Enabling/spoiling on a different level

Parents Forum
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<p>SusieQ, I think the way you do, but at least none of my children's teachers have asked me to correct the homework yet. But I know that many of my friends correct their kids homework to make it as error free as possible before it is turned in. I have never understood that. Of course, if my child is having a problem understanding what to do, I will help them figure it out, but, yes, I've always thought the idea was that the teacher would be the one to correct the homework and give the feedback, and as you say, if parents would stop doing it, the teacher might actually get some useful information from the homework from the mistakes the kids make.</p>

<p>And no, don't understand how any kid could feel good about turning in mom's papers in college. Very strange to me. My older kids are very sensitive about their writing and usually won't let me see it and do not want my suggestions. But the things some people will do to succeed at Selective U, eh?</p>

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<p>mstee, the good teachers never do, but there are so many .....ones? Yeap, this happened in the Bay Area as well. I had to call the district and complained. My thoughts were what happened for some of the immigrant's children, the ones that parent never even finished high school or even were educated, what a terrible thing to expect indeed from parents!</p>

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<p>I'm a student but I feel that I should post because the topic being discussed here is one of great interest to me. I was born in Moscow, Russia and my family moved to the US when I was 5. At that time, nobody in my family spoke a word of English and after a difficult several years at elementary school, I learned it and learned it well (rose from the bottom of my class to the very top), taught it to my family, and handled any communication that needed to be done with banks, companies, etc. I still help my mom from time to time when she needs to write formal letters for her business. In any case, you might conclude that what I have done is the exact opposite of what some of these parents that you are discussing have allowed (or even encouraged) their kids to do. I don't know if I would necessarily recommend my own experience to anyone as it was definitely not an easy one. (I remember when, as a fourth-grader, I was on the phone with banks questioning statements and was SO nervous I could hardly speak. Then again, now that I'm 19 and sometimes do need to make similar phone calls, I find the process simple and relatively not stressful, while my friends are still learning how to do it.) My family never really asked anything of me; it was all my own initiative, to help my then-struggling family.</p>

<p>Needless to say, I never got any help in writing essays or even proofreading. I could never even hand my family a paper and ask them to tell me if it makes sense! I often did translate papers (I can translate simultaneously so that it appears as though I'm simply reading an essay that was written in Russian) so that my family didn't feel quite so left out of everything I did for hours on end in my room, but it's not quite the same. I went to a private prep school and know that many of my peers at the very least got help with proofreading (if not help that ventured into the realm of cheating) and I was probably at a disadvantage when it came to grading time. But honestly, I feel that while I've had less academic support throughout my life, I am better off for it. I can correct/proofread essays very well and friends always come to me for help in that regard. I can write essays or anything really and generally speaking, it is of good quality. I trust myself and my own work without seeking approval or input from others. All of these are great things to have and the poor kids whose parents cross the thin line of cheating vs. helping are robbing their kids of them. It's really very sad to me because while these kids might achieve great success, they will likely have complexes and self-reliance issues for much of their lives and this is liable to translate into their personal lives (outside of the workplace) as well.</p>

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<p>SusieQ2007, I hadn't read your comment until after I'd posted mine. While my family was/is very well-educated (scientists, editors, and economists when we were in Russia), I just found it amusing that we were discussing a similar issue almost at the same time.</p>

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<p>I agree with you very much. As far as cheating and enabling at school, my S always had a more heightened disdain for cheaters. He would see or hear so many inventive and "old" ways of doing it over the years and most didn't get caught. He told me some teachers HAD to know but turned a blind eye. I didn't get that at the time, but later I realized how they had to pass so many and the better the grade, the better the teacher looked sometimes. He loved a math teacher he had freshman year in his catholic school. Some kids in other class's would have a test and then kids in later class's would ask the answers (to the smart ones of course) This teacher would give the kids one of 3 tests and each row got a different one. The incoming kids never knew which one they would get so that cut down on it a bit. I think some kids do it once or twice, but some graduate to new heights of cheating and it's sad and of course unfair to the other kids. My S knows he has integrity and the repeat offenders will eventually find they can't cheat their way out of something.</p>

