Help students with homework for long enough and you'll hear this statement a lot. Tell a student to fix an answer and the response is almost automatic, "My teacher doesn't care."
It's a reasonable response. So many teacher give completion grades: if work is done, students get credit. Kids -- who so often struggle to draw conclusions from their reading comprehension work -- quickly reach a conclusion here: My teacher cares if the work is done, but does not care if it's right.
Taken to its extreme, this conclusion means that students just "fill in" homework. We see answers that are completely wrong. Totally made up. Completely nonsensical. The paper just needs to look like it contains work.
When we admit new students to our homework program, we often warn parents: your kids are going to hate this -- and for the first few weeks, they are going to swear that we are making their grades worse. Why? Because we're going to insist that they do their homework correctly.
Why do we do it?
Read magazines or education news or listen to podcasts and you may hear credible sources, often teachers, tell parents not to check their children's homework. This is the kid's responsibility, they say. Or, how can a teacher tell what a kid can or cannot do if parents check homework (and help students get things right)? Checking homework, they tell us, is helicopter parenting and wrong.
As a tutor and homework help instructor, I have always disagreed with this. I have always believed that the best homework pushes students to practice the skills they learned (or were supposed to learn) in school. A student who cannot do homework is a student who needs more instruction -- or at the least more practice. And practice done wrong is worse than practice not done at all. So, we correct all of our students' homework. When things are wrong, they redo them. When they don't know how, we teach them. And, for some students, particularly the ones who struggle to learn in the classroom (Are they not paying attention? Is the teacher confusing them? From our perspective, it's impossible to tell), I often feel like these are the moments when the kids learn the most. Students who can successfully complete their homework each day are students who know the material.
So, what about as a parent? I just experienced this problem for the first time with my preschooler. She loves doing her homework and completed her first two homework packets with very little help from me. It's tracing and cutting and drawing. All she needs from me is some help reading instructions.
But she rushed through the third packet. Her lower case h's looked, at best, like drunk n's... at worst, like nearly sideways chicken scratches.
I had her do them again.
I pulled out some notebook paper and ruler, made some wide lines, and had her redo the work.
The lesson: your work should be quality. You should take pride in your work. I care about how well you do your work. You should care about how well you do your work. Ms. Jenny cares about the quality of your work.
But, as I said that last sentences, I wasn't sure. Would the pre-school teacher hold them accountable for good work?
I found out a few weeks later at our first conference: She did. She didn't want the work to be perfect (they are 4 years old afterall!) but she compare their homework to the work they did in class. If the homework was messy compared to classwork, they missed out on play time to re-do the work.
So, it turned out, the teacher was right on top of it. I didn't need to check my girl's work, because her teacher would. But, because I did, she got her play time. And, I got to start, right now, in pre-school, teaching her the right values for school work. That's my job and I don't want to leave to to chance. I love that her teacher and I agree, but I don't want to take a chance on that lesson being lost.
I'm lucky. Her teacher agrees with me. We'll play back up for each other and make sure my kid learns to take pride in her work. But I'm sure there will be other teachers with different priorities, or not enough time, or too many students who need more help than my kid. In those cases, I want to make sure that I'm there to say, "I care about your work being right -- and you should too." And, in those cases, I will also tell her what I always tell my students, "I'm sure your teacher cares if it's right -- even if she doesn't have time to check everything you do -- I know that she cares."
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