If your child’s grades matter—if you live in New York City, where students apply to middle schools or charter schools, or are in some other way in a situation where the numbers are going to make a difference—then you probably look at things differently. You’re in a tough spot, right there at the intersection of what’s culturally wrong with homework and how parents are making it worse. Most of us won’t have to deal with the ramifications of a child making mistakes with long-term implications until they’re in high school, when college and adulthood feel closer, children are more competent, and it’s easier to see why they need the freedom to screw up (although not necessarily easier to watch).
On balance, you want your child to do the homework. When you look back and tally things up, nearly everything you teach her around homework (including the things you teach by what you do, not by what you say) should be in service of the larger message: she makes mistakes while learning, does her best, and doesn’t freak out if her best isn’t perfect because she knows it’s good enough.
If sometimes you find yourself in a place where you’re doing more to help than you want to, don’t beat yourself up, but don’t slide further and further along the slope, either. If you can, talk with your child about why you’re more involved and how that can change. This might be a time to go on to the next section and start advocating for homework change—sometimes teachers haven’t fully thought through the implications of a homework grading policy.
How Your Kid Does Homework Now Isn’t Necessarily How She’ll Do It Forever
Every situation is different, and every child is different. Even with the best of intentions, it’s unlikely you’ll quickly find yourself out of a job when it comes to homework—you still need to help them learn how to do their best work efficiently and effectively. So what can you do that helps them move toward that goal? Encourage your child to make some conscious choices around homework instead of doing it “whenever.” Offer help with when and where, not how. Ask things like “When are you planning to get your homework done?” with, you know, bonus information—“You’ve got soccer from four to five and Holly is coming over for dinner.” Especially at the start of the year, let the kid make the choices, then help assess. “Hey, your teacher keeps writing that she can’t read your math homework. Let’s figure out how you could make it neater.” “Hey, you left the homework until after soccer last week and weren’t happy. Maybe a different approach this week?” (I’ve even had my kid record a message to their future self, saying, “Don’t wait until bedtime to do the math!”)
Then let them figure it out, and don’t judge the results. It’s easy to slot your kids into categories when it comes to homework—the organized one, the slacker, the hard worker. But those things don’t always hold true. The organized one will forget something big, the easy-A-maker will fail, the slacker will suddenly get interested. If you haven’t made those roles part of their identity, it’s easier for kids to let themselves see things differently, to get past mistakes if they’ve made them, or to get excited about a new class or project.
People, including children—especially children—change. Kids grow. They evolve. They’re supposed to be learning how to do this stuff—and that doesn’t just mean algebra and the ABCs. They’re learning how to sit down, how to do hard stuff, how to do something they don’t want to do, to plan, to think, to try again.
They learn some of that from homework. That doesn’t mean we have to like homework. We just have to get out of the way and let them do it.
The Homework Itself
Sometimes the homework itself really is the problem, and once in a while, changing that is easy. When my oldest son was in third grade, his school tried out a program that required the children to complete their homework online. There were many problems with this scenario (our dubious rural Internet connection at the time; the trouble it caused with his younger siblings, for whom just touching the keyboard was a coveted privilege), but the largest was that he could not type, and the assignments took him forever. We gave it some time, in the hopes the bugs would be worked out, but after a long night of hunting and pecking to meet the requirement that he copy (by typing them into the particular homework program) sentences including his spelling and vocabulary words, I finally got in touch with the teacher. “Oh,” she said. “It would be fine if you typed the sentences for him.”
“But the assignment is to copy the sentences. That’s the whole assignment.”
“Yes, but it’s fine if you do the typing.”
“If the assignment is to copy the sentences by typing, and I do the typing, whose homework is it?”
To her credit, she laughed. That was the last such assignment, and the homework program itself lasted only a few more weeks. It just wasn’t effective for the kids at that age, and it took parents and teachers working together to figure it out.
It’s rarely that simple. In general, whether you wish there were less homework, or more homework, or different homework, giving things a little time to shake themselves out before you take action is a good plan, especially at the beginning of anything new (and that’s a fine time to work on your and your child’s perspective on homework—it’s homework, and it’s not a matter of life or death).
But what if, after a little time has passed, you feel like the homework is a problem overall? Or what if one assignment, one class, or one teacher has your child (and you) all tied up in knots? It is possible for you, or an older child, to make some changes in homework—sometimes immediately, sometimes in the long run—that might make everyone happier, if you approach it right. But you can’t do that until you understand what the homework is, what it’s for, and who has the power to change it.
What Is This Homework, Really?
