
by FedUp Mom

People generally talk about homework in terms of quantity, and it is shocking to see how much time kids are spending on it. But I would like to step back and consider the question of quality.

First of all, if we plan to assign a certain amount of homework every night, we’re already in trouble. This is practically the definition of busywork. “We don’t know what schoolwork would be useful for kids to do every night, but we’ll make sure and assign 10 minutes per grade level of this stuff, whatever it might be.” The theory is that 10 minutes per grade level per night will create “good study habits”, but it’s crazy to expect kids to learn good study habits in the absence of anything worth studying.

Take a typical public-school “balanced” classroom. In our nominally high-performing district, each classroom will contain a few gifted kids, a few “problem” kids, and another 15 to 20 kids all over the very large range in between. Then all these kids are sent home with the exact same homework. There’s no way the homework can actually be appropriate for every child. In my experience, it’s often not appropriate for any child (copying dictionary definitions?)

Homework proponents say that some subjects require practice, and they’re right. I’m studying Mandarin Chinese myself, and I can see that it requires a great deal of practice. Even the most uncreative approaches (e.g., flashcards) can be useful in this context. That’s why we’ve all noticed our kids getting lots of foreign-language homework, right? Nope, me neither.

Homework proponents say that practice is necessary for learning math, and they’re right. This is why math is one subject where I have mostly had my daughter do the work. Nevertheless, I had to teach her how to divide by 10, because somehow she hadn’t learned this in school (she was either in 4th or 5th grade at the time, I don’t remember which). She was put in 5th-grade “accelerated” math in spite of not knowing her times tables, too. In hindsight, it’s interesting that neither the principal nor the math teacher were surprised when I mentioned it to them. They didn’t offer any help, either. It was presumed to be my daughter’s fault, and my responsibility to fix. This is “outsourcing to parents”, which is epidemic in wealthy districts like ours.

Homework proponents say that homework gives parents insight into what’s going on at school, and it’s frightening how true this really is. In my daughter’s train-wreck 5th grade year, she came home with a “science” assignment one day. It was work that might have been finished at school, but got sent home because she didn’t complete it in class time. The science unit was on nutrition. For each letter of the alphabet, she was supposed to think of a “healthy snack” whose name begins with that letter. Then, she was supposed to write the whole list out twice — first as a rough draft, and second as a clean copy, with pictures pasted on. This project was so tedious my daughter could hardly bear to look at it, which is why she had already sat through a week of class time without completing it.

So the homework my daughter received neglected practice where it might have been useful (foreign language, multiplication tables) and imposed pointless busywork of no use or interest to anyone. Did it give me insight into what was going on in school? You bet it did.

Bad homework is just the tip of the iceberg of a broken school system. If we managed to ban homework from our public elementary schools tomorrow, we would still have a great deal of work ahead to fix the schools.

As it is, the schools in our wealthy district are propped up by compliant parents. There are parents who make their kids do all the assigned homework, or do it for them, and then hire tutors, or teach their own kids, to make up for all the school’s inadequacies. Some parents get terribly threatened by any criticism of our schools, for fear that if the school’s reputation is damaged, property values will go down, although it seems to me that ship just sailed. Other parents are concerned that criticism of the schools will damage their child’s chance of getting into a highly competitive college. So it’s an elaborate charade. Schools pretend to teach the kids, knowing that they have the advantage of well-educated families with kids who do well on standardized tests. Parents pretend to be satisfied with the schools, in the hopes that the school’s reputation will bolster the price of their house and get their kid into the Ivy League.

Have a nice weekend.

How To Help Your Four-Year Old With Homework
by Who’s the Mummy

How to help your four year old with her homework

Regular readers will know Flea started big school this month. I definitely had mixed feelings about her starting full-time in a mainstream school only a couple of weeks after turning four, but she is thriving. It’s a lovely school, she loves the children in her class, and having a small group means she’s settled in and made lots of friends really easily.
But there’s homework. Seriously? Homework? For four year olds? Okay, so it’s not trigonometry but still.

Every day Flea brings home a folder in her bag. Inside are some flash cards and cut out words to match up, a small early reading book to look at, and a sheet of card with phonic sounds and short words for Flea to ‘revise’. Also in the folder is Flea’s ‘reading record’ where the teacher comments on how she’s done each day, and specifies what homework needs to be done.

I’ve now worked out the best way to help Flea with her homework. And I’m going to share my secret with you.

Here’s what I do: after Flea’s in bed, I take everything out of the folder and mix it up. I make sure to put the flash cards in a different order. Then I put everything back in the folder, and put the folder in Flea’s school bag.

It’s actually a perfect plan. What I’ve realised is that the next morning, Flea will go through these materials with her teacher. So it’s not like she’s not reading the book at all. What’s more, her teacher invariably writes: “Great reading today, well done!” in Flea’s reading record, and even adds a smiley face. So Flea is obviously keeping up with what’s expected of her.

I know, I’m a terrible parent. But I just don’t believe a child’s life should be all about school at this age. So I will often collect Flea from school and we go somewhere. We might visit friends, we might go swimming, or we might go to the beach or the park. We might go out for dinner together, or go to the book shop. We might just go home and play. But personally, I think at her age, all of those things are more important than doing an extra 15 minutes of school work.

Still, I won’t be mentioning any of this at Parents’ Evening next week. Just in case.

I teach 4th grade math and science. Much of what I teach is basic skills. As any athlete or musician will tell you, developing basic skills is about practice, practice, practice. If I assign my class to complete a sheet of two-digit by two-digit multiplication problems for homework, I do not care what their motivation for completing it is.… [T]the students will be better at the skill after having completed the work.

