Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Helping with homework?

Just curious what is "normal" in terms of parents helping a gifted (non-2e child) with homework? Apparently some of the teachers in DD's gifted program are very upset with parents for helping their child write/type reports, projects, etc., and are telling the parents that if they continue to help, they will give the child an F. Kids are being grilled on whether their parents assisted or not. I can understand that for, say, a 10th grader, but these kids are in fourth grade and the teacher gives huge assignments, like write a report with 12 paragraphs on New Jersey.
Here I thought that by NOT helping (and at times DD not doing anything resembling the assignment), I would look neglectful, like I'm not supporting my child's education, but the teachers are now on a witch hunt trying to find out which kids are getting help.

I personally don't help my kids outside of their 2e challenges, and they haven't ever asked for my help either. If they have questions about how to *do* a problem, for instance a math computation or a grammar question or essay construction question, I'll answer it - but I've never typed a report for them or helped them complete an assignment just because it was a big project type assignment. FWIW one of my kids is entirely nt, one is dysgraphic and has an expressive language challenge, and one is dyslexic. I have typed countless times for my dysgraphic ds, but that's an accommodation for a kid who has significant deficits in fine motor skills. I proofread essays for my dyslexic child because she is still working on grammar, spelling, etc but again I see that as help required for learning for a child who has a significant challenge. I proofread essays for my nt child because she loves to write and wants help with the finer points of grammar/etc - things beyond what she is getting in school at this point. I used to help the same dd with math when she was younger and completely lost re concepts, but with help she got over her math frustration and is now doing her math assignments completely independently. So in summary, I help where our kids need instructional help or support in the form of 2e accommodations, but that's it. They have always written or typed their own reports, prepared their own posters, done the rest.

We've had an assortment of teachers re how much and what type of homework is assigned. My dds had assignments as large as 12-paragraph essays in 4th grade but my ds never did. Keyboarding/typing was built in as an expectation at school, but our kids were also given opportunities to learn/practice at school. I've also seen a wide variety of parent-help among classmates - there have definitely been parents who did a lot of the project/prep/typing work for some of the kids in each kids' class... and it was pretty obvious, to my kids and to me. On the flip side, I don't feel that my kids were ever marked down because they did their projects without that type of parent support.

polarbear

A lot like Polarbear's answer-- I've helped DD with areas of relative weakness (and by relative, I mean that related to her peculiar asynchronous profile)-- so in 4th grade, I helped her with organization on a massive assignment-- but it was truly a beastly thing, and they had little instructional support for breaking it into components, etc. To be clear, this was no 12 paragraph assignment. It was a 16 part research report on the history of her state, and needed multimedia finished product, citations, etc. etc. Numerous sources, and high quality sources, etc. I'm truly not kidding. I've never seen the like for that grade level. She was so resistant to even starting the darned thing that we were waiting on her to do it so that she could move into 5th grade. Anyway, that's my reason why we did that; I also wound up scribing about a third of it because she refused to do any of it-- but we were also honest with the teacher about that, and she had a little discussion with DD about ownership of one's own work, etc. (With our blessings, actually.)

I've usually offered my assistance to DD in one of three ways:

1. Editorial advising-- careful reading of the assignment rubric, offering yes/no answers to "is this good enough" and even offering such advice as needed.

2. Fine motor related* skills-- AS REQUESTED, and with the understanding that I will never be doing more than is necessary to model and teach DD the skill-- then I let her do it. Her graphic design/layout skills are amazing as a result-- I'm sure that people have seen her posters and THOUGHT that parents were doing them, but it wasn't so.

3. Instructional-- when it was lacking, we've filled the gap in INSTRUCTION. If she asks about a math problem, I'll look for a similar one and model a solution, then have HER work one for me, stepwise. But never-- ever-- have I "done" work FOR my DD when that work was to be evaluated by others. That would be wrong.

