I grew up poor. Luckily it was on a farm so we never wanted for food or shelter. I remember to this day, mom mom and I cutting out peices of cardboard and making “flash cards” of the multiplication tables.
That was the “fun” part
After that came the drills of multiplication .
With out realising it, one day, I could “see” the whole multiplication table in my head (from 1X1 to 20X20)
Now I routinely extract squares in my head, and have only to think a minute to find cube roots.
I help my daughter in the same way. Start with the very basics, and go from there… regardless of subject. When my Daughter was having trouble with “social Studies” in grade 7, I asked her “What IS social Studies?”
So much of modern education is content based… it seems they forget that context is the base for understanding.
The only time I’ve ever had a parent do the research for me was when I asked one of them to pick up a library book I had ordered while I was in school, or something like that. I don’t think that counts.
Although there was the time I was in second grade, and my father went and made my communion banner for me. My mother and I came home from shopping, and he had it all done as a surprise. I was disappointed, because I had wanted to at least help work on it. (I HAD mentioned what I wanted).
God, I hated helping the kids with homework… To clarify, I hated helping my son with homework. My daughter was easier. With her, it was just helping her if she needed something explained to her. Also, there were certain things I would just about do for her – she has cerebral palsy and some of the artier assignments were difficult for her because of her fine-motor problems. So I would cut things out for her, if things needed cutting out, for instance. So for her, I just needed to be available while she was doing her homework. Not so bad.
My son, on the other hand, just hated doing homework and it would always take him forever. He dawdled, and bugged his sister, and bugged me. I tried separating them in different rooms, and he would call me in so often to ‘help’ him, that I was just in there with him the whole time and not available enough to his sister. The whole mess came to a head when he was in the 4th grade. By this time, his homework was taking something like 3 or 4 hours a day. I blamed the teacher at first – why the hell was she giving 4th graders 4 hours of homework? Then I took a look at the actual work and realized that, if done properly, it could easily be done in an hour or slightly more. That’s when I realized that Nick was playing me – unless I was actually in the room, watching him work, he didn’t.
My first thought to fix this was to make him responsible for his homework or lack of it. I wanted to look at his work every day, decide how long it should take (using very generous estimates, of course) and give him just that long to work on it. If he didn’t finish, then he would have to go to school the next day with unfinished homework. My husband vetoed this clever plan, though, since he felt it was ‘our’ (read; ‘mine,’ since he wasn’t home) reponsibility to make sure the kids did their work.
So what I ended up doing was setting the timer for the amount of time I thought the work should take, then keeping track of any time he spent over that limit. In their district Fridays were half-days with no homework, so on Friday, I would take the ‘extra’ minutes he spent on homework during the week, and make him stay in and work on extra homework instead of going out to play. The first Friday, he had to spend 2 hours drilling multiplication tables while all his friends played outside.
My younger two are not school age yet, but the eldest is, and I do not do his work for him.
To clarify: I give the equivalent of “tutoring” where it’s needed, but it’s brief and only meant to help him understand the underpinnings of the subject so that he can learn the full-blown topic on his own and complete the work or the project.
He’ll come to me for particularly vexing problems but again, I don’t do the work or give him answers. We will usually go over the concept again, but he’s got to apply it and figure it out on his own. He enjoys putting his skills to the test and now that he’s a bit older, he gets a big kick out of it.
I might have mentioned it in another thread way back, but when SilverKid was in kindergarten, I was pretty surprised at all the projects on display in the classroom that looked surprisingly sophisticated and - well, looked to have been done by an adult.
**SilverKid ** always does his own projects. He actually mentioned to me in a dejected tone one time when he was in kindergarten that his project didn’t look as “neat” as some of the other kid’s projects. Some of the projects produced by a a couple of kids looked like they’d been clearly done by an adult.
I told him that it was very important to do your *own * work and come up with your *own * original ideas - and be proud of them - and that he should be very proud of the work he’d done on his projects.
Interestingly enough, mid-year, the teacher sent a “general” reminder in all the kids’ folders mentioning, among other things, that it was very important that the kids’ work be their own creations and that while parental involvement was critical and very valued, the kids needed to learn to do their own projects to develop critical thinking and planning skills, blah blah blah.
A while back, we went to one of those big-box craft stores to buy supplies for an end-of-year project SilverKid needed to complete, and while waiting in the checkout, I overheard two women who were clearly discussing their kids’ various school projects.
One of the women actually mentioned that *the time she spent doing her kids’ projects * was equivalent to a part-time job. :eek:
I’ll help with the overall concept if he’s having trouble grasping it, but he is responsible for doing his own work and his own projects.
Brainstorming for ideas for a paper, especially if the assignment was a little hazy. “Write about what you did the summer”–hmmm, well how about the trip to the zoo? the time your brother broke his arm…
Critiquing and editing. Yep, your limerick is pretty good, but check the rhythm in line 3. Check the verb-subject agreement again in the third paragraph. I don’t understand what you mean in the section on Gettysburg…
Scheduling, motivating, helping them set aside quiet time without interruptions. Comforting through stressful periods.
Explaining math in different ways. If one of the kids was struggling with long division or fractions, I’d re-teach the skill fron a different angle.
Making vocabulary fun. In highschool my daughter used to get 30-40 complex vocabulary words to learn every week. I used to put them in story form–for example, rewriting The Cat in the Hat using words like obsequious and malevolent. By the end of the year the teacher was giving me the words a week ahead and we were copying the stories for the whole class. Lot of fun.
Finally, I’ve actually done some of what we refer to as bull sh*t assignments. For example, my son loves Spanish. He checks out books in Spanish (Harry Potter). He watches movies in Spanish. But he detests doing word search problems and cross-word puzzles, while I love them. When he is assigned one of these in Spanish class, I just do it for him. We figure the teacher is assigning it as a “fun” way to get him to learn the vocabulary. He’ll learn the vocabulary anyway, he can pass on the “fun.”