By May, he was really grappling with new ideas and he wrote in one of his Comments:

I want to assure you I do not have an ego attached to any of these ideas. I’m completely willing to throw away everything I’ve always thought and try to do better. I’m still new to this teaching thing so I was kind of operating on the, “just do what has always been done and make it through the day” approach. Now that I’m finishing up this year I think I’m ready to make some changes in the way I do things.

Jason told me that this summer he did more reading, including The Homework Myth, Understanding By Design, The Trouble With Boys, A Framework For Understanding Povertyand Getting To Got It. “As a result I asked my principal for permission to make homework optional for my students this year. To her credit, she had read Rethinking Homework and was very open to new ideas. Of my 45 students, only 5 parents responded asking that the homework continue to be sent home. Here is the letter that went home with my students at the beginning of this school year”:

Dear Parents,

I have asked permission from my administration, and have been granted the freedom to institute a homework policy for my classes that is more aligned with current research. I have done this for several reasons:

1. It has come to my attention that homework often encroaches on “family time.”
2. I understand that parents, after a full day of work, may not want to spend the limited time they have with their children acting as task masters to see that the homework gets done.
3. The frustration, anxiety, and fighting that often results because of homework outweighs any benefit homework might have.
4. Research indicates that group homework (same homework for all students) may have little to no academic value at the elementary level.

Here is how the policy will work:

· The district math and science homework will not be sent home except by parent request.
· Whether a student completes or does not complete the district homework will have no impact on their grade.
· There will be no rewards or negative consequences for completing or not completing the district math and science homework.
· All students will receive an “S” under the conduct heading “completes homework.”
· All district math and science homework will be available for download on my website at all times.
· On occasion students will be asked to finish, at home, assignments that were not completed in class.

A College Teacher’s Response to President Obama’s Idea of Lengthening the School Day
by K, A College Teacher

President Obama advocates increasing the length of the school day and the length of the school year. More School: Obama Would Curtail Summer Vacation.

There are many problems with this.

President Obama seems to be arguing: if something isn’t working, what we really need is more of it. It just plain doesn’t make sense. While some countries provide more learning in more time, there are other nations that make better use of less time and have better student outcomes.

This also assumes that the best learning occur in school? I would argue that children need more common-sense approaches like turning off the computer, television, gameboy, and Wii to be thrown outside. And, we don’t need the government to do this for us… we just have to pull the plug. Explorative play seems the best solution to teaching students to think independently. Children need more opportunities to play free-style with real family time and real outdoor play – free-range style. They also need more emphasis on programs like Tinkering School, scouting, Odyssey of the Mind, Outward Bound, and any number of other creative initiatives that encourage outdoor adventure, problem-solving, and critical thinking. For their physical well being and their mental health, students need fewer worksheets, less time sitting at a desk, and more time actively solving problems and exploring.

What are the costs of all of this extra time? Do taxpayers want to pay more for a program that isn’t achieving to its potential? Who shall pay for all of this extra time? Is this a recipe for faster teacher burnout? Does this lost flexibility make the field of teaching less attractive? When will teachers find the time for the many learning opportunities (continuing education hours) that we expect them to achieve? How shall families carve out family time with their children with less and less flexibility? If we value the family, shouldn’t we protect family time?

Will more time in school have the intended effect? The evidence on this is not clear. I would argue that teachers don’t need more face time with students… they need to be encouraged (and allowed) to have more creative and innovative learning in the time they have. Less emphasis on rote memorization, less emphasis on standardized tests, and a greater ability to reward the truly innovative and encouraging teachers can improve learning far more than “face time”.

Let’s not let “don’t you care about education?” turn into a rallying cry for more school. I care about learning: I have three young sons in school and I am an educator. It is clear to me that learning does not only happen at school. Some of the most salient learning experiences come through exploration and adventure. Rather than making more school, we should advocate making more learning opportunities. And, we should make this idea known to schools, government agencies, and our political representatives.

I just want to say I support your website completely, and everything on it is true, and relates to my school experience. My family gets really stressed out, to the point of tears, screaming, or yelling, etc. at least 3/5 school nights, and I believe homework’s one of the reasons we are all often stressed and high-strung.

I think school is making everyone very unhappy and unsatisfied at my school. We often have very little time to socialize or have any fun (we are only 13!), and we are always doing our homework all night, and having to go to bed early. I go through the whole long day half falling asleep because I am so tired from getting up so early and staying up too late doing homework. Also, we carry extremely heavy loads in our backpacks. I have back pains now and am really tense from carrying that up and down stairs every day.

I think the system is ridiculous. School is already murdering my childhood, and giving me little time for fun, but with that little time I’m reviewing everything I learned in school until at least 8 PM. It’s depressing, insane, and, erm, yes. It makes me mad.

Let me say, I would have written a lot more and given a whole lot of points here, but I just finished my homework (its 9:00 PM), and I have to go to sleep by ten every night because I have to get up at 5: 45 AM to make it to the bus to school. And, oh, I just remembered some more homework I’ve got to get done.

I also thought the teacher made a very good point about the importance of keeping all discussions between teacher and parent as cordial and as respectful as possible.

I’ll Make My Reading Logs Optional
by a Virginia Teacher

I accidentally came upon this website when searching for reading logs to give to my students this year for homework. This blog has really made me rethink the validity of the entire idea and really homework in general. Reading the comments from so many frustrated parents has been insightful, because I honestly never thought about how homework can invade a child’s home/after-school life. I applaud the parents who advocate for their kids and the tremendous weight homework can put on their shoulders. As a teacher, I want parents to feel like partners in the classroom and having conversations like this one can only help kids get the best educational experiences possible. The last thing I want to do is to stress my students out, so I’ll probably make the reading logs optional.

One thing I noticed by this site is a distinct divide between teachers and parents and while I do think discussion is important, it seems to get hostile. There are huge assumptions being made on both sides. I think teachers and parents BOTH need to have a generosity of the spirit. I am not, and have never been interested in doing harm to any student in my class — that’s not why I teach. In the same way, I don’t think concerned parents are trying to “terrorize” teachers. There has to be middle ground on which teachers and parents can both feel validated.

