The local school district has an internet thing called “Power School” with which parents can check on their childrens’ grades. Every quiz, test and homework project is listed along with the score earned for each. Keeping track of the kids’ grades is quite easy. I’m sure a lot of kids hate it.
If your school district does not have this you should ask for it.
We have that too, ours is called Active Parent. Not only are the grades on there, but attendance and disciplinary records, so that you can check up on your precious snowflake.
My niece likes it because she can check her own grades.
You can also check the child’s cafeteria account and see what they are buying (entree vs. cookie) and add money to their account.
Ours has it (or something like it). I hate it. It may have been designed to better communication, as the letter says, but in reality it’s become attempt to force *me *to take responsibility for my children’s work. I’ve had teachers ask me at conferences if I’ve checked it when my son has chosen not to done his homework, with a clear tone that this is all my fault.
I don’t mind it in theory, or used by parents as they’re interested; I mind the misapplication of it.
My kid’s only a year old. I’m nominally in the “do your best” camp, but given the intelligence I expect her to have (hey, she comes from a long line of engineers on both sides 
) and the school system she is likely to be in, I’d say anything less than an A is a failure on someone’s part.
Now, that failure could be a bad teacher’s, and/or it could be mine and her dad’s for not noticing she was having issues; and I am totally willing to concede bad grades for exceptional circumstances such as developmental issues or making a principled stance on something. But in the absence of something like that, yeah, unacceptable.
My son is going to be starting kindergarten this fall. As far as expectations, I expect him to do his work and I expect him to do it as well as possible. If he needs help, I’ll give it to him or, if I can’t help him, make sure he gets help from someone qualified to provide it. But I’m also planning to withold judgment about grades until I can see what his personality is like at school, ability to concentrate, etc.
I want to expect him to have good grades as much as I want him to be super smart. But everyone’s different.
What I do know from working with him on preschool homework is that he doesn’t like to do things he’s not good at. He’s a perfectionist and, unless he’s spectacular at something, he’s probably going to choose not to do it. That’s something I’ll have to help him curb when he’s younger, but eventually, I’ll have to let go. And that’s going to be hard.
And I hate to say it, but I will probably have slightly higher expectations of my daughter based on my own experiences. I know it’s not politically correct, but I’m probably going to be harder on her than I will on my son. Likewise, my husband will probably be (and already is) harder on my son than I will.
But you ARE responsible for seeing that your children are doing their homework, when they’re children. Teachers cannot go home with kids and sit the kids down and make them do their homework. Parents are supposed to do that. Parents are responsible for their kids’ education. A kid with a marvelous teacher and a disinterested parent isn’t likely to do well. A kid with a disinterested teacher and a marvelous parent will do better, assuming the teacher does assign at least some homework.
During grade school, a parent should go over the kid’s homework, and making the kid redo it if necessary. The parent should be able to answer any questions the child might have about concepts. Any parent who can’t probably shouldn’t be having and raising kids. In middle school, the parent should at least check to make sure that the kid is doing the homework, though not necessarily checking each page. In high school, it’s time to slacken the reins again. The parent should make sure that the child has the time and space to do homework. If the kid needs help, the parent is responsible for getting that kid help. However, by this age, the teen should be able to critically review his/her homework, and only ask questions rarely. Now, IF the teen is consistently sloughing off the homework, the parent may need to take disciplinary measures. But most kids won’t need this by the time they’re in high school…or at least, won’t need it often.
I agree. The parents ARE responsible. Who else would be?
That attitude by parents - that they had no role in the children’s eductation and didn’t want to be bothered about it - was one of the most difficult things I had to deal with as a teacher. Without backup from parents, teachers are screwed.
There’s a middle ground between “no role in a child’s education” and sitting with a high school junior every night until he finishes his homework.
Where, exactly, a parent should come down in that middle ground really, really depends on the kid. The one responsibility all parents have is to keep enough of an eye on the situation to understand what is going on and what needs to be done.