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<p>I know Thumper is right about projects. Many of the projects at the science fair had to be done primarily by adults. I am glad that our elementary school discontinued them. </p>

<p>I know of a situation where an elementary school teacher wrote her son's essays (private catholic hs). She did all homework with him.
Her son had to leave college at the end of the first year, bcs he was unable to handle the work and went to a cc. His college maybe in the selective range (25% have entering sat verbal and math under 480). His high school was highly competitive.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
doing it once when I was a kid was enough for me

[/quote]
I always remember the statement from S' 5th grade teacher on Parent Night advising (begging?) parents not to "help" with projects, etc: "You have already been through 5th grade."</p>

<p>And I'm totally with mstee on the stupidity of "correcting" your kids' homework. How on earth is a teacher to know what kids are struggling with, and thus need extra or different instruction to truly grasp the concepts, if the homework has been sanitized by a parent?</p>

<p>Now I differ with the prevailing opinion on reading/reviewing kids' writing. S has often valued my read of an essay and I like reading them (which of course I could wait to do only after grading). But he has often sought my opinion in a way that I believe all good writers do - asking for a read to see if what he is trying to say has, in fact, come through. I checked in with his Freshman English teacher on this, and her take was (as mine is) that there is appropriate and inappropriate parental feedback:
appropriate: "this section is awkward, try clarifying," "don't understand this paragraph" "redundant", etc.
inappropriate: rewriting the awkward, confusing or redundant sections</p>

<p>This also is helpful to him in the sciences with lab and experiment reports - a scientist, or budding scientist, can easily be so enmeshed in what he already knows that his writing may not be clear to a layperson and he has always wanted me to be his lay reader for science reports. (And believe me, I am as clueless as they come in this area :confused:.)</p>

<p>It seems that most on this thread feel a parent is off base to even look at a kids' writing before submittal. I think part of good writing is learning to draft, re-draft, finalize and part of the draft, re-draft process can be incorporating feedback from others. This is how I've always proceeded.</p>

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<p>I thought once we sent the kids off to college, the days of checking homework were through?!! I know that I have retired from the homework-checking business.</p>

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<p>my son is also a terrific writer, and we read each other's work. I basically just proof-read his papers (he is not a terrific speller and spell-check does not always catch the homonym errors). I don't understand his technical work well enough for meaningful input anyway. But I enjoy reading things he has written because I marvel at how his mind works. He has great constructive criticism when he reads something of mine, and is much more likely to suggest substantive changes when he reads something I have written than I am when I read something he has written. I think the give and take btwn us is probably similar to what would go on btwn writers who are peers. It certainly does not feel like "cheating" or doing each others work. It's more like when writing teachers ask students to critique each other. I could imagine him engaging in the same sort of give and take with classmates when he gets to college.</p>

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<p>We proof read each others' work...after three or for drafts, little mistakes get missed, so we mark the line or paragraph with the mistake, and my Ds have to find it and correct error.</p>

<p>I will confess, I have colored in those Christmas tree math busy work homework assignments. You know the ones, where 3 are red, and 4 is green...I would rather my kid do more math than color in an elf to keep busy. Drawing an elf would have been better. And, I have typed up the spelling sentences child has dictated to me, after three hours of homework in 6th grade. Sometimes the teachers gave so much work that was just plain busy work. </p>

<p>Imagine the kids in college getting parents to write the papers in the business world- lawyers, doctors, engineers, public relations, journalists, pretty scary thought</p>

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<p>juliatorgo, I was in similar situation to you. My family threw everything at me when I was a teenage because they were afraid to deal with the public due to lacking of English speaking skills. I had to handle so many situations like dealing with this and that, it became second nature to me. Now,there is nothing that I fear nor afraid. I am self-reliant and it's the same attitude that helps me to survive 3 recessions. So I say if one does not get help, it's actually a good thing because sooner or later one has to learn and it is better to learn sooner than later. Is that tongue twisting enough?(lol)
However, I do sometimes put up a good fight, just for the principles, not because I think my kids will be at disadvantage.</p>