I think this is important to keep in mind: Teachers have kids for 7 hours a day for only 9 months. Parents have kids for a lifetime. Parents are a child’s first teachers and parents know their kids the best. I believe good, effective teachers honor this. It is very sad to me that so many families have experienced such negative experiences with public schools, especially because kids and their opinion of school and learning are caught in the crossfire.

I will definitely have a different mindset about homework going into this new school year.

Because I’ve spent the past five years being involved in issues of education, I attribute this phenomenon to schools. Students spend too much time answering rote questions, memorizing facts, writing 5-paragraph essays, and doing school-imposed work and not enough time reading, getting involved in activities of their own choosing, and learning for the sake of learning. My former colleague attributed it to the students having grown up using the internet for all of their research and using the “cut and paste” method of writing.

We’re probably both right.

After our discussion, I came across this article by a Canadian university professor on the same topic, Has Ontario Taught Its High School Students Not To Think.

Has Ontario taught its high-school students not to think?
Elementary and high schools spend so much time on the content-laden curriculum that students are unprepared for the analytic and conceptual thinking they’ll need at university
by Alan Slavin

Has Ontario’s educational system taught a decade of students not to think? There is growing evidence that the combination of standardized testing with a content-intensive curriculum that’s too advanced — both introduced by the Conservative government between 1997 and 1999 — has done exactly that.

A dramatic indication that there could be a serious problem was the performance of my introductory physics class on their November test last year. It was identical to one given in 1996, but the class average over this 10-year period had plummeted from 66 to 50 percent. There is about a five-percent fluctuation in this test grade from year to year due to variation in student ability and the difficulty of the questions but, when I looked at the class average over the many times I have taught the course since 1981, I found that four of the five lowest grades have occurred in the last four years, with the lowest this year. When I enquired elsewhere at Trent University, I found the same pattern in the mathematics department, where the first test in linear algebra was down some 15 percent from its historic mean, and the calculus average had dropped nine percent from the year before.

But this is not just a Trent phenomenon. Brock University has seen a significant increase in the failure rate for students in first-year physics with similar results in mathematics. Both Brock and Trent are considering remedial teaching this school year. The University of Guelph, where reliable data is also available, experienced a similar drop in performance in the first-year physics course. There is general dissatisfaction about student preparation from physics instructors at other Ontario universities although it is difficult to get reliable numerical data as course structure and instructors change relatively frequently, and final grades are often bell-curved to maintain an acceptable distribution.

In contrast, there is no evidence of the same rapid decline in other provinces, according to the four other physics departments I’ve contacted in the Atlantic provinces and British Columbia. This appears to be a made-in-Ontario phenomenon.

Professor James Côté and co-author, Anton Allahar, in their recent book Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis (see a review in this issue), blame a general student disengagement with learning as source of the problem. However, most of the students I see are not so much disengaged as poorly trained for university expectations. Students’ ability to do analysis and synthesis seems to have been replaced by rote memorization and regurgitation in both the sciences and the humanities. This is a complaint that I hear from instructors in senior high-school classes through to professors in the humanities. Trent philosophy professor, Bernie Hodgson, tells me that his students want “philosophy paint-by-numbers” — a memorized, fill-in-the-blanks approach to passing tests and writing assignments — and this is exactly what I and many of my colleagues are seeing in science and mathematics disciplines. While we still get some students with excellent analytical ability, there has been a serious decline on average. In mathematics and physics, it means that students do not really understand what they are doing even when they have covered the material in high school. This problem is reflected in the learning approach of most students, which has changed along with their test performance. All term, students were asking me when I was going to teach them what they need to know for the exam, as though physics has only a fixed number of facts or kinds of problems that need to be memorized and fed back to the instructor.

However, memorization/regurgitation is not an approach that works in physics or in other analytical fields such as philosophy, English, mathematics or the visual arts, where the main emphasis is on constructing one’s own knowledge and approaches. There is always a certain amount of material that must be memorized, but knowledge of facts makes up only a small component of one’s learning. More important is the ability to relate these facts in new ways, to see them in a new light, and to bring quite disparate ideas together to solve new problems or create new forms of art. This ability to analyze and synthesize is what makes good scientists, writers, philosophers and artists. It is the ability needed to drive a knowledge-based economy.

The dependence on memorization also affects work habits, with a third of students in some university classes not handing in assignments or failing to pick up graded work to find out where they’ve gone wrong. Why should they, if they believe the way to better grades is to memorize more material rather than understand? The resulting high failure/drop-out rate in the first two years of university has enormous cost to society, although the students who do persevere and graduate clearly have or develop the requisite skills.

What could have caused this dramatic shift in the approach of our students? I do not believe the problem is with the teachers, who are generally well trained and dedicated. The main possible explanations seem to be the following:

1. In 1997, the Ontario government introduced a new, content-intensive curriculum for grades K to 8 in mathematics and language, followed in 1998 by the science and technology curriculum. The design of this curriculum was top-down, unlike earlier curricula that had been designed by local teachers and their school boards under general guidelines from the Ministry of Education. Much of the new curriculum in the junior grades is considered by many experienced teachers to be beyond the mental development of students at that level. This encourages blind memorization rather than understanding. Moreover, the new curriculum significantly reduces time spent on the visual arts, and was so content-heavy that it greatly limited the amount of time available for developing analytical and conceptual-understanding skills from kindergarten on, even though the development of these skills was a stated goal of the curriculum. Students first exposed to the science curriculum in Grade 5 are now starting second year of university. Two high-school English teachers recently told me that this curriculum is the main cause for the loss of analytical ability. This problem was aggravated by the retirement, shortly after 1997, of many established teachers who understood the importance of developing analytical skills but had become disenchanted with the state of education. Then in 1999, a new four-year curriculum was imposed on high schools, starting with Grade 9 and advancing one year at a time to the 4U (4th-year, University-preparation) courses in Grade 12. As a result, 2003 saw the graduation of the “double cohort” of the 4U students and the last of the OAC five-year students.