If the kid wants good grades but is a mess at keeping organized, I think it behooves a parent to offer tons of support in the form of helping the child develop techniques to stay organized (assignment notebooks, calendars, bag-organizing, homework checks, checking their grades to make sure they aren’t getting overwhelmed). Hopefully, these strategies become more and more internalized and the parent’s involvement can become more detached, but these kids can backslide up until graduation: I think a parent ought to keep an eye on them and nudge them as needed.
If a kid wants to get good grades but struggles with over commitment, it’s reasonable for a parent to step in and say “you are being a lousy person. You can’t live up to all this, you have to chose”. Kids don’t always see the inevitable consequences, and watching them slowly meltdown and make themselves ill as they scramble to keep all the balls in the air is really not productive: they don’t learn, they just burnout and feel like failures (IME).
If a kid wants to get good grades but has trouble learning the way school is set up, I think a parent ought to help them find ways to learn: at younger levels, this may mean helping teach them themselves, at older grades it may be helping them find the resources they need (such as going in early or staying late to work with the teacher, or a class/good book on study skills). Again, I think it would be irresponsible for a parent to watch a kid struggle and struggle and struggle but never step in to help the kid or help the kid get help. This is especially true if you have the kind of kid who internalizes everything/blames everything on themselves (I am just so stupid!)
If a kid just doesn’t give a fuck about grades, I think it’s pretty reasonable to let the kid live with the consequences: summer school, repeating a grade, whatever. It’s not the end of the world, and the kid can decide from that if they care.
I do think a parent has a pretty strong responsibility to teach a child not to cheat: I mean, in the end their grades are their responsibility, but cheating is an ethical issue, and I think parents need to take an active role there. The natural consequences just aren’t severe enough to make the point. (rather like if you take a 4 year old back into the grocery store to return a candy bar and the clerk just pats them on the head, laughs it off, and lets them keep it. At times, that’s about how schools treat cheating.).
Nope. They are.
I am responsible for making sure they have a place, the time and tools to do homework. I am responsible for answering questions, clarifying concepts, explaining bad directions, etc. I am responsible for driving them to the library, to the art supply store, to the museum and anywhere else they need to go to do their homework. I am responsible for putting in and taking the cookies out of the oven, cutting paper, using the hot glue gun and other skills my child has not yet mastered safely on their own. I am responsible for setting a good example by doing *my *homework, and saying out loud how good it feels to have it done and sharing feedback from my teachers, test grades, etc. and letting them know how my hard work pays off.
I am not responsible for doing their homework, or even for making sure they do it, any more than I am responsible for their eating their peas or going to sleep at 8:00. I provide the homework tools, the meals and the bed. What they do with those things are entirely up to them. And you know what? It WORKS. Kids who know their parents consider them capable human beings who can be responsible for themselves raise kids who are capable human beings who can be responsible for themselves.
There’s a world of difference between the neglectful parent and the parent who empowers their child. Neither one is much interested in checking online gradebooks, but for totally different reasons.
My daughter enjoyed school and did well most of the time. I refused to do with her what my mom did with me *(“Why didn’t you get an A?”) *- when she made mistakes or did poorly, I talked to her to figure out if she understood why she didn’t do as well as she should have. As long as she recognized the problem and knew what the right approach/answer was supposed to be, I was OK.
I guess that approach worked well for her. She got a full ride scholarship to college and is now doing extremely well as a science teacher.
This is well said. It started with my daughter with assignment books we were supposed to sign every night. We now have the online stuff instead.
Is the assumption really that I am going to log in every night to get the homework list and then go to them to make sure they did it? Sorry, not me. I am always available for question and help as** WhyNot** states, but I’m not going to follow my kid around to make sure they’ve done everything, everyday.
If I do, at what point is the child going to learn how to be responsible for their own tasks? Or how to keep track of them and how to execute them? I’d hate for that to be learned (and the dependence unlearned) at their first day in college or on the job.
