Judith Newman, writing in The New York Times, and drawing on research, offers an admonition for parents too involved in helping with homework:
Sociologists at the University of Texas at Austin and Duke University assessed the effect of more than 60 kinds of parental involvement on academic achievement. Read it and weep, helicopter parents: Across age, race, gender and socioeconomic status, most help had neither a positive or negative effect, and many kinds drove down a kid’s test scores and grades. One of the biggest culprits? Homework help.
Why is this help so counter-productive?
For one thing, most of us aren’t teachers; knowing a subject is not the same as being able to impart that knowledge to others, as anyone who’s ever found herself screaming, “Just take my word for it!” to a mystified 7-year-old knows. Second, when we don’t understand, we’re embarrassed. This may be particularly true of successful, competitive professionals. How many of us feel good telling our children, “I make enough money to buy a summer home in Tuscany, but please don’t ask me to explain Common Core math.”“I think of myself as an intelligent, functioning adult,” says the writer Julie Klam, who has a daughter who just finished fifth grade. “But my God. Do you know what a ‘math lattice’ is? No, you do not. The way basic math is taught now, it’s not like A plus B equals C. It’s more like A plus B, and then you run out for oranges, and then you take the subway. My daughter’s recent assignment was like a buffet of confusion.”
Further complicating the homework is the increasing fashion for making it “creative” — which often renders it unnecessarily complicated, at least for the age and dexterity of many younger children. “I used to be very involved in my kids’ homework until my second grader came back with an assignment to recreate New York City’s waterways using a baking sheet, mounds of paper towels, tin foil and rivers of water poured from a pitcher,” says Marjorie Ingall, a Manhattan public school mother. “First of all, I don’t care about New York’s waterways as long as the water that comes out of the tap does not catch fire. But that aside — this is an assignment for me, not for an 8-year-old. There was just so much crying at my house.”
What, then, are (helicopter) parents to do? Read on to find out.
Marie,
Thanks for your comment. Your experience -- having to do homework with your child -- is not uncommon. It raises the question of what exactly school is for if, when students get home, they have essentially a repeat of the school day.
This often carries on into high school, where students get two and three hours of homework a night, a scenario that has no real correlation to the working adult world. (When I was practicing law, I certainly worked many hours, but when I left the office at 6 or 7, or so, I didn't go home and do another two or three hours of work -- or if I did, it was rare.)
-Matt
Anne --
Thanks for reading and taking the time to comment. I appreciate your reflections and your story from the front lines. You've asked some good questions and noted some themes that I've written about previously. (See, for example, my post "In Praise of Students.")
For me and for our school, we try to give homework that is thoughtful and intentional, anchored in specific learning goals. We don't want to give homework just to give homework ("busy work"), and we reject the notion that hours of homework = great school.
To that end, I don't give homework every night, and I am mindful of how much work students receive from my colleagues. Sometimes I err on giving too little; sometimes I err on giving too much, but I am always trying to find a good balance for the reasons you mention.
Regarding your other points: My original post did not address whether students deserve down time. Of course they should. To me, that goes without saying. Every human being deserves that.
My point in my post was something entirely different: the conditions under which someone is trying to complete an essay or, for example, read a few passages from a text. If, for example, students are trying to read a chapter of Old Man and the Sea while simultaneously carrying on conversations on Twitter or through text messaging, and then they don't pass a reading quiz the next day, then those study habits have to be examined. Are those distractions the only reason a student struggles? Perhaps not. But they could be a big part of it.
An additional point from your response that I take away is that schools must continue to be mindful of what they expect of students. Do schools exert too much pressure? Are schools and teachers overscheduling students, or encouraging them to do too much? We too must examine our own patterns of encouragement to ensure that we aren't setting a standard that leads to exhaustion.
Again, thanks Anne for reading and contributing to the discussion.
-Matt E.