HelicopterParentsPart3 < Kitchen

10 Dec 2005 - 13:55

helicopter parents in the TIMES

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Staying Within the Lines on Homework help

I spent years reading about how women (or blacks) internalized the culture's view of them.

Ed reminded me yesterday that this is called false consciousness.

Parents have false consciousness.

Here's an article, written by a parent, all about the Bad Things Parents Do when their children go to school. The author lives here in Westchester; she's in one of the river towns. Hastings, Dobbs, or Ardsley, can't remember which. That makes her a neighbor.

LISA JACOBSON runs a tutoring business, Inspirica, in Manhattan, and she has seen parents at their worst, their most enmeshed, their pushiest. Parents who do their children's art projects for them, so the third-grade classroom looks, she said, "like a gallery at MoMA." Parents who tinker with science labs and correct math homework and edit English essays until the child does not recognize more than a comma in an opening sentence.

Gee. It's those Pushy Parents again. The ones I keep hearing about here in Irvington.

I wonder why all those Pushy Parents are spending hours of their lives doing their children's art projects.

Might it be because if they don't do their child's projects the child will be given a large, prominently displayed 'D' for all the world to see, called up to the teacher's desk, asked loudly, 'Are you even trying to do the work?' and sent off to the cafeteria to be taunted by the entire 6th grade class?

I wonder.

Back when my sons were younger, the rule was that they did the "content" and I would help out with the cutting and the coloring. It just didn't seem worth the extra hours they would spend wrestling with scissors and crayons. So after my older son drew his poster for social studies intricately mapping the route from the school to his house, I colored the roads black and the treetops green. And once he had completed his essay for French about the Arc de Triomphe, I took a razor and cobbled a three-dimensional model of that landmark from foam-backed board. (For the record, he lost points for neatness on the map poster I colored, and while his French essay earned an A, my foam representation got only a B.)

Does this passage offer a clue?

A parent-created art project earns a B.

Question.

What grade does a child-created art project earn?

As it happens, I have the answer, since I've just run that experiment.

Here's how it comes out. Other parents stay up all night doing their child's feature story/persuasive essay/major research product. (Seriously. One mother told me she had to pull an all-nighter to get it done. Good for her. She's as furious at Mrs. Roth as I am, btw, and has been hovering on the brink of Going To The Principal for some weeks now.)

Your child writes his own feature story.

Your child receives a bright red D, is berated in front of his classmates, is taunted at recess, spends a week crying at home every night.

Meanwhile you drop work on your Actual Job, the one you need to pay your monster property taxes to support the school, in order to steal time to launch a major offensive against the school you're working so hard to support.

Question.

What was the smart play here?

Stay up all night writing your child's paper and be done with it, or let your child write his own paper, after which all he** breaks loose and you get to spend the next 6 weeks dealing with it. And that's 6 weeks if you're lucky.

On the one hand, I am well positioned to help with their writing. Not to do it for them, but to read what they write and send them back to revise. On the other hand, is that helping or hurting? Can a teacher, however well intentioned, possibly give