You don’t follow the child around all day, every day. Instead, you provide the space and time. During grade school, each night when Homework Time is almost done, you examine the homework. If it’s wrong, or if it’s unacceptably messy, or whatever, it gets redone until it’s acceptable. It doesn’t have to be perfect (which is a good thing, because a grade schooler is unlikely to turn out perfection), but it has to be a decent effort. Gradually, you turn this into spot checks. I NEVER said that parents are responsible for doing the homework. Parents are responsible for seeing that the homework is getting done.
Children learn what is acceptable, and how much slacking they can get away with. But they learn that they do have to put some effort into the job, and they have to finish the job. It’s like letting them go next door to play for half an hour, and then letting them go a few houses down, and then crossing a couple of streets. It’s not all or nothing. But they need a lot of supervision at first, and if they do well, then you loosen things up. They’ll make mistakes, but they can usually learn from them. But it’s unrealistic to expect a gradeschooler to be able to cross that busy multi lane highway by himself. He needs to learn how to cross the little two lane suburban streets first, under your supervision.
I agree with this, but our school district is good about teaching this simply by virtue of how and when they introduce homework. The when is right away, in kindergarten. Every night they have a small homework assignment. Most of them take about 10 minutes, some as many as 20. They’re printed on a calendar we get at the beginning of each month. Things like “Count to 50 by 1’s, 2’s and 5’s.” or “Find five objects in your home that are circles.”
This is not rocket surgery. This is not even a two lane road - this is the homework equivalent of a dirt path to cross. Some nights, she actually has to write something, and that’s a one lane suburban street. I don’t hold her hand, but we walk together, as it were. At the beginning of the year, she’d ask me when it was safe - when she can consider it done and put her homework in her folder for the morning. Since Christmas break, I’ve been asking *her *if she’s done, same as I asked her if it was safe to cross a street when she was 4.
But again, if she has a night where she simply refuses, that’s not my problem. I am *not *responsible for making her do it. I do remind her that *she’s *going to have to deal with the consequences of her choice. She’s going to have to tell her teacher why she didn’t do it. I ask her what else might happen and we both come up with ideas: She might have to stay in at recess or miss Centers to do it at school. She might have to stay late and do it after the end of the school day. If she refuses often, she might have trouble learning the material and not know what to answer if the teacher calls on her in class, and that would be pretty embarrassing. And if she really doesn’t learn enough, she won’t get to go to first grade next year!
So I suggest, if she refuses to do her homework, that she use Homework Time (which is *only *Homework Time; even if the teacher forgets to assign Homework, she can think about what she did in school for 10 minutes instead) to think about her homework and think about how she’ll handle those problems that happen when you choose not to do your homework.
And when you have a kid who can navigate the dirt path with no assistance, and the one lane road with minimal, she’ll have the internal tools and confidence to handle the two lane road - which probably begins when she’s got to pay attention and write down the assignments instead of having a print out. And that, honestly, is one thing I CAN’T make her do, since I’m not with her in the classroom when it has to happen. Again, I can provide her with a notebook, I can show her how I write down assignments and put them in my calendar by due date, but I can’t make her write down her assignments in class when I’m not there.
This is my daughter. She was just an average student until about middle school when she suddenly decided to become a kick-ass student. Now she’s in community college, doing very well academically and planning to become a teacher. However, she does have social problems that sound just like Sue’s girl’s.
The boy is fourteen. He has a great social life, but he’s pulling D’s and F’s. He’s been on restriction (no computer, no TV, no spending the night at a friend’s house) for a couple of months but it doesn’t seem to bother him much. He freaked out a couple of weeks ago when I told him I was going to come to school and attend classes with him one day. In fact, he was so upset that I backed off and told him I’d only do it if he didn’t get C’s or better on his report card. If I shovel the trash out of his backpack and monitor his grades online and study with him and criticize his homework, his grades improve, but I can’t keep up that level of effort all the time.
My daughter, 10, basically gets straight A grades, and last year in 4th grade she got a perfect math score on her MCAS test (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System).
