Time with homework

Yep, my son's in 7th grade and I still help.....lots. I tried letting him go it alone the first nine weeks, and it wasn't good. he failed both subjects that he is mainstreamed for. I figure I'll always have to help as long as the school doesn't. They did get an aide in his LD classroom now and he's being going out there for study hall and she helps alot.

It's nice that your school has an afterschool program, wish our's did. My son's homework is modified too, he is only responsible for 50%. But my problem is I end up spending lots of time on it then he does, because even though he only has to turn 50% in, I have to do the other 50% so I can help him study for tests. So I end up reading the entire chapter for example. I also want to be sure that when he is completing homework he has the right answers. Sometimes I think homework is worse on me than it is him. LOL

Our school doesn't have an after school "program" per se. He is not the only child that receives help with home work from a SPED teacher, but it is just part of his ed plan.

Homework in our school system is only supposed to be review, at least at this level. He gets a study guide of all the material he is responsible for before any tests, and we study from that. But this study time is also counted into homework time. If we need to do more than this, THEY need to know about it. I am fully convinced that I'm not doing him any favors by shouldering too much of this work. It only hides how much support he really needs.

I know each family has to decide what's right for them, but I know for us we have proven that the more I can hold myself apart from "school" teaching/reteaching, and instead make myself responsible for emotional support and academic enrichment activities, the more of an even keel we can maintain.

Karen

I think it depends on the child and his diability. My son is NLD with a high average VIQ, and a 22 point spread between VIQ & PIQ. He reads very well, and has an excellent memory. But he has visual/spatial and visual/motor difficulties, and his processing speed is slow. Worse, it is _drastically_ reduced by pressure.

I can't speak to other types of LD's, but I can tell you that children with NLD usually work SO hard during the school day, that there is precious little brain power left for any meaningful learning at home. We've proven a number of times that with a lower homework load, he consistently gets better marks on his tests, which are unmodified except for visual clarity. I'm not talking a little better. I'm talking about 50%'s if he's under too much pressure, and 90%'s on the same type of material if he's given half the homework. Which way is he learning more?

Interestingly, now that we've switched him out of a class where the teacher was, IMO assigning more homework than was reasonable for ANY of the kids, he IS getting through most of his homework without modification. It is the responsibility of the classroom teacher and the SPED teacher to sort through homework assignments, and separate out what is truly important from the reams of busy work and repetition that some teachers assign in the name of "homework".

If he is not capable of finishing an assignment relatively independently, and in a reasonable period of time, the new teachers, like our last year's team, don't WANT me to re-teach. They want the homework sent back with a note saying that he did work on it, but wasn't able to finish it. They want to know what he can and can't do so that they can work on things that he's having trouble with. As far as I'm concerned, that's the way homework should work, whether a child has an LD or not.

Karen

Karen,

I am just curious why the teachers don't want you reteaching your son. My son essentially cannot do his homework independently. (except for math sometimes). I end up reteaching everything (homeschooling might be easier). Part of it is that it takes several times through before things "stick" with him and part of it is that he does not learn very well in a large class environment. He has CAPD. Now at school he is working fairly independently and getting B's and C's. Our kids are pretty different in that my child has a language based disability.

Beth

Karen their is an exception to everything, no arguments here, but have you considered that the reason your son is doing better in the second class has nothing to do with his disability, that all children, disabled or not would preform poorly when the teacher piled on an insurmountable amount of homework simply because they were burned out?

I have to disagree and protest vheminatly to teachers not wanting you to reteach. Why should your childs education be dependednt on their ability to find the time to reteach your son what he missed. Are you sure they are reteaching it? next few times you get an assignments he cant do, make copies of them and send the origionals back, a week or two later ask your son if he can do them now, you will be able to knock me over with a feather if he can. Im willing to bet at least half of the things never get retaught to your son.

A better solution is to help your son and indicate on the lower right hand cornor of the paper that your son was unable to it himself, also write the type of help he required, scribe, help understanding the questions, didnt understand the process, if its math didnt know how to carry or borrow ect.

that way you insure your son does learn and the teacher knows he was unable to do it independently and why.

The good teachers that we have worked with don't want us re-teaching at home because that then "disguises" his disability, and they can't really tell what he knows and what he's getting, and what he hasn't got until/unless he bombs on a test. Homework gives them constant feed-back. Then they can use his resource time to re-teach concepts (usually geometry, map-reading, or inferential comprehension related at this point) as needed.

The first half of this year, he was in the class of a teacher who, IMO, should not be working with children with disabilities. Her idea of "motivating" kids was through pressure, intimidation and negative reinforcement. It didn't matter how high he jumped, she'd raise the bar just out of reach, so that he never experienced real success.

