The Homework Myth

As mentioned in a previous post, I did not take notes while reading this book, so I expect this review to be less detailed than my review of Fires in the Bathroom.

While reading Alfie Kohn's The Homework Myth book, I got into debates about its content many times. Here is a compilation of my discussions:

Me: Why do we need homework?
Them: Homework reviews important skills.
Me: Why can't that be done at school? Wouldn't class time be better spent on that practice where the students could get help?
Them: But there isn't enough time to do all that practice and cover the content.
Me: If you understand how to do the work, you don't need to do a lot of practice. If you are lost, then you need instruction, not practice. Also, this would streamline your ability to get through content faster because you wouldn't have to back track when kids don't have homework done.
Them: Well, homework teaches you responsibility. It teaches you how to do work for when you are in high school or college.
Me: No studies actually show this. Aren't their better ways to teach responsibility that don't undermine a child's natural curiosity? Is all that practice really necessary when there isn't a large correlation between homework and high school student achievement either?
Them: Well, we did homework and turned out alright.
Me: Just because we did it doesn't make it good for students, especially since younger and younger students are being assigned more and more work.
Them: Other countries give lots of homework and we need to catch up to them.
Me: Actually, it isn't true that lots of other countries give a lot of homework. In fact, Japan has ended homework in some places. Instead, some places have more class time for instruction and support instead of encroaching upon the family.

It is usually at this point (if not sooner) that whoever I was talking with got frustrated with me and changed the subject.

What impressed me was how thoroughly Kohn presented his argument against homework. Every counterargument that someone mentioned in my conversations, Kohn addresses. Kohn's research on homework is extensive, which makes him very creditable. He cites many sources, as well as providing a list of those sources and about 40 pages of notes at the end of the text about the cited research. Also, Kohn's writing is very well organized. He breaks the content into many chunks making it very easy to follow his ideas. This style furthers the feeling of thoroughness. But, his writing is repetitive. He is constantly adding that research does not back up giving homework for academics, but actually shows it may be harmful. This gets old by half way through the book. I felt that anyone interested and intelligent enough to make it that far in the book had gotten the point by then.

Most interesting to me was the early discussion on the negative effect that homework has on children, particularly the family. Since when I was teaching, I didn't have a family per se, I didn't understand this. Furthermore, growing up my family didn't spend much time together, so homework didn't affect us much. I do remember my parents investing time into our homework though. I don't remember many of these exchanges being tense, but they were time consuming. So as a teacher, I didn't have a lot of personal experience of homework ruining family time and twisting family relationships. Reading this section gave me insight into how homework affects a wider range of families outside of my direct experience.

I was left at the end of this section feeling powerless. I am on board with Kohn that homework should be for older students, and then we should modify how we think about it (more on that in a minute). But, my feelings as a teacher will most likely not affect my child's experiences throughout her eduction. I was left feeling very sad about my poor little girl facing hours of mindless, yet frustrating homework that eats up her evening hours with her parents and her time to relax. I found myself actually thinking I would ask teachers how much homework counts towards final grades to determine if the percentage was worth us just not doing it in our home if we didn't feel it was necessary. I was also contemplating calling Natalie's future school and asking about the homework policy, even though Kindergarten is still about four years away for her.

What I did feel good about was the section where Kohn describes how we should rethink homework. First, he states that we should reset the default so that homework isn't a given. I know as a teacher I though of homework as a given when planning, but mostly so I could fit in as much as possible. When I switched to Nancy Atwell's reading and writing workshop, I didn't do that anymore. And that is the type of homework that Kohn recommends. He strongly recommends free reading. Also, continuing projects not finished in class when students choose not to use class time is another new form of homework that Kohn recommends that I used in my classroom with writing workshop. Choice is a large factor in Kohn's new vision of homework; his endorsement of choice also made me proud of that amount of choice I gave students in reading and writing.

While reading The Homework Myth, I was tempted to buy copies for the superintendents of the school districts I plan to be in contact with in the future. In my mind, that is a big endorsement for Kohn's ideas on homework.

Teach: Tony Danza Episode 2

We managed to fit the new episode of Teach: Tony Danza in during Natalie's afternoon nap. Afterward, Mike asked me if I like this show so much because he is teaching English. I think that I like it more because I identify with the content, but the show is doing an awesome job focusing on general challenges in teaching.

I really liked how this episode showed the chaos of teaching. He has three students he's having trouble with because of dealing with special ed accommodations - their legality versus his ideals. Then, there is a student who he is riding because she isn't working to her potential, yet she is completely resisting him. Also, there is one student begging for more challenging work, while another student listed as gifted is complaining about being lost. This was a very realistic picture of what a single class can be like and I think the producers did a great job of portraying this.

