Why You Really Should Check Your Kids' Homework

"My teacher doesn't care if it's right!"

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."

What words do you use with your kids?

"Don't provoke your brother!"
"Why do you have to antagonize each other?"
"Will you please stop taunting him?"
"Wipe that sulk off your face."
"Don't pout."
"You guys are really aggravating me."

These phrases wore grooves in my brain over the course of my childhood. Clearly, I was not an easy child.

Now, as an ISEE and SAT tutor, I invoke these sorts of phrases when I try to see if students know words like provoke, provocation, antagonize, antagonistic, taunt, sulking, and pouty. They usually don't. When I ask students, especially students with siblings, if their parents implore them not to antagonize each other, they typically shrug, "They just tell us not to bug each other."

I don't know if this is true. I also don't know if I know these words because my mother used them, or because I have always liked words (I should ask my brother if these words also strike strong memories for him). My mother is not an intellectual type. The first in her family to go to college, she dropped out halfway through to become a flight attendant. She only finished when she learned she was not tall enough to meet those willowy 1960's stewardess requirements. But she had a wide and varied vocabulary for scolding us and that vocabulary sticks with me. 

And the strategy haunts me when I talk with my 4 year old. Daily, I pause for split seconds when I talk to her. There's always an easier word that I can use.  An easier word that will mean I don't have to answer 52 follow-up questions and she will actually totally understand what I'm talking about the first time around.  But should I be using the harder word? Is that my job? Is that how I improve her vocabulary naturally?

The scenario that convinced me that I'm doing it wrong was a simple one: 

We were on the freeway. One of those big trucks that carries a dozen new cars drove past us on the northbound side.

"Mama, is that a tow truck that carries your car when it doesn't work any more?"

"That's what a tow truck does, but that truck had a lot of cars. It's probably taking new cars to the..." ...and here a pause.  If I were talking to an adult I would call it a dealership. But, for my girl, for a second I thought about calling it a car store.... "dealership."

"What's a dealership?" 

(Of course.)

"It's like a car store. It's a place where you go to buy a car."

"Mama!  Look, there's a carousel at that dealership!"

She was pointing out the window, at, sure enough, a car dealership, looking at one of the big striped tents the dealership was using to shade some cars.

That was the moment when I thought, "Yes, that's it. I'm supposed to use the real words."

I know this from working with our EdBoost kids. They love to pick up on the words we use. Our homework helpers love to call me "persnickety" and they come in from school to tell us that their teacher used one of the big words that we like to use (procrastination, diligence, efficient, etc). I know, from my job, that we have an obligation to use good vocabulary with kids.

And, I am also convinced that we have an obligation to use those big words with little kids - even if makes our lives just a little big harder right now. If we do, maybe some SAT tutor sometime in the future won't have to work so hard.


P.S.  This morning she told me I was "aggravating her"... I'm both proud and.. and that other feeling you get when your pre-schooler tells you that you aggravate her.