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

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.