I went to Ian’s after school night. I got there a few minutes early, so I picked out a seat in the gym right next to the door, just in case I needed to make a sudden and strategic dash out of the place. There’s only so much "we’re a community of learners" crap that I can stomach before I feel the need to hurl.
I checked out the other parents. Ian is bussed to a school in a different town, which has better services for his needs. So, I haven’t seen any of the other parents before. All new faces. They all seemed to know each other at this school. Air kiss. Air kiss. I played around with my cell phone to waste time. Some class differences between this town and mine. The moms’ hair was professionally streaked, unlike the parents at Jonah’s school who just pour the Clairol on their scalp every few weeks.
And boy, everybody looked old. Wow, everybody was, like, 40 or something. Wait! So, am I. Sometimes I forget.
Lots of hoopla in the blogosphere about this teacher who assigned homework assignments to the parents. I’m with all the commenters at Unfogged, who advocated the use of violence on this man.
Amy P has been forwarding me links to education posts this past week and is chomping at the bit for a good education discussion. Let’s help her out.
This is an OPEN RANTING THREAD about education.
Apt. 11d 
I was going to say no rants, and really, I am pretty happy with my daughter’s teacher this year (as opposed to last year’s teacher, who was a lovely woman but way too detail-oriented for me). But I do have one story you might find interesting.
On her science test this week, the students were asked to write about the senses, and the topic they were asked to write about was a turkey dinner cooking on Thanksgiving. My daughter had points taken off because her description of the taste of the turkey was insufficient.
Well, we’re mainly vegetarians and I can’t bear turkey dinners (unfortunate timing of morning sickness in both pregnancies), so she has next to no experience with turkey dinners! She has never tasted turkey. In fact, her description included “I can see the turkey’s body. I can feel the turkey’s bones”–words more suited to someone seeing a turkey as an animal rather than as food.
I e-mailed the teacher about it (making sure to reassure her that I wasn’t grubbing for a few extra points–really, what’s the point?), but I just wanted to explain to her why this normally excellent student got such a question wrong. 😉
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Wendy: Now, you have me ranting!!!!
A child’s individual description of their personal sensations (during any activity) is not science. It’s writing, or oral communication, or poetry. But, it’s not science.
It’s also not an appropriate science writing exercise.
And, to confirm your mini-rant, a turkey dinner is not a cultural norm that you can rely on every child to have had, in any school district I’ve been in. I wouldn’t have even known what she was talking about, if I’d been assigned this topic any time before I reached college. (raised in a vegetarian, immigrant home).
We were assigned homework at back to school night, but it was easy “tell your daughter about a first grade experience.” My husband (who went without me) promptly forgot about it. I had to email the teacher to get the homework, which I then did for both of us, in order to not make my daughter feel left out. She did ask us about it on the day it was due. And, unfortunately, my husband’s preferred response (Hey, I only do homework if I want to) would not have been the appropriate modeling of parent behavior.
Our school experience is going fine. I am wondering whether my daughter is going to be challenged sufficiently, not because I want her to be learning more more more, but because I want her to learn what it feels like to have to work at something.
bj
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BJ, I knew this was going to happen. I didn’t explain that part of the test well, but it did make sense to me and was a small part of the test. Don’t freak about it!
What I like about the teacher this year is that she *is* challenging my daughter, who found her homework to be ridiculously easy last year.
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Yes, the big thing is being generally pleased. I think we have a tendency to obsess about the details, and really, what I want from education is to be generally happy with the teacher, as a professional. Then, I want to get out of the way and not worry about micromanaging each lesson, or plan, or day.
bj
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I just had a Macchiavellian thought–maybe the parent homework is supposed to provide the teacher with enough material to detect if the parents are writing assignments for the kids? In that case, I approve.
As other people have pointed out, the parent blog homework is really only suitable in an extremely homogeneous school setting. Imagine how English language learners, single parents, the non-internet savvy and those working long hours feel about it. (You could phone in your blog post to the teacher directly, but that’s still pretty intimidating for an ESL person–there are few things that inspire more cold dread than speaking on the telephone in a foreign language.) There’s also the potential for teens to feel embarrassed by their parents’ contributions, especially children of parents in the categories I mentioned above. There are plenty of native English speakers who can barely write a sentence without misspellings, iffy grammar, ugly punctuation or bad spacing. This is exactly the sort of assignment to reveal class differences that would not otherwise be obvious. I’ve also seen the criticism that many parent-involvement assignments ignore the fact that parents may have other children, and that such teachers don’t realize what a nightmare they may be creating for families with more than two kids. And what about minimally competent parents who don’t respect school or value education?
