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Summer homework is due. Today.
Today is Day One for 1.1 million New York City public school children. The rest of New York's school children are matriculating right around now, too, and it seems that most of them — public and private — were asked to do something school-related over the summer. The question is: Did they do it?
The answer, albeit Clintonian, is: That depends on what the word "they" means.
Did "they" do it if mom sat next to them till 3 a.m. last night, doing the typing to save time? What if she read them "A Tale of Two Cities" out loud? What if dad rented the DVD and suggested topic sentences?
In our house, we certainly intended to have our kids do their work in a timely fashion. As August rolled around, the vague notion of something important we were supposed to do — they were supposed to do — started rising like a harvest moon.
[snip]
The brilliant idea of having the moppets do "a little bit every day" so it wouldn't be a "burden," and yet they wouldn't "lose the gains they made in the academic year" had about as much impact in our household as the brilliant idea of having them start raising organic alpacas and selling the wool for college tuition. Lovely in theory, but — hey, "The Simpsons" are on.
All of which means we have sabotaged our children's education, according to a lot of folks in the field.
[snip]
"I really have to start paying attention," my friend Marla said last week as she hunted for her daughters' assignments. My cousin and her son got three hours of sleep the night before their school in Chicago began. My sister was shocked to find that the eight questions her high school junior had put off turned out each to have eight sub-sections each — a,b,c,d,e,f,g and h — and "h" was always, "Write a definition of all the adjectives you just used." No sleep for them.
But at least they weren't over at my friend Carol's apartment. It took quite a while before Carol's daughter started cutting out pictures for her summer book report collage.
On Anne Frank.
[snip]
[These] are the stress-free months us parents don't get throughout the school year either, which is why the stomach feels such distress when it is time to start the whole cycle again. And so, teaching our kids perhaps the worst academic lesson of all, we pull a first night all-nighter. On the other hand, it's amazing how much of "A Tale of Two Cities" you can absorb when the clock is ticking, the DVD is blaring, dad's gluing and mom's typing. It's also very easy to give an example of, say, "The worst of times."
We may all have forgotten buckets of what we learned last year, but we remember this one: Homework stinks.
Hope you got yours in on time.
That Panic Last Night
By LENORE SKENAZY
September 2, 2008
My feeling: the whole parent involvement in the schools thing is not working out. At least, it's not working out the way schools mean it to work out. As far as I can tell, the requirement that parents be deeply involved in homework produces further antagonism between schools & the people who send their kids to them.
Then, when those people write newspaper columns about the horrors of parental involvement, everyone else loses confidence, too.
Speaking of parent involvement, one of the big selling points for Catholic high school around here was my best friend's experience in LA. Her two kids, one boy & one girl, attended Catholic schools K-12. Both were accepted by highly selective colleges (Yale for one) where both have done very well -- and neither my friend nor her husband helped with homework ever. No tutors, either. Once, when I filled my friend in on the kind of labor we've had to put into homework, she simply stared at me, a look of noncomprehension on her face. It was as if we lived on different planets, which we did.
I mentioned back in June that C. was given a monster summer reading assignment by his new school. Two thousand five hundred and forty-nine pages in all, not that anyone was counting. Five novels, Guns, Germs and Steel, the Book of Genesis, the first 12 books of The Odyssey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens, and six Science articles from the New York Times. Plus quite a number of short-answer written responses.
This turned out to be completely do-able -- not just do-able, but for the most part fun. I did take Liz's (and Paul's) advice about organizing the reading, and I did keep C. on track by managing his Excel chart (that's a screen grab of the chart I made for me). But that was easy (and productive - I'm now using the chart for my own work).
I didn't have to nag, and I didn't have to "help." That was the big surprise. It turns out that the school understands the meaning of C's reading scores better than I do. (woo hoo!) The school definitely understands the kind of novels a new freshman boy likes to read better than I do. I would never have chosen these books. *
Thus far I conclude that the "secret" to a good summer homework assignment is:
- work the student is capable of doing without help. I had no idea C. could read GGS, the Bible, or The Odyssey completely on his own. But he did, and he seems to have understood them, at least judging by the brief conversations we've had.
- at least some work the student wants to do or will enjoy doing. C. loved all five novels, which were so terrific that one of his friends bought and read one of them, too.** Those 5 novels, I believe, increased C's motivation to read the Bible & The Odyssey, neither of which would naturally have sparked his interest. The 5 contemporary books whetted his appetite for more challenging fare. (I think.)
- extremely short-and-sweet questions along with answer forms on which to write the answers. All of the summer assignments, which came from Religion, Classics, English, History, Science, and Guidance, were bundled together in one print-out, which was mailed home and posted online. And nearly all of the written work could be completed on that one form. The science teacher also included examples of student work to show exactly what he wanted students to do.