2. In 1997, the Ontario government also introduced standardized province-wide testing in math and reading/writing in Grades 3 and 6, with a math test in Grade 9. I am told that much of the teaching at the elementary level is now directed to passing those tests, as schools are rated publicly on the results. Students must also pass a standardized literacy test to graduate from high school. This emphasis on passing standardized tests which cover too much material at too advanced a level increases the dependence on rote memorization and takes time away from the development of conceptual understanding and analytical skills.

3. With the elimination of the Ontario Academic Credit (OAC) high-school year (Grade 13) in 2003, our students entering university are a year younger. The teenage brain is still developing its “executive functions” during this time, so students enter university with a year’s less ability to analyze and plan ahead.

4. Are we just admitting poorer students to university? The average entrance grade of students from high school has not declined over the last few years, but grade inflation is clearly present: the percentage of academic-stream Ontario Scholars, those graduating students with averages over 80 percent, has risen from about five percent of the graduating class in the early 1960s to almost 50 percent now.

5. The trend among young people to move away from reading and towards video and video games, means they spend less time developing reading/writing/analytical skills.

6. Young people’s general belief that the web is the source of all knowledge puts a greater emphasis on memorizing facts and much less on the ability to develop one’s personal ability to think. They do not appreciate that, even as students, they will be expected to develop new knowledge, not just regurgitate existing facts.

Of these explanations, the last three should have caused a gradual decline over the last 10 years, rather than a fairly abrupt change over the last five years; so, while contributors, these are not likely the main culprits. That our students are a year younger is not likely the main cause of the problem, as there was no obvious difference between the OAC and the 4U students in 2003-04 when they arrived at university together. Moreover, the younger age would have caused an abrupt shift in student performance in years 2003-05 which should have been constant after this, whereas the decrease in performance has been most apparent in 2006-07.

This leaves the first two options as the main causes of the decline in student performance. My personal belief is that it is the content-heavy curriculum that is the main culprit. When I speak to primary and secondary teachers with experience from before 1997, this is the outstanding complaint that they have with the educational system. A retired Grade 1 teacher whom I respect greatly for her expertise in teaching at this level tells me that they used to spend part of two weeks developing the idea of “fiveness” in her students. How many different ways can you make up five, using different objects as well as cuisenaire rods (coloured rods that come in varying lengths, such as 1, 2, or 3 cm). Which of several groupings is less than or greater than five? And so on. When they were done, students understood the number five at a broad conceptual level, and they carried this understanding to other numbers. She says there is now little time for such activities if a student is to be ready to pass the standard tests which are tied to the new curriculum; all a student has to do is memorize that 2+2+1=5.

This view of the curriculum is not restricted to teachers at the K-12 level. A review panel of university physics professors has just recommended that some 30 percent of the Ontario high-school physics curriculum be removed to allow more time for the development of conceptual understanding and analytical skills. Moreover, the review teams for all of physics, chemistry, biology and earth sciences agreed that: “a) The existing curriculum is too ambitious and focuses on breadth instead of depth; b) Some topics are clearly too advanced for grade 11/12 students and should be dropped; c) There is a yawning gap between the ambition of the curriculum and the reality of students entering University. Students continue to demonstrate serious deficiencies in problem solving skills, basic math skills, and hands-on laboratory skills when they arrive at the university level.”

These potential problems with the curriculum were, of course, pointed out years ago. For example, in 2000 Margaret McNay, at Western’s Faculty of Education, wrote an article on the new curriculum in the Journal of Curriculum Studies in which she said, “Grade 1 students can learn to parrot ‘right’ answers, and grade 7 students to memorize incomprehensible definitions, but no educational advantage is gained when the conceptual demands of what is taught are beyond the comprehension of the students.”

The question arises as to why we are only now becoming aware of this problem at universities, 10 years after the new curriculum was introduced. One would not expect that the shift in a student’s mode of learning, from one based on understanding to one based on memorization, would occur instantly, and many teachers continued to teach the way they always had, regardless of the new curriculum. However, a student first exposed to the new science curriculum in Grade 5 in 1998 is now entering second year of university. I believe that the rapid decline in performance over the last five years has its roots in the teaching at the elementary level; a university student’s ability to think decreases with the length of time they were exposed to the new curriculum.

I recently reviewed the drop-out rate from my introductory physics class that I have taught quite regularly from the 1980s. Over this time, the drop-out rate has increased gradually from eight percent in the early 1980s to more than 20 percent now, with one glaring exception. In the Ontario double-cohort year of 2003-04 and the next year, (which included about 25 percent of the four-year students who stayed in high school for an optional fifth year), the drop-out rate plummeted to eight and 10 percent, even though the class performance was not exceptional. Similar results were seen at Brock and Guelph universities. The best explanation is that these students were told that they would have to work very hard to gain one of the limited places at university. The work and study habits they developed then carried into university, and helped them through their first year. The lesson is that at least some student problems can be reversed very rapidly if the incentive is large enough.

The indications are strong that we have taught students to memorize and not to think. If we do have such a problem, we must move quickly to determine its magnitude, and deal with its causes. A new Ontario curriculum was introduced for K-8 in Mathematics and English in 2005 and 2006, respectively, and a new high-school science curriculum is currently under review as mentioned above. Let’s hope that local teachers and school boards are bringing their expertise to the development of this new curriculum, and will be involved in its monitoring and evaluation. There may be 10 years of students who have been taught not to think, and reversing that effect will be not be easy without a determined effort.