The first thing we as parents need to do is assess our child’s experience of the homework against, well, reality. Does sixty-four math problems sound like madness? Ask your child to reach out to a classmate and be sure she got the assignment right before you join her in freaking out. (We once discovered, after much drama, that only the even-numbered problems had been assigned.) Of course it’s crazy that she’s expected to write five researched pages on a given topic by tomorrow morning—but is she sure that this assignment was given out this afternoon? Kids make mistakes. They also procrastinate, and some are prone to adjusting the truth to make themselves look better (at least one of mine frequently “kinda” knew about the reading). And in some cases (as with my pencil twirler) it’s simply taking your child longer than it does anyone else’s.
One more thing to consider as you try to evaluate the work your child has been assigned is whether he’s more capable than you (or he) thinks. That may look like a huge page of math problems, but a kid who has been practicing addition facts in class may be able to knock them out in less than two minutes (in fact, that may be the goal). More complex endeavors may be well within your child’s grasp, perhaps combining the things he has been learning in the classroom in new ways that will stretch and challenge him, but truly are doable—doable, that is, in a manner suited to his age and experience, not yours.
When my two youngest children were in fourth grade, they were assigned to prepare a five-minute-long speech from a biography, to be delivered, not read, from notes on index cards, in costume and in character and with at least one prop. I thought it was impossible, particularly for my daughter, who can have trouble telling the important facts or events in a book from the details. But various circumstances meant that even though we intended to help, we couldn’t.
They did fine—because they were, in fact, ready for this project, and their teacher knew it. Madeline Levine, a clinical psychologist and author, suggests that if, as a parent, you find yourself classifying an assignment as impossible rather than challenging and getting ready to don your superhero cape and leap in, you should stop and look more closely. It may be out of your child’s comfort zone, she said, but if you break it down into chunks, is it within th
eir “capacity zone”?
When kids pull off something that’s a real reach for them, that’s a happiness booster for both of you. If I had helped with my daughter’s report, it would have included much less information about the ponies and horses Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to become a doctor in the United States, owned as a child and maybe a little more about her medical career. But that didn’t matter. The right question isn’t “Can she do this the way I’d do it?” but “Can she do this at all?”
What Is This Homework For?
The goal of that oral book report wasn’t that my child learn the “right” things about Elizabeth Blackwell. It was that she take information from written sources and present it aloud to her classmates. Often, the homework’s objective is pretty simple. For younger children, in math, it’s usually practice. Teachers want those simple facts to become automatic. The same goes for spelling. Sometimes an assignment that seems like busy work, like copying the spelling words out four times each, is an effective, if not particularly inspiring, learning tool.
With projects, book reports, and similar homework, the goal—along with the more obvious educational content—might be learning to manage time or to plan ahead or divide a big project into smaller pieces. Teachers might assign reading to allow the teacher to move faster or to be ready for class discussion.
Understanding what the homework is meant to accomplish can be key to working with a teacher toward an individual, short-term change if it’s one particular kind of homework that’s creating a problem. If, for example, the goal is for a child to read every night but your child spends so much time watching the clock and adding and subtracting minutes that no reading can get done, maybe she could check a box instead of entering a number. If the teacher has asked that you set a timer so that a child can work toward speed on a page of math facts, but your child is made frantic (as one of mine was) by the ticking away of the seconds, maybe she could use an app or flashcards to practice.
You don’t, of course, want to make your child the exception to every rule. Sometimes tests are timed, sometimes homework is no fun. But especially in the lower grades, teachers are often willing to work with parents if a type of work is causing an issue.
Who to Talk to, and What to Say
Oona Hanson, a Los Angeles parent who became interested in homework policies while advocating for her own child, and eventually obtained a master’s degree in educational psychology and became involved in school governance, suggests that regardless of whether you think you’ll be advocating only for your child or seeking larger changes, you start by talking to the teacher about what you’ve observed, not what you think.
“Describe what is happening with your child,” she suggests, and don’t put the teacher on the defensive with phrases like “He loves your class, but . . .” Work from the assumption that you and the teacher both want what’s best for your child, but don’t assume anything else. When she described her daughter’s concerns over a packet of homework that came home every week in kindergarten, the teacher quickly told her not to let the child worry about it. The real goal was just to take something home at the beginning of the week, then bring it back at the end. “She said, ‘She can do as much or as little of the work as she wants.’”
Should you ask around before you approach the teacher? Yes—and no. Tapping a friend whose child is also in the class on the shoulder at a soccer game and starting up a conversation about the homework is great, as is placing a phone call (to another parent or child, not the teacher) to clarify the night’s assignment. A quick spout-off on Facebook, though, is a bad idea. “When parents get on social media and then they start texting each other, everything gets blown out of proportion fast,” says Anita Perry, a former teacher in Devens, Massachusetts. “Suddenly the principal is involved and it’s this big enormous problem,” when reaching out directly to the teacher could have led to a simple resolution.