At this point, my sense is that the sheer amount of summer reading and writing kids are asked to do isn't the problem. The problem is giving kids summer homework that is either over their heads or too logistically complicated for them to manage.
This brings me back to the FWOT aspect of projects and constructivism in general. Kids being taught via projects and discovery must expend huge amounts of time and energy organizing and simply remembering everything they're supposed to do.
I'd put money on it C. had the largest summer assignment of any kid mentioned in Skenazy's column, and yet I spent no time helping with content and minimal time helping with logistics. It's pretty easy, in terms of the demands on executive function, to remember you have to read 8 books. It's hard to remember you have to answer 8 questions and the 8 questions have 8 questions, too.
SAT prep
A few years ago I read a book about kids who scored perfect 1600s on the SAT. The main feature of perfect-scoring kids that distinguished them from everyone else was the amount of reading they did:
[S]tudents who ace the SAT read an average of fourteen hours a week. Average score students, on the other hand, read only eight hours a week—an immense drop-off. The biggest difference, however, was found in the amount of time students spent reading for school. Average score students spent four hours a week reading literature, textbooks, and other assigned reading for school. Perfect score students put in nine hours a week for school-assigned reading, more than double the amount of time.
[snip]
What do 1600 students read for fun?...The book most frequently mentioned—by a total of 6 percent of perfect score students—was Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.
The Perfect 1600 Score: The 7 Secrets of Acing the SAT
Tom Fischgrund
bonus factoid: One of my friend's children had something very close to a perfect score on the new 3-section SAT. (I don't know what the other child scored, but it had to be quite high as well.)
No SAT prep class & no tutor.
Just 13 years of Catholic schools.
* And not just because I hadn't read them, either. What a fabulous list! I read everything on it, and loved everything on it save one of the novels. (C. liked that one just fine.)
** nix on the Anne Frank assignment
16 comments:
Both of my sons continued to do Kumon math and reading over the summer.
I can't say that I was always on track...many times I wasn't, but I didn't care. My thought was I pushed both boys hard during the year and we deserved a break. We spent our time shark fishing, relaxing by the pool, and looking for sea glass at the beach.
Life is good.
I think an important thing is: just what is read?
Well, I admit I didn't do very stellar, but just good enough, with a score of 2100 (CR 740 M 670 WR 690 -- stupid factory essay score), but I find most of my reading time spent on the internet.
Do they count that? Do adults still have some belief that internet reading is inherently somehow of a less intellectual equality than hard paper reading?
Because I will tell them that if not for the internet, that I would have never heard of Steven Pinker, never gotten into cognitive science, never found this blog, never really thought about economics and maximising production (I got interested in this by playing computer games), would have never gotten my score of 5 in AP World History, microecon, English Lit and English Comp (and thereby would have never made AP national scholar) ... oh I don't know. The internet dominates my intellectual life. The best part is that it's so digestible -- I can access this blog from my phone. :-)
So what counts as reading?
Care to share the names of the novels? I am always on the search for books to suggest to my adolescent students.
Our students were expected to read one book over the summer and then were given a test on it when they returned. Incoming 10th graders were expected to read "Westside Story." What is the test used for? Nothing. What is the book used for? Nothing. They read "Romeo and Juliet" last year, so it doesn't seem to mean anything. If they didn't read the book, that's their fault. Or, the teacher could give them 2 weeks to read it. This is a high-poverty area and a very small town with no bookstores. The likelihood of them being able to get a copy of the book is slim. That they should want to is even slimmer.
I didn't give the test. I don't see the purpose.
Thanks for weighing in on C's success. It's fascinating after watching him over the last few years to now see him come into his own.
It's also fascinating that the novels he was assigned, mostly adult ones, helped ease him into the more difficult reads.
I do think that highly gifted kids (like I'm guessing lrg above is) have a tendency to self-teach at an early age and expore challenging material in ways that other kids might not do on their own.
*One novel was Guns, Germs, and Steel, and another was Angela's Ashes. Raisin in the Sun was the play he was to read. Catherine, you whould repost, or point to, the letter the school sent home. I printed it out but I have no idea where I put it.
*Redkudu,
Our school had a similar requirement. Even the neighboring private school didn't have as much rigor on its list as C's.
SusanS
One novel was Guns, Germs, and Steel, -- it isn't a novel, but a non-fiction book by Jared Diamond. From Amazon:
Explaining what William McNeill called The Rise of the West has become the central problem in the study of global history. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond presents the biologist's answer: geography, demography, and ecological happenstance. Diamond evenhandedly reviews human history on every continent since the Ice Age at a rate that emphasizes only the broadest movements of peoples and ideas. Yet his survey is binocular: one eye has the rather distant vision of the evolutionary biologist, while the other eye--and his heart--belongs to the people of New Guinea, where he has done field work for more than 30 years.
