Reply to MCPS elementary, middle school students could get less homework under proposed policy update

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Homework obviously didn't teach OP how to think.

Why does a parent need a school to assign homework?! You are the PARENT. If you want you to do more homework, assign it.

But I don't think a parent is involved at all. This smells like a thinly veiled cookie cutter talking point slogan thet certain groups repeat ad nauseum in response to all news without regard to the actual issue at hand. It doesn't work because you already have all the morons in your camp, and the rest of us see through you. [/quote]

This is OP. As a parent, I am supposed to assign homework?  LOL

I have had kids in both MCPS and private. When my youngest was in private elementary school, she had homework every night. Mostly math and reading and also studying for spelling tests. The math is the most time consuming, as it should be. Math is an important subject that requires practice. The short amount of time spent in school on math is not enough for a student to master it. Now MCPS teachers want parents to assign the math homework. I guess public schools are self service institutions now. This is one of the many reasons I pulled my kids out of MCPS and so glad I did.

[/quote]

Public school students run rings around private school students in math.

One example:

https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blog.umd.edu/dist/f/613/files/2023/12/2023-Winners.pdf[/quote]

There will always be a tiny select group of exceptional students, but by and large, students performance in public schools is mediocre at best.[/quote]

Nevertheles, the  PP's point is valid. Public schools students run rings around private in math.[/quote]

Let's be honest and tell it like it is. Asian students run rings around everyone else in math. Look at the winners and they are almost all Asian. Asian parents put their kids in the most competitive public schools to get the best education they can for their children. It doesn't have anything to do with public school math being better in elementary schools. Then in secondary there is a demand for higher level math because so many students have studied math outside of school.

This is why the no homework/less homework is really an awful way to increase equity for poor students as well as Latino and Black students. I was the third grade teacher who made sure my students really learned math facts. When I was growing up I lived in a city with many Asian immigrants. My Latino parents thought the schools were in charge of education and they didn't need to do extra. I always excelled in math so I was in the top math groups. By high school I started thinking maybe I wasn't that good in math, but finally realized that many of my Asian classmates were going to Saturday language and math school as well as private summer math classes run by members of their ethnic groups.  They had access to the math instructors textbook to check all of their answers. They could keep working at a problem until they got the correct answer.

So when I became a third grade teacher I wanted to be able for my students to have extra work as well. Besides math facts I offered extra math work to anyone who wanted it. Many of my top students and their parents loved getting extra work- maybe 5 out of 25 students. Just because others didn't want to do or were unable to do the extra work shouldn't mean no one gets the opportunity to get extra work. In 4th grade a teacher from Peru who worked at my school did the same. By the time they were in 5th grade and math tracking started our students were excelling in math. So many of the  students who went from my class to the Peruvian teacher's class were the top students in the grade.  If we could have continued helping these families supplement in math, these kids would could have ensured theses students stayed in the top math classes when they went on to the junior high and were combined with higher income kids with more resources.

If instead of paying for all this equity training for teachers and having countless administrators if school districts paid for any FARM student to enroll in Kumon then AOPS they would see so many underrepresented students excel.  It also should be a requirement that every math curriculum used has WORKED EXAMPLES so that if a student is absent or they don't understand the problems or weren't paying attention they can still go home and look at the worked examples and figure out what to do. Or their parents can figure out how to help them. [b]Eureka math for the most part does NOT have worked examples.[/b] It makes absolutely no sense that students do not have math textbooks besides workbooks. [/quote]

Eureka does have examples of how to solve problems in the Succeed/Homework book. They’re called the “Homework Helper” pages and are included for every lesson in the homework book. [/quote]

As an educated adult I realize that and I also can easily find online videos that match whatever lessons they are on. A second grade would have to be able to actually read well to independently complete MATH homework. There should be an actual textbook that reviews how to do the problem with worked examples in the TEXTBOOK.

And the homeworker helper examples are so wordy that they often aren't helpful at all. These are some examples of homework directions from the second grade book:

"In the following problems separate the rows or columns with horizontal or vertical lines...Draw an array of X's with 2 more rows of 3 than the array in Problem 3. Write a repeated addition equations to find the total number of X's"

You can't easily look at the picture and really figure out what to do.  If you plug those word into a readability formula publishers use to gauge what grade level text is like the FLESCH-KINCAID grade level readability scoring system it is SEVENTH GRADE! How is a second grader supposed to really understand what to do?  And it is such a waste of time to draw x's. Why don't kids have colorful math textbooks that aren't so wordy to go along with math workbooks?

This is why math scores are never going to go up overall for disadvantaged students. For all this talk of equity, giving students this type of math program is so unfair. [/quote]

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