Abstract: BY NOW, I've grown familiar with the prelude. have a teacher question for you, my friend asks me on a fairly routine basis. Invariably, there is a parent/teacher meeting pending, and she fears it might get ugly. Her son has gotten another less-than-stellar grade on a homework assignment that ate an entire weekend and required the assistance of two adults with advanced degrees. The latest assignment is just one of many that have taken their toll on my friend's family. In fact, she attributes the case of shingles she developed last year to a Welcome to the New World brochure that had to be typed and tri-folded (no cutting and pasting allowed). Despite repeated efforts to learn the intricacies of desktop publishing software, she and her son were unable to master the formatting. At 11:30 p.m., they admitted defeat and decided to submit the information typed, but paragraph form, bracing themselves for the hit. Surprisingly, they still couldn't make this assignment go away. Deemed unacceptable by the teacher, it was handed back to the student, who was forced to outsource it to yet another adult. Contemplating her case for the fateful meeting, my friend wonders aloud, Am I being unreasonable? In the depth of her sighs, I hear both outrage and defeat. As a special teacher (now termed consultant teacher), I do not routinely dole out but I collaborate with my colleagues (the general education teachers) to facilitate, and evaluate instruction that is fair and appropriate for the students question. Regardless of the assignment, I can ask my colleagues: What is the curricular goal? What is it you want them to know and understand? If the goal is to demonstrate an understanding of the reasons why immigrants came to America, then how that understanding is assessed can take myriad forms. A brochure? Sure! But designing the brochure should not become more important than the point of the brochure, as seemed to be the case with my friend's son. For many teachers reading this, that idea does not come as a revelation. Many of us have received enough hours of professional development to earn another degree: asking essential questions, adhering to backwards design, and focusing on process over product are all part of our repertoire. We get it already. Or do we? The more conversations I have with friends and relatives who are panicked and confused over the homework that their children receive (and are incapable of completing on their own), the more outraged I become. As a new parent, I wonder what position I'll take when my own daughter has a doozy of an assignment. Do I let her tackle it independently, even if it means she will stumble occasionally? Or will I succumb to the pressure of ensuring that she gets good grades, even if those grades scarcely reflect any real understanding? The heart of the matter is this: Is this a parenting issue, or a school policy issue? In my own experience, my father, a veteran teacher, never once hovered over me as I did my homework (that is, when I did it). Admittedly, I was not always as dutiful and tenacious about it as he would have liked, but that was my work, and the grades were reflective of my output, not his. (I think it may have been the best parenting lesson I could have received.) And what about those students who will not get help with their homework, simply because the adults at home are unable or unwilling to help? Should those students be penalized for a home environment that doesn't enforce--or, more accurately, ensure--that their grades stay in the black? If the responsibility rests with the source, would that be the school or the individual teacher? After all, homework is generally assigned and graded at the discretion of each teacher. In that regard, I still defer to the advice my father gave me when I was baffled over assigning and grading homework during my first year of teaching: Homework should be independent practice, he said. …
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 3
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