Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The Ultimate Bad Homework Question Thread!

Wait...the president of France banned homework altogether? Why can't we do that?

In his last math test (with $20 bills not $60 bills, fortunately!) DS "solved" his issue with the show your work/how do you know parts by drawing elaborate pictures of the scenarios in the questions (he even drew a small zoo!). It made me laugh but seemed to satisfy the teacher because it was his first 100% on a test.

My favorite from that test goes something like this: 2378 is <, >, or = to 2338
How do you know?

Me (in my head): How do you know? Umm, because 2378 is more than 2338? I mean, it just is, right? What a stupid question! Ugh
Me (to DS): I guess write something about the tens place?

Seriously, though, regarding the 48/8 question: it seems a bit contradictory to spend a significant amount of time teaching kids to do multiplication/division facts to automaticity and THEN ask them to show their work. Isn't the whole point of the drilling to get them to be able to answer the question without any "work"?

DS8 replies to those requests with "because I know my math facts". I was blaming the ASD, but maybe it is only a being 8 issue?

Don't worry, it was a suggestion and it will never actually happen.

When I was a child we found out that the equivalent of the department of education had forbidden homework for the elementary grades. Somehow none of the teachers at my school had gotten the memo, and our attempts at protests were not met with approval...

I completely banned homework as a kid. It became schoolwork aka things to do in other classes which, like the person talking in the front of the class, would also contribute very little to my learning. At least that way I could kill two birds and do my own thing at home. Nowadays with agendas and parent signatures, etc. I doubt this coping mechanism is available.

Seems like a perfectly reasonable response to me!

Did you take your books home to maintain the appearance that you did homework at home? I did that for a long time, but eventually I left them at school and found out that my dad didn't even notice.

Ugh... well, it isn't really a "homework" question... but my daughter's American Government textbook has a hefty sprinkling of mispellings.

While this isn't so bad, ordinarily, one might expect that such a textbook would NOT, generally, have trouble with "Barak" Obama's name. And yes, it isn't just an "alternate" spelling-- because it's random, according to my disgusted DD.

:facepalm:

That was awesome.

Today I taught my daughter how to do her first basic algebra word problems. I decided to do this because she's always coming home with word problems like the following:


My daughter solved it by subtracting 4 from 60, dividing 56 by 2, and adding 4 to the result. Great. Richie has 32 so Howie must have 28. That's all well and good, but the method breaks down for harder problems:


Err...well, I can't just subtract something, and I also get a remainder if I divide 65 by 3, so that method gets kind of messy. And of course, it'll get even more complex if I add more people and more fruit. So I taught her how to solve the first problem by using algebra:

• Howie has x bananas
• Richie has x+4 bananas
• Together they have x+x+4 = 60
• Solve in steps

This was not an easy process for her (see that thread about struggling). But after a while, she became completely focused and the ideas started sinking in. She never focuses like that on the stuff that comes home from school. She was also delighted when she solved a problem by herself. I'm planning to practice this every day for 30 minutes or so, and by the end of this week, she's going to be pretty good at this stuff.

Narrowly-functional approaches that break down outside a small zone really bug me about contemporary mathematics education. Personally, I wonder if these approaches actually send a message that answers should be derived using arithmetic and guesswork. This mindset may make it harder for kids to see that there's a structured way to solve math problems.