It is fascinating and well-written and I recommend it to every literate adult.
Lrg makes a thoughtful point. Do schools need a broader definition of "reading"? My boys spend a lot of time on the internet--not IMing or Facebook, but reading all about all sorts topics. Newspaper sites, blogs, various forms of commentary on things they are interested in. It's not the same as reading a novel, but it's reading, and it's thinking about what they've read, and it's following where the ideas lead to learn even more...probably a lot like the reading most of *us* currently do!
Anonymous has a point too--not all kids will self-teach like this. But for those who do, a summer reading requirement imposed by their school might not be too well received. Although I was very impressed with Catherine's and how well her son did with it (no doubt these are things we all should read), I admit to being glad we didn't have one!
"Do schools need a broader definition of 'reading'?"
I'd venture that schools need more quantifiable measurements of reading.
So ... do I care if the reading is on a monitor or on a sheet of paper? No, not really. But I do care if reading long works (e.g. Sense and Sensibility) gets entirely replaced by reading short works (e.g. The Ransom of Red Chief).
I would like to see the schools track (and gently push) the ability to read:
*) Texts with more difficult vocabulary over time.
*) Texts with more difficult syntax over time.
*) Single texts of increasing length over time.
*) Fiction with more complex story lines over time (e.g. more sub-plots, more characters, the use of flashbacks)
*) Fiction with more subtle imagery over time.
My concern with replacing more traditional reading assignments with Internet reading assignments, is that the Internet tends not to contain texts with lengths comparable to traditional novels or traditional non-fiction texts (e.g. Guns, Germs and Steel).
Blog postings are different from Montaigne's (sp?) essays.
I don't have a problem with scoring reading stuff off the internet as reading, but I do have a problem with scoring reading a blog post as just-as-good educationally as reading a longer/denser/harder work that one finds in more the more traditional medium of books.
I don't expect this tracking to happen, though. And there is some evidence that longer dead-tree works are being replaced with shorter dead-tree works already ...
-Mark Roulo
Picking books that kids want to read can be difficult. I went to a single-sex girls school, where one of our assigned texts was Jane Eyre. Appropriate material for teenage girls? Probably. I personally loathed it.
"Do schools need a broader definition of 'reading'?"
Reading at my son's school is really, really big. They have to read a lot. What do they have to read? That's the problem. The reading and exploring my son does on the internet is a lot better than reading the nth book in the Artemis Fowl series or an assigned "teen" book with a message. This has led me to remark that their reading is overrated. The school is using reading to reduce direct instruction in all sorts of things, like spelling, vocabulary, and grammar.
The social studies teacher handed out a background newspaper article on Barack Obama for the kids to read. It was good in that my son asked me a number of questions about definitions and meanings. Of course, what about the kids who can't ask their parents? I ended up giving him a lot of background information and we had a discussion about primaries and the political conventions.
The teachers probably think this is great. I don't. My son has had almost zero instruction in history and government. He has not been prepared properly to read that article. I have to do their work. This is another example of their top-down, real world approach to osmotic learning.
"The social studies teacher handed out a background newspaper article on Barack Obama for the kids to read."
Well, at least your child didn't come home and exclaim that the only reason you weren't voting for Obama is because he is black.
Of course, my husband and I set him straight and explained both parties stance on various issues.
Paula,
That reminds me of the time my son came home with a sheet about the differences between Democrats and Republicans. When it came to the things that the parties "care about," the Democrat side of the chart said, "The Poor." The Republican side said, "Business."
SusanS
At least the article stuck to the basic facts, but I don't think the teacher will hand out one about McCain. It seems like some teachers can't resist pushing their agenda. My son's 6th grade teacher got really weird about free range chickens.
I stand corrected. The teacher did hand out a background article about McCain. The problem still remains that the teacher still expects kids to figure things out without having any background knowledge. She asked them how they thought things would change if Obama was elected. She hasn't even begun to explain how the three branches of government work.
"The problem still remains that the teacher still expects kids to figure things out without having any background knowledge."
Exactly. Case in point was my fifth grader's social studies homework last night. He had to find three artificats lying around the house that a political scientist, geographer, historian, and an economist would find interesting. His first question was what was a political scientist? There was no discussion in class about political science. Just do the work and hand it in. Then, they'll discuss it.
Unfortunately, our social studies interactive notebook is one big agenda. It's not one I like.
"political science"
Isn't that the study of spin?
Well, I've asked for a meeting with the SS teacher so that I can find out what she expects and how I can help my son. My guess is that she will say that the work is just to get them thinking.
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