Parent Company

Summer homework: A debate

The New York Times' Room for Debate blog has a panel considering the pluses and minuses of summer homework.

This has been the subject of debate in our house. Our 11th-grade daughter's summer assignments were very challenging, to the point where I sometimes wondered if more of her time would have been better spent just riding a bicycle or splashing around a pool.

Here are some opinion snippets from the Times panel:

Harris Cooper, psychologist, Duke University: "The long summer vacation disrupts the rhythm of instruction, leads to forgetting, and requires time be spent reviewing old material when students return to school in fall. ... My advice? Teachers, you need to be careful about what and how much summer homework you assign. Summer homework shouldn’t be expected to overcome a student’s learning deficits; that’s what summer school is for. Parents, if the assignments are clear and reasonable, support the teachers."

Nancy Kalish, co-author of "The Case Against Homework": " Schools should rethink summer homework, and not just because it stresses out kids (and parents). The truth is, homework doesn’t accomplish what we assume it does. According to a Duke University review of more than 175 studies, there is little or no correlation between homework and standardized test scores or long-term achievement in elementary school, and only a moderate correlation in middle school."

Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University: "To the general question of whether or not schools should assign summer homework, the answer is, 'Yes, most assuredly.' ... The reason stems not only from the brain drain of summer and the fog of texting that enwraps youths during leisure hours. It relates also to an attitude young people take toward education. In a word, they regard learning as a classroom thing, that’s all. They tie knowledge to the syllabus, not to themselves. They read and study to write the paper and ace the test, not to furnish their minds. Learning is to earn a high score and good grade, not to form responsible citizens and discerning consumers."

Denise Pope, lecturer at Stanford University School of Education: "The problem with summer homework is a lack of buy-in from one of the main constituencies: the students. During the school year, the students don’t necessarily enjoy doing homework, but they understand it is part of their daily routine. In the summer, students expect, and often need, a break from this routine and the daily pressures that usually accompany it."

It seems to me that summer homework is a good idea to keep the brain cells moving, but like everything else it should be served in moderation.

---Greg

Putting the brakes on bullying

An article on Slate.com says that it takes a village to stop a bully.

If your child is being bullied, say authors Alan E. Kazdin and Carlo Rotella, the four most common responses are: "telling your child to stand up to the bully, telling your child to try to ignore and avoid the bully, taking matters into your own hands by calling the bully's parents or confronting the bully yourself, or asking your child's teacher to put a stop to it."

None of those is likely to work, for various reasons.

The authors' solutions involve problem-solving with your child, then initiating a campaign within your school to raise consciousness about bullying and get out the message that it will not be tolerated.

Most parents would go to ANY lengths to put an end to bullying that victimizes their child. Still, it seems like it would take a very large commitment of time and energy to mount an effective anti-bullying campaign. For working parents whose time and energy are already stretched to the limit -- well, I guess most of us would just press ahead and find out that our limits stretch farther than we thought.

The Slate article is a good one to bookmark for the school days ahead.

---Greg

Tipping the hat to teachers and coaches

As the school year winds down, I’d like to offer appreciation to teachers and coaches for another year of helping our children (in the collective sense) learn and grow.

I look at our youth soccer coach and marvel at how he can control a field of 30 second- to fourth-graders, let alone teach them how to play the game. My only experience with getting large groups of young kids to comply with orders is directing them to the food table for pizza and cake at a birthday party, and even that isn’t so easy.

Or a middle school teacher who has to deal with a class full of attitude and hormones and actually gets them to pay attention and learn, or as they say, “stay on task.” Imagine spending a day with this age group? Anyone who has dealt with kids knows that this is no picnic. Or the music teacher who teaches little ones how to eke out a complex series of symbols in musical language from a violin or piano (and has to listen to squeaking all day long) and then produces a recital with a room full of kids who can actually play beautiful songs.

When you think about it, which I don’t do enough, it’s amazing how many people are involved in teaching our children skills and shaping th em into adults.  While we are our children’s first teachers, and try to continue to be through their lives (with less and less effect, it feels, as the years go by), it is the proverbial village that helps us teach and guide them. In our culture wars of “it takes a parent” vs. “it takes a village,” I say it takes parents and a village to raise kids.

While we’ve celebrated Mother’s Day and are soon to celebrate Father’s Day, here’s to Teacher’s and Coaches Appreciation Day, which can also include all others who help us navigate the journey of raising those who we hope will be loving, responsible, productive adults.

