Homework Is Two Four-Letter Words!
10/1/2007
Way back in the twentieth century when Andy Gibb was teaching the world to sing and all the girls had those monogrammed round purses with the wood handles that somehow always managed to stay shut despite the absence of any type of clasp or snap, I was in third grade. It was about this time that I realized I really liked the first couple weeks of school because we did a lot of review and “getting to know you” activities. I also had a really cool teacher, but privacy laws forbid me from expounding upon that.
This was the year when I first became acutely aware of the familiar pattern of readjusting to homework after a couple of nice long months of summertime escapism. It was as though the season had reached an agreement with the education system to immerse us in a sort of scholastic purgatory where we still had to go to school, but school couldn’t follow us home. It only took a week or so though before we found our stunned selves hauling home an armload of books wondering if backyard football was now strictly a weekend affair. Those afternoons told us summer was officially over. Blissful outdoor over stimulation was replaced by sitting still, reading, writing and math(ing). Brains had to fight to block out dinner smells and the sounds of younger kids, still unblemished by the rages of elementary school, gleefully romping though our vacant front yards. Rites of passage don’t have to be fun to be meaningful.
Jump ahead thirty years and I have no clue who sings anything popular, and my daughter has as many Webkinz as my sister had purse covers. We still review and get to know each other, and homework still lies, coiled in wait. Some things never change. What has changed, however, is our ability as parents to provide insight and feedback to the school concerning work load and challenge level. Certainly this is not the case everywhere. Walden’s family-centered philosophy is dependent on parental input to assure our success with students.
Another difference is the level of parental concern over homework itself. Whereas my mother’s version of checking homework was asking me if I had finished, nationwide today we often analyze each assignment for meaning and appropriate challenge. While homework concerns begin when it is first assigned in first grade, controversy truly begins third grade where developmental, hormonal and intellectual levels vary from student to student in ways they never have before. We work hard to keep to our standard “ten minutes per night per grade,” but at age eight, one boy’s half hour is another’s fifteen minutes and yet another’s hour and a half. Couple this with the many opposing parental views of what constitutes meaningful homework, and across the country, teachers begin dancing snow dances in the middle of September.
Whether first or twelfth grade, our families play an integral role in helping Walden teachers determine how close we come to our meeting our homework goals. As parents and teachers, however, we have to factor in the beginning-year adjustments our children must go thorough in order to reestablish a foundation of homework habits and self-regulative study. One evening’s homework is simply that: one evening’s homework. While no student’s dedicated homework efforts should take twice as long as our standards dictate, judging homework impact over a period of several evenings rather than one helps to provide us with a more objective view of our effectiveness.
So, as we bid goodbye to the honeymooning salad days of the beginning of the year, our children enter into a new grade struggling to focus on assignments amidst a flurry of distractions and memories of a more leisurely existence. Like we did way back in the last century, they will adjust. Some will sooner than others, but each will progress when allowed to overcome. A good school will never eliminate adversity from a student’s life but will work, with the help of parents, to assure that with a little sweat and back-to-school lament, nothing is insurmountable.
Brian Archibald