I consider that plagiarism, and so would she; it's effectively having her present a parent's work or intellectual property as her own. No way.


Worse (IMO) is that it sends a message to your child that his/her efforts are inherently inadequate and that the end justifies the means. Bad, bad juu-juu, that message.

Yes, I see a lot of parents do this kind of thing. I'm aware that many of them see nothing wrong with it, and they tend to assume that all other parents are doing it too, and that this makes it okay somehow. It doesn't.


* I scribed with a keyboard for DD when she was <9yo. I occasionally did hand-written scribing for her until she was about 12 re: prewriting/organizing/project planning. HER ideas and words, and my physical skills to get them captured. It was that or voice-to-text. I never 'reworded' things, though, and I never took control of that process. There was also always a plan (in my mind) to fade the support as her asynchrony shifted to allow for her to take more control over the fine motor skills that she needed. We were teaching her keyboarding skills, for example-- once she had those, we let her do that aspect of things for herself.

Hmmm good question. DH and I were - um - discussing this last night. I was helping DD10 with her weekly French reading (which she hates). She procrastinates doing it and so it was last minute. Also, she has in the past had anxiety attacks over _not_ having homework finished. So, my thinking was to gently push her towards getting it done _before_ she is too tired to think clearly, and also avoid having a melt down.

DH thought I shouldn't be helping her - she should learn to do this type of work on her own. Which is true, but her frustration level was high and I didn't want to end up in a bad place. I wasn't doing the work for her, just sitting with her as she was reading, and prompting her when she was stuck on answering the questions.

With DS7, I generally sit with him while he is doing the work in order to keep up the momentum. I did help him with a coloring assignment because it was silly and would have taken him a long time. He told me which color to use and we worked together to fill it in (I did some teaching at the same time of pencil grip and so on).

Not sure any of this answers your question - is _all_ help banned by the teacher? Or is there a range of allowed 'help' (e.g. encouragement, feedback, scribing) and not allowed (e.g. research and actual writing)? For 4th grade, 12 paragraphs sounds like a long assignment - I'd be tempted to help as well...

I suppose this depends on what level of parental intervention is defined as "help."

I confess to having done the lion's share of work on my DD10's school projects that have involved art. This is partly because the learning value of said activity is questionable at best. It's also because my DD will select a project, select a media (often modeling clay) and then sit at the table rolling clay into a ball, then rolling flat, and repeating for hours on end, accomplishing nothing except drying it out, because she's not sure how to approach it. I end up "helping" by building most of the project while she continues kneading.

DD will set these projects next to those of her peers, some of which clearly look like the child was left completely to their own devices, some looking like they had parental participation, and some looking like the kind of polished, highly-detailed, professional art pieces only an adult could have made. Since my work looks something like the middle group (I don't art), I don't waste a lot of time feeling guilty for my role.

Research papers, on the other hand, I've been involved with very little. In earlier grades, I got involved in directing her to data sources, evaluating their usefulness in a glance, and helping her skim for relevant facts that she can organize. She has this down now. Other than some proofreading in early years, I've never gotten involved with her actual writing process. This is because, unlike making pirate ships, this exercise reflects an important skill that will serve her well throughout life.

I can't say she's been asked for 12 paragraphs, though. That seems excessive.

I would be interested to hear your teachers' perspective on this, because if some children are turning in research papers that look like the polished art pieces in my DD's class, that's a valid complaint. The student learns nothing when the adults do all the work. These teachers should be seeing smaller writing samples from these kids on a near-daily basis, so they should know when the paper doesn't match their style.

The other night, DD was doing prealgebra homework (writing down equations for an arithmetic series). She could do the increasing ones, but couldn't immediately figure out how to write an equation for the decreasing ones. The entirety of my help was to ask, "OK, so this one is correct - explain to me how you got that answer. How do you know what this coefficient is? Now, what do you think you could do to apply the same rule to solve this one?" Then I bit my tongue for a full minute while she stared at it. Then she figured it out and banged out the rest of the assignment.