---Allison

Snow day

You've got to love those unplanned snow days, don't you?

Our school decided at 6:30 this morning to pull the plug. In our case it did not cause a parental emergency today -- at least so far -- but I know that in many households, it did.

How much scrambling did your family have to do this morning to cover having the kids home?

My brother John lives in Burke, Va., where a snowstorm last year turned one high school student into a YouTube sensation. The lad called the home of a Fairfax County school official to request a snow day. The official's wife answered the phone and she was not happy to be getting such a call. She let the kid know about it, and he was recording the phone call. He uploaded it to YouTube and it became a big hit. Below is a recap.

---Greg

Walking the walk

There's a great post on the Free Range Kids blog titled "We are we chauffering our kids to the bus stop?"

Writer Lenore Skenazy's point is that kids should not only walk home from the bus stop -- or even from school! -- for their physical health, but for the psychological benefits of becoming self-sufficient human beings. Skenazy writes:

When parents pick their kids up from the bus stop, those kids are left to assume it is wrong for them to even consider walking home. It must be too hard, too dangerous, too strenuous – too impossible for someone their age.

Message from parents: You’re a wonderful, amazing, precious person! But you’re not up to a two block walk.

I couldn't agree more. Unless you're living in a war zone, your kids can probably handle the walk home from the bus stop.

I'll mention this to the other parents I see at Tim Horton's today, buying the kids' after-school snacks before picking them up from school.

---Greg

The dreaded parents’ meeting

Along with the onset of fall comes the beginning of every other activity, extracurricular, sports, church, etc. And any organized activity involving kids has to have a kick-off meeting for the parents.

Yes, I get that parents need to be informed about whatever is going on with their kid’s team, church group, sex education class, or troop. But now having attended about 100 various parent meetings for our three over the past decade or so, I have meeting fatigue.

These events are always scheduled for an hour even though the content can be covered in 5 minutes, or could just as easily have been summarized in an e-mail or memo. The agenda always includes handing out the team or activity schedule and an overwhelming amount of papers that one never knows what to do with: a sign-up sheet for snacks, passed around while an endless dissertation on the type and quantity of snacks allowed is given; and a plea for how the parent will donate money, time, other items, or their first born to this particular activity; veiled threats given if one’s child should miss any practices, rehearsals, classes, etc.

Then there are the parents. Each meeting includes at least one of each of these types:

-- The Eager Beaver  -– usually a newbie. Can’t wait for his/her kid to jump in the pool,  be on the stage, prepare for their First Communion. Bursts with enthusiasm and over-engineers the simplest of tasks, such as creating pivot tables and complex macros in Excel spreadsheets for the team schedule or the First Communion seating chart.

--  The Searcher for Significance -– usually a parent who takes on an activity as a cause celebre or as an outlet to demonstrate his/her mastery of skills that go otherwise unused in daily life. Dedicates a disproportionate  amount of time to said activity as a way of living vicariously through child.

--  The Clarity Seeker -– never quite gets enough information, always needs a clarification, an additional explanation, an exception for why his/her kid can’t do what is supposed to be done.

--  The Non-Compliant Cynic -– sits in the back, writes out a check as a substitute for more substantial donations of time, signs up for the least labor-intensive job required. Buys prepared snacks; doesn’t make cute mice or snowmen out of pretzels, marshmallows, and licorice lace. This would be me.

Yes, I do enjoy watching a kids’ sports event, school play, religious ritual as much as the next parent, and recognize the effort involved in organizing these activities and try to contribute in my own way. It’s just the extracurriculars-as-lifestyle parent trap that I can’t quite buy into.

---Allison

Homework hassles

I often wonder how other working parents deal with the daily rigors of seeing to it that their children get their homework done.

The amount of homework that our children receive is actually much less burdensome than what many of their friends at other schools are assigned.

Even so, we find it almost impossible to keep up with the assignments that our fourth-grader and sixth-grader receive. I so wish that our teachers were required to record the daily assignments into an e-mail to the parents or else post them on the school's Web site.

This would enable us as parents to level the playing field in the shell game that is otherwise known as “What's your homework today?”

Instead we practically have to beg our son and daughter to show us their daily planner, the book in which their assignments are recorded. Finding the planner in their backpack is at best like playing a game of Where's Waldo? (and at worst like trying to find weapons of mass destruction in prewar Iraq).