This episode focused mostly on issues surrounding special eduction. Tony had three students who wanted to use the Resource Room for their quiz, but he asked them to stay instead. I still think that his line of thinking came from the best of intentions. He thought, "Let's try it here first, where you are part of the class, and if things go poorly, we'll address it." He saw sending them out of the class as either him passing the problem along or their using it as a crutch to not try harder, both of which can happen with special ed students. (I say this from experience. I once had a student who's mother brow beat a new special ed case worker into getting it on the IEP that her son only had to write something like 5 sentences for assignments. Five sentences for a high school essay? That student had already proven he could do more and his mother was using his disability as an excuse. As to Resource Rooms sometimes not providing the most productive kind of support: A fellow teacher once had a student who was allowed to use a dictionary on a vocab quiz she took in the Resource Room). After an intervention from his coach, attending a mini seminar on the resource room (was this already scheduled or was it planned for the benefit of Tony and the show?), and talking to the principal, Tony gets it. It doesn't matter what he thinks on the matter; legally he must accommodate for these students if they ask for it.

While I thought that Tony's idea of trying the quiz in the classroom first and him giving them extra time and effort was noble, he didn't handle the quiz debriefing well. He strongly gave the impression that the thought everyone did poorly because they weren't trying. While that is definitely the case for some students, it wasn't for all, especially the special ed students who were trying to explain to him their difficulties. Tony was left not asking the right questions. He trying to be very supportive and reassuring, but he didn't get down to the problem at hand much. What I saw the most was students saying they were stuck, but he didn't ask them more specific questions or pull out the text and get into working through it. I saw a lot of the same problems I've encountered with students, such as smart kids reading but still being confused and other kids unable to engage with the text.

I found the way Tony dealt with Paige (a student who was doing poorly and resisting his help) both commendable and pushy. I have never been able to go over to a student and talk to him or her face to face the way Tony was. I always feared pushing too hard or singling the student out, which is exactly what Tony did. Paige pulled back more and more as he pushed. I personally don't think that he should have discussed her grades with her at her desk where other students could hear them so easily. That was something I always tried to avoid. (In fact, a lot of his debriefing of the quiz got too personal about students' individual problems). But, I do think that Tony was right to call home, and that Paige was starting to come around by the end of the episode. She did participate in the activity for him. Showing students you care about them on such an individual level is amazing stuff if you can pull it off correctly.

Monty is another story. I don't understand why he agreed to be on the show if he wanted an advanced class experience. Did he really think that if he was in a mixed class that the class would go at the pace of the top students? I really disliked watching his monologues about the class since he was so single sighted and critical, claiming that it was all in the name of his education. However, he was very much like many advanced students I've met in the past. Its just a side of that type of student that I don't much enjoy. I have to give him props though for asking for extra work. It was a great idea. But, I do feel sad that he only waited a week (if that) before asking his grandmother to go in and talk to Tony about it. As viewers, we know the kind of week that Tony had, and he probably didn't have much mental energy left for coming up with extra advanced assignments.

Near the end of the episode, he breaks down after talking to his coach and the coach sends the assistant principal (because she is a woman I wonder?) to talk to him. An assistant principal needs to be able to deal crying from all sorts, and she did a wonderful job talking him through it. Another person who was rather impressive in this episode was Paige's friend, Tiana (I think that was her name). She did an excellent job telling her friend the truth about the situation with Mr. Danza nagging her and singling her out and it was refreshing to see a student conversation where the student helping her friend really understood the teacher's motivates and stuck up for them.

Next week's episode appears to deal with one of my biggest challenges: Classroom Management.

Lesson in Practice

As I read The Homework Myth and Fires in the Bathroom, I inadvertently put one of my major classroom lessons into practice.

I went into reading each of these texts knowing that I wanted to write a somewhat detailed review of each book. But, for some reason, I decided to only take notes on one of the books. As I read Fires in the Bathroom, I stopped to use post-it notes (since I didn't own the book), but I didn't take notes on The Homework Myth.

Now I have finished both books, but I am slacking on writing my review of The Homework Myth. Is it because I liked Kohn's book less? Is it because I was less interested in the material? Was the writing enjoyable? NO, in fact, to all these questions. I very much enjoyed The Homework Myth, while Fires in the Bathroom was just alright. But now that I have completed the second book, I don't have anything to look back on to help me write about it. When I did my first review, I flipped through the text and pulled out each post-it and decided whether to use it in the review. Drafting the post was a breeze. Conversely, now that The Homework Myth is done, I'm having a hard time remembering all of Kohn's points. In fact, when I was asked a question about the book near the end of my reading, I struggling to respond.

Also interesting, I didn't talk about Fires in the Bathroom at all. But, particularly for the first half of the book, I debated homework with my husband almost daily. These were sometimes heated conversations where I referred back to specific passages of the text, but now I can't remember exactly what we discussed. What is interesting about this for me is that just talking about the text wasn't enough for me to remember it.

So, I have learned a few things from accidental experiment:

• I reinforced my knowledge that I remember information better if I write it down.
  
• I used to think that I remembered information from lectures and discussions in courses well because of my listening skills, but I'm wondering if it really was my note taking that made the difference. Even if my notes weren't excellent, they were enough to jog my memory later.
  
• I don't remember non-fiction texts anywhere near as well as fiction without the use of notes.
  
• What I've been telling students for years is true (at least some of the time, for some people). If you are planning on using a text for more than a pleasure read, taking notes of some kind is to your advantage. They are even more advantageous if you are going to use the information in another way, such as a report.
  
