@dfbdfb but… uh… I was talking about her class. I did not suggest that it was applicable to the world at large…
I used to teach a collaborative, interdisciplinary course with a physics professor from another country whose English grammar was terrible but whose ideas were brilliant. For many ESL folks, the mastery is never going to be there, especially if they started English later. You better believe he asked me to go over his stuff before he handed it out to our students. That this was true in no way affected his competence as a teacher, or as a physicist, as long as he was aware that he needed someone else to check the grammar.
So last night my college student freshman was sitting in the living room working on an English Lit paper. She looked up from her laptop and asked, “Does this sentence sound okay to you?”
As she read it to me I immediately thought, what would @dfbdfb do?
Thankfully the sentence was good so I responded, “Sounds good to me.” I’m thinking I’m still okay on even the strictest of cheating standards.
Five minutes later she pipes up again. “Hmmm, I’m not sure if ‘social mobility’ is really the phrase I want to use here.”
Uh, oh, I’m on shakier ground now. “What do you want to say?” I ask. She explains her thought. “And how would you define social mobility?” I ask.
She gives a credible definition then adds, “but it just doesn’t seem to fit what I’m trying to say here exactly.”
“Well,” I say, “I agree that the term doesn’t really seem to fit.”
“I’m going to say this instead,” she says and reads me the new sentence.
Did I cross any lines here?
I think you’re safe, @mom23travelers. 
Well, this thread has convinced me it’s OK if I proofread my son’s papers as long as I stick to checking for grammar and typos. 
@MaineLonghorn …and this thread taught me that there are people out there that are so rigid in their interpretation of rules and fairness that they lose sight of the purpose of education.
Of course, it might, just might be that some of us recognize that different courses and different assignments have different purposes, and therefore require different rules, some of which are, yes, quite rigid indeed.
@mainelonghorn You are probably alright, but there were a couple of codes I saw that do not allow a student to show their work to anyone. @dfbdfb is correct in that it is quite possible for each specific school, class, and even each specific assignment to have different rules (though most follow school’s code.) Some of us know our kids well enough to know they wouldn’t ask us to do something the instructor has said was not permitted. (Mine still asks me if I read the parking signs…) but having them double check is not a bad idea.
Years ago there was another thread on this topic and I confess to having been shocked back then at the vast numbers of parents who thought it was OK to edit, not just proofread, their child’s work. I really don’t think this was as common when my eldest was younger, and a helicopter was just a type of aircraft. But I remember the day when my youngest–a second grader and the worst writer of my three children–happened to mention that her classmates were e-mailing home their stories from the classroom computers to get help from their moms. I asked my D if the project was classwork or homework, and D said it was classwork. So I told her that in that case, the story needed to be done in school and written all by herself. Guess what? The teacher planned a tea at which the students were to read their stories to all the parents one evening. I can’t tell you how bad I felt when D’s pathetic story was read aloud. The others were young Hemingways and she was P.D. Eastman. Since then, I have learned the large extent to which today’s kids are receiving special tutoring and assistance on even somewhat unimportant graded projects, like summer homework assignments. Frankly, I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the extent to which my kids are competing with adults for good grades.
However, I used to console myself by assuming these families were robbing themselves of learning and that the students would end up struggling in college. But no, that’s not happening because their parents are STILL helping them. On that older thread, several people admitted to writing their grown children’s work emails for them. For some of us old school folks, this is an astonishing admission. It’s amazing that we adults could make it through college competently proofreading our own typewriter typed pages, but kids in the age of spelling and grammar checkers and the delete key somehow cannot be relied upon to do the same. Is the only difference that we couldn’t send our papers home electronically and now kids can? How will this generation ever be able to edit their own children’s work?
The only change in my view on this has come about as a result of having a less capable child who also received much weaker/non-existent grammar and writing instruction than her older siblings. I do feel sometimes that it isn’t her fault her writing is mediocre and it’s certainly not due to laziness. It’s the result of a poor educational foundation. No doubt other kids in poorer districts have it far worse than she does. So I can see how I might justify a greater degree of editing under the guise of teaching her what the school never did. The slippery slope problem, though, is that kids today are so over-scheduled that I think parents are too tempted to just make all the changes for them because it’s 1 AM and the student is up in his/her room finishing his/her physics homework. In other words, though well-intentioned perhaps, the parental assistance is not as instructional as people want to convince themselves it is. (After all, some of these same parents admit to having completely written their kids’ college application essays for them because their kids just didn’t have the time.) On the other hand, why should my daughter get a worse grade (or admissions results?) than her peers when her own writing is just as good as theirs is before parent edits?