As I’ve seen discussed on kitchentablemath.blogspot.com, “parent involvement” is the holy grail these days, since it correlates with high achieving kids and schools. Unfortunately, it’s not clear how exactly the relationship works, or what kind of parental involvement produces the magical results. How dreadful if these time-consuming assignments were preventing parents from doing the stuff that actually produces high achievement!
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I agree with you about the *kind* of parent involvement. My parents were very hands off, for example, mainly because my dad was a public school teacher and he found parent involvement to be more difficult than helpful. But they weren’t neglectful. I don’t know what that key is–maybe it’s having expectations or having a high level of discourse that is still age appropriate? My kids love animals and nature and science, and we talk with them about that stuff when they show interest.
I’ll tell you one thing I’m sure of–it’s not testing them on spelling words!
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Oooh ranting. My son is pre-school aged so I am just watching the headlights approach. I have taught though, a decade ago or so.
What I find frustrating is that the school and teachers sometimes seem to be expending so much effort on what they CAN’T control — what parents are doing in their homes — rather than what they CAN control, like creating engaging assignments for the students themselves, or developing amazing curriculum. Probably because those things may take more effort.
The whole blog thing is insane to me. So let’s have MORE Internet commentary on things people don’t know anything about on blogs? Woo hoo what a great thing for kids to think of as “work”…
… hey I’d better get offline and get cracking on that novel.
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This year we moved to Texas and my daughter started kindergarten at a multi-denominational Christian classical school informally affiliated with my husband’s university. We pay $400 a month year-round, and it’s the best money we’ve ever spent. It will start to pinch when we’ve got two or more kids there, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
My daughter does Spanish, PE, a souped-up phonics program where the kids learn hand signals for each English phonogram, Singapore Math, geography, scripture, art and art history, music and music history, etc. The summer reading assignment was Kipling’s Jungle Book. In a few years, she’ll start Latin. The academic content is very rigorous, but the teachers seem very skilled at providing a spoon full of sugar to make the medicine go down. Every so often, something happens like I listen to my daughter and realize that she’s singing the parts of an insect’s body to the tune of “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes.” Her mind is just so sticky right now, that every bit of information she encounters adheres. She wants nothing so much as to acquire information, the more the better, which is what classical education theory says is typical of her age group. She learned to read last year (with a lot of work and bribery on my part), so she’s actually a fairly independent learner now, with a lot of momentum. She just goes around learning stuff pretty much effortlessly.
The school is very transparent and has excellent parent-teacher communication. Each teacher blogs the week’s activities in each subject, as well as being available by phone and e-mail. There’s also a communication log that travels back and forth from home to school (that’s my favorite).
Except for finding themed show-and-tell items once a week, there’s essentially no homework now. Yay! Eventually, there will be homework, but the school doesn’t seem to suffer from projectivitis. We are going to need to put in 5 hours of volunteer work per term, which is going to be hard with a 2.5 year old at home and me not driving yet, but it will happen eventually. In the meantime, my husband reads her E. Nesbit stories at bedtime, she pores over library books like “The Milk Weed Bug” or “Sponges are Skeletons,” and loves to watch BBC’s Blue Planet, with its plankton, sea slugs, and kelp. Freedom from homework allows her to pursue her personal interests.
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Laura,
I’m dying to know what you object to in the buzz phrase “community of learners.”
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meaningless mush
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Heh. I have three words for you: Quality. Schools. International.
Where the “Quality” comes from is anybody’s guess.
I’m seriously considering homeschooling. And if we go back to the States prematurely (that is, before, oh, 2012 or so), it will be because of the crappy schools overseas. One more QSI country and I’m gonna scream.
Amy, I’m green with envy. A very unappetizing green. That school sounds amazing, and I want something just like that.
Texas, eh? Not much commercial law developmental work there, I’m afraid.
[Sigh]
I need a vodka now.
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I’ve never heard of QSI before. I take it you’re in one of the old Soviet republics. What’s the issue? Someone I know visited an international school in Germany. She said it was a rich kid school, and that it was a real zoo, behavior-wise.
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There’s only so much “we’re a community of learners” crap that I can stomach before I feel the need to hurl.
