<p>An interesting discussion. Jonygrl, I think your comment is fair, but I also think it tries to conflate divorced children with what teachers in poor and inner city areas face, and they can be two very different things. In poor and inner city areas, a lot of the kids aren’t children of divorce, they are the children of young, ill educated moms who never were married and are on the margins of society (and often have quite a few kids). This isn’t a stereotype, it is the truth. Kids of divorce, on the other hand, are not necessarily from poor, inner city backgrounds and often they have parents that were middle class or higher level, and many of them have at least some form of parental involvement, whether it is the mom or both parents. Not saying that schools shouldn’t take that into consideration, they should, but it is a very different story…and blaming the teachers is far too complex. Yes, I have no doubt that in some or many cases teachers/schools give up on the kids, expect less from them, because they are from the South Bronx, but many do try and face incredible odds (I had one parent who asked me if a statement in Tom Wolfe’s book “The Bonfire of the Vanities” when the kid who is killed at the center of the story is called ‘a good student’, and someone comments any kid who comes to school and doesn’t cause problems is called that, and unfortunately, that is often the case in some schools…)</p>
<p>The whole issue of homework is something hear and dear to my heart. The problem to me is that most of what is being given out is crap from what I see, and most of it is political, the idea seeming to be that more then a few parents see quantity as being as good as quality, and because in some ways this is seen as a cheap and easy way to mollify parents, schools do it. Part of it I suspect is in response to what you see in Asian countries, which have traditionally relied on this kind of approach to learning (it is basicslly grinding into the kids the facts and such they need to do well on the tests), and people associate that with success. Sorry, but giving out long worksheets or other makework is just an exercise in numbers (I don’t blame the teachers on this one, it is parents and the schools that push for this). To me homework should re-inforce what is in the classroom, if doing math it should be actually using what is learned, and it should be that, not piling on.
One of the knocks of the Asian style of schooling, something Chinese parents are taking seriously, is that this forced servitude to homework takes away from other learning experiences, like actually doing things including play, that suddenly teaches that what they learn is real (to give you an idea, I was into model roicketry growing up, and it was amazing when I started realizing that things like physics and trigonometry and other things I had learned had real value, that building an altimeter that used a protractor and using 3 of these to calculate the height was basic trig…). </p>
<p>As far as private schools goes, I think it depends on the school. Someone posted that the parents their demanded the teachers be slaves to the parents, and I am sure that is true. On the other hand, my son went to schools where the teachers told me outright they could make more money in the public schools, a lot more, but that being in that environment, they had the freedom to truly teach, to work out things the way they thought they should go, and individualize things and try new things, which (in their words) the formulaic approach of the public schools and the demands of the NEA made impossible there. It was why I sent my S to a private school, not because I wanted him to go to harvard and be an investment banker, but because I was looking for a place where they don’t teach to the middle and they see in a bright kid a challenge, not a burden (I damn nearly went into shock when we had a meeting with one of his teachers, and she told me she sometimes had nights when she sat there wondering if they do the right thing for the kid).</p>
<p>They also emphasized study skills, they spent as much time on how to do homework and throwing out homework, and that is a big difference. Part of what many kids, including myself, learn in college is how to study, how to use the time. Teaching kids that homework means grinding through a ton of stuff for hours every night teaches the wrong thing, because when they get to college they can get the idea that studying means sitting reading the same thing over and over again, rather then knowing how to study and figure out if they are ready. It is sort of like music practice, there are kids out there who have been forced by their parents from an early age to practice ridiculous numbers of hours, and while they achieve high level of technical proficiency, the kids as musicians are lacking a lot because they sacrificed the other things you need as a musician. With practice it is about practicing right, not practicing for practicing sake, and the schools my S went to seemed to know that. </p>
<p>I also think the approach to education we have is outdated, it was formulated in the 19th century by Prussian bureaucrats trying to turn out ‘good citizens’, and it is centered around molding kids pretty much into a uniform product…and we haven’t gotten out of that, despite the many problems with the current model. We blame teachers, but a lot of it is on ourselves, because no one seems to know what they want, yet they ‘want it’ in the form of ‘educational success’.</p>