My kids (2nd and 3rd graders) get much more homework than I did in grade school.
On the other hand, they seem to have a lot more down time during the day at school, too. It seems like they are always having a movie day (not educational movies – stuff like Monsters University) or a ‘bring your electronic toys to school day.’
The homework is different, too – less memorization and pure math, and a lot more applied math and word problems. Which I guess is good. The other day they were running around the house with my tape measure trying to figure out the area of every surface in the house.
To be honest, I’m actually one of the people who in my professional life argues for the memorization of multiplication tables. My point, however, is that talking about the “basics” is a bit misleading. What kids need to know today is pretty freakin’ complicated, due to the technology they’ll need to be able to navigate successfully (and no, knowing how to operate a PS3 controller and post pictures to Instagram doesn’t help you create a database or edit a Word document).
Handwriting, IMO, ought to go mostly away. Teach enough that you’ve got one style of writing–print or script–that’s more or less legible, and then focus on keyboarding, a far more useful skill given our technological environs. Post-zombie-apocalypse boy will I have egg on my face, but until then I want kids learning to navigate a keyboard.
That makes sense. My son’s handwriting, or printing, is painfully bad, and horribly slow. It would take him probably 5 minutes to print what I just typed in this reply.
My point is just that all those kids killing themselves to pass tons of AP exams, stay involved, etc. etc. are not all deluded: for many of them, they are aiming at a reasonable goal that they may well meet. And schools are providing a pathway to those goals, not just blowing smoke. Whether it’s a worthwhile goal is a different question.
I teach in a district where the average ACT score is 17–and only the most motivated college-bound kids even take the ACT in this part of the country, where SAT is preferred. There are lots of kids who do not have the scores to get into even “non-competitive” colleges.
UT/A&M now only have to accept the top 8%, which has freed up quite a few slots: that 4.0/1950 SAT kid probably does have a shot these days. And it’s pretty easy to transfer in as a sophomore: I really don’t think it’s the Worst Thing Ever to have to go to UTA for a year.
On the other extreme, you have the perfectionist: the kid who over-does everything because anything under 100–even the chance of anything under 100–is unacceptable. There are kids that you could assign “write out these five vocabulary words one” and they’d use a quill pen on handmade rag paper,write in caligraphy, and have the seven rough drafts stapled to the back. Then that parent would call to complain about the homework load.
I do think a lot of teachers are not sure what homework is supposed to do, or what the point is, so they assign a ton, hoping to hit a target they can’t see. There are only a limited number of things it can do: you have to find those skills and tasks that kids can master independently. I think it can be very important because it pushes back against the narrative that it’s the teachers job to get the knowledge in your head, and you can only learn if you are explicitly taught. Furthermore, kids always feel like they know how to do something until they try to do it independently: only then do they discover the gaps in their knowledge. And it’s a practical necessity in some advanced courses: you can’t cover the whole course in class: there simply isn’t enough time.
Agreed. There are certain things one ought to just know rather than have to look up or figure out each time. Knowing products up to 10x10, and being able to spell common words that you can’t sound out the spelling of, are some of those things.
Agreed also. Since kids are inevitably going to learn to print first, I’d say it’s time to give cursive a decent burial. Signing checks and legal documents are the only occasions where I need cursive, and by the time my son in first grade needs to sign a check, he will be able to do so electronically.
I agree that the world is more complicated, but my daughter has learned what the highest point in Antarctica is…it might be better to fill her head with memorizing the multiplication tables - far more useful…
In some subjects - especially as they move from elementary school, they fill their brains with a lot of information - not necessarily useful information. How many times in my adult life have I needed to know the difference between sedimentary and metamorphic rock? Handwriting would be FAR more useful. Also, we’ve gotten History several times now - but very strangely. We’ve done Minnesota History at least three times, my kids can name the tribes native to this part of the country several times over - because someone in the Legislature decided being able to differentiate the native tribes in this region was IMPORTANT - but they never FINISH - they haven’t had WWII because they never get that far before the school year has ended, much less the more recent and - frankly current world shaping - events like Watergate or the Civil Rights movement.
It’s not, but the legislation fails to take any qualitative differences between schools into account; you can’t tell me that the top 8% at say… Dallas Samuell is remotely comparable in academic preparation and ability to the top 8% at somewhere like Austin Westlake or Dallas Highland Park. I’d wager that the top 25% at say… Westlake are academically better than the top 8% at Samuell, but the state just looks at class rank, which is absurd.
My kids don’t get more homework assigned than I had as a kid but they do have more to do.
My son gets specific homework twice a week. My daughter does not have specific homework assigned. However, they both have anything not accomplished in class sent home.
Sadly, this means that I spend about 10 hours a week teaching basic math concepts to my kids.
