Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Homework punishes the gifted?

Toying around with a hypothesis...

A common theme recently is dealing with our kids and their reactions to homework/avoidance. Looking at some of the homework DS6 brings home, I'm not always clear on the purpose. But school made me quite the skeptic.

Schools give repetitive work to take home and sink ideas in further. Many of our kids have a bad reaction to it. They are intrinsically motivated by learning. They are in the process of developing or have already developed learning strategies that work for themselves. They've done a great job and are the sorts of self-starters businesses seem to clamor for.

What does the school do? Punishes them.

Part of why they learn so well is they have a drive to discover, understand, and learn new things. They work ideas over, make connections, draw conclusions and truly learn the material. Repetition is the antithesis of that drive. And it feels like punishment (and one of the worse possible punishments for someone driven to understand the whole world.)

If it feels like punishment, then what in their mind is being punished? Skilled, active learning. The effort they put in at the time the material was presented to fully understand it in the first place.

So what is the outcome of this operant conditioning?

Outcome?

Bad news, that's what.

By the time they can actually use the enrichment of homework for LEARNING purposes (late high school and college homework, which often relies on "flipped" classroom experiences like that), many GT kids have become conditioned to regard needing to do homework as a sign that they are "struggling" to master the material.

They also may simply refuse to see it as a useful part of authentic learning for themselves.

I think that one of the worst situations is when enrichment occurs as extra homework, but the original boring drills still need to be done too. Luckily we haven't had to deal with that much yet-- I tend to just tell DS to ignore the busy work, but that approach might cause minor strife with rigid schoolteachers and admins. Still, there's no way I'm going to let the school take more time out of my son's day because he's gifted.

One thing I really dislike about our current school situation regarding math is the period at the start of every year where the almost exclusive focus is on drilling on basic facts, to get ready for testing and combat the district's historically low math scores. I believe this is an approach recommended by the district's math consultant, of whom I have a low opinion in general. This winds up in reducing even further the time spent each year on instruction on new skills and concepts, and thus negatively impacts all the children who are strong in math.

Boring drills can be made fun by timing them. But beyond a certain point they are redundant.

Especially for math and science, most teachers and "consultants" are not mathematicians or sciency types and thus lack the ability to create a sustain a curriculum that grows and deepens. And most kids are not that into it either.

The leaves the top 5% on their own.

I'm really in devils advocate mode, today.... Appologies.

Repetition is annoying, and I hate it. I never really did my homework either. In my old age, though i have tosay I feel that I missed out because I did not commit enough information -- pure boring data-- to memory when I had the time to.

There is a difference between reading and lectio, and I think the second has serious advantages. But you have to learn the mind-state where it happens, and that can only be done though repetition and experiencig that mind state.

Anyway, its that place where you look at the same thing over and over, and keep seeing something new in it, no mattr how simple it is, because you're realy looking deeply.

I'm sure math hopework was not the way for me to get there, for me it was poetry in dead languages, but disliking repetition is a handicap for some kinds of higher thinking.

Anyway, my 2 cents

Schools are not trying to punish children, gifted or otherwise, with homework, but they do not recognize that different children need different amounts of practice to master something. Gifted children usually need fewer repetitions. A strength of EPGY is that the number of problems it gives on a topic depends on how quickly the student get the questions consistently correct.

Unfortunately reward and punishment are perceptions on the receiving end. I was thinking more along the lines of the more painful outcomes with kids having anxiety, oppositional behavior, underachievment, where homework could compound issues by creating a nasty bit of cognitive dissonance.

It would be an epic effort to find a worse consequence for them not do homework than the one homework has already. I'm all for avoiding the under-skill level drills, but push comes to shove finding things like timing to bring fun or some alternate mindset to play seems the most hopeful.

Repetition is not the same as deeper analysis; indeed that's another survival mechanism. Finding strange connections between the numbers on a math page, counting words used, etc. What would be really nice is a context where that type of analytical thinking is led and students are encouraged to apply and share those as they explore the more foundational skill stuff (actually I think I read that Exeter Academy does that and has impressive results in competitions.) EPGY sounds smart too.

You've just described the basic model for public and much of private math education in the United States (don't know about elsewhere; ColinsMum and others?). I believe that the general model is to go over last year's stuff until November. Only then do the kids get to learn something new. For kids like mine who do math all summer, this approach is toxic.

I think that repetition can be damaging when used as a blunt tool without much thought on the part of the teacher. Take the worksheet problems DD8 had been doing frequently until this week. Last week's she had to do 20-35 problems of the type 64*3 per night. It was the same last year when these problems were "new." She didn't even need to do one of those problems, but had to waste as much as a half-hour on them (this was simply the time it took to write everything). This got me thinking about struggling students. If my DD needed 20-30 minutes to do them, how much time would a struggling student need? And how tired would the kid be, presumably with yet more homework ahead?

Rewrite, restate, show your work - are the words that bring my ds10 almost to tears. I still have not found a satisfactory explanation I can tell him, why he needs to show his work for problems that he can do in his head in seconds?

What would happen if your daughter just did a smattering of the problems to show she knew how to do them, and you explained this in an email? In a system where there is no ability grouping and no acceleration in grades 1-5, so that placement depends entirely on age, it may be rational to blow off pointless work.

I have not had the guts to do this with my children, and I suspect that my wife would be eloquent in her opposition.