Facing the problems of home and school

Poor Elijah was sprawled in his chair. He’d brought home a new book about Churchill and spent the morning rearranging his bookcase. I pointed out that shelving a book probably shouldn’t leave him incapacitated and gently suggested he should exercise more. “I’d definitely exercise,” he explained, “if it didn’t involve so much moving and lifting.”

I replied that “moving and lifting” was pretty much the definition of exercise.

“That’s the problem,” he agreed. “Someone needs to fix that.”

Before you get the wrong idea, Poor Elijah doesn’t believe that the nature of exercise is the problem. He knows he’s the problem. He also knows that all the diet-without-dieting and exercise-without-exercising miracles advertised on television tell us what we want to hear while they empty our wallets.

Experts and officials propose similar fixes for our education problems. Their learnwithout-learning reforms likewise promise academic success without sweat or discomfort, and we’re likewise susceptible to their pain-free proposals.

Some schools, for example, offer cash incentives to students who demonstrate “more effort in their schoolwork.” A recent University of Chicago study found, not surprisingly, that a twenty dollar bonus was more effective than a ten dollar bonus. More traditional “non-cash” incentives like trophies and public recognition also “had a positive impact,” but not as big an impact as cash.

Advocates contend that incentives “can help motivate students” without dampening their “intrinsic motivation.” They assert there’s no inherent difference between paying students to learn and recognizing their achievement at a school assembly. After all, they argue, how many of us would go to work if we didn’t get paid?

There’s a big difference between learning and working for a living. Carpenters don’t build other people’s houses for the sheer joy they get from pounding nails. They get paid because they’re providing a service, not receiving a service. Paying students to learn is like expecting my doctor to pay me to take my pills and come in for a check-up.

In another something-fornothing development, NEAToday reports that homework is “in the doghouse.” Having diagnosed homework as a “major source of stress for all students,” some teachers and districts are eliminating it altogether. Others favor policies prohibiting “time-wasting, rote, repetitive tasks with no clear instructional or learning purpose,” a prohibition which presumes that teachers routinely set out to waste students’ time. It also ignores the fact that some useful homework involves repetitive tasks called “practice.”

Some experts instead promote “continued learning,” where reading, writing, and arithmetic become “part of everyday family interaction,” formerly known as helping with homework. Teachers, meanwhile, can provide “guidance to parents” by furnishing problems to do, things to read, and things to write, tasks formerly known as assignments.

Critics scoff at assertions that homework is ever “beneficial” for younger students, but some reformers allow that it can help prepare high school students for the rigor and independent work they’ll face in college. Sadly, preparing for the rigors of middle and high school used to be the reason for assigning homework to elementary students. Apparently, we’ve dialed rigor back at every level.

I’m not saying there’s no such thing as pointless, excessive homework. I’ve unintentionally given some bum assignments myself. But indicting homework because it’s a “chore” presupposes that chores are automatically bad and ignores the reality that sometimes chores are necessary.

Banning homework because it isn’t “fun,” citing it as a prime source of “stress” for children and parents, mocks the real stress that children and parents face in war zones and refugee camps. What does it say when a few extra math problems are enough to provoke our national “tears and anxiety”?

Regarding American families, in 1965 future senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan detailed the correlation between the prevalence of single-parent black families and the “social and economic” problems, including “school matters,” faced by those families. Today the “rate of unmarried births among whites” is “considerably higher than the 1965 rate among blacks.” Research and analysis continue to confirm that “youngsters from singleparent families face a greater risk of poor schooling outcomes,” including “behavior” and “academic problems.”

How can we be surprised that our schools and students are in trouble? How can we be surprised that “poor schooling outcomes” have become more widespread?

I’m not arrogant enough, or foolish enough, to imagine I have all the solutions to our societal and family malaise. Life is complicated, and mine hasn’t exactly read like a 1950s sitcom.

I’m troubled, though, by a report that probed the connection between “family strength and student success.” The author declared that “the challenge for schools” is to “help all of their students — including ones from singleparent families — to beat the odds.”

I try every day to teach my students the academic inheritance that was passed along to me. I don’t care how many parents they have. I hope what I teach them will serve them as they face the duties and trials their lives present.

Too often, and increasingly, we’ve found it convenient to lay the task of raising the nation’s children on our schools. It hasn’t worked out well.

I’m an English teacher. I’ll do my best to teach your children to read, and I’ll guard them when they’re with me. But I can’t be their second parent.

Placing that burden on me and on schools will only make things worse.

Schools can’t solve the problem when the problem is at home.

Banning homework because it isn’t “fun,” citing it as a prime source of “stress” for children and parents, mocks the real stress that children and parents face in war zones and refugee camps. What does it say when a few extra math problems are enough to provoke our national “tears and anxiety”?