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<p>Okay, I'll reluctantly enter the fray. I am a teacher, and my perspective on the "parents correcting homework" is this: Practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect. If your child completes a homework assignment incorrectly, and believe me this happens frequently due to an incomplete understanding on the part of the student or perhaps an incomplete lesson by the teacher, in any event, if you do not look over the assignment you have just allowed your child to reinforce the skill incorrectly. The teacher may not (okay, will probably not) look at the assignment for a few days, meanwhile the child thinks they have done it correctly. Come on. I looked over my son's work and I wasn't even a teacher then. Oh, and many students simply write nonsense in the blanks in order to appear finished. If the parent is only looking for completeness, these look okay. What is your child learning then? I can't tell you how many papers my son had to rewrite in 4th grade because the handwriting was not acceptable. The papers were complete, but not to an acceptable standard. There is very little time for the teacher to micromanage 25 people and face it, we only have them for a year, you have them for 18. Your the one who has to live with the product. Flame away.</p>

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<p>flaming
english
sorry dont do grammar
I never could get it- I have to have my daughter edit my letters and I still can't keep what an adjective and pronoun are straight
I would be afraid I would cause more damage than help- by relying on parents to correct the work, that favors children whose parents are capable of doing that and disfavors those whose parents don't beleive in it, dont have the time or aren't capable of it.
math
ha
they don't teach something I could check like arithmetic
they teach new-new math that emphasizes group discussion and deemphasizes correct answers
The teacher tells the students their parents wont understand it - they are right</p>

<p>The biggest problem however is not with the assignments but that the students do them in class- they don't have any to take home, so even if my daughter will show them to me without me sneaking them out of her backpack when she is asleep or forcing themaway from her, she doesn't have them because she did them in class
This year she does have teachers who actually hand the work back with corrections.
Usually the teacher would just tick off that the assignment had been done, no way of knowing how you did.
Why can't they get their assignments back at least?</p>

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<p>momof1...I realize that teachers are stretched thin and can't always grade everything in 1 day. But in your opinion, what is the acceptable limit of parental involvement? I agree that especially in the younger grades, parents should look at HW to make sure the kids aren't filling non-sense into the blanks in the worksheets to get it done quick. I also agree that if you look at an assignment on a particular concept and every single answer is wrong, its probably good to explain the concept to the kid and have them re-do the HW so that they don't go around making the same mistakes for weeks. </p>

<p>But many parents help goes WAY past that. Many parents don't even give the kid the chance to do the HW their way...they say 'my kid is busy with soccer, piano, and his friends and the teachers give too much HW. i can do these multiplication problems in 5 minutes' or 'if my kid does the science project, it'll be obvious that he did it and it won't be better than the Smiths' project which their engineer father will be doing, so i'll do everything from picking the topic to building the thing.' Another variation--a parent who won't let their kid make mistakes. Many must correct the HW even if it contains 2 careless mistakes--because god forbid their kid get less than a 100% on the assignment. I agree with you that parents should be involved and not leave it all to the teachers...but involvement going past (1) looking for non-sense answers suggesting a lack of dedication to school and (2) making sure the kid generally gets the concept and isn't totally wrong is too much. In order to make their kids look perfect, these parents aren't letting them make mistakes. It catches up to them--they get so dependent on help that they don't know how to function on their own which is quite an issue in college. I knew several college students who deployed their ENTIRE families to helping them--i.e. Dad will explain calculus and physics; Mom helps with econ; Aunt Jane knows all about literature and will write those papers; Cousin Joe will do my stat HW etc. And you better believe that when they made less than an A in some class, mommy would be calling their COLLEGE PROFESSORS to argue for grade changes. It was pathetic, though amusing to the rest of us.</p>

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<p>I think there's a difference between enabling and critiqueing/editing. Both my kids are pretty strong willed, but I have to say that in public schools, the quality of the "correction" they get from teachers sometimes is dismal. From about 8th grade or so, if my kids asked me to read drafts of their work, I would do so, and sometimes be very harsh with criticism and suggestion. (I can't stand excessive use of passive voice! aaargh!!!) </p>