I see that as an appropriate level of parent help.

I have typed answers at her dictation for online forms (e.g., camp enrollment questions), but I don't think I've done one for a class assignment since first grade, and I got teacher permission ahead of time for that.

When DD was young there was active requests from schools that encouraged parents to be involved with homework. I think what most posters have written has reflected the type of help we were asked to give.....listening to reading initially and helping with sight words. It was a bit pointless for us as DD was a fluent reader so she had comprehension homework and I was expected to help her work through it.

As kids get older help usually means checking what homework they have, talking about how they plan to tackle the tasks, how they are going to make an appropriate space to work, advising on taking breaks or staying on task. Modelling how to do a math question or physics question by finding a similar one and working through it is fine. I am no longer any help with that but there are plenty of places to go on the Internet.

I don't have a problem at all with editing, all authored work needs editing and if you are too close to a piece it is usually hard to see even some obvious mistakes. Advising that a sentence seems repetitive or a paragraph should be moved or brainstorming a better word to mean X is all pretty normal but the bulk of the work should be the student's. Our DD wouldn't let it be any other way because they do courses on plagiarism at school.

At the end of the day it is all about facilitating learning and growing children with the meta analytical skills to manage on their own. But if they need he,p to get there, be it from a teacher or a parent, then they deserve help. Doing it for them isn't help. Sometimes it can be hard to know whether you are helping or doing but the key is, is my child learning or am I taking the learning from them.

This article is a review of the research of parental involvement in homework.

http://www.hfrp.org/publications-re...-school-program-staff-and-parent-leaders

My kids are pretty independent with their homework. As I tell them when they occasionally ask for more help than I think appropriate, I already passed 4th grade (or whatever grade) so I don't need to be the one doing the work.

That said, I tend to help my 4th grader by scribing his brainstorming. He spits out concepts, I write them down with no add-ons. He brain just goes so much faster than his hands, especially this year since they are required to type everything and he only types about 15 wpm.

For my middle school child who is 2e, I haven't really helped her with anything this year other than minor stuff like coloring a section of a poster to her specifications. She occasionally asks her older sister for help with a math problem that she can't get. Her sister doesn't give her the answer but makes her work through it.

My high school student would be deeply offended if had anything to do her homework. I think that she asked her dad to help her figure out something in math once this year.

We check that the homework is done (3rd grade regular classroom, 5th in math/language arts). If something is illegible (somewhat frequent), we have him rewrite that item. We also give spelling words aloud and have him spell them for us. Have helped him with dioramas a bit more, i.e., helping him find materials, but after he's come up with the idea.

We do not normally check his answers. We are flying around trying to get everyone fed and in bed at that time. I figure if he gets it wrong when it is scored, that's better than us showing him the error and him getting a perfect score at this age. Too many of those already.

I do expect to review and suggest edits once the kids are older and writing long amounts of text. My mom did that for me, always explaining what could be changed, and it turned me into a pretty solid editor. Freeform thoughts on this BB notwithstanding.

I don't know whether it's "normal" but it is my understanding that in my area, help from parents is encouraged for K and 1st while the students should be doing his own work by 3rd grade. Of course, there are always some parents who do their kids' homework, which is the reason why many teachers discount/disregard work that is completed outside the classroom, at least as an evaluation of the student's ability.

However, I believe it is always okay to answer questions and clarify concepts that your child do not understand as well as check to see that your child has completed his homework. That level of help is acceptable because it still allows the teacher to grade the student's work product rather than the parent's.

My two younger kids got their own laptops the summer after 2nd grade, partly so there would be no excuses about access and so they can easily practice researching/typing/preparing/printing their own assignments.

Having said all that, I am guilty of sometimes helping DS (who has borderline fine motor skills) with cutting/gluing/taping stuff when I didn't want him to waste too much time.