Alan Slavin is professor in the department of physics and astronomy at Trent University. He holds two national teaching awards: a 3M Teaching Fellowship and a medal from the Canadian Association of Physicists.

I once wrote about those pesky contracts that teachers expect parents to sign, but I never really noticed how many signatures teachers request, perhaps because elementary school is now a distant memory for me. Deidra gave me something new to think about.

My Children’s Teachers Require My Signature
More than 400 Times a Year
by Deidra Hewitt, Denver, North Carolina

I’d like to know when signatures on pieces of paper became equated to proof of good parenting. My children attend a public elementary school. I am required to provide between 400 and 500 signatures, per child, per year. For all of the chatter about parents being “partners” in their children’s education, and how many times we’re “invited” to “support” our kids in various ways, this is clearly not the case, when the school is requiring, not requesting, my signature.

I was informed this year, that the policy for my 5th grader included punishment for him, if I forgot or refused to sign things like planners, reading logs, and Friday folders. Apparently it doesn’t matter whether I agree with the policies, find them effective for my family, or see specific requests as redundant. Regardless of how involved I am in my child’s school and life, a signature is regarded as proof positive that I’m doing my job. If I don’t want to sign something, then my child will suffer the consequences.

I am treated like an errant student who must prove to the big, all-wise, all-knowing school that I’m aware of my children’s homework, make sure that they read, and look at their completed work. Not to mention the contract that I’m supposed to sign, at the beginning of the year, promising that I’ll do my job to provide a good home environment, and adequate rest for the children!

Of course the school kindly has the teacher sign that he/she will do the job that they’re being paid for, with my tax money. Isn’t that something that I ought to be able to take for granted?

I have worked with the principal to agree not to punish my child, if a signature is missing this year. My son will not face consequences (pulled slips, silent lunch, non-participation in Fun Friday) by not having a parent signature, but I still feel dejected and disappointed with the fact that the policy remains in place, at all. I have no voice in my school, and certainly do NOT feel like a partner with them.

And please try to listen to WHYY’s Voices in the Family today at noon. I’ll be one of the guests. Here’s how the upcoming show is described:

School’s back, and so is Big Homework. Here’s what my 7th grade daughter has to do tonight:

1 Math review sheet,
1 Science essay,
French vocab for possible quiz,
History reading and questionaire, and
English reading and note-taking

About two hours, give or take. This is considered a pretty light load, so as to ramp up gently. Over the next few weeks, it will get up to three hours or more.

Most of us give very little thought to this long-lived combination. School and homework seem as interconnected as cars and gasoline. Kids need homework to get smarter — right? It’s supposed to be how they pick up a good work ethic.

Read the rest here.

At the same time, also in Florida, the Collier County School District in Naples instituted a new policy of abolishing the grading of homework. Its new policy came about after the District, in response to parental concerns, looked at research into best practices. According to Naples News, the Chief Instructional Officer wrote in a memo to middle school principals, “Research advocates that homework receive teacher feedback versus a grade; the concept here is that we should have the opportunity to practice before we receive a grade. Think of it as learning to drive — you must have the opportunity to practice on many occasions — with feedback — before you go to the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) to be tested.”

One Mother and Her Army
by Jerri Ann Head Reason

My son was in Kindergarten last year and mostly I complained about the state of affairs at school, including what we now refer to as the horrible “H” word; homework. I couldn’t fathom how five-year-olds could be expected to do any “H” word, never mind the amount he was expected to do. And, that’s how I met Sara Bennett and I came to read The Case Against Homework. Mostly I spent my time complaining online and to anyone who would listen but not actually talking to people who could help. This year, as the parent of a first grader, I have taken a different approach. That approach is “if you can’t beat them, join them, and then change their minds, one person at a time”. Knowing the people who can help make the change possible is essential and it’s not going to happen if you just sit back complain. If you have any question about the amount of “H” word I am referring to, see the website I created to help the first grade parents keep up. It’s a doozy, PhD in First Grade.

I started this year out with a bang. I joined the PTO first. That put me in direct contact with a few people who had some pull. I did some teaching for the school and the PTO to parents regarding various topics and the principal quickly asked me to serve as a Parent/Teacher Liaison. Obviously, it’s not my role to get into the privacy of students, parents and teacher’s conversations. But, instead of a having to have a group of people bound together and barge into the school building with a complaint, she asked that I be that go-between and that I then approach the administration with any serious complaints. I quickly agreed and set about meeting parents, teaching parents of the kindergarteners or any other students new to the school about the policies and procedures that may not be obvious (and in my opinion probably aren’t even necessary) and helping everyone learn to use the monitoring system that our schools use via the computer. I also used this as an opportunity to ask parents their opinions on the “H” issue.

And, to my surprise, all were in agreement with me…the “H” word is out of control. So, having secured a relationship with the PTO Secretary who is also a trustee, I took my case to her. She expressed that she “sort of” agreed with me and would try to help me look into it further. I then approached, the second of three trustees. He has children in the school who have been subjected to the craziness of it all, and immediately I had another ally. My next step was to approach the School Board Member who represents our school and having children of is own, although in a different school, he agreed with my thoughts, my ideas and was open to reading the statistics regarding the “H” word.

That leaves me with one Trustee to approach and he has a son in high school and one in my son’s class. Once I have made my case to him, then I will take my information and move to a higher authority. And, believe it or not, it’s not looking to be near as painful and difficult as I originally thought it would be. And that? That makes me smile. I know my children aren’t going to lose their childhood to homework. It’s been a slow process if you look at the overall picture. But, if you look at it from the standpoint that school started on August 11th, I’m one month in and I’ve managed to sway some key people. And, one final straw came yesterday when several teachers that I approached regarding the “H” word said to me, “I don’t give it unless it is absolutely necessary. The board (school board) is not real fond of that technique but that’s how I like to handle my class.”

