Since everybody’s whining about doing homework with their kids, let me join in. (Here’s an old post by Harry on the topic.)
Jonah, the drama-queen, has been giving me HELL about homework for the past couple of months. The homework isn’t particularly onerous. It’s not all that interesting, just pages torn out of a workbook, but there isn’t a huge quantity of it. Yet, my kid manages to turn about 20 minutes of studying spelling words and filling in a worksheet into a two hour experience. He’s a smart kid. When he’s paying attention, he can whip through the work, but Jonah daydreams. Now, I have no idea where he gets that trait from, because I have laser-like concentration, but still… He has to finish his work, so we can get on with our lives.
Yesterday, I wiped away the bits of rice and chicken on the table after dinner and set him up with his homework — two worksheets and spelling words. Ian was given a coloring book. Since Ian hates coloring, he tore out of the kitchen into the living room and started singing to himself and walking in circles, which he is absolutely not allowed to do, because he’s going to get beaten up for doing odd things when he’s in Kindergarten. So, I yanked him back to this side of normal and bribed him with chocolate to do some coloring.
When we got back to the kitchen, Jonah was experimenting with gravity. He wanted to see how far he could tip his chair backwards before he fell over. Jonah! Stop it! Chair down. Legs forward. Do your work. He sighed and looked back down at the page. Then Ian needed some assistance with coloring in the train. After a short time, Ian shouted, “Help” and ran out of the room. I let him go. I made Jonah read the directions on his worksheet out loud. The whole time his legs were thrashing about. He seemed to get it, so I turned away for a while and cleaned up the kitchen. After five minutes, he had done nothing. Now, he was experimenting with the erasing qualities of a rubber band. Jonah! What are you doing? Why aren’t you doing your work. “I’m thinking”, he shouts back and tips over a cup of juice on the worksheet, which also has holes in it from the rubber band experiment.
This went on and on with much sighs and body contortions and shouts and culminated with Jonah locking himself in the bathroom and announcing that he was going to run away from home and live by the railroad tracks.
Today, we put together a new incentive chart. I need a drink.
Apt. 11d 
Sounds like it’s Jonah who really needs a drink.
(Now my parent-friends who read your blog will never trust me with their kids again!)
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I forget — Jonah is a 1st grader? Isn’t this perfectly normal? I’m disgusted by the HW I hear about these days. My Kindergartener doesn’t get homework. A few times they’ve sent home “kindergarten challenges.” But, they’re not required, and the 2 she’s had have been kind of fun. One was writing in rebuses, the other to think of unusual uses for objects. She did the 1st but not the 2nd.
I certainly didn’t have homework in K-3 (i.e. early childhood education), and I wouldn’t have done any stupid worksheets either. I’m convinced that teachers are taking homework that might benefit some kids, and forcing all the kids to do it. My guess is that the teachers don’t want to deal with telling parents which kids need to do the homework.
Tough to deal with, though, ’cause I wouldn’t feel comfortable telling the teacher how to run her class, or in telling my kid not to do it.
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Does he really need to do the homework? By that I mean, is the work “busywork” or will it help him acquire skills?
What is his teacher like? What happens to the homework after he turns it in?
Not like Jonah will stop doing his homework, but it might be worth it to think about the consequences of not doing it as you figure out a strategy to support him as he does his work.
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bj– really curious? when and where were you in school? I had homework from kindergarten on. I started kindergarten in ’78. When I got frustrated at some point in 1st grade (saying things like “I hate school”) my mom just wrote a note saying that I understood the assignment but was too tired to complete it. Other parents were shocked that she didn’t make me finish the homework and that I knew she was questioning the teacher. The interesting thing was that once my mom spoke with my teacher and explained how there was too much work, she understood that the problem was with the homework. She thought that the homework was fun– let’s say it was coloring in letters or cutting out pictures of certain things from magazines. She didn’t realize how much time it would take and that the children saw it as work.
That said, by 2nd grade I was used to homework.
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Just as an FYI, my 4 year old son often gets up and walks around in a circle singing, but hasn’t gotten beaten up in day care yet.
I HATE the homework, but I can see some benefits. Sometimes when my daughter (2nd grade) does the math worksheets, she gets some answers wrong, and it gives me or my husband a chance to teach her. The spelling words are just simple practice/memorization. My issue is that the spelling words are too easy for my daughter, who is an excellent reader. I also hate that I have to play math games with her twice a week, and they are boring (to me) math games. And we have to frickin’ sign and initialize everything.
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Oh, I love to hear that other kids walk around in circles also. We’ve been told that we have to get him to stop doing that. Also, he’s not allowed to twist his hair when he’s tired. When I told his therapist that hair twisting was some weird genetic thing, that my dad does and his father also did, she said that they probably all had the same disorder as Ian. I’ll have to write a post sometime on all the things that Ian has been diagnosed with. I really hope that his speech will get to grade level soon, so that I can get out of the crazy world of special education.
My sister in law the teacher said that 2nd and 3rd grade boys are especially bad about doing homework, so Jonah (who is 2nd grade) is acting appropriately. But Jonah is also more of space cadet than other kids. He’s also way too sensitive and dramatic, so homework time becomes a huge chore.
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my son has been known to walk in circles–several times he ran around our ridiculously tiny kitchen island so long that he started to cry because the bottoms of his feet were hurting. he spent his first four and a half years twisting the top of his hair when he was tired. before he got hair he twisted mine. he’s six now and still occasionally does the hair-twisting thing. as far as i know, he’s perfectly normal. but then again, maybe i should be the one worrying?!
