Recently my son and one other child in his class have been assigned what the teacher is calling “extension homework.” According to what I found by googling, this term just means “applying existing skills to new situations” but I’m wondering if there is more to it than that.
The homework seems quite challenging for a 10-year-old: this week it was about space exploration, and he had to list memorable advancements that ultimately led to the moon landing; write an essay convincing the government to devote more (or fewer) resources to space exploration, and about 3 other questions of a similar nature (with three nights to complete it). This was in addition to his regular homework.
We’ll ask his teacher what’s going on, of course, but she’s notoriously slow to respond. We just don’t know if this type of homework is assigned because he is ahead of the game, or behind (either way, we’re happy it is happening). We suspect the latter because the only other student in the class who is getting it has a reputation for being quite smart; our son is actually officially “diagnosed” as intellectually gifted (long story, that; never mind for now) so he’s no slouch either.
But what’s the deal? Why do students in a class get singled out for this, usually?
Hmm, just came back and saw this thread sinking fast … well, I’ll give it just one bump then let it die. I should add one bit of background, though, as on rereading the above it strikes me as nothing more than a thinly veiled brag about my kid - believe me, it’s not.
CairoSon is the world’s absolute WORST writer - lousy handwriting, dreadful spelling, and hates the idea of expressing himself on paper. That’s why we aren’t just assuming this is special homework for top-performing kids - if it were just intended for the best writers in the class, believe me, he would NOT be in that group.
If I could wildly speculate (and since adequate time has passed for anyone with a serious answer to chime in), the teacher might be new at the profession and happy to try something a little beyond rote skill-and-drill.
She’ll be burnt-out in two or three years. Enjoy it while it lasts.
I’m not sure how curriculum planning for gifted and talented students works where you’re from, but where I’m from there is an expectation that for the kids who are “coded” as gifted/talented (meaning more $$ accompanies such students), extension programming will be offered – content stretching beyond the standards necessary to meet grade level requirements, and hopefully designed to keep students of this nature from growing bored without significant challenge. Some teachers love to sell homework, others don’t see a huge need for it. I suspect yours leans towards the former and is using homework as part of the “extension” programming.
Many universities run extension programs, including some in Indonesia. It may be that your son’s school is hooked up into some funny university program. There’s no telling what academics’ll get up to in the way of experimentation.
California State Universities have extensions - I took a screenwriting class at the Berkeley one - but they don’t involve 10 year olds.
My wife wrote a few chapters of a high school biology text. One of the requirements for the questions at the end of the chapter were a few which would do exactly what CairoCarol’s son was asked to do - apply the material in a different context.
It’s actually a good thing, so long as the total amount of homework doesn’t become unreasonable. Often gifted kids just get more of the same homework. Being given 100 math problems because you can knock off the official 50 quickly does nothing good. Our GATE coordinator recommended that spelling pretest be given, and kids getting all the word right be excused from the drill and practice and using them in a sentence junk, and do something more interesting. Going on to the next year’s work, acceleration, is fine so long as GATE students are tracked and don’t wind up doing it again. Enrichment is by far the best solution.
So, don’t do the essay for him, but critique it and help him with the structure. I assure you, when he gets into college he will thank you. My kids did.
Your son is lucky to have a teacher who goes to the trouble to give individual instruction based on ability. Plus, I suspect most kids will enjoy writing about space.
I was going to weigh in on the nature of the assignment until I read that you are happy with it.
For most teachers, “extension” refers to assignments that go above and beyond what is normally assigned. The particular reason usually has to do with the teacher’s perception of the child’s needs or abilities. Many teachers believe that homework is not valuable unless it is difficult or stressful or causes some sort of academic pressure. So when they have a student who looks like he’ll whiz through the homework that the rest of the kids may wrestle with, instead of not assigning that student any homework, they assign some sort of “extension” homework. This, of course, rests on the assumption that many teachers and parents make that homework, per se, is valuable - a different discussion, probably for a different region of the board. xo, C.
That’s true, but there is a difference between making homework “stressful” by assigning twice the number of the same problems as opposed to an enriched problem. I also think stressful is not the same as challenging. It seems to me that assigning each student homework with an equal level of challenge is the ideal situation.
I agree that there’s a difference. I also think that even if it were possible to assign an “equal level of challenge,” that the first question that should be asked is, “Is there a good reason to assign homework?”
I had some issues with this back when my children were in school. My daughter once came to me for guidance on an assignment in algebra to write an essay describing their feelings about mathematics.
My theory, never disproven, was that there were a lot of boneheads in the class who couldn’t do math, and this assignment was a tool designed to get them a good grade, allowing them to do well on at least something.
This was in the same school where she was assigned a homework problem that I told her that all she had to do was move the zero to the right side of the equal sign and solve the quadratic. “What?” she replies, she had never learned the quadratic. Says I, “You can’t solve this problem without it, you must have learned it, or they wouldn’t have given you this problem.”
Following up at school, I learned that they expected her to guess. That’s right, solve a math problem by trial and error. Just pull numbers out of your ass until you find something that works. I was not impressed.
That’s not that odd, in my opinion, and quite a valuable skill to learn in maths. You’re not completely pulling numbers out of thin air. You make one guess, adjust based on the answer for the second guess, and so on and so forth until you hit the right answer. And, of course, with a quadratic you’ll be looking for two answers, one positive and one negative, although I suspect only the positive answer was required for the question, if the quadratic had not been done in class before.
Also, trial and error is the common way to learn how to do square roots without a calculator.
I used to do this all time. If I forgot an equation, I would still be able to hone in on an answer based on these sorts of trial and error methods. It’s a good tool to have in your arsenal.
I agree with this if you’ve forgotten an equation but it should not be used as a substitute for learning the equation. Pi = 22/7 for most real world problems, but if an instructor says they’re equal that’s just wrong. There’s a right answer and a close enough answer, and there’s a difference between them.
I assume the equation or method of solving the quadratic would eventually be taught, if not in the next lesson or two. Learning how to use trial and error methods, I think, is a valid and important skill. Were you not taught how to do roots by trial and error? There’s no need to immediately jump into the quadratic equation or factoring or whatever when a simple equation like x^2-2x-15=0 can be solved very quickly through a cursory trial-and-error glance (at least the positive root is fairly immediate.) I seem to recall that’s how it was introduced to us: we got our feet wet with one or two equations like this, and then the instructor showed us how to “really” solve the equation.
I was taught to solve square roots by this method. It’s pretty burdensome, but I went to school in a time when they found it necessary to teach us how to do long division of roman numerals. It was not a pleasant experience for anyone.
I like that method and sometimes when I’m stuck somewhere with nothing to do (as on a long bus or train ride) I root a random number to pass the time.
Euclid’s Algorithm on random X and Y, too.
Anyhoo, I remember doing what could be called “extension homework”. Heck, in Grade 4 or thereabouts, me and two other students had our little math club. We sat in the back of the room at a little table during math class, with a teacher’s textbook (i.e. it had the answers) and read well ahead of what the Deltas were doing.
It was a rather pretentious reference to Huxley’s Brave New World, in which society is divided into five castes ranging from Alpha to Epsilon, corresponding to decreasing levels of intellectual development. The “Deltas”, in this case, were my less-math-inclined classmates.
In any event, it was merely a description of a personal experience that corresponds very roughly with that of the OP’s kid.