And, therein lies the problem. The “H” issue rolls downhill and it all starts with the State Department of Education pushing “higher learning” and “better test scores” without knowing that the “H” word is not the way to accomplish this. It trickles down until teachers are actually evaluated by the way they handled the “H” word.

So, we have a long way to go, but I have gathered some of the best people to help me march the march and hopefully before the end of this school year, I won’t be sitting with my first grader while he does 40 minutes worth of homework every night. If you live in Alabama and you are fortunate enough to have found Sara and the book she co-authored, by all means, contact me. Let’s make this a state wide campaign, we can be much more successful that way.

Ready, Set ..Go!

I’m a high school senior now. I live in an urban community, meaning that schools in my town are embarrassingly underprivileged. All my life I feel that I’ve been cheated by the traditional education system. All students do is zone out on lectures, do class activities, and then go home with homework. My younger brother suffered so dearly during elementary school and the family would be up past 10pm shouting criticisms, shedding tears, then leaving the rest for the morning as we ate breakfast. Although the whole system is flawed, homework is possibly the most responsible for failing and loss of interest.

Homework is very exhausting. At my mediocre “honors” school, homework is taken to a whole new and annoying level. We get useless weekly projects that don’t help students understand the material. We are forced to take notes at home in addition to class notes. We do vocabulary…in the 11th grade! Math students have to do power point presentations, essays and research! Physical education students must also do essays and reports. It’s utterly ridiculous. People suffer from back pain due to hauling in a notebook for every subject, that needs to be checked weekly.

My school has no sports team, no library, no stable clubs, poor funding, and the school is entirely composed of trailer classrooms. On top of this, state standards have caused homework and the rest to become even more prolonged. We must write the standard pertaining to the assignment before we begin. So yep, I go to a bungalow school with no school pride, overcrowding, and tedious homework every night.

And then I realized something else. Homework is counterproductive. I remember this past junior year, asking friends what we learned in U.S. History, the most tedious class. No one knew. I asked, “What was in chapter one?” Shrugs.

“What is the encomienda system?” (System Christopher Columbus used to keep captured natives in line.)

“The ‘what’ system?”

It was sad. But…when you asked them to explain the plot of their favorite anime, or to talk about the latest book they read — they’re on it. It’s because homework causes disinterest and doesn’t allow kids the freedom to explore and find their interests. Because it is so overwhelming and in the end irrelevant to class time, students shut off and go into “auto work”. They call friends and cheat. I personally scribbled and faked bad handwriting so that my work would still get stamped. And then the morning after it’s gone. Traditional education is like that across the board. Students text and daydream while the lecture is on.

The monotony of it all is causing a dangerous cycle. The uneventful class time causes students to resent and not care about homework. That causes students not to learn. Then when homework time comes, other activities are missed out on and we can’t just relax, which turns into procrastination to avoid the pain of not knowing the material and leaving your leisure. The procrastination backfires when it’s time to take a useless test or do a project. Then we cram. We pass the test and complete the project. Mediocre results, yet still no one cares. Wash rinse and repeat. That’s what happens to a person’s brain under the traditional system.

I suggest that all schools adopt the free school, democratic, or Sudbury Valley models of education. It allows age mixing, pursuit of interests, allows trial and error, inclusion in the school’s operation and things aren’t needlessly forced onto students.

I’ve even dedicated my time to a blog that covers topics on the problems in traditional education: introvertedwisdom.com.

Too much homework

As kids go back to school, we need to pay attention to a growing movement among parents and educators calling on homework to be severely reduced. We think they are right.

Childhood is a time for growth and education is an important part of that. But so is being a child. Enjoying your youth and family. School hours have expanded over the years to the point that many school days end at five instead of three. Almost weekly tests in one subject or another are being the norm in many schools. Homework assigned, or studies expected, reach two to three hours a night. It is far too much.

Kids and families need to decompress at the end of a day. Kids need time to be kids and families need time to be families. It can’t just be school, rush home and grab a quick dinner, and back to the books. Monastic existences do no one any good.

We need to ask why this is happening. We all know about the explosion of information. But we have to ask about what happened to the three Rs, reading, writing and arithmetic. We know more is now required. But two hours of homework a night for primary school kids who need their parents to help them is over the top.

We need to examine just how good the “pedagogie” is coming out of Quebec. We also have to look at whether things like not having enough English textbooks is one of the reasons for so much homework on the English side, although in all fairness the problem is just as acute on the French side. We need to look at the qualifications of teachers as well.

Just yesterday, a Montreal newspaper reported that there is such a drastic shortage of teachers that some schools are hiring teachers — and there are almost a hundred — who only have a high school or Cegep diploma. If lack of teachers and large class sizes are problems, then we have to ask the provincial government to make teaching a more attractive profession. Stressing kids and parents is not the answer.

Teachers are professionals. As professionals they are tasked with imparting knowledge to children during a given part of the day. They are also public servants. As such we have a legitimate right to ask why are they not completing their tasks in the appointed time and “offloading” their work onto families?

If Quebec is throwing too much information into the pedagogy, let’s cut it. If the use of homework and weekly exams is some kind of shock treatment by teachers to concentrate the minds and sphincters of students, let’s stop it.

Several years ago two Penn State researchers conducted an international study and found that instead of improving educational achievement, increases in homework may actually undercut teaching effectiveness and worsen disparities in student learning. The study found that most teachers are not making efficient use of homework, according to David P. Baker, professor of education and sociology. They assign homework mostly as drill, to improve memorization of material either in math, science or the humanities. While drills and repetitive exercises have their place in schooling, homework may not be that place.