This is hilarious!!!
I’m going to tattoo this to my forehead!!!!
Or possibly to Mr. Principal’s forehead, as the case may be.
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If it’s tattooed on his forehead, he won’t see it much.
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My sons’ school sent home an exciting! notice! that we can send them to a school-approved website that will give them opportunities to practice standardized taking tests. Because they don’t waste enough classroom time preparing for and then taking standardized tests, don’t you know.
The kindergarten teacher sent home a nine-part math homework assignment. Nine parts! This is kindergarten, last time I checked. They are things like, “Get a dozen leaves from outside and make a graph showing how many are green / yellow / brown.” Times nine.
I am still waffling about whether to muster an organized summary of my objections, or to grit my teeth and do the work with him, or to be passive-aggressive and lose the workbook.
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It concerns me when I hear complaints about how so much time has to be taken up practicing for standardized tests. If you look at NY k-8 tests, you’ll probably conclude they are not very rigorous. Especially when compared to tests from some other states, like California, where academic standards are actually more in line with our worldwide competitors. I view many of the schools’ complaints about “teaching to the tests” to be excuses for poor curriculum.
How about if our schools spend less time on fluff projects and other types of “crayola curriculum”, and more time on content rich rigorous instruction so that our kids can receive a world class education?
That’s my rant for today.
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Education-ish story of the day. My 5 year old son just finished working on a large drawing of the solar system. He started it, and his sister kind of got involved/took over a bit and labelled everything. But my son wanted it for show and tell next Friday–I don’t know why. Last week he brought his sister’s stuffed gorilla.
Anyway, he asked me what was that thing that goes around the earth. The moon? I asked. No. A comet? No. I thought a while, then I said, A satellite? Yes!
I didn’t have the heart to tell him a satellite wasn’t part of the solar system.
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opportunities!
yes!
that is the new word, opportunties!
our children are going to be given many opportunities to write from here on in!
also, and not by coincidence, many opportunities to be arbitrarily and harshly assessed!
$22,000 per pupil spending!
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I just had a Macchiavellian thought–maybe the parent homework is supposed to provide the teacher with enough material to detect if the parents are writing assignments for the kids? In that case, I approve.
That’s unethical. I taught at the Unversity of Iowa; my husband is a professor at NYU.
There are fairly strict ethics surrounding the question of how a teacher or professor handles suspected plagiarism (which would include downloading a paper or having your parent write it).
Any teacher who did this would be out of bounds, and would need to be disciplined — or, better yet, professionally developed within an inch of his/her life!
Of course, that wouldn’t happen.
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How dreadful if these time-consuming assignments were preventing parents from doing the stuff that actually produces high achievement!
That’s us!!!
We desperately need our time to reteach math. Desperately.
Instead I’m spending my time creating Civil War artifacts.
Now my husband is spending time reteaching h.s. writing assignments.
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Catherine, how is that unethical? It’s not the approach I would use, but I can’t see that it is unethical and would require institutional intervention.
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So let’s have MORE Internet commentary on things people don’t know anything about on blogs? Woo hoo what a great thing for kids to think of as “work”…
This is a HUGE problem in my $22,000 per pupil district.
We have a book shortage, which is now denied by (some) members of the Board; teachers are teaching from the internet.
My neighbor’s son was just sent to Wikipedia to do “research.”
Google isn’t research; the internet isn’t a book.
All of our experienced teachers are retiring, and we seem to have a new generation of teachers who think Stuff You Find On The Internet is knowledge.
Strangely enough, we have a massive achievement gap here in Irvington.
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Catherine, how is that unethical? It’s not the approach I would use, but I can’t see that it is unethical and would require institutional intervention.
I’ll ask Ed (when he gets back).
There are a series of steps you are supposed to follow; the teacher is not supposed to engage in behaviors that could be considered a form of entrapment.
I’ll ask.
When I was teaching, years ago, I know I would have been in trouble doing anything to encourage (or smoke out) plagiarism.
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I am still waffling about whether to muster an organized summary of my objections, or to grit my teeth and do the work with him, or to be passive-aggressive and lose the workbook.
lollllll!
If you’re already writing posts on a blog about Kindergarten homework (and good for you!) you’ve already made a choice – you’re going to be preparing many, many, MANY organized summaries of your objections in the years t/k.
I have reams of organized summaries of my own objections.
Ed, too.
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