They know that they will learn more from mommy than from their teachers. <sigh>
They probably have it in to account. US college admissions is not and never has been a straight reward for merit. State universities in particular have a mandate to promote access and opportunity throughout the state.
Yes, but on the other hand, if even the absolutely top kids at, say, Samuell, are not prepared for college, it seems like we are dealing with systemic failure. A school should provide a pathway for it’s very top kids to succeed. One way to remedy that failure is to let the kids that were failed have the opportunity to make up for that. It’s a kluge of a fix, and it’d be far better to not have the problem in the first place, but I can see the logic.
And, again, now that automatic admits are down to 8% at the flagships, I do not see many super-eligible kids not get into those programs just because of rank. Everyone knows someone who knows someone that did, but most of those examples are either a few years old, or they weren’t quite as amazing of a candidate as the story makes them sound.
A girl I know has 4 kids and she told me they don’t teach handwriting (cursive) in school anymore. Her teenage son was on a TV talent show and she said they had a bunch of waivers, etc. to sign - she said she was embarassed that he could barely sign his own name. Her kids are all smart too, just weren’t taught that skill like we were at their age.
Yep. My son recently had to sign something too. He printed his name, all of 8 letters in total, and it took probably 20 seconds. He’s almost 15 and otherwise an intelligent kid.
ETA: And for what it’s worth, although I could write reasonably well, I lost the ability sometime in my 20s and now just print in capital letters. But I’m fast enough at it, and it’s legible when I want it to be.
So, we need cursive, because our tradition is to sign our names in cursive, right?
I propose an alternative: we all start PRINTING OUR SIGNATURES. Maybe we draw a flower at the end of it. Maybe we create a unique letter-doodle with our signatures. Maybe we all just create a unique scribble that isn’t vaguely related to cursive, instead of a unique scribble that is vaguely related to cursive, as our signature.
Or we can spend some time in our kids’ lives to learn cursive, just so they can continue the tradition of signing names in cursive. Serious question: how many hours of instruction should we devote to developing a signature, instead of devoting those hours to learning to research, or learning to describe a scientific observation accurately, or developing flexible strategies for mental subtraction, or learning about the history of civil rights in our country, etc.? In other words, given that time spent in cursive instruction is time lost to other instruction, how much time should we sacrifice of other instruction so that we can maintain a signature tradition in the next generation?
I imagine that teaching cursive specifically for the purposes of a signature would probably be faster than teaching cursive for everyday use. I don’t even remember a lot of class time being devoted to cursive in the first place (though I do remember a lot of time spent writing essays in cursive and wishing I could print).
I’m also not sure why, if we go that route, it has anything to do with school by necessity. Perhaps people should teach their own children how to sign their own name if they believe signing one’s name well is important. After all, schools for the most part have left it up to parents to teach children how to fill out a check, and one of those check-writing elements is…a signature.
I would question a parent that is shocked at whatever minor item they deem a school has failed to teach their children, but then go on to fail in closing that learning gap themselves. What, is it not their problem?
On topic, I remember that my 1st grade teacher mentioned extra credit if we went home and tried to fill out a sheet of cursive (Aa, Bb, Cc, etc) before the subject came up in class. When I turned it in the next day, the teacher scoffed at my sheet and said that she never mentioned any homework or extra credit of that sort. I learned distrust of authority early!
Heh. I don’t know about anybody else, but my daughter sometimes gets up at 5:30 to finish the homework she didn’t get done by 8:30 the previous evening.
An average of 2 hours a night is normal. 1 hour is light, and so much that you can’t complete it isn’t unknown.
6th grade, 12 years old.
On the other hand, she is a far, far better student than I ever was, her education is far superior and integrated, and she is enthusiastic because she sees the results of her hard work vis-a-vis her classmates who don’t work as hard.
So she has more homework, but I can’t say that it’s doing her any harm.
When I was about 15, my uncle looked at my signature- some convoluted thing- and said that one day I’d have a hundred travelers checks to sign, and I’d hate my life with that signature.
I adopted a meaningless glyph that vaguely recalls a couple letters in my name and take a half second to scrawl. Serves me well, I didn’t even have to change it when I got married.
Anyway, the point is that this signature problem takes about a half hour of doodling to remedy.
In theory that’s great, but taking a kid who’s not prepared for college due to systemic school failure, even if they’re in the top 8% of their class and dropping them in Austin in the Fall may be an opportunity for college, but one they’re unlikely to succeed in. They’d probably be much better served to go to say… one of the DCCCD schools for a couple of years and transferring into a 4 year college afterward, just like that kid from Westlake would be better off in College Station instead of having to go to UTA or A&M-Commerce.
