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Don't Help Your Kids With Their Homework
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Dana Goldstein writes in The Atlantic that while one of the central tenets of raising kids in America is that parents should be actively involved in their children's education — meeting with teachers, volunteering at school, and helping with homework — few parents stop to ask whether they're worth the effort. Case in point: In the largest-ever study of how parental involvement affects academic achievement researchers combed through nearly three decades' worth of longitudinal surveys of American parents and tracked 63 different measures of parental participation in kids' academic lives, from helping them with homework, to talking with them about college plans, to volunteering at their schools. What they found surprised them. Most measurable forms of parental involvement seem to yield few academic dividends for kids, or even to backfire — regardless of a parent's race, class, or level of education. Once kids enter middle school, parental help with homework can actually bring test scores down, an effect Robinson says could be caused by the fact that many parents may have forgotten, or never truly understood, the material their children learn in school. 'As kids get older—we're talking about K-12 education — parents' abilities to help with homework are declining,' says Keith Robinson. 'Even though they may be active in helping, they may either not remember the material their kids are studying now, or in some cases never learned it themselves, but they're still offering advice. And that means poor quality homework.'" (More, below.)
Hugh Pickens continues: "The study did find a handful of parental behaviors that made a difference in their children's education such as reading aloud to young kids (PDF) (fewer than half of whom are read to daily) and talking with teenagers about college plans. 'The most consistent, positive parental involvement activity is talking to your kids about their post-high school plans, and this one stood out because it was, pretty much for every racial, ethnic and socio-economic group, positively related to a number of academic outcomes—such as attendance and marks,' concludes Robinson. 'What this might be hinting at is the psychological component that comes from kids internalizing your message: school is important. '"
'Even though they may be active in helping, they may either not remember the material their kids are studying now, or in some cases never learned it themselves, but they're still offering advice. And that means poor quality homework.'" You mean like correcting the blatant errors in the grade school science texts?
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Parents help with homework, kids never learn how to solve problems by theirself.
You had better get any information you want into your kids head before puberty.
After puberty, they lose the ability to listen to parents.
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That the kids who did well without help didn't *need* help because they were smart self-starters? Yeah, maybe that's it.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
If your kid is stuck on something, help him out.
If you don't know how to help him out, then admit that. In any subject where the results are objective you can look at the practice section if you have any doubts about your ability to be helpful. If you're both stuck help him formulate the question(s) to ask the teacher, if he's having trouble doing that on his own.
Don't do your kids' homework for them.
Next article.
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OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I'm a Jew. I implore you to do exactly the opposite of what I tell you to do, in the strongest terms possible!
(That should keep him occupied for a while...)
Ezekiel 23:20
Homework -- self practice -- is where you actually learn the material. When parents do their kids' homework, the kids lose the opportunity to learn the material for themselves.
This isn't to say that students don't need help. Rather, they need help thinking through the material instead of the "help" of being told the solution.
not because the material's hard, but because it builds and builds and builds. If you're not taking the course along with your kid you're not gonna pull it off.
What I hate seeing is these schools giving 4+ hours of homework a night. It's damn near impossible to do all that. The US economy is crashing due to outsourcing and blind faith in Free Trade, and everyone's trying to figure out what to do that doesn't involve stuff that's politically impossible (like Tariffs and an end to Work Visas for people w/o a PHD and a large body of work). So far the solution seems to be to overwhelm children with tests and homework...
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And yet, homeschooled kids tend to outperform their bricks-and-mortar peers. According to the study, homeschoolers do slightly worse when their parents are teachers. My own suspicion is that when parents do their kids' homework, the kids don't bother learning what they don't need to.
It is easy to confuse causation with correlation. Without an experiment, causation cannot be shown. Data suggests correlation only. To a person whose never taken a statistics course (a statistics course should be mandated for all students, would decrease people's gullibility), said data might look as though the parents that help with homework CAUSE poorer test scores. To someone who's used to seeing this causation fallacy, I see a possibility that kids who are doing poorly in school are more likely to be helped with their homework by their parents, and therefore it's the poor cognitive ability which CAUSES the parent to help, and the poor cognitive ability CAUSES the poor test scores.
Helping with homework is such a broad subject that stretches from answering the occasional question, to doing the assignment for the kid. Based on my limited experience, the important thing to keep in mind is helping the child develop good behaviors. Show the child that doing homework is important by setting time aside every day for homework. Be engaged with the kid and communicate with them about what is going on at school. Give them some flexibility. "What order do you want to tackle your homework in?" "Do you want to go 30 or 45 minutes between breaks?" "How much of this semester long project do you want to get done this week?"
Homework is less about mastering subject matter and more about developing good habits. Kids go to school "all day". Parents definitely work all day. Those are jobs. The people who excel in their professions are the people who put in the extra effort. Professionals who put in the extra effort usually do it because they are fortunate enough to enjoy their profession. Kids do not get that perk. They are stuck with the subjects they have to learn. A parent who comes home from work and "tunes out", implicitly communicates to the kid that doing so is acceptable behavior. The parent who comes home and helps the kid with homework sets the example that just because they've "put in their 8 hours", it does not mean that they are done with their responsibilities.
Those of us who work in IT inherently set examples of strong work ethics, by being on call all the time. The challenge is to balance the work responsibility with finding time for the family. In most cases, having the discipline to not check emails for 2 hours while helping the kid with homework helps to establish healthy boundaries with employers as well.
One last perk... it helps you get laid. Oddly enough, mothers are turned on by men who help their children succeed. Go figure.
If you want the exact opposite effect, homeschool your kids. This makes you far more involved in their education and lives plus they do far better than public school kids. One of the big benefits of homeschooling is that we don't have to have any arguments about what we're going to teach, no creationism vs evolution. We teach real science. We do real research. Homeschooling has been great, for us.
YMMV so do what you please.
Seriously, mental math is something that's always going to be useful as it's a way of developing math sense. Chances are that when you're checking out at the supermarket that you don't tally things up yourselves, but with mental math, you can estimate whether the bill is reasonable.
What's more, if you're doing mental math regularly, it's both more accurate and faster than whipping out a calculator. And what's more, you always have that option, you can even write down the intermediary steps if you need to.
As for the base-10 shortcut, it's not about that, it's about preparing the students for algebra. Being able to point back to this when teaching the associative and commutative properties is quite useful. ,
> Those who wrote math text and teach math are not math experts. They are teaching experts. Their math may not be right.
This makes no sense to me. Please explain. Do you actually believe it's better to more skillfully teach wrong facts compared to less skillfully teach correct facts? Or were you talking about things like, we would only confuse second graders with negative numbers, so when teaching them, we'll just implicitly assume that negative numbers don't exist.
Unless you mean Arithmetic Mean, then they are exactly the same thing