• Talking about a text right after reading it isn't necessarily enough to commit it to memory.
  
• Liking a text doesn't necessarily mean that you will remember it later either.
  
• I should pass on to students that this process also works with non-fiction. This could be particularly useful to help students figure out how to write about a non-fiction text for another course, especially since content area teachers often don't give a lot of direction about how they want their papers written.
• How can I teach this lesson to students? I am glad to have this experience to share with them, but it is unlikely that just the story of my experience will motivate many of them to give it a try. Could I challenge them to try it out with two texts? Maybe we read two short stories and return to them a while later. One has notes and the other doesn't.
  

The question I'm left to ponder is: How important is it for my students to remember a text after they have finished it? We read literature primarily in my classroom. Usually the literature is a venue for practicing other skills. The text itself isn't the content the majority of the time. If students remembered my beloved Huck and Scout, it would improve their understanding of American culture, but it probably won't directly impact them later. But, students do need to remember a text long enough to get through it. Some of my students have trouble remembering what they read into the next day. Or, some of my students read ahead and finish a text significantly sooner than the rest of the class so they have a large gap before discussing or writing about the text.

Also, I must not forget the kind of notes I am asking students to take, and I took myself in this accidental experiment. I did not note the content. I noted my reactions to the content. While it is often easy to remember your strongest reactions to a section of reading or a short text for a short period of time, as I've proven to myself, its hard to remember your reactions over the course of a whole book that is read over time. A record of those ideas would prove useful for generating writing topics or for gathering evidence to support an overall opinion. Thus, this type of note does serve two functions. They do force the reader to engage with the text on some level, hopefully one that is personally meaningful. But they also do leave a trail to follow when one has free choice on how to respond to the text once it is through, which traditionally is an analytical essay in the high school English Language Arts classroom.

Teach: Tony Danza Episode 1

My husband stopped on Teach: Tony Danza while channel surfing. I was immediately intrigued. In fact, I swear it was just the day before I was thinking about how difficult it would be to do a reality TV show of a classroom or high school. I couldn't sit down and watch since we were getting ready to go out. Luckily, A&E has the full episode on their web site, so we watched it that evening instead. The DVR is now set to record the whole series.

Overall, I felt bad for Mr. Danza. The first few days of teaching are so difficult and embarrassing and to be scrutinized by so many venues made it almost painful to watch. Watching a show like this, viewers are waiting to see him make a huge mistake that a real teacher wouldn't do. Viewers expect the big celebrity to come in and say how difficult teaching is. But, Tony Danza isn't just waltzing in there. Unlike Paris Hilton's silly little TV show from a few years ago, he has a degree in eduction and has taken every step of the process seriously. There is footage of him scrubbing his classroom (which is something that I didn't always know that some teachers have to do themselves), putting up his bulletin boards, and attending teacher orientation.

Watching him over the first week, he makes mistakes that are common for all new teachers. But, he is lucky that he is being told about them. I went maybe two months or more teaching at my first position before I was observed and received feedback for improvement. He is getting valuable feedback so early that he can make adjustments the second week of school!

The major piece of feedback Danza receives is that he talks too much. Even though I'm sure that he isn't the first teacher to get this criticism, it hits him hard personally. But often criticism of teaching is hard not to take personally. That just seems to be something in the nature of teaching. Especially when the teacher is as enthusiastic as Danza, the teaching is personal because so much hope and passion have been put into it. But, the viewer can really see that by the end of the week, he's gotten the message. Now the challenge will be how to relinquish control over to the students, because right now he is doing all the work. Like he said himself, he feels he is preforming for them. While teaching is preforming at times, it is also a lot of guiding and weaving student input together.

Meanwhile, he appears to have no business being involved with the football team. I personally think the producers of the show had something to do with that move. Otherwise, both he and the head coach were real idiots thinking he could coach without any knowledge on the subject. That's precisely why I never volunteered to do anything with sports. I never played sports or even really watched them. How could I possibly help coach? I think that Danza's interest in the band will be better placed because he at least has some music background. But, from the previews, it looks like he is helping a new extracurricular each week. This feeds my idea that this is to make the show more interesting. However, Danza's work with extracurricular activities does show the habit new teachers have of taking on too much, too soon.

My only other criticism of this show is that it appears that Dana only has one class. A&E's web site says that he was a full time teacher, but only one class is seen on the show. Is it because he had only one class? That's not full time then. Is it because they could only get one class worth of students to participate? That is very possible. Either way, I dislike that only one class is discussed. Even if the producers can not legally show those students, Danza should at least make reference to the fact that he has other classes. He isn't taking on the full role of a teacher with only one class. While everything so far has been very real, the fact that he only has this one class, makes the intensity of it so much less for me, because in real life, that experience is multiplied 5, 6, 7 times. Parring down a teacher's class load to one group of students is very popular in media, though. In fact, I can't think of a single movie or show that really shows a teacher dealing with more than one class at a time. I understand that this makes it easier for the audience to follow, but it doesn't depict reality. I don't expect viewers to keep track of 100+ students, but there should be a happy medium.

I am very interested in the topics raising in the previews and I'm excited to watch the rest of the series.