Posted on 09/27/2022 9:25:40 AM PDT by LibWhacker
Whenever "Gina," a fifth grader at a suburban public school on the East Coast, did her math homework, she never had to worry about whether she could get help from her mom.
"I help her a lot with homework," Gina's mother, a married, mid-level manager for a health care company, explained to us during an interview for a study we did about how teachers view students who complete their homework versus those who do not.
"I try to maybe re-explain things, like, things she might not understand," Gina's mom continued. "Like, if she's struggling, I try to teach her a different way. I understand that Gina is a very visual child but also needs to hear things, too. I know that when I'm reading it, and I'm writing it, and I'm saying it to her, she comprehends it better."
One of us is a sociologist who looks at how schools favor middle-class families. The other is a math education professor who examines how math teachers perceive their students based on their work.
We were curious about how teachers reward students who complete their homework and penalize and criticize those who don't—and whether there was any link between those things and family income.
By analyzing student report cards and interviewing teachers, students and parents, we found that teachers gave good grades for homework effort and other rewards to students from middle-class families like Gina, who happen to have college-educated parents who take an active role in helping their children complete their homework.
But when it comes to students such as "Jesse," who attends the same school as Gina and is the child of a poor, single mother of two, we found that teachers had a more bleak outlook.
The names "Jesse" and "Gina" are pseudonyms to protect the children's identities. Jesse can't count on his mom to help with his homework because she struggled in school herself.
"I had many difficulties in school," Jesse's mom told us for the same study. "I had behavior issues, attention-deficit. And so after seventh grade, they sent me to an alternative high school, which I thought was the worst thing in the world. We literally did, like, first and second grade work. So my education was horrible."
Jesse's mother admitted she still can't figure out division to this day.
"[My son will] ask me a question, and I'll go look at it and it's like algebra, in fifth grade. And I'm like: 'What's this?'" Jesse's mom said. "So it's really hard. Sometimes you just feel stupid. Because he's in fifth grade. And I'm like, I should be able to help my son with his homework in fifth grade."
Unlike Gina's parents, who are married and own their own home in a middle-class neighborhood, Jesse's mom isn't married and rents a place in a mobile home community. She had Jesse when she was a teenager and was raising Jesse and his brother mostly on her own, though with some help from her parents. Her son is eligible for free lunch.
An issue of equity
As a matter of fairness, we think teachers should take these kinds of economic and social disparities into account in how they teach and grade students. But what we found in the schools we observed is that they usually don't, and instead they seemed to accept inequality as destiny. Consider, for instance, what a fourth grade teacher—one of 22 teachers we interviewed and observed during the study—told us about students and homework.
"I feel like there's a pocket here—a lower income pocket," one teacher said. "And that trickles down to less support at home, homework not being done, stuff not being returned and signed. It should be almost 50-50 between home and school. If they don't have the support at home, there's only so far I can take them. If they're not going to go home and do their homework, there's just not much I can do."
While educators recognize the different levels of resources that students have at home, they continue to assign homework that is too difficult for students to complete independently, and reward students who complete the homework anyway.
Consider, for example, how one seventh grade teacher described his approach to homework: "I post the answers to the homework for every course online. The kids do the homework, and they're supposed to check it and figure out if they need extra help. The kids who do that, there is an amazing correlation between that and positive grades. The kids who don't do that are bombing.
"I need to drill that to parents that they need to check homework with their student, get it checked to see if it's right or wrong and then ask me questions. I don't want to use class time to go over homework."
The problem is that the benefits of homework are not uniformly distributed. Rather, research shows that students from high-income families make bigger achievement gains through homework than students from low-income families.
This relationship has been found in both U.S. and Dutch schools, and it suggests that homework may contribute to disparities in students' performance in school.
Tougher struggles
On top of uneven academic benefits, research also reveals that making sense of the math homework assigned in U.S schools is often more difficult for parents who have limited educational attainment, parents who feel anxious over mathematical content. It is also difficult for parents who learned math using different approaches than those currently taught in the U.S..
Meanwhile, students from more-privileged families are disproportionately more likely to have a parent or a tutor available after school to help with homework, as well as parents who encourage them to seek help from their teachers if they have questions. And they are also more likely to have parents who feel entitled to intervene at school on their behalf.
False ideas about merit
In the schools we observed, teachers interpreted homework inequalities through what social scientists call the myth of meritocracy. The myth suggests that all students in the U.S. have the same opportunities to succeed in school and that any differences in students' outcomes are the result of different levels of effort. Teachers in our study said things that are in line with this belief.
For instance, one third grade teacher told us: "We're dealing with some really struggling kids. There are parents that I've never even met. They don't come to conferences. There's been no communication whatsoever. … I'll write notes home or emails; they never respond. There are kids who never do their homework, and clearly the parents are OK with that.
"When you don't have that support from home, what can you do? They can't study by themselves. So if they don't have parents that are going to help them out with that, then that's tough on them, and it shows."
Most schools have some kind of tutoring program, where the student can get help outside of class time. That means the student will have to sacrifice some of their own free time to spend going over problem topics. Often the tutors are older students who are volunteering their time to sit in a study hall corner, going by a schedule, being there to help whoever needs it. Some effort must come from the student himself before anything really changes.
