<p>We found that we had to teach our kids HOW to study. It seems schools never do a good job of this and students spend about 1/3 more time than they need to for poorer results (even if they get A's). It is hard for students to learn to study and think at the level of the discipline rather than at the level of a student. We began introducing reasoning skills early on and added other inquiry and writing skills as they got older. Help with homework typically involves prompts on applying the skills.</p>
<p>No help at all from me -- I wouldn't even know where to start. My contributions have been to simply provide a counterpoint/devil's advocate on some conversations. HS kids put way too much faith in opinion statements from teachers. And S had a teacher in his sophomore year that, I swear, must have spouted as the gospel truth every single idiotic urban legend there was. Thank goodness for snopes.com and The Straight Dope.</p>
<p>idad, I wanted to make much the same post. I'm glad you did. I consider it to be like this - I don't do homework (or studying), I do the "Philosophy of Homework (or Studying)". LOL.</p>
<p>Not since middle school.</p>
<p>I don't think most American parents help out with homework - at least not past the elementary grades. Most teenagers aren't that keen on their parents being that involved with their lives, for better or worse..</p>
<p>Occassionally my D would ask her dad about Calculus problems she stuggled with, and I think she found that helpful. Son has never asked for help, but he will go to a teacher with questions if he needs it.</p>
<p>How much do your children help each other? </p>
<p>My sister and I are 2 years apart (I'm the baby), but even when we lived together we didn't help each other much at all. We were always in different "schools" - American/British O Levels (actual different schools at this time), or middle school/high school, IGCSE/IB. As a younger sister, I couldn't help her with French, though she was beginning after I had taken two years of French. My pronounciation and grammar was heinous.</p>
<p>My children are three years apart and they love to study together. My son in particular is a fantastic tutor to his younger sister. He makes everything fun and silly, so, for example, she'll say that Rome was founded in 753 BCE and she remembers this because it's a palindrome (obviously, it isn't -- it's just something funny they made up). Studying Latin vocab is always a riot because they come up with ridiculous stories for every word she doesn't know. He makes her learn History as a story, not just dry facts. Why, what came of that, what parallels are there between that and this? He really gets her thinking! Though they laugh constantly, he takes teaching her very seriously and is quite the task master. But she can also help him when he's doing Latin translations because she knows a lot more Latin than I do, and her Grammar knowledge is better than his was at that age.</p>
<p>My parents help me study. Perhaps not so much studying, but they help me with ideas for essays and projects and do a lot of proof-reading. </p>
<p>I feel very lucky in the fact that my parents have a broad range of knowledge, basically in all the areas I'm studying. My father is a math and science person and my mother is a humanities person. Between the two of them, and their respective other languages, I'm set. </p>
<p>The biggest thing they do is definitely help brainstorm and edit essays and projects. That is the most helpful, to get others ideas.</p>
<p>The last time I helped one of my kids with homework was in grade school. It was dividing fractions and when I told my daughter to just flip the second fraction and muliply, she flew into a rage and told me they were not "allowed" to do that and she showed me the lesson and it was lots of pages of bundles of asparagus and clouds and pieces of cheese . It was way too confusing for me so I showed it to my husband who has a masters degree in engineering from Stanford and he flew into a rage and my daughter ended up crying and we all decided that Terc Math was best left up to professionals.</p>
<p>1Down2togo, I was taught to flip and multiply when I was in a Montessori school. When I moved over to public school, most of the kids were dividing as if they also had not been allowed to flip. Unless an enterprising teacher taught them to flip, they're probably having the time of their life in calculus ;).</p>
<p>Okay..maybe I'm just stupid...but..how does one divide fractions WITHOUT flipping the second fraction??? :confused:</p>
<p>I have absolutely no idea, it makes perfect sense to flip since it's a reciprocal function, right? My friends never could explain it to me...</p>
<p>I knew I was no longer useful in the homework department when my DD was in third grade. She asked me if I knew what "such-and-such" (can't remember) was and I said, "No, I don't, but we can find the answer together." She replied with "Oh, I know what it means ... I was just wondering if you knew what it meant. :(</p>
<p>
[quote]
when I told my daughter to just flip the second fraction and muliply, she flew into a rage and told me they were not "allowed" to do that
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Slightly OT: That sort of thinking killed me in elementary school. I always figured that if I got it right it didn't matter how I did it. In middle school I was the kid who always asked "but wouldn't it be easier..." (and receiving in return, "well, sweetie, if it works for you..."). Now I'm in high school and my chemistry teacher jokes about how he hates grading my work because he doesn't know what to make of it--sure, I get the right answers, just never using methods he'd expect. :D</p>
<p>How embarrassing is this: My 4th grader asked me to help her with a word/math problem, and I couldn't figure it out...I always was bad at those......but I did pretty well in Statistics in college!</p>
<p>On the TERC mathematics curriculum, see </p>
<p>Nothing that required any knowledge of the subject matter after elementary school. Continued to help with "administrative assistant" stuff thru high school - things like drilling facts to be memorized, proof-reading, checking answers against a key on practice tests so son could keep working on the missed ones w/o knowing the answer, keeping the study plan on schedule with reminders.</p>
<p>I am clueless about what my kids are doing at school. I would like to have helped them when they were young, but they always said, "I can do it myself", so that was that. Plus, since I work, they like dto get their homework done before I got home.They may have gotten slightlky better grades with parental help - I actually believe they would have, especially with essays - but on the other hand I have never received a note from school that they were unprepared, didn't hand in homework on time, etc and they are now 15 and 17. As my daughter gets ready to go off to college next year (wherever that will be), at least I am not worried about how she'll do "on her own", since she has always worked on her own.</p>
<p>This is how I helped my kids study. </p>
<p>"Do you have any homework?" :)</p>
<p>MomofThree, heh: D's schedule was put together like a Swiss watch. While on the way to ballet after pick-up from school, it was almost like a daily catechism covering: what's on tap for homework? how long do you think it will take? Etc.</p>
<p>D over took my current math abilities by the second semester of junior year...good think she never asked me for help. My French is likewise rusty so there went that. (Marite might say "badly corroded" except that she is unfailingly polite.) There were a few times that D asked me to look at English papers for comments but many more where she did not.</p>