Don’t ask your kids about grades, test scores or homework, advises Kerry Dickinson of the East Bay Homework Blog. Instead, focus on the content of the subject he or she is studying.
Instead of “What did you get on the test?” say, “What are you learning in science?” If you are connected to some school communication tool (like Schoolloop) you can look at homework assignments and grades privately. Benefits: you are teaching them to take ownership of their own schedules. You are letting them manage their own time. You are taking the focus off scores and putting it on learning.
Dickinson’s ”10 Tips to Start the School Year Off Right” offers a list of ideas from common sense to counterintuitive: Don’t overschedule your children; don’t sign your child up for academic tutoring unless he or she is in jeopardy of failing a class; and don’t attend every sports game or extracurricular activity (”your child will be participating for the love of the game or of the activity, not to earn your approval”).
(H/T: Kathleen Manzo via Twitter)
Dan Willingham does a takedown of all-purpose education pundit Alfie Kohn over at Britannica Blog. Dan cheekily titles his piece “Alfie Kohn is Bad For You and Dangerous for Your Children” to lampoon Kohn’s stock-in-trade of broad-brush oversimplification. He details how Kohn ”consistently makes factual errors, oversimplifies the literature that he seeks to explain, and commits logical fallacies.”
Kohn specializes in attacking conventional wisdom in education. He takes a common practice that people think is helpful and then shows it’s not helpful, and in fact is destructive. Most people think that homework helps kids learn, praise shows appreciation and makes them more likely to do desirable things, and self-discipline helps them achieve their goals. Kohn argues that each of these conclusions is wrong or over-simplified. Homework may bring small benefits to some students, but it incurs greater costs and overall is likely not worth assigning. Praise doesn’t help academic achievement, it controls children, it reduces motivation, and makes them less able to make decisions. Self-discipline is oversold as an educational panacea, and in some contexts may actually be undesirable.
Kohn raises interesting questions and is a useful provocateur, Willingham concludes, but he “cannot be trusted as an accurate summary of the research literature….He will lead you to something interesting and useful, but if you want to use it, you will have to do the work yourself.”
Along with Stuart Buck’s recent blog piece, seconded by Jay Greene, it seems the spotlight is burning a bit more brightly on Kohn of late. He has richly earned the dressing down. I’ve gotten out of the business of responding to Kohn’s deliberate and persistent mischaracterization of the Core Knowledge curriculum as ”rote memorization” and a “bunch o’ facts.” (The offer still stands, Mr. Kohn: Let me know when you want to visit a Core Knowledge school.) Clearly, Kohn has no incentive to let a bunch o’ facts get in the way of what is a lucrative business of books, articles and lecture fees– reportedly 200 speaking engagements a year at $5K a pop. Indeed, it’s tempting to view Alfie Kohn, Inc. as the intellectual equivalent of professional wrestling. He needs a heavy to go after to keep that income stream running strong.
Update: Eduwonk questions Dan’s sanity and masochistic tendencies in taking on Alfie Kohn. Dan’s response in the comments section discusses the real price of shrugging your shoulders and rolling your eyes.
Children who develop headaches while reading or who struggle to complete their homework may be sufferring from an under-diagnosed vision problem. As many as one of every 20 students have some degree of “CI” or “convergence insufficiency,” the AP reports. Standard vision screenings administered by schools won’t catch it, since such exams stress distance vision.
To bring print or other close-in work into focus, both eyes must turn slightly inward, or converge. Convergence insufficiency means the eyes aren’t doing that properly. Words may appear blurry or double, or disappear as readers lose their place. “Complaints are rare in very young children because pictures and large type don’t require as much convergence,” the AP notes. “Parents tend to start noticing a problem once homework and deeper reading begins.”
Lots to cheer about if you’re a fan of lower standards and diminshed expectations.
One of Britain’s top grammar schools is slashing homework to no more than 40 minutes a night. The school’s headmaster more than that becomes “mechanical” and “repetitive.” His deputy adds that too much homework could be “depressing” and put pupils off learning. “We had boys doing three or four hours a night at the expense of sports, music practice or simply having fun,” he says.
In Toronto, the school board has passed a policy manadating a maximum of one hour of homework for 7th and 8th graders, while another in Barrie, Canada has banned it altogether. That earned an “atta boy!” from anti-homework scold Alfie Kohn. “The Toronto policy is a teeny first step,” he tells the Canadian website Parent Central. For parents who are concerned that homework keeps them in the loop about what their children are learning, Kohn sniffs, “We can solve that problem in five minutes. Teachers can send home annotated guides to the curriculum – here’s what we are teaching and why.” That will indeed take five minutes. To read.
Finally, what do you call 1+1=3? In Pittsburgh, it’s called half right. School officials in the Steel City are the latest to go for the no-grade-lower-than-50-percent strategy as a way to keep struggling students involved.
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