Just last year, after a parental outcry, the Toronto District School Board decided to study the issue of homework. Reduced it. And the results are having a significantly positive impact on students’ performances.

So how much is enough? Hard to say. But how about two hours total for the week and an additional hour for the weekend. There is a phrase chiseled into the wall of one of McGill’s libraries. “The quiet and still air of delightful studies…” Studies should be delightful, not draconian, from grade school to high school as well.

I thought I would write my own 10 tips, which would lean more towards how to ease homework overload than how to set up a comfortable work station at home, but before I started typing I saw that Kerry Dickinson, someone I’ve written about many times (she was instrumental in changing homework policy in her Danville, California, community), had posted her top 10 tips on her new blog East Bay Homework Blogspot. While Kerry’s tips are different than mine would be, she has lots of good ideas.

Here are her first three tips:

1. Don’t over schedule your children this school year. Benefits: you save money, get more time at home as a family and are generally less stressed out when you’re not driving your kids around after school running from one activity to the next.

2. Don’t sign your child up for academic tutoring unless he/she is in jeopardy of failing a class. (Don’t pay for a tutor to boost a “C” or “B” to an “A”.) Benefits: same as in #1 and you are sending the message to your child that he/she is fine the way he/she is. You will trust the teachers to do their jobs. They will get a better indication of your child’s ability if your child isn’t getting extra outside help (this includes helps from you, too).

3. Don’t ask your kids about grades, test scores or homework. Instead, focus on the content of the subject. (Instead of “What did you get on the test?” say, “What are you learning in science?” If you are connected to some school communication tool (like Schoolloop) you can look at homework assignments and grades privately. Benefits: you are teaching them to take ownership of their own schedules. You are letting them manage their own time. You are taking the focus off scores and putting it on learning. You are alleviating stress in their lives.

Read the rest here. And if you have more to add, please leave a comment below.

One person recommended adding a section where readers can post articles. It’s a great idea but it isn’t feasible. So please send me articles you’d like to see me post. I’ll blog about them and then I’ll file them under Resources.

And, to start off the school year with something fun, listen to this song by Nathalie, an eleventh grader from Princeton, New Jersey, who wrote it for a friend who had to take the AP test on her birthday.

Wouldn’t it be great if every student started sending the lyrics around? Maybe educators would take notice and listen.

Here are the lyrics (but I highly recommend listening:

The AP Song
by Nathalie

You would judge me
On the accuracy of my best guess
But you cannot budge me
I don’t want to take this AP test

And my free responses
Will be mainly composed of pure BS
I REALLY DON’T WANT TO
No, I don’t want to take this AP test

And it’s even my birthday
But the College Board doesn’t care about me
Oh, what a Thursday!
I’d really rather not take this AP.

Since I live in Princeton
My neighbors all work for ETS
They don’t know how I hate them
And especially their stupid test

I should be studying
And as procrastination goes, this is far from the best
But I’ll forgo a review book to sing that
“I don’t want to take this AP test”

I paid 95 dollars
And I’ve never regretted an expenditure more
But the check has been written
So I’d better get at least a four

And it’s even my birthday
But the College Board doesn’t care about me
Oh, what a Thursday!
I’d really rather not take this AP.

Have a great summer. And, if you’re looking for a book to read yourself, please take a look at the book list I just added.

Intrigued, I emailed his mother, Julia Rhodes, to find out a little more. She told me that her son, who had been diagnosed with a learning disability when he was young, was “smart as a whip,” but struggled in school. His grades in elementary school reflected his refusal to do homework and when he went to high school, he decided that he would negotiate a deal so that he wouldn’t have to do homework. “A great communicator,” her son talked to his teachers and made deals with them. He told them he would help them, tutor other students, and do well on his tests, but that he just couldn’t face doing the “mundane, day-to-day work.” And his teachers, eager to keep the personable athlete in their Sonora, California, high school, agreed. Even through college, her son negotiated deals with teachers.

Rhodes, a single mother and a teacher for many years, instilled in her son “the belief that he could do anything. I didn’t care about his grades,” she told me. “Not everyone has to be an A student. I’d seen too many driven kids, and they weren’t happy or passionate about what they were doing. I just wanted my son to believe in himself and I helped him learn how to advocate for himself.”

Math students in this high-performing school district used to rush through their Algebra I textbooks only to spend the first few months of Algebra II relearning everything they forgot or failed to grasp the first time.

So the district’s frustrated math teachers decided to rewrite the algebra curriculum, limiting it to about half of the 90 concepts typically covered in a high school course in hopes of developing a deeper understanding of key topics. Last year, they began replacing 1,000-plus-page math textbooks with their own custom-designed online curriculum; the lessons are typically written in Westport and then sent to a program in India, called HeyMath!, to jazz up the algorithms and problem sets with animation and sounds.

Read the story here.

A Former Graduate Student Speaks Out

I admire your mission. The subject of how I spent my life doing homework and what turned out to be worthless schooling is a subject I often cry and get angry about, but a past situation I would for one like to make up for, and also a situation that I would like to help others on. I am turning 30 now, and have a lot of living to catch up on and have wasted many of my best years.

Actually my grade school, middle school, and high school were mostly fairly run and had opportunities for the smart and driven students, but they forced students to do work whether they liked it or not. The harder courses were taught by efficient, inspired, and helpful teachers. The dumber courses were run like penitentiaries. I myself was a very smart and driven student, eager to get work done early.

The problem that I and most students faced was that doing our work better and faster only led to getting placed into harder courses that assigned even more work. There was no incentive to reach completion since we were like hamsters caught in a wheel. The faster we ran, the more the wheel turned. The dumber courses did not teach anything, but just wasted time, and assigned about the same amount of work– just dumber and more repetitive. Students who were non-compliant or who failed certain mandatory tests were forced into yet more schooling, summer classes, and force-fed education-–which we all feared.