Our oldest daughter and spoiled us in this regard. She has always been self-motivated when it comes to completing her school assignments, which gave Allison and me a break for a few years. But as every parent knows, no good deed goes unpunished. Now we pay for it with the amount of monitoring that we must do to see that our other two keep up with their schoolwork. 

I often work night shifts at my job and Allison works during the day. Our children have become masters of infiltrating in the cracks in our parental armor created by our schedules. When it comes to being transparent about the completion of their assignments our kids use more head fakes then Kobe Bryant.

And as I said, we don't even have a tremendous amount of homework.  Some friends of ours just sent their son to a new school for sixth grade.  They say that the volume of homework, more than the difficulty of it, is something for which they were not prepared.

Sometimes when my patience is in short supply (which is most of the time), I will start to resent the feeling that I must spend as much time monitoring or administering their homework as they do executing it.

“This is not my book report, it's yours,” I have said to our son on numerous occasions.

I also start to resent the feeling that I am a prison guard keeping tabs on the inmates and I guess the kids have watched a few prison movies because they try to buy me off with cigarettes even though I don't smoke. (Just kidding, Child Services. My kids do not possess any tobacco products.)

I need to join a parental support group to find out how other families deal with homework hassles.

---Greg

 

Picture day

I dread picture day. It’s enough of a challenge to get three kids out of the house in the morning in minimally acceptable clothes (with our son this means not wearing an outfit that looks like it could be featured in a Tide commercial before the wash), let alone wearing picture-worthy outfits and having decent haircuts all at the same time.

My attempt Wednesday to chase our son down to touch up his hair was futile. I guess it’s not cool for young boys to have hair that looks like it’s been near a comb. This should photograph well.

Over the years our school photos are of the hit or miss variety and are thus stuffed away in various closets or files. I feel guilty when I look through catalogs and see picture frames with 12 holes designed to hold 12 years of school pictures, so that you can scientifically document your child’s maturity throughout their school days. These frames are usually made to look like a school bus or some other humiliating design, which I can’t imagine would go over well once one’s kid gets past second grade. Maybe I’m rationalizing my own failure to buy into this archiving industry.

I always feel like the loser mother who doesn’t get out perfect outfits to ensure their kids leave the house ready for posterity to be captured and included in holiday cards or nicely showcased in a triptych office display. In fact, my office has Dorian Gray pictures of our kids -– anyone who didn’t know me at work would think I was the mother of toddlers by the age of the kids in the pictures.

And my current screensaver has a picture of our dog. Does that make me a bad mom?

---Allison

Getting boys to read

The Washington Post's "On Parenting" has a chat with Jon Scieszka, the author of "The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales" and the Library of Congress' first national ambassador for children's books.

Scieszka offers some thoughts on getting boys interested in reading. This is a hot topic in our house now as our 9-year-old son wrestles with his first book report of the year.

The author says that boys don't want to be stuck in the fiction ghetto. "They'd rather read nonfiction or humor, graphic novels, science fiction, action adventure, audio books, or online reading and magazines," Scieszka says.

Among his recommended titles are Sterling Point Books' redone autobiographies for older kids and Mo Willems' Elephant and Piggy for younger ones; Tony DiTerlizzi's "Kenny and the Dragon", "Fog Mound Chronicles" by Susan Schade and Jon Buller, Eoin Colfer's "Artemis Fowl" books; Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson's "Neverland", Neil Gaiman's "The Graveyard Book" and Corey Doctorow's "Little Brother". Also, First Second has a whole range of graphic novels that appeal to younger guys and older ones, including a Robot series for younger readers.

I was by no means a super reader when I was a lad, though I do remember plowing through the Hardy Boys mysteries, as well as many sports books by the time I got to middle school.

I think I will give some of the graphic novels a try with our son.

---Greg

The hamster wheel

As we reach mid-September, we enter Hamster Wheel season. Everything winds back into gear – school, after-school activities, music lessons, the backlog of meetings and events at work that get scheduled in September because everyone is on vacation in July and August.

Thirty days hath September, but it feels like 60 days of stuff get crammed into it.

Here is the hamster metaphor for what our lives as parents feel like right now:

If only I could get back on the wheel with such ease and actually get exercise in the process.

---Allison