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When Mom does the homework

October 6, 2011 By

Mommyish blogger Rebecca Eckler asks people not to hate her for doing her fourth-grade daughter’s homework: The girl is tired from school, play dates and activities, and playing is more important than homework, she writes. However, Eckler hates math, so she lets her daughter do that by herself.

You’re teaching your daughter to lie, resonds Madeline Holler on Babble, who wonders why “Eckler sat down and cut out and mounted pictures of elephants for a research project so that her daughter’s board would stand out among those of her peers’.”

A lot of homework is a waste of time. My question is, then, why create a charade? A charade that the fourth-grader is complicit in. Sending in finished homework sends a sign to the teacher that the daily assignments are manageable when they are not. When the daughter gets praise for her standout poster on elephants (or a gold star for a completed word search), what does the mother expect the daughter to do: say “thanks,” or say “thanks, my mom did it”? If it’s the former, then she’s teaching the girl to lie. If it’s the latter, then why do the homework in the first place? What’s wrong with a crappy elephant poster?

. . . If the consequence of not doing homework is too steep, there are other avenues, like cutting back on after school activities or, gasp, talking to the teacher about homework expectations.

Sometimes your child’s best isn’t great, Holler writes. That’s OK.

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Flip and feedback

September 29, 2011 By

“Flipping” lectures and homework is being tested at some schools, reports Ed Week.

In a Khan Academy pilot in suburban Los Altos, California (where I live), students in grades 5-8 watch Khan’s online math lessons at home and do exercises. Teachers can track students’ video watching and see how long each student takes to correctly solve 10 problems in a row for each math concept.

That’s not really a homework flip, since students do exercises at home, but it helps teachers quickly see where students are getting confused.

At Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science and Technology in Georgia, John Willis requires physics students to view recorded lectures and other materials online, then uses short quizzes to make sure they follow through. He uses class time for demonstrations and experiments. Other teachers have followed his lead to save instructional time.

 Mr. Willis said that what used to be a two-class-period process to set the groundwork for a laboratory assignment has been moved online—mostly with student-made videos explaining the setup procedures and hypothesis planning.

“It allows me to improve the connections I’m making with students, because now I can get into the material in a deeper way,” Mr. Willis said.

For a recent experiment using microscopes, Dr.(Susan) Kramer and another biology teacher posted YouTube videos of scientists discussing the equipment, photos of the school’s microscopes for the students to label, and their own videos explaining common problems in setting up the experiment.

“When [the students] came in, that shaved a half hour off what we would have normally had to eat up in lab,” she said. “So at a time when we’re trying to cram more into less, they’re already coming in prepared and ready to go and that saved us a lot.”

Flipping requires students to do more work on their own. It also requires all students to have access to computers. Los Altos and Gwinnett loan out laptops when necessary. (I’d bet the average Los Altos family owns 2.5 computers.)

 

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Smarter homework

September 15, 2011 By

Students don’t need more homework or less homework, writes Annie Murphy Paul in the New York Times. They need smarter homework assignments that use what we know about how people learn. A new discipline called “Mind, Brain and Education” has produced useful insights, she writes.

For example, “spaced repetition”  — repeated, brief exposure to information — is more useful than studying it once in a large block.  “Retrieval practice” uses the pressure of a test — it can be a self-test — to help students remember more.

When we work hard to understand information, we recall it better; the extra effort signals the brain that this knowledge is worth keeping. This phenomenon, known as cognitive disfluency, promotes learning so effectively that psychologists have devised all manner of “desirable difficulties” to introduce into the learning process: for example, sprinkling a passage with punctuation mistakes, deliberately leaving out letters, shrinking font size until it’s tiny or wiggling a document while it’s being copied so that words come out blurry.

Teachers can use “interleaving” — mixing different problems in one assignment — to create desirable difficulty. “When students can’t tell in advance what kind of knowledge or problem-solving strategy will be required to answer a question, their brains have to work harder to come up with the solution and the result is that students learn the material more thoroughly.”

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Many dropouts never really started

September 12, 2011 By

Many college dropouts never started a program of study.

Also on Community College Spotlight:  “Squeezing in” homework.

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Why math tutors prosper

July 15, 2011 By

Many elementary students never learn basic math facts,  writes Lynne Diligent on Dilemmas of an ExPat Tutor.  They end up in remedial math classes in college. She advocates drill on math facts, more homework and no calculators till 11th grade.

I no longer teach Grade 3; I am now a private tutor. Unfortunately, I am now running across a number of 14-year-olds who are using calculators to add 5 + 3, or 7 + 6, or 9 + 2.

 Diligent also calls for requiring students to learn concepts before moving on, instead of  “spiraling” through the same things year after year.   

