Posted on 06/04/2004 6:43:52 AM PDT by billorites
Kyle and Leon Patton have settled into a weekend routine. Friday is family night, the one evening of the week they get to spend with their sister and parents, eating pizza and watching Animal Planet. Saturday is for sports such as flag football, and Sunday is devoted to church.
But since April, they've had to work one more activity into their weekend schedule: homework.
On a recent Sunday, that meant Kyle, a third-grader, had to list 15 words with the prefixes "un," "dis" and "non" and use three of them in sentences. For math, his teacher at Fort Washington Forest Elementary School assigned homework that involved comparing the value of decimals. Meanwhile, his brother Leon, a sixth-grader at the school, determined the probability of rolling a number less than 3 from a dice cube (its faces numbered 1 to 6). Then, Leon defended his answer in writing.
To Prince George's schools chief André J. Hornsby, those are simple tasks that will help prepare students for state standardized tests.
But to many Prince George's parents, Hornsby's April decision to require students in kindergarten through eighth grade to do homework on weekends makes little sense, particularly because it was imposed near the end of the school year and without much community input.
In public schools nationwide, elementary and middle school teachers tend to assign little or no weekend homework, making Hornsby's mandate unusual, said Sylvia Seidel, director of teacher education initiatives for the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers union. "There's so little family time," she said. "Often this is an opportunity for children and parents to do things together."
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My children are homeschooled, so I guess all their schoolwork is homework.
Come on. Unless it's a really big math assignment that shouldn't take more than half an hour. Maybe the parents should help with the homework.
The best family time I ever had was teaching my kids: at the fireplace in the kitchen reading Whittier, Illiad; digesting thick old mustybooks at the kitchen table: Persia, Babylon, Rome...while we ate pizza. Multi-tasking.
I have questions for the complainers:
Does real life require people to work on weekends?
Do you want your children to be ready for the real world?
When my students complain about homework, I ask them what they think they will be doing when they're adults. Then I tell them that it's my job to help prepare them for the real world.
They think they have it bad, whenI was a kid we had to do our homework three miles in the snow...oops wrong pity party.
Trust me here folks. I've lived in and around PeeGee County all my life. Dem kids aint doin no homewert on duh weekins anywaze. So duh parents point is moo.
Family time is very important to the development of children, but so is learning various subjects and meeting different goals and completing tasks assigned. Since the students in the PG county schools are already behind 'the 8 ball' when compared to the rest of the country all parents should be doing everything they can to help their children perform better on tests and learn something in the process.
When the parents moan & groan about school assignments what does that yeach the children - it's not fair. These parents need an attitude adjustment.
INTREP - cheese choice with that whine?
Where do these parents get the idea that the government schools can force their kid to do ANYTHING? If a parent believes that whatever the parent has planned for children (or whatever the children have planned for themselves, which might be, for example, reading a politically incorrect book) is more worthwhile than the gubmint-skool-assigned homework, then the parent should instruct the child to ignore the homework assignment. If the teacher chooses to respond by giving the child a lousy grade, so what? K-8 don't count for anything anyway.
There is no evidence that homework below the high school level improves academic achievement in any way (and a good deal of evidence that it doesn't). In the case of public schools, it serves mainly to enable educrats to monopolize children's time and attention. Read "The End of Homework", an excellent book on the subject by an author (can't recall the name offhand) who is anything but a far right nut.
Another interesting facet: Fridays are the ONLY night this family is together--and their "together" is watching TV. Honestly, that's a bigger trigger point to me than having 20 minutes of busywork on a weekend.
The issue is who's choosing the subjects, goals, and tasks. If parents have decided that certain activities, such as family gatherings or outings, church, non-school-assigned reading, etc., are what they want their children doing, then THOSE are the tasks that their children need to complete.
The way I see it, they are at school for 7 hours a day, that should be more than enough time to go over what they are supposed to be learning.
"There is no evidence that homework below the high school level improves academic achievement in any way..."
Maybe so, but reading, thinking, and learning good study habits I think sure do. Most if not all the important habits/lessons are learned at home anyhow. Crybaby parents lead to crybaby children - the 'Whiners' from Sat Night Live comes to mind immediately.
Well, I can see their point.
My daughter has been assigned mountains of homework since she was in the 3rd grade. And this has been the routine virtually every school night since:
4:00 Daughter comes home.
4:30 Mom (who is a school teacher) comes home.
5:30 Dinner.
6:00 Mom and daughter commence homework.
8:45 Mom confides to husband (me) that daughter gets way too much homework.
9:30 Daughter and mom begin to tire.
10:45 Mom says "We aren't going to be able to get to all of it tonight, we'll just complete everything we cann get to."
11:30 Daughter and mom, exhausted from over 5 hours of continuous homework, finally close books, leaving at least one subject untouched.
6:00 am Mom and daughter off to their respective schools, bleary-eyed from staying up so late doing homework.
On the contrary, homework can reinforce lessons in the class or be assigned to more research. The problem is not that we ask too much of elem school students, it is that they are bored by the infantile curriculum in the middle grades, necessitated by the failure to learn a good base of principles in primary grades.
You can't teach History and civics to children who still can't read.
Dear Clara Lou,
"Does real life require people to work on weekends?"
In real life, in Prince Georges County, Maryland, most folks work for either:
1) Federal government
2) State or local government
3) Government contractor
4) Very large corporation that behaves like the government
And in real life in Prince Georges County, Maryland, the great majority of folks who work for one of the above seldom, if ever, work on weekends.
sitetest
Exactly.
I suppose a disinterest in weekend homework is the main reason we don't hear about Rhodes Scholars from Branch Ave. :)
Thank you for stating the non-obvious. Another way the schools steal the children's childhoods is by giving summer homework. Naturally, no kid does it til the last minute. Which means the kid spends the entire summer not relaxing but in a state of permanent procrastination and guilt. I detest the methods of modern education. And these are the LEAST educated children we've ever produced.
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