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As someone who often allowed my children to shine on their homework, I have come out the other side with a greater respect for the discipline required to actually do it and for the sense of sense of self-efficacy that can accompany the completion of well-completed assignment.
So he doesn’t want to do it…Big deal. If you don’t think it is an onerous amount of work, then he can learn the lesson sooner than later that life is not all about what you want to do.
I am getting sooo cranky in my old age.
But seriously, I’m not sure from the sounds of this that it is really about the homework anyway. Sounds more like a good old-fashioned power struggle.
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This is the kind of behavior my #2 had been up to for several years, and we got a diagnosis of ADHD a couple of months ago. We seem to be getting some traction on the whole thing, now, between medication and a far more directive style of parenting than we need for the other two.
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Ooh, I have to reveal my age. I went to Kindergarten in 1971, and don’t remember any homework at all until the 5th grade. And then, it was of the “special projects”, like do a report on Egypt, not worksheets.
I’ll admit that I was a worksheet rebel, and didn’t do them even when they were assigned, and got away with it (later in the 5th & 6th grade). I also used to fill in random answers on the weekly multiplication tests. So, in general, I was not a compliant student when I knew how to do the work. I’m hoping that I don’t have to negotiate that battle with my kids (that is, I’m hoping they aren’t asked to engage in too much practice of skills they have already acquired). This motivated our choice of private school, and we’ll keep our fingers crossed that it was the right choice.
This is a different question from not doing homework that you should do (I had plenty of that in high school and college).
bj
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I was in kindergarten in 1966, and we had no homework until third grade at least, and probably fourth. All I carried back and forth to school (walking! a mile! without an adult!) was lunch and milk money.
Of course, I didn’t have nightly homework in high school either.
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Maybe he needs a blog, which seems to a perfect outlet for the dramatic and overlysensitive. 🙂
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I don’t have kids — my cats don’t count, I think — so I’m going to whine about the Indianapolis Colts. Eff ’em!
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I don’t know what your morning are like but you could try getting him up a half hour early to do it instead. When I was a kid this worked brilliantly on me ’cause ‘leaving for school, where the homework is due’ was much more incentive, plus I wasn’t all worn through my ‘sitting’ patience for the day.
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Just my two bits:
I don’t know about HW in elementary school, but in middle and high schools in our district, we have parents who complain if you do not give homework. Our administration checks in on us to make sure we give some kind of assignment over vacation. (They also tell us not to show movies in class from start to finish.) It seems the more vocal parents are those that are disappointed if they ask their child if s/he has hw and the child says, “no”.
I end up giving hw 3x a week and extra credit over vacation.
I also tutor a kid in a neighboring town, making sure he does his hw in the hour after he gets home from school while his parents work until 7pm.
I have a question for parents-is there an opportunity for you to get your paperwork/reading done at the same time as your set HW time?
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Thanks for the advice, guys. Homework does go much better in the morning, but there isn’t enough time to get everything done. If Jonah is too tired to do everything at night, we carry over some work to the morning.
Could I get paperwork done at the same time as Jonah’s HW time? Probably. But it would have to work that could be interrupted. I couldn’t read or write during that time. I usually multi-task by cleaning the kitchen during HW time.
I think Jonah gets the right amount of homework. 20 minutes a night isn’t a big deal. The only reason it goes on for two hours is because he’s daydreaming.
I just came from a school conference with Jonah’s teacher. Sounds like he’s just as fidgety and unfocused in the classroom, but she shrugged it off and said it was a maturity and boy thing. She said that if he could concentrate on the tests that he would be a good candidate for the gifted and talented program for next year.
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My wife is a teacher–this is her advice. (One of her current students is a lot like Jonah.) (All the below is close to a quote.)
Use a timer; set it for whatever amount of time is reasonable for Jonah to concentrate, and keep him on focus until the timer rings. (That may be only 5 minutes.) Teach him to stay on focus himself until the timer rings. Somehow, the definite endpoint helps many students concentrate. Then let him take a break, but not do anything interesting. (If he needs to bounce, let him–but don’t let him do something that gets his brain out of gear). Repeat until the homework is done.
With usual success, he should be able to do the homework in 2 10-minute sessions in a week or two.
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Aren’t there special timers that you can stop whenever you take a break?
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Thanks, Sam (and wife). I was starting to time Jonah. I was saying that he had to finish all his work by X point. But that was stressing him out. He would give up if he didn’t think it would make it. Your method of telling him he has to focus, rather than finish, for five or ten minutes sounds like a much better tactic. Yay!
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Michael Gurian, in _The Minds of Boys_, theorized that boys who fidget are trying to stay alert. He suggested giving boys something non-disruptive to do while paying attention in class; I remember the example of a squishy ball to be held in the non-writing hand. Instead of falling out of his chair, a boy can squeeze the ball to stay alert.
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The other thing you can try to do is to sit him down to do his homework and then go about your own business. Doing homework should not be a big deal; it should just be part of the natural course of the day. If you’re spending a lot of time talking to him while he’s sitting there, if you’re constantly trying to ‘get’ him to pay attention and do his work, what you’re actually accomplishing is giving him the attention he wants. Put him in his chair, read him the assignment if you have to do that, make sure he understands, then let him alone do his work. If it takes him 10 minutes or 10 hours, it’s up to him.
You can come back and check on him every so often, of course, in case he needs help. But in response to things like ‘it’s hard’ or ‘I hate homework’, a simple ‘I understand, sweetie’ should be your only response. Remember, the goal is to make doing homework no big deal. So if you get dragged into a discussion, you’re letting the focus shift away from the homework, which is the last thing you want.
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