Similarly, your kitchen table complaints aren’t going unheard, even if you didn’t press “post.” “First and second graders are very honest,” says Perry. “They come in the next day, and they say, ‘Mommy said this homework was stupid and I don’t have to do it.’”
Beth Rabin, a Los Angeles mother of twin daughters now in high school, first contacted a teacher about homework when one, then a fourth grader who normally loved school, began to really be “dragged down” by her homework.
“I observed for nearly two weeks,” she says. “I made sure I had good data, and then I went to her, and I just said, this is what’s happening. This is how long it’s taking.” The teacher’s response was to suggest a reduction in homework in an area (vocabulary) where her daughter already had strong skills. That didn’t eliminate the most challenging parts of the homework, but it did lessen the amount of time spent on it.
Sometimes, teachers genuinely don’t know how long an assignment takes a student or how it plays out in the family. Your suspicion that a younger teacher, particularly one without a family of her own, might not have thought about the homework in the same way as a teacher with more experience or a family does may be correct. One seventh-grade teacher wrote me an email saying that when she first started, at age twenty-one, she never really thought about how homework would impact a family. “My understanding was that I should assign homework every night. I did that until last year, when a parent made me see things differently. I just was following what I thought I ‘should’ do as a ‘rigorous teacher.’ I thought I would get in trouble if I didn’t assign homework each night.”
Years after the fourth-grade homework incident, Beth Rabin realized that each of her twin daughters was spending eight hours a weekend outlining a chapter in a particularly dense textbook for an advanced placement course. Again, she observed, and again, she got in touch with the teacher, this time with a question as well as a description of what was happening. How long should the outlines take? Two hours. Eight hours was indeed a problem. “To her credit,” says Rabin, “the teacher asked around,” and found that some students were able to get it done in two hours, while others were not. Rabin’s daughters and some of their classmates needed to develop more of the skills needed to do the task; the teacher worked with the girls, suggesting strategies for doing the work as well as managing the time involved.
It’s important to remember that the solution may not lead to perfection—Rabin’s daughters still spent more than two hours on that assignment—but it might be enough to reduce a child’s stress and, by extension, your own. Rabin’s daughters are stretching to achieve something that might be easier for some students. Some assignments take some students more time than others; some classes are designed to require more, or more challenging, work at home; sometimes students take on a course load that’s more work than they realized. Sometimes the right course is just to accept the homework and move on to managing it and helping your child find her way to success with it. Sometimes, you’ll want to take your advocacy further.
Most teachers really are receptive to a parent approach about the homework, but some aren’t—and some genuinely aren’t able to make the changes you were hoping for because they’re working within a set curriculum or with a school- or district-wide policy. That means your next stop is with school administrators, and maybe beyond. Principal Doreen Esposito says PS 290 changed its homework policy partly as a result of parent advocacy.
“It started with a concern over inconsistency,” says Esposito. Some teachers in the upper grades gave a lot, others relatively little. At a meeting of the leadership team formed among teachers, administrators, and parents, one parent with experience in the area offered to present the research around homework. He did it, she says, in a non-confrontational way. “What he said was consistent with experiences I had had,” she says. “Some of the homework we sent home seemed to have no purpose, yet parents were fighting with their kids to get it done.”
If some parents weren’t happy, many teachers weren’t happy, either
. “Homework is busy work for teachers,” she says. They have to show that they’re looking at it, yet it’s often not useful as a way to evaluate students. “If it isn’t done in class under the right conditions, you don’t really know where they are independently.”
In 2016, the school moved to what they call “home-based learning” rather than “homework”: projects, practice, or curricula designed by students in consultation with their teachers to enhance or deepen their learning. She ticks off a list of the qualities the teachers hope the home-based learning will develop: creativity, curiosity, perseverance, independence, problem-solving, responsibility, collaboration, self-direction. Home-based learning, she says, “allows kids to reflect on their work and create their goals, and to make that connection at home.”
But working toward that kind of big change isn’t easy, and it isn’t fast. Here’s one final thing worth remembering, even if your actions seem to be leading nowhere: sometimes change is gradual, and sometimes we’re contributing to it even if we can’t see it. The parent who brought in the research about the homework did so after his daughter had a particularly difficult fifth-grade year, but by the time the new program was implemented, she had graduated.
And sometimes, after you’ve done everything you’re willing to do, the homework still will be a real pull on your family’s happiness in a way you don’t feel you can tolerate. After four years in a public school with homework expectations that consistently made her son miserable, New York City mom Julie Scelfo moved him (and subsequently his siblings) to a school with a different philosophy. His first school, she says, expected parents to have nightly involvement in the homework, handling things like “grammar and punctuation and spelling” at home, and the homework began in kindergarten with weekly packets and just kept increasing from year to year. Some families would welcome the invitation to be such a big part of a child’s education, but it wasn’t working for Scelfo.
How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute Page 15
