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.

One point of hope: since DD10 began EPGY algebra a few weeks ago, she now understands showing work for the first time. It's complex enough for her and symbolic enough that she actually does have to go through it step by step. She may not like doing the same steps for school math, but at least she understands what they want and why.

I have no explanation or hope or optimism of any sort for the EM show-this-ten-ways stuff that isn't showing work, I'm afraid. I guess the best I will manage for DD5 when she gets there is to give her something hard, then explain that her teacher wants to make sure that if her school work is this hard, she can still do it. I will probably get a confused and incredulous stare, but that's for the future.

Hadn't thought much about the "show your work" dilemma (still brings up annoyed thoughts of getting my sight division ability broken by long division.)

Think if DS brings it up I'll make references to computer programming. We sometimes play a robot game, where I'm a dumb robot and he has to get me somewhere to do something (turn right... I keep turning and turning.... STOP!) Maybe "what if your teacher was a robot and needed to solve this problem..."

This is the kind of idea that a logical rational-thinking person would have. Unfortunately, schools don't always seem to work that way. There are three ability groups in the class, and if I send a message saying that DD only did a fifth of the problems, I risk planting the idea that either a) she has trouble with these problems and must therefore do more of them, or b) the kids in the top-level group can do all the problems at night, and she can't, so she doesn't belong in that group.

I suppose that, in some ways, it really doesn't matter which fourth-grade math group my DD is in. The top group is only slightly less below her level. It's like the grade skip: she still isn't at a level that would really challenge her, but things are just...less bad this way. And of course, a grade skip has spared her a year of pointlessness at school.

But I am probably just a pushy parent who won't let her daughter be a kid, because, really, there is nothing bad about being in the lower group when she really needs to have that "extra time" to "build that foundation."

In the case where there is ability grouping and refusing to do all the problem would cause a transfer to a lower group, I would not consider the tactic I mentioned earlier. Our schools have no ability grouping in math until 7th grade, so I wonder how they would "punish" my son for skipping some work.

In our case recess was taken away. All missed work had to be done during the recess. But now when DS10 is in 6th grade, but takes 7th grade math, they would move him back to the 6th grade math for missing work or low scores on tests.

Unfinished HW is somehow done during class time at my DD's school, too (or so I am told--she does all HW, but apparently not all kids do...which interests me, since this is a gifted magnet with highly motivated and involved parents, but a crapload of HW)

DD9 is getting 90 minutes of HW per night in her 4th grade gifted magnet class. One night she spent more than an hour hand writing five paragraph summaries on geology. We just received the paper back with a B- grade and the only comment was, "Shorter summaries."

Oh, this is one of my pet peeves. So many people believe that if a child needs advanced work, that just means they should be loaded down with more of the same. Last year my son's class spent about five months learning to add two digit numbers, a skill my son had learned before kindergarten. I repeatedly spoke to his teacher and administrators about the fact that he was not learning anything, but it took until April for anything to change. Instead of a sheet of 20 or so addition problems, she started giving him multiplication problems - on average, about 100 problems per night. The drills helped him, since he was in the process of memorizing his multiplication tables. But I got the impression she was trying to prove somehow that he was not so advanced.
He did all the homework. But that incident, combined with the snarky way she spoke to me and my son, caused me to complain loudly about her to the administration and school board, and I have made it crystal clear that when my daughter gets to that point, she will NOT be in that teacher's class.

More of the same homework seems to be a common "solution" employed by teachers of mainstream classes with gifted students. Differentiation and adaptation of the curriculum seem to be foreign concepts. As for the struggle getting DS to complete handwriting exercises and other pointless (his word) tasks, well that's for another day. Of course I try to explain the relevance of such work to his future plans, but although he understands my argument, at age 7 he finds it difficult to accept!

As my DS commented, "Homework is such a waste of time that I could be spending actually LEARNING something"

Yep-- my DD was about the same age the first time she expressed a similar sentiment. She hates busywork, and she's got a nose like a truffle-pig for sniffing it out.

We've been battling to get her to do work "just because" for the intervening seven years now. 'Not pretty' is a polite euphemism for the war zone this has occasionally produced around here.

Grrr..."Show Your Work" GAH!

DS just lost half marks on every question of his math test, because he did not show his work. But it was multiple choice!!! Who shows their work on multiple choice? Yes, she had it at the top, but come on, if you want that kind of detail, don't make it multiple choice.

Okay. Rant over.