<p>DS’s has daily Geometry homework. It counts for 10% of his grade the homework grade is based on completion and showing their work not if they get the answer correct or not.</p>
<p>Most high school teachers have between 120-150 students. Imagine if they tried to look over all the problems on that many homework assignments each night. It is a near impossible task. All of the math teachers my three children have ever had graded for completion. They go over homework in class and it is the student’s responsibility to ask questions/correct mistakes. Also, homework cannot count for more than 10% of the overall grade. </p>
<p>“Most high school teachers have between 120-150 students. Imagine if they tried to look over all the problems on that many homework assignments each night. It is a near impossible task.”</p>
<p>Hardly impossible. And I hate to imagine how many students are allowed to slip through the cracks because it’s up to 12-15 year old children to raise their hand for issues, instead of the teacher discovering issues. The teacher discovering issues on exams means by then is far too late to go back and help, as after the exam, the class moves on to the next chapter. All homework should be collected and at the very least spot checked.</p>
<p>@jayhawk1 Hardly impossible? I’d love to see you try and grade 150 assignments on top of a full day of work, along with lesson planning for 3+ different classes every single day. I would love to have the time to check all of my students’ homework problems and write comments explaining their errors for every problem, but it’s just unrealistic given all the demands on my time as a teacher. Also, I don’t see why it’s unreasonable to expect students to make corrections to their own work as a teacher reviews homework with the entire class. Further, while it would be great for teachers to be able to root out every single problem every student is having with the course material, again, there just isn’t time. The best thing parents can do is teach their kids to ask if they don’t understand (whether that be in class, after class, before class), because then teachers know for sure that there is a problem and can address it.</p>
<p>My kids’ math teachers have not collected and gradeed homework. They go over some in class or post answers on the board. Students are expected to check themselves and ask for help if needed. It is a decent sized school with top standardized scores for our state so the policy seems to be ok in that regard. </p>
<p>Some of my kids’ teachers do spot checks or homework quizzes. These have been honors math classes where homework is assigned each night. They also have frequent quizzes. When son took calc BC, about midway through the year the teacher said they only had to do as much work as they felt they needed to be successful. In the math classes prior to that my kids received a lot of homework, or at least so I was told (frequently!).</p>
<p>The one college class I had with problem sets for every class was graded only for timely completion. The problem sets were discussed in class, and it was up to students to figure out what they had done wrong.</p>
<p>If the OP really wants to help his daughter, what he should do is not necessarily to check her geometry homework to make sure it is right. He will coach her on using class review time to identify what she has gotten wrong and to self-diagnose (and self-cure) her areas of weakness. Also on asking questions to learn what she doesn’t understand.</p>
<p>So, rather than checking her homework before she hands it in, he should ask her the next night what she got wrong the previous night, and what she should have done differently. </p>
<p>jayhawk - I actually had the opposite beef. At my kids school homework was graded. I felt like homework should be practice, when it’s graded it’s now a take home test. I fought that battle for years and lost. </p>
<p>Jayhawk doesn’t have time to supervise his kids math homework, but thinks the high school teacher should be required to do so.
Parent night should be coming up, that would be a good time to meet the teachers and hear their class philosophy.</p>
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<p>Ummm…do the math. 120 homework sets. Say it takes 4 minutes per homework assignment to grade and write comments (and I think 4 minutes is on the low side). That’s 480 minutes to grade that homework, which translates to EIGHT HOURS of grading, with no time off, no breaks.</p>
<p>Teach your kids to ask for help. Not only will it help with math, but learning to speak up is a good life-skill as well. </p>
<p>My kids’ teachers just check for completion and some don’t even do that. Our high school teachers would be lucky to have only 150 students. I don’t see how they could check the answers or why a kid at that level can’t take some responsibility for understanding the material. My daughter commented “It would be stupid to grade the homework; it’s for learning”.</p>
<p>@scout59 I said spot checks, not checking each and every problem. I think it’s careless and lazy to not check students’ homework during the week. By the time anything is caught (on say a quiz) you’re already several days removed from the topic. </p>
<p>I don’t have the time because I’m not yet home when my kids do homework, which is usually from 3:00-5:00pm.</p>
<p>“I just don’t have the time to watch her homework each night but now it looks like I’ll have to.” - Why? Are you worried she won’t do all the problems? Or are you worried that she won’t learn well enough from the class review? Different situations, so we’d have different advise. </p>
<p>That’s even better.
If homework is done by the time you get home, you can sit with them and go over the questions they have.</p>
<p>@jayhawk1 If you were going to check the homework, you’d need to wait for them to do it first, so I don’t see why you say you don’t have time to check their homework since you get home after they have finished it. I stopped routinely checking my kids’ homework sometime around 4th grade, so I’m having trouble understanding why parents would need to look at every homework a high school student does. I don’t even see most of the big tests or major papers.</p>
<p>Are you planning to check their problem sets in college too? When do they learn to learn on their own?</p>
<p>HS is a transition to adulthood. More and more responsibility taken by the student. </p>
<p>Good teaching isn’t checking all of the homework, it is presenting the material and going over the problems with the class. Math is easy for students to self check while the teacher discusses it. Kudos to the teacher not doing busy work. Your D needs to take control of her learning. She needs to spend extra time going over problems she missed as soon as possible and not just try to learn it the night before any test.</p>
<p>Notice- you and the teacher are turning control over her learning to your D. YOU are not doing the work of checking or figuring out how problems need to be done unless she gets stuck and asks for help. A big part of learning is learning how to learn.</p>
<p>OP, what do you think is the underlying problem – is she too shy/scared to ask for help, is she just not really engaged (e.g. doesn’t care if she gets a B- in the class), does she not really have time to finish her homework so she’s rushing through it and guessing at some of the problems?</p>