Hey, PD Eastman is a lifelong favorite! Are You My Mother is a classic, and I think I can still recite Go Dog Go from heart. First book I learned to read. I’d pick them up any day over Hemingway’s rum-soaked, misogynistic tomes.
(Joking aside, I do like Hemingway, too. But there’s always room for Eastman on my bookshelf. )
Cheers to @TheGFG, for summing up far more eloquently than I the ethical and practical issue presented here. well done, and thank you.
My daughter phoned this afternoon. She sounded so happy. She was leaving the writing center after another session with a person who was new to her. She felt she received so much valuable help. Her paper was at a different point in the process than last week’s paper so there were different concepts to go over. I love it when she gets excited over learning.
TheGFC: since you didn’t think your youngest was receiving adequate writing instruction, did you consider supplementing outside of class? Perhaps with writing assignments that had nothing to do with school, just what you thought she needed to learn? Would that seem unethical? Or maybe you did do this?
At our local public school, some students entered first grade with very basic reading and writing skills. They had a head start and got the best grades. In at least one case the child had learned from his older siblings who wanted to play school. They were the teachers… He had to be the student. Off topic,but a story that stuck with me.
I agree with @TheCFG if the parent is doing real editing and/or rewriting. That’s not what a lot of us parents do. We check for grammar and typos. I wish their grammar and spelling were better, but it’s not surprising, really. I have lost count of the number of times our newspaper journalists have used “it’s” incorrectly. Really??
Those who have read my posts over the years may already know that my town has become a place where tutoring centers have popped up on every corner. An ordinary smart kid simply cannot gain access to the advanced academic tracks in our schools, especially in math and science, unless his parents can afford summer classes and tutoring or do rather intensive supplementation themselves. But even with those resources–which we didn’t have–there are so many hours in the day, once you subtract class time, EC’s, meals, showers and minimal sleep. D’s writing was not her weakest area and she is one of only around 30 seniors out of 750 to register for and be accepted into senior AP Lit, which should, but regrettably does not, indicate she can write all that well IMO.
And the irony is that my kids in Hooterville had none of those pressures and over programming yet they are at the very colleges others are in a frenzy to get into. Seems like a waste of so many kids childhoods.
If you care about college admissions results, you either have to respond to your own local conditions or move away. I have friends who live in other states and the academic level required to succeed in their towns is very different. Here parents like to joke that our average kids could move to certain other districts and become academic superstars overnight. Fortunately, colleges take those differences of expectation and performance into consideration. But let’s not pretend that the top kid from one town is going to be the same as the top kid from another–even if they end up at the same university. One student may need to attend a summer program first, such as the one UPenn offers, or begin college taking “remedial” courses, for example. Regardless, the point is that the writing level required to succeed in some very competitive high schools may be beyond even the majority of normal smart kids, hence the tendency for parental and tutor over-intervention in editing.
" Frankly, I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the extent to which my kids are competing with adults for good grades."
This (and your whole post) gave me flashbacks to middle school science fairs. Even late elementary.
My area is in general far less competitive and stressful than many. But I do live in college town, and my kids were always in magnet or gifted programs. When they were in gifted programs, it was the worst as far as crazy competitive parents, especially in math and science. Lots of very briight kids. Who also somehow had access to university facilities for their science fair experiments, and did crazy elaborate stuff. And lo, that kid has a parent who is a physics prof, or a chem grad student. What a coincidence!
End result for my kids-they hated science fair and both were turned off taking honors sciience in HS because honors science meant you had to participate in science fair.
@TheGFG In your town is the high level of writing the result of lots of really good writers and not enough seats or is it a result of the parental involvement in the writing process?
@TheGFG – great post. With my D18 back in 7th or 8th grade when she was having trouble with math and simply “wanted the answer”, I irritated her to no end when I refused. All I would do is talk about how to solve the problems in general. It was a failure at the time because she found other means to get the answers online. Now that she’s in 11th grade and taking AP Calc AB, she killing it because the answers are not readily available online and she actually had to learn how to solve the problems. This kid went from thinking math was a necessary evil to “loving calculus” in a few years. Unfortunately, she still has some gaping holes in the fundamentals from those early years (mainly the finer points of algebra, which is shocking to me). Even though it caused me a bunch of grief and dirty looks, I’m glad I stuck to my guns on this issue.
@1or2Musicians – I see the same thing at D18’s HS. You can tell who has significant outside help when you listen to the kids’ description of their project. They’ll emphasize big words (in my case, “hue, saturation, and luminance”) independent of the rationale (the reason to use the HSL color space is that it allows you to deal with the color/hue independent of the intensity and saturation, which was critical to the project).