And she believes teachers should “instruct and explain, and then follow up with practice to master the skills,” rather than putting students in groups and telling them to figure out problems on their own. But group work is great for math tutors, she writes.

 

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Should homework count?

June 28, 2011 By

Homework will count for only 10 percent of a student’s grade in Los Angeles public schools, a new policy dictates.  The goal is to equalize grading for students with “varying degrees of access to academic support at home.” Some teachers fear students won’t bother to complete assigned work.

Because many teachers grade on effort, rather than performance, the policy will lower grades, predicts Darren, who teaches math in Sacramento.

In my classes, homework counts for 20% of a student’s grade–still too much for LA Unified, but much less than so many others teachers. This means that 80% of a student’s grade comes from tests and quizzes, which are measures of performance.

In my classes, students must demonstrate some level of mastery of the material in order to pass the course; I don’t give courtesy D’s for those who learn nothing but “try” all the homework.

I don’t think teachers should assign homework that requires “academic support” at home.

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Khan video — plus a great teacher

June 22, 2011 By

Khan Academy’s online video tutorials are being hyped to the skies, writes Rick Hess.

Khan Academy isn’t over-hyped, argue Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel on Ed Next. It’s mis-hyped. Salman Khan’s “short, engaging tutorials in math, science and other subjects” could be transformative with the addition of a key ingredient: excellent, live teachers.

The Hassels suggest letting students spend part of their school time viewing high-quality videos or smart software, which would replace “teachers’ rote lectures and one-size-fits-few whole group learning.” The best teachers would have time to work closely with more students.

Picture this: let’s say one class out of four in a school’s 4th grade has an excellent math teacher, and she spends half her instructional time on whole-group instruction and half on more dynamic/personalized learning. If Khan takes over the former whole-group time, two 4th grade classes could have that teacher just for personalized/dynamic learning. The effect is a 100% increase in the number of kids who get a top-tier in-person teacher — without reducing personalized instruction time with kids. She’d need a learning lab monitor for Khan time at school and time-saving digital tools to monitor kids’ progress (a la Wireless Generation or others; Khan’s experimenting with this, too).  The change would be at least budget-neutral, and the great teacher could earn more within budget, since lab monitors are not paid as much.

Technology won’t replace good teachers, the Hassels writes. It can extend their reach.

Some propose “flipping” homework with instruction: Students would view the videos at home and work on solving problems in class. Thirty-nine percent of high school students do no homework, the Hassels write. They won’t watch instructional videos either.

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Rethinking homework

June 21, 2011 By

Do students have too much homework? In Pleasanton, a middle-class California town near San Jose, the school board is set to discuss cutting back homework time.

KQED’s Michael Krasny hosts a debate featuring Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth, Harris Cooper, Duke psychology and neuroscience professor and author of The Battle over Homework, Pleasanton Superintendent Parvin Ahmadi and Tom Loveless, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former sixth-grade teacher.

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Too much homework?

June 17, 2011 By

Schools are setting limits on homework — typically 10 minutes a day per grade level and no work on weekends or holidays — reports the New York Times.  Usually these are schools in middle-class areas where parents worry their kids are under too much pressure — and kids have lots of extracurricular sports and lessons scheduled after school.

For elementary students, the 10-minute rule — 10 minutes in first grade, 20 minutes in second grade and so on — makes a lot of sense. Kids who do more homework don’t learn more.  However,  I worry about older students who expect breaks on weekends and holidays. One of the most valuable things students can learn in K-12 is how to schedule their time to get assignments done.

Of course, the quality of homework assignments varies: I’m not a fan of assignments that require a parent’s extensive involvement — especially if that parents is supposed to have arts and crafts skills.

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Finland: Is it trust or teacher training?

April 25, 2011 By

Finland Phenomenon coverWhy do Finnish students ace international tests? The Finland Phenomenon: Inside the World’s Most Surprising School System,   a 60-minute movie by Robert Compton (Two Million Minutes) and Harvard researcher Tony Wagner (The Global Achievement Gap), credits a “culture of trust” created by the absence of high-stakes testing, teacher-evaluation systems or homework.

Very smart, very well-trained teachers are the real secret, argues Gadfly’s Daniela Fairchild.

What is most interesting about the film, though, is its depiction of Finland’s rigorous, intense, and competitive teacher-training programs—a more probable explanation for the nation’s academic strength. These programs accept a mere 10 percent of applicants (akin to Ivy League acceptance rates in the U.S.)—and kick out teacher trainees who aren’t up to snuff. Candidates observe veteran teachers, co-design and execute lesson plans, and receive feedback from peers, mentors, and even students.

Finland tracks students in 10th grade: Half go to academic high schools and the rest go to vocational schools.

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