Geeky Girl comments on summer homework.
http://talesofgeekygirl.blogspot.com/2009/08/summer-homework.html
– Post From My iPhone
I can relate to this article on how boys have trouble getting organized and how it affects their school work. My organization struggles are not something that truly interfere with my daily life. I find it annoying, yes. I know I could be more efficient, yes, but I function just fine. Geeky Boy, on the other hand, struggles and it means his work suffers. In a school system that values neatness and deadlines over almost everything else, a disorganized student is bound to suffer. It’s too bad the article didn’t tackle that issue. While it’s true that GB should be more organized and that it would be helpful to him, it would also be good if missing a single worksheet didn’t have such a huge effect on grades or that neatness wasn’t a huge part of a project grade. I’d certainly like for him to be more neat and organized, but I can’t force it, and I’m not the kind of mom who’s going to do it for him. And, I don’t have the means to hire tutors and whatnot to help him either. I just don’t see the point when I know he’s a bright kid who’ll get his act together eventually.
One theme of yesterday’s Wednesday Whining was homework. I added my own homework whine before I’d read everyone else’s and was tickled to see so many other people who have issues with their kids’ homework. I’ve written about homework before and Geeky Boy’s (and our) struggle with it. Pretty much everyone at Phantom’s was annoyed with having to be so involved in their kids’ homework. They remember (and I do, too) not having to get help from their parents; they remember just doing their homework and suffering their own consequences. I think the stakes are higher now, for whatever reason. I think there’s more homework and there’s more expectations on parents to be involved in the process of doing the homework. For dual-income families, this is especially hard. Either, homework gets done during an afterschool program or with a sitter or it gets done after dinner when it’s late and everyone’s tired. So the parent feels uninvolved or resentful, neither a good feeling.
I honestly feel pretty bad that we haven’t done a better job of instilling the importance of schoolwork in Geeky Boy. I believe we’ve instilled the importance of learning and education, but we haven’t really explained that to get that learning and education, there are hoops to jump through. And sometimes those hoops aren’t fun and are quite difficult, but you have to do them anyway. Geeky Boy feels pretty defeated right now, like there’s just no chance of pulling it out. School, which used to be easy for him, has now gotten difficult.
I remember when school first got hard for me. It was math. I’m actually very good at math, but when we got to trig, I was so confused. And I was afraid to ask for help. I sat in class, feeling stupid and just muddled through. But, when the final came around, I did some math and figured out I could pull out an A if I got a 98 on the exam. So, I went to my teacher and I explained that I’d let myself fall behind because I didn’t always understand what was going on. So he worked with me for about an hour or so and I got it. And then I went home and studied my butt off and I got the 98. Wherever you are, Mr. Chandler, thank you! A similar thing happened again in calculus and I got a friend to tutor me. Somewhere I found the motivation to do better. Now, I need to help Geeky Boy find his.
I’m still on the fence about homework. In elementary school, I think it’s superfluous. In middle school, though, it’s obviously laying the groundwork for high school and college. Here in the northeast, academic competition is fierce. This is where some of the extra work comes from. People want to make sure their kids get into the best schools. Public schools compete with private schools, wanting to prove that their kids are just as smart as the ones in private schools. This puts a lot of pressure on the kids. It’s my job, then, as a parent, to help alleviate that pressure, to support my kids in their work. It’s a harder job than I thought. We want our kids to be independent and we want to sit back and watch them become independent and cheer from the sidelines, but sometimes that’s not enough. Sometimes we have to dig in with them, show them the way, and do more than cheer. It’s not what we remember as kids, but this is the way it is now.
I’m not sure what to make of the response. It was what I expected, that this whole thing is about neatness. I hate, hate, hate the focus on neatness in grade and middle school. I mean, really, what is the point here? Okay, so neater writers do better on the SAT. That is not right. They should be graded on content and structure and sophisticated argument.
She claims that she brought up that she would be going over penmanship (specifically “how to make letters”) at back to school night. I do not remember this. I remember her saying she wanted the notebooks to be neat. What’s interesting is that in the email she sent me, she said that the notebooks were there to demonstrate their knowledge of the topics covered. I find this contradictory. Do perfectly shaped letters demonstrate knowledge? I can understand if the writing is illegible that maybe that would be a problem? And I can see neatness being, say, 10 points of the whole assignment, but I just have an issue with this focus on the insignificant details.
The thing is, this is a pattern in our lives. Maybe it’s just my kid, but I have battled neatness issues with my son for his entire school career. He just not neat. He’s not going to be neat and in five years, he’ll be typing everything anyway. And I have to say that this focus on the minute details is something I struggle with in my teaching too. Students very often have been trained to focus on these things–the commas, the correct citation method, etc. It’s not that the details aren’t important. Certainly when you’re ready to submit something for a grade or for publication, you want to cross every t and dot every i, but first you must focus on the bigger picture. And I guess I see this misplaced focus in the schools.
I sent a fairly pleasant response back, thanking her for her explanation and explaining that neither Geeky Boy nor I knew the intention behind the assignment, which I hope was a nice way of saying, “Be more clear about why you’re asking students to do things.” So, for now, I’m laying off, but I’m still keeping my eye on this one.
I’ve just fired off an email to Geeky Boy’s social studies teacher complaining that 1) they spent two days in class practicing handwriting and 2) they had homework to practice handwriting. I said I was disappointed that she considered this 6th grade level work and asked for an explanation for why she was doing this kind of work in class and not something more substantial. I said I didn’t consider handwriting a particularly important skill at this grade level (especially in social studies!)
I’m sorry, but I usually sit back and let the teachers do their jobs, but I find this egregious. I can’t even begin to express my anger over the fact that someone thinks handwriting is going to help get a student into a good college! Please.
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