As a long time animal trainer, I know a lot about motivation. You build confidence and the desire to succeed by making goals challenging, but attainable. It is by experiencing the feeling of success, that the animal (or child) learns the intrinsic value (pleasure) of success.

And while it is important to make kids stretch at times, and reach beyond themselves, it is NOT the way to teach on a daily basis. Any runner knows that in training, you work mostly within your ability, building for the the big race where you need to reach into reserves to win. If you are working to the very edge of your ability every day, there are no reserves to be tapped.

So after trying to work with this teacher all fall, (the SPED director and SPED teacher did their best to teach her how to deal with a kid like this, but she just wasn't getting it) the SPED director was actually the one who suggested that we change him to another classroom. These teachers, although no more familiar with NLD, are much kinder and more nurturing, and interestingly, their homework assignments are so much smaller, even though this is "just" another, normal, integrated 5th grade classroom, that he his not having any difficulty getting through the assignments without modification. (He was completing less than half the assigned work in the other classroom... not because he couldn't do the work, but because of the sheer volume)

When he was in 3rd grade, I had spent 3 hours a night doing homework with him, under emotionally stressful conditions, while they regularly reported to me that he had done "nothing" during the school day. With the help of my advocate, we made it clear to the school that it was their responsibility, under federal law, to design an appropriate education for him, and that included attention to his emotional well-being. If they could not design a program that would meet his needs in the public school system, we would seek outside placement at their expense.

If I had needed to, I would have taken him out and home schooled, (though we didn't tell them that) but fortunately it didn't come to that. But If I had continued to need to work 3 hours a day with him, I definitely would NOT have also continued to subject him to the stress of the a public school classroom all day as well. I would have worked with a fresh, relaxed kid in the morning not one who was mentally and emotionally bankrupt at the end of the school day.

Karen

You are right, the amount of homework assigned by the old teacher was just plain unreasonable... one of the reasons we moved him to a new class. But I see too many people who just assume that if the teacher assigns it, it must be neceassary, and then flog themselves and their children through excessive quantities of homework.

The reason my son can't get through his homework rarely has to do with not being "able" to do the work. It has much more to do with being unable to do the AMOUNT of work. When his work is modified, it is never to dumb down the content, it is to reduce the number of the same type of problem. The reasons we moved my son were many. If the homework load had been the only problem in his old class, we could have made this year work by carefully continuing to modifying his homework.

A quick example of this is that in our school system they give speed tests on math facts. My son knows his addition and subtraction facts cold. But he will NEVER be fast at them. So they had him stuck on the subtraction math fact test, even though he's in the 5th grade. There are 100 simple problems on the page, and you have to score at least an 80% to move on to the next test. (multiplication) Well, he has never been able to break 75 on this test, in 2 years. BUT... EVERY problem he finishes is correct, he's getting 100% of them right. He simply doesn't have the speed, particularly under pressure, to get through 80 problems in the time allowed. (the new teacher has, thankfully without me asking, moved him on to the multipliation test)

The areas where it takes longer for him to actually learn someting, are either visual/spatial (geometry and maps) or inferential comprehension. Because NLD kids don't generalize easily (if at all) concepts learned in one type of problem don't flow over into the next. That's the way their brain works. He may always need individualized teaching to make those connections. At best, we are not talking about something with a quick fix. It will take years and years of having them pointed out before he starts making those connections for himself. (if he ever does, but we live in hope<g>)

I'm not saying we never help him out if he gets stuck, and if we do, we do exactly what you suggest, and send the teacher a note saying exactly how he got stuck and what we did to help him with it. But we can't/won't get into a bettle over it. If he wants our help, we give it freely. If he starts to get frustrated or anxious, which happens often under homework conditions, we pack it up and send it back to school with a note.

I'm sorry to hear that your school does not effectively re-teach material that your child misses. Ours clearly does, because if my son is not too stressed out, he consistently gets good grades on his tests.

Karen

But if parents continue to "help" their children with homework that is excessive and developmentally inappropriate, and do so without comment, what is going to give teachers the input they need to allow them to accurately gauge appropriate homework levels?

I'm not talking about proofreading and/or brainstorming here. Most people learn to turn to others for help in these areas. I'm talking about about being buried in quantity. Or being given work that I, as a parent have to learn in order to teach my son. (I have been chuckling ruefully about remembered comments from my parents on "new math" lately ;-)

Karen

Things we Tried:
Tutor -over the summer , doing homework in a different room, doing homework at library, punishment, after school help, rewards, sticker chart, willingness to help, getting homework for the week -ahead from teachers - also getting a heads-up on projects (I find this info effective on Fridays when they want to go snowboarding on Sunday), Weekly Missing assignment Worksheet on Fridays from the Sped. Teacher.(and lots of times my son produced the homework he forgot to pass in). At times I just let it go, so we could all just breath and be a family.