Friday, April 22, 2011

Do you ever wonder how your child will learn?

So I was talking with a Mom of older children (ie. in school) and she's having a hard time with her children's school. Now mind you, her kids go to a school in one of the two best school systems in our state and our state is pretty high on the rankings nationally of how good our school systems are. So you would think that as long as she's an involved parent everything should be rainbows and unicorns, right?

Well, she was talking to her kids about their homework the other day and noticed that a few of the answers on their assignments were incorrect. When she asked her kids about them they responded with "Oh it's cool, they only check for completeness, not accuracy". Wait, WHAT?!?!?! When the Mom called the school about this they confirmed that it is only for completeness since they are just trying to reinforce what they learned at school and not teach anything new at home. Um, how is it reinforcing if the kids are getting it wrong!?!?!? AND they don't care, because they know they will still get a 100! I mean this all goes back to the "every child is a winner" crap, just make them feel good... don't even get me started on that.

This conversation got me worried about Kinsley's education, since I'm such a talented writer and speller (dripping with sarcasm) she's pretty much doomed if I'm supposed to pick up that slack! I mean they are actually teaching kids how to use spell check rather then learning how to figure out on their own how to spell! Dont' get me wrong, i LOVE me some spell check, i use it all the time sometimes on this blog, but we've all seen the awesomeness of spell check, you know, where it puts in a TOTALLY different word than what you wanted. Not to mention it does NOTHING for terrible run on sentences that go on for miles and days at a time with commas everywhere in site, even where they, aren't, needed, right?

So do Mom's get outside help from writing tutors? Do they pray that the kids turn out okay in the long run and don't get professors from hell that claim to hate all seniors because they forgot how to write only to learn that they never knew how to write because they only had to complete an assignment, not get it correct?

Someone needs to write a manual about this stuff because I SURELY do NOT have a clue!
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1 comment:

  1. JessApril 24, 2011 at 12:58 PM

    Coming from the teacher's point of view, we're technically not allowed to give grades for homework, because although there are many hardworking honest studets, there are also parents out there that do their student's homework for them, so we can't really count on the accuracy. Several of us have also been told that it's not "best practice" to check homework during class, because it's time that should be spent on instruction instead. So it's tough. We mostly use the way students work through or solve problems during class for grades, and help them then and then hope that they have what they need to practice again at home.

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