<p>I mean, I have had my daughter show me papers that got A's and my feeling is that the paper is a piece of garbage, and I'll say so. I saw the same thing with my son -- both the kids are capable of writing better, but they learn early on that they can get away with turning in garbage mainly because they use big words and take up a lot of space. I'll confess that I got away with that sometimes myself in college -- I wouldn't have studied or know a thing about the topic, but I'd learned all the right buzzwords to throw in to a paper and it would slide right by (big university). </p>

<p>So for me, it's not about helping kids with schoolwork - it's about filling in a big gap between the the level of work the public high school teachers expect and what I consider to be decent writing. My kids didn't always show me their work, but when they did I wasn't going to let runon sentences and mismatched subject/verb tense slip by. I didn't care about the grade -- half the time I would be looking at a paper after it had already been turned in and graded - I cared about teaching my kids to write. </p>

<p>I wrote a book myself last year and produced a halfway decent first draft. The book that is being sold is much better than what I wrote, thanks to my editors -- who made basic grammatical changes on their own, and sent me back more substantive changes for rewrites. The first 3 chapters needed lots of extra work, while I was learning the stylistic mode my editors wanted. Once there, the rest of the book was a breeze. I was very happy because there is not a single word in that book that doesn't reflect exactly what I wanted to say -- the content is 100% from me. But the words and phrasing required help -- 95% of the changes the editors wanted or made are things that I also feel were improvements. And this all happened when I was 50 years old with professional credentials as a writer. I wouldn't dream of writing even a short article for publication without passing it through the eyes of at least one editor or proofreader. That's not cheating - that's just how professional level writing is done. </p>

<p>So basically... I've got pretty high expectations and when my kids ask me to look over their writing, they sometimes get an earful. That's probably why they don't always share what they are writing. But the last time my son asked me to look over something he had written was a couple of weeks ago - he's employed now, not in school; we were stuck in an airport together with a delayed flight, so he wrote out a draft of what he was working on and then gave it to me to look over on the plane, and I did suggest several changes.</p>

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<p>momof1, I agree with what you wrote but what I did not agree with was the part that the teacher hunted parents down in the parking lot and told us we must correct our kid's homework. Is that fair?
I do, from time to time, look over our kids homework just to make sure there is not a gross misunderstanding of things but If I missed something, which I often do, because I do have a full time job, I don't want the teacher to ask/harrass my child the following day, why were the homework not corrected. I hope you can see the difference.
Your post assumes that parents can help. My post assume that teachers must do their job. Some teachers can't even spell or write a sentence without making mistakes, so how do they expect us to know it.
Yes passing the buck is what I see. If those 25 students are your product for one year, you must assume responsibility and take pride in teaching them to the best that you know how(I do know some great teachers by the way), so when you're saying that we have them for 18 years, it is our problem, can we also get to claim your salary for one year because you technically do not want to owe up to the responsibility of your job. </p>

<p>Enough ranting and raving from me.</p>

<p><strong>EDIT</strong>I know there are 25 kids and I often volunteered to help and so are a lot of parents, but that should be no excuse!</p>

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<p>I think that having more than one grade in a class helps. Some schools have looping ( same class stays with teacher for at least 2 years) other schools have the teacher teach more than one grade- so you might have a 2nd & 3rd grade class.
This is great- cuts down on transistion time for students and teacher- teacher knows where the holes are, and if student isn't developmentally ready to fill it one year, they often are by the next.</p>

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<p>Maybe there are two aspects of helping we are talking about on this thread. One is the real help of genuine feedback and honest assessment (from parents and teachers alike) that fosters a student's skills and eventual independence. </p>

<p>The other is doing the work of the student FOR the student, which breeds an unhealthy dependence upon the source of the "help." The student's own thoughts (or "voice") is buried deep within her. She never discovers the joy of communicating an original idea; she is continually underestimated and misunderstood. Parents who do that to their children are not good parents.</p>

