I’ve been on a calling spree. Didn’t do your homework? Here’s my cell. Call your mom–or, preferably, your dad. First you talk, then I talk. Sometimes I make six or seven calls a day. The parents seem to be happy about it, but some kids continue to be repeat offenders.
The downside for me: parents have saved my number. On Sundays, in the evenings, during my lunch, I get calls from unknown numbers: What was the homework? Can I bring my son’s homework in to school–he forgot it? I wanted to talk to you about how my child is adjusting to your class.
Hmm. For now I don’t mind, but I’d prefer no weekend calling. Let your child be responsible. Everyday s/he has ten minutes to write the homework into his/her daily planner. If s/he doesn’t, then shouldn’t s/he face the consequences?
But the consequences are being benched and getting the phone call home, so I guess we’re trapped in a vicious circle: parents call me in order not to get called themselves!
Or maybe it’s just because they care. But then why didn’t David do the homework three times this week?
I’m not sure about this strategy of mine. All I know is I’m very glad I upped my minutes in August.
What do you think? Do you want your child’s teacher calling you when s/he doesn’t do the homework?
on Oct 8th, 2009 at 7:25 am
I would LOVE it, but consider it quite a luxury. H’s teachers require the kids to have at least one others kid’s number from the classroom - a homework buddy.
on Oct 8th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
And what happens when someone doesn’t do the work? What sorts of consequences were there in 5th?
on Oct 27th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
When I was tutoring students with learning disabilities, this was a common and constant problem. The ability to write down homework and remember to do it is an executive function - it seems so easy to do for those of us who naturally and without awareness process, sort, record, retrieve, and act on information. But it is a fairly complex higher-level function.
The problem I see with the parents consistently not monitoring the kid’s homework, is that the kid learned it (or acquired it genetically) from that parent. You can’t expect a parent without well-developed executive functioning to teach it to their kid. Not unless the parent is super-motivated to address his or her own issues alongside helping his or her child. And they rarely are.
Ways that I have seen teachers deal with this:
1) Phone buddy (or actually buddies) as mentioned above
2) Teacher must initial the homework assignments that the student has written down in her/his homework folder/book (time consuming for the teacher, but perhaps shorter in the long run than all the phone calls). To really make this system work, the parents, in turn, have to initial each homework assignment when it is complete.
3) Posting the homework assignments on line. But then the teacher has to really be certain to keep up with it. If the teacher puts up a week’s worth of homework assignments at once, chances are it will be modified at some point, so the teacher needs to remember to modify what is on-line. And, of course, not all parents and students will have access to the internet at home.
4) Would it be possible to record the homework assignments on a phone greeting every day? Some schools have phones in every room and perhaps those could be used. That way families without internet access could still get the homework everyday. Then the child who remembers to write down his or her homework every day for a week could be picked to record the homework assignment one day. And the child who remembers to do his or her homework for a week, could be picked to record it another day.