Not surprising.
Back in the 70's they began to teach math in a new way, in other words the most confusing mess you ever saw. I know because I was one of the kids they experimented on. Division left me in tears.
And then my dad asked me what the problem was and taught me how to divide in a single evening. It was simple, no guess work and you got the right answer every time as long as you knew your times tables and subtracted correctly.
I went to school the next day and flew through the work sheet. And got a zero because I had the right answer but had not used the hot mess of a guessing method.
The goal was not to teach me how to do division but to make me jump through nonsensical hoops.
Once again my dad came to the rescue. He went down to the school and had a few words with them. Upshot was that I was taken out of that school and they home schooled me for the few months we were there.
If the parents are having to "help" the kids with homework the teachers are not doing their jobs. At all.
There is a difference between education and job training.
Sounds like your example got a good education but ultimately all he really wanted was job training. He got that and was happy.
I would say he probably uses those high schools subjects every day, just doesn’t know it. They’re inadvertently disguised as something else.
The problem with teachers is they don’t explain why you need an education.
You think you are going into pro sports> I hope that works for you. Have you seen athletes end up 35 and broke? That is because they don’t learn enough math to protect what they earned. Others cheated them and or they made bad investments.
The idea is to play a few yrs then sit back and enjoy your wealth. Can’t do that if you can’t even balance your checkbook.
Want people to listen and obey you? You have to be articulate enough and speak well enough so people do what you tell them to.
Let's outlaw homework then. And also have SWAT teams from the school hunt down parents who sneak out and buy workbooks for their kids to unfairly do homework on their own. The Handicapper General Diana Moon Glampers demands complete equality
I was exhausted re-teaching my kids everything every night. And also, since they were quietly, well-behavedly struggling, they got overlooked.
Schools make a lot of noise about intervening and rescuing struggling kids ... but it’s just noise.
Of course if a certain political party wants you to be stupid enough to believe their lies, and said political party controls the Teachers Unions, well, there you go.
In HS I did my homework at school. Home life wasn’t fun. Plus I had to go surfing every day...and smoke a joint.
I was a much better student in college. Got my ya-ya’s out in HS.
“Came back to our small town work as a bookkeeper until he recently retired.
He would be the first to tell you that on his job he never used the algebra, geometry, chemistry, and biology he excelled at in high school.”
What is your point?
In four years in HS only one used his sciences and became a doctor( class of 73). I’m still friends with him but he never sends me scrips for painkillers and cool designer drugs:>)
It’s the phones.
Of course there are advantages and disadvantages to a child’s performance related to family structure. Life decisions of the parents have effects on the children. That’s why responsible parents who did all the responsible things (take education seriously, were stably employed before marriage and children, etc.), have kids that do better. That’s why such behavior was encouraged (now it’s disparaged as “acting White”). Test scores are the only real measure of learning so screwing around with grades based on family structure doesn’t change the fact that the kid is poorly educated. It’s just another affirmative action sham designed to hide the social malignancy.
My friend the valdictorian also developed an interest in flipping homes about thirty years ago. He said he wished he had taken industrial arts in high school. He said it took him a little longer to get up to speed doing that kind of work in his spare time.
It was hard for me to focus on the college prep courses since by the time I was half way through high school I already knew how to raise crops and livestock on a midwest farm, fabricate things out of steel (made my first mini-bike at 13), fly a twin engined airplane (including knowing the charts), operate and work on a wide variety of equipment.
My dad recognized my mechanical mind and encouraged it. He had me driving farm tractors unsupervised in the field by age 7.
Not all kids are the same. That should be recognized early on. A teacher needs to recognize a child’s strong points, and praise them for that, but also give them encouragement to try to improve their weaknesses.
So, if the parents are together and value the child and education, it’s not fair to children that have stupid, lazy parents.
My mother’s father left when she was three. Her mother had quit school in 8th grade to help with her younger siblings. She raised my mother and uncle by being a hair dresser. My mother had no one to help her with homework, but succeeded because she cared. She would stay after school and get help when she needed. When one teacher said she had bad handwriting, she spent an entire summer working on her penmanship to show that teacher when she went back in the fall. She had no free lunch, figuratively or literally. But, poor white folks don’t count, I guess.
We all need a friend like that.
And I’m sure if one looks hard enough, there are plenty of YouTube videos that can cover any subject you need.
Wish I had that when I went to school.
My kid is quite good at math, and he came to me with a problem in pre-Calculus that I tried to work out. After a few minutes he told me “I even tried using the midpoint formula and couldn’t do it.” After I was sitting there like a dummy, essentially trying to DERIVE the midpoint formula from first principles.
I said to Kid “You mean you have a formula?” He said “Yes.”
We worked it out.
Then he wanted to tell his friend he’d solved it, because his friend was also having trouble.
I told him “Don’t be surprised if your friend already figured it out but didn’t tell you”. Which is how it turned out. I told Kid “Well, at least you both got the same answer.”
Bingo!
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