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<p>I see nothing wrong with a parent going over students homework with student after student has done it. If parent isn't doing it, but is checking what is done, it can be helpful. If student is struggling, and is sloppy, parent can help teacher by working with their own child. Doing the child's work is one thing, double checking is another. I had a teacher once who gave us back our assignments sometimes with no corrections, but told us to find our own mistakes. She had copied the assigments and made her own corrections, and then we compared. It wasn't all the time, but enough to make an impression. </p>

<p>My youngest D had a teacher who told the kids- read the social studies lesson, the test is tuesday. So I basically home schooled D in social studies. Her style of learning was different from what the teacher did. I don't consider it cheating, as D wrote her own papers, took the tests, took the notes, I just worked with her as it was important to me that she get the connections, see why it is relavent to today, and she taught me back.</p>

<p>Its a fine line parents need to maintain. It is not the teachers' responsiblity to monitor if it is the kid doing the homework or the parent. That is the parents' job.</p>

<p>When you have parents that let there kids play video games all the time, watch too much tv, have little supervision, then the teacher can not fix that.</p>

<p>I grew up with a working mom, and no matter what, she ALWAYS found time to sit with me, and double check my homework.</p>

<p>I really get mad when people blame teachers. Take some responsibilty as parents. I mean, how long does it take to check a second graders homework. Like ten minutes. And if parents cross the line, that is not the teachers fault. its the parents. Teacher says- parents please spend ten minutes with YOUR OWN CHILD and look over homework. What's the problem</p>

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<p>I know teachers do their job. My husband is also a teacher, and instructs 7th grade math. He has 146 students, and saw 23 parents at parent-teacher conferences. It is always a joke among teachers that the parents you see are not the parents you NEED to see. Without exception, the ones who are involved and hold their children accountable for their work in school are there and have successful students. The other 123, who need to know how their children are doing, never show up, never return phone calls, and are absent from the process. The children know that education is not important, and there is no accountability. </p>

<p>Same goes for homework. I send very little homework home. Why? Because those that don't need the extra practice do it and do it well, and it comes back with little notes from the parents asking for more info. or drawing attention to some difficulty their child had. Those who need to do it rarely turn it in, have little home support, and often fill in the nonsense answers I referred to earlier. If there is no accountability at home, how can the teacher hold the student accountable? If education is a priority, then make the time for it. I spend hours every day designing instruction, finding materials, integrating skills and curricular demands, grading papers and dealing with students who have behavioral problems, Individual Education Programs, or who are mainstreamed from Intensive Resource classroom. I have an IQ spread of 86 points, age spread of 4 years in a second grade classroom, and yes, I do a excellent job by any measure. My students are pre and post tested using nationally standardized tests, and we use a variety of instruments to gauge progress and to diagnose weakness. Once a week we hold team meetings where half a dozen professionals whose lowest level of education is a masters degree get together to try to find an approach that will help Johhny learn to read or understand math. The least parents could do is check the homework. We bring all of our forces to bear on children we will be responsible for for one academic year. Why do I say that you will be stuck with the product? It is not scapegoating, it is just too painful to be so invested in a child whose parents simply don't take the time from their busy work, social and activity schedule to be a parent. We often spend more time with a child than the parent during that one academic year. We have to send them on. We have to say goodbye, and yes, you will be ultimately responsible for the young man or woman your child becomes. </p>

<p>When you spend time with your child on homework you are telling them that it is important. Even if you do not have the language skills or the skills required of a particular discipline, you are letting them know that you are holding them accountable for the completion of the work. As I tell my children when they say "My mom didn't know what to do," ~ Mom wasn't in class. If the student doesn't know and tellsl me that, fine, but they need to take responsibility and not make it Mom's issue, and Mom needs to ask why they don't know so the student knows that someone will follow up.</p>

<p>Oh, and I agree that proofing, editing, and providing a sounding board for papers is more of a collegial pursuit than a "do for." That is called the writing process. I've proofread many of my son's papers, and made suggestions that he disregarded. Okay. I have also caught minor capitalization oversights, etc., that I drew to his attention. We do this at school all the time. I would never send a newsletter home to parents without having a colleague proof it. THAT is silly!</p>