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."
One of the things I teach my kids about math, is that people who are GOOD at math are ALWAYS looking for ways to simplify, not ways to make things more complicated.
In order to get thru college math I did every piece of home work I could get my hands on and spent 8 hours a week in the math tutoring lab but I passed and I was so proud of myself. I’d been a lousy student in high school but I proved to myself that I could get this done.
I’ve known carpenters that used geometry without ever being taught geometry. And they didn’t know they were using it.
I'll bet he did over his lifetime, just not in his specific choice of work. The things is, we may never use many of the things we learned in school, but the point of an education wasn't to remember everything you learned, it was to build a foundation of knowledge for you to continue to build on.
How many people today are scammed into believing things that are untrue simply because they don't have the educational foundation to question dubious things? Carbon dioxide is bad, mmkay? No. Carbon dioxide is life. Carbon is life. There is male, there is female, and there are abnormalities of both, but they're still base male or female. Child molesters in church or the Boy Scouts are bad, but groomers in schools are good. It's all in how the foundation is laid.
Looks like the respondents have a problem with the English language as well. How many times did they use “like” in their answers?
He’s a real keeper. I’m happy to still be friends after all these years. One of few that applied all that schooling and did something with it.
I went through elementary, middle and high school 4 times.
One time for me and again for each of my 3 kids.
Homework was IMPORTANT in our house. If the parents value education the kids have a chance. If the parents don’t, then its all up to the kid.
How stupid. Cry me a freaking river.
Some kids have bad genes. Half the people in any class are in the lower half. Lower half parents usually make lower half children. Thus it has always been. Nothing is going to change that.
Two things:
1. Let survival of the fittest take its natural course
2. Stop having more lower half of the class children.
12 Billion more to Ukraine?
Local Kid in trouble with school work, and $12 Billion to Ukraine?
What chance does this kid have?
Another generation lost.
So those students who are fortunate to have educated parents should be penalized so they will learn no more than either the students without educated parents or the stupid students.
That’s called equity.
There you go!
You use algebra every day. We all do!
Algebra is the manipulation & combination of meaningful symbols from which we form more meaningful complex symbol groups that also have meaning subject to a set of rules.
That is alphabet (symbols) builds words, words build expressions and meaning\information is conveyed.
Language with its grammar is an algebra. There are many algebras!
Money isn’t the problem, we spend way more on education per student than any other industrial country and it’s not even close.
“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.”
Had he not taken those subjects in high school it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to choose to become a doctor, engineer, pharmacist, chemist, mathematician, scientists, or any other career in the STEM fields later in life. Do you want to narrow your career choices at age 14?
Just go the Khmer Rouge route, just kill the parents, then everybody will be equal.
Oddly enough, I never had math homework as a kid. And I still took calculus in the 12th grade! So why is it MY teachers taught me math, but now they need to have the parents do it for them?
The answer is and always has been “tracking” or ability grouping in classes.
PS: Most of my teachers never met my parents, either! Yet they still managed to teach me. Maybe it was because my PARENTS taught me discipline, so my TEACHERS could focus on math? What a concept...
the authors apparently don’t understand that outcomes for children a mix of nature and nurture. America has a caste system of a very porous sort. Offspring of low IQ parents are less likely to be intelligent by nature, likely to live in poverty, likely to receive scant encouragement or resources for learning, have no educated people in their lives, etc. This leads to generations of low performers. Whodathunkit?
I’m all for trying to identify the specific things that hold kids back, and doing something about them. Something as simple as requiring the foundering, unsupported students to attend a 45 minute “homework” session after regular school, with teachers giving one on one help and encouragement would turn some lives around (especially for elementary students — older than that and the habits are likely set).
I’ve messed with kids’ heads when they couldn’t do simple math. They apparently weren’t even pressured to learn multiplication tables by rote. If 7x5 was a problem for them I’d ask them what 3+4 was. They can usually get that. So (3+4)5=15+20=35. They’ll give you a blank stare. Then you move on to integral calculus...the integral from 0 to 5 of the function f(x)=7.....
Getting good grades by studying and working hard is “acting White”.
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