Last week, I had dinner with some family friends at my parents' house. One of these friends is an eighth grade math teacher. We were discussing the differences between teaching ten years ago and teaching now, and I was appalled at some of the things she mentioned.
We talked about how a generation ago, if a kid came home with a bad report card his or her parents wanted to know what happened. Why was their kid doing poorly in school? Clearly they needed to work harder or maybe even get some tutoring. Nowadays, parents see a bad report card and they want to know what their child's teacher did wrong. No one can argue with the fact that teachers have very much to do with their students' success and good teaching goes a long way, but since when do kids not have any responsibility in earning good grades? In this current generation of school aged children, we are obsessed with making sure they know how fabulous they are. Any effort is good enough. Whatever they do they are all winners. Encouraging a child to try his or her best is a good thing, but in life there are in fact winners and losers. Not everyone is good at everything. There is something to be said for teaching a child to put in an honest effort in everything they try and that hard work pays off. Children give up too easily now. If something is the least bit difficult they move on to the next hobby or task. And not only are parents allowing this to happen, but they're encouraging it in some cases.
Our family's teacher friend shared that she often gets requests from parents to not give their children homework. In fact, multiple parents sign off on homework by initialing it after twenty minutes, because according to them their children shouldn't be spending more than that on homework per subject. No more than twenty minutes?
This particular teacher says to do her homework thoroughly it usually takes an hour. So these students who are only allowed to do twenty minutes per subject are actually losing out because they will be less prepared than their classmates who spend an hour a night on their homework. These parents are doing their children a disservice. Not only are they ensuring their children are underprepared for their exams and will most likely get lower grades, but they're also teaching them it's okay not to put in your best effort. Eighth grade teachers are in charge of preparing their students for high school. This often means giving them more homework than they did in seventh grade to prepare them for the workload that high school requires. Speaking from personal experience, I had about three-four hours of homework a night in high school, and there's no way that an hour a night for all my subjects in eighth grade would have prepared me for that.
What I found very interesting about all of this was our friend said the parents who never complained their children were getting too much homework tended to be highly educated themselves and very successful. The parents who signed off after twenty minutes on the other hand were often people who didn't do very well in school themselves and had received less higher education. This is similar to what I experienced in New Orleans. Parents who never made it very far in school didn't value their children's educations as uber important. Their are many layers to solving the education crisis in this country. And one of these layers starts at home---parents need to stand behind their children and defend their right to a quality education. They also need to believe that education is important and a path to success for their children.
In my last entry I was writing about how the education system in this country needs to change. Well, today I would argue that we need to change too. We need to require more of our children. We need to fight for their future while still teaching them that they have to work hard and take responsibility for their actions. If we don't do these things, the problems in our education system are going to get much worse before they get better.
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