The good thing is that I used my high school to place out of 35 college credits–through the advanced placement program, and earned full scholarships to college. The down side was that I was putting off living a normal life, believing the sacrifice would pay off.

Even with scholarships though, the work in college was grueling, while keeping the scholarships depended on maintaining stringent GPA requirements. I graduated with a degree in physics and minor in mathematics with a good GPA, but once again, I had put off living a normal life.

The beginning of the senior year in college, I realized there was not really any available employment with just a bachelor’s degree and so I was persuaded to take hard courses in order to get into graduate school. Being successful at them, I then went on to graduate school to be a research scientist, and did all the requirements of a master’s degree, but never finished my thesis since there was lack of funding for that field of research and I had realized that I was pursuing a dead-end career.

Since then, I’ve spent 5 of the last 6 years either unemployed or severely under-employed, all the while desperately looking for work. In spite of my immense knowledge, talent, and work ethic, my credentials and experiences were considered worthless. My former teachers only recommended more schooling to earn Masters and PHd’s–though many of their students were also unemployed and many deeply in debt from their schooling. None of the people I had spent so much time with and worked so hard for had any real leads at all to any employment, just more schooling. Even a dean of my undergraduate college said to me that “Education is nice to have, but it does not really matter. We just do whatever, anyway.”

At first I felt unfortunate, but then I felt betrayed. Among the jobs I had the last 6 years, I sold watches in the mall, folded shirts in a department store, washed dishes in a restaurant, cleaned toilets, and mopped floors at minimum wage to find work. I never imagined that my diligence would lead to that. Obviously, most of the recent jobs have not contributed anything to my resume or finances. The one good job I had was as an engineer’s assistant, but the position only lasted a year until we completed major projects. I thought I would find similar work soon, but all the companies I had found were either outsourcing or laying off their workers.

I would sure like to use my talents to earn a living wage, but for now, I am just doing a part-time government job which is just 20 hours a month and below $15 an hour. I have lived with my parents for the last 6 years and we are all very concerned since the economy has only gotten worse.

In some ways though, the past few years were a blessing to catch up on life, and to get to know my own family better–a few of them who only had a few more years left in them. I enjoy living myself, having nearly missed out on life, and I have been grateful to reclaim a life of my own.

And so, I say to everyone as a hard learned lesson: There is a world of difference between a mirage of promises and what is truly rewarding in life. Live lives of meaning and purpose and to thy own self be true.

We Hold Their Hands Too Much
by K, a College Teacher

Having your teen carry a cell phone is a good idea for many reasons. But, I would argue, it is also a bad idea for those same reasons. If your teenager gets a flat tire, they should be able to fix it without calling daddy. If they find themselves alone at home and hungry, they should be able to feed themselves without calling a parent. This topic is covered very nicely by Lenore Skenazy over at freerangekids.

You may think that I exaggerate, but many college students can scarcely survive a day without having their parents run interference for them. For example, I teach a study abroad course in the Caribbean. The charter flights operate on Caribbean time: Planes have been late, rescheduled, cancelled, and we were once told that our flight didn’t even exist. If you travel a lot, this probably sounds familiar. When it happens to you, you go into problem-solving mode, right? You stay calm and kind, but insistent. You figure it out. What has been fascinating is some of my students’ reactions. I have seen them cry, throw up their hands and say “we’ll never get to the beach”, and call mommy and daddy.

They also call mom and dad for fairly routine situations. When I had a van
break down on a trip, one students starting crying, saying, “now we’ll never get home”, and, again, called mommy and daddy. By the time I had arranged to tow the broken van and had ordered a rental replacement, I had several parents call my cell phone to make sure that little Jimmy or Jane was okay. In some cases, it isn’t even a problem that prompts the need to call their parents. Recently, a student was on the verge of tears because there wasn’t cell phone coverage at our remote location. She said, “I have to talk to my parents every day, otherwise they worry.” Does a young adult really have to report to mom and dad that she has survived another harrowing day in college? Another child called mommy for an hour-long chat every single day of her year abroad in Japan.

Anyone who has finished high school should know how to cook a meal, do their own laundry, read a map, and fix a flat. They should be able to cope with life’s routine challenges without requiring advice. I find it disconcerting that a twenty year-old woman told me she was frightened about flying a commercial airline without a “grown-up” to help her find the gate (true story). How can they be expected to get a job, pay their bills and contribute to society if they can’t help themselves through the airport? Eighteen year-old “children” are serving our country in war zones: We should expect more of the ones who stay home — they can handle it.

As much as students are accustomed to mommy and daddy holding their hands through every routine bump and bruise in daily life, they are used to teachers holding their hands through every academic challenge. Each assignment is expected to include a laundry list of expected content, page limits, citation expectations (down to precise numbers and acceptable sources), and instructions on how they should introduce and conclude their work. Assignments that should be outlets for creative and innovative thinking and problem solving become big fill-in-the-blank worksheets. These assignments become hopelessly tedious, but they are so easy that we can have students do more of them. More is better, right?

It wasn’t always this way. While we have needlessly increased the volume of written work, we have dumbed-down our expectations. In literature courses, my father (in the 1950’s) always had one weekly writing assignment. The assignment never varied — he was to write an essay on “some facet of this week’s reading that you found interesting.” Nothing more needed to be said. By the time I was in school (in the 1980’s), the assignment had been fine-tuned to one broad question about the specific work that we should address. Apparently, we have continued to add specificity to the assignments until they have become meaningless. While I don’t really advocate leaping back to “write about something interesting,” I propose that we support intellectual development by giving fewer, but more meaningful, assignments. We should only assign work that has defined learning goals and requires students to demonstrate mastery of content or independent thought.

Teaching requires putting students into situations that they can only escape by thinking. This is true whether we are teaching life lessons or academic ones.