We read to her a whole lot when she was little and we spent a huge amount of time with her, but we NEVER pushed educational stuff.
She LOVED school until last year, when she started liking vacations and holidays better, but she still likes it.
We make sure she does her homework every night, offer help when she asks for it (rarely) and make sure that she stays on track with any special projects that have longer deadline times. Other than that, nothing beyond my wife volunteering to help with the school drama club and sometimes subsitute teaching at our daughter’s school*.
We praise her good marks and usually go out for ice cream after the report card comes home, but that’s as much “pressure” as there has been. (And heck, I’m such an ice cream addict that we’d go for ice cream even if her grades were crappy.)
*My wife, as a second career, was recently certified to teach and is working on her masters degree with a hope of teaching secondary English or history, but she was not a teacher, nor was she in the educational system during most of our daughter’s life.
My older daughter is very driven, and was quite fanatical about doing her homework. She liked to blame it on me, despite the fact that I never, ever would say something like why not an A+ if she got an A. (Never had a C problem.) It has served her well in grad school, where she is obsessively conducting studies and writing papers.
I’m very much opposed to focusing on grades, because if you only take courses where you know you’ll get an A in you’ll exclude yourself from learning all sorts of good and useful stuff. Our kids knew we were available to help with homework if they needed it, to explain the material, and we knew they were doing it. That’s enough for me. If they got a B they got a B. My younger daughter, also now out of college, has gotten more benefit from the time she spent raising a guide dog puppy and riding than she ever would have gotten from studying a few more hours a week.
I do pressure my kids to get good grades (defined as A’s & B’s) in all of their classes. I frame the point of it as keeping their options open. They don’t know right now what they will want to do with their life, so why not do well now so they can CHOOSE what they want to do later. It’s a hard concept to get across sometimes.
It ties into the “why do I have to take this class, it’s stupid” discussions.
I was raised by a mother, father, and stepmother who didn’t get stellar grades and decided that I was supposed to make up for their shortcomings. I didn’t get good grades so I spent most of my middle school and high school years grounded and confined to my room as a result. I promised myself I wouldn’t do that to my kids.
My husband is one of those people for whom grades are the most important thing. He and my son have been butting heads for years over my son’s lack of effort. He would always try to get me “on board” with the groundings and restrictions. I finally had to tell him that I couldn’t in good faith participate in what I call his affection-for-grades exchange program and that it was ultimately up to the boy to earn his own success.
Then my son signed up for track and field and guess what? He had to maintain a good average to continue participating. This grading period, he brought home a report card with no D’s on it, and he’s never been prouder of himself.
I’ve seen this in action in my own house growing up. I fought my parents tooth and nail to get them to leave me alone. I had screaming fights with my mom NOT to wake me up in the morning because I had an alarm clock that worked perfectly well. I had fights with her about NOT doing my laundry because I wanted to do it and make sure it was done my way. Mostly she got it but she would backslide every now and again and try to force things to be done in a specific way at a specific time. It never went well. Because I made her give me the space to learn stuff on my own I have no problem being a responsible adult. I have a great job that requires me to be very responsible and I have a squeaky clean record in every sense of the word.
My brother, on the other hand, relishes her intense need to help out when she isn’t needed. She wakes him up every single day. When he was in college she called him every morning on her way to work to function as his alarm clock. Now that he has graduated and is living at home again he goes out drinking all night and sleeps all day while she takes care of his dog and calls him in the afternoon to make sure he woke up and is getting showered and stuff. She still makes him peanut butter sandwiches when he doesn’t like what she made for dinner despite the fact that he is 23 years old. He got better grades in school than I did because my mom held his hand throughout his entire life but he also has no job and a brand new DUI to put on his record.
Some of the differences between us are just because we are different people with different personalities, of course, but I truly believe that a lot of the problems he has now are due to the fact that he never had to learn to do anything on his own and is now an adult living at home with his parents who *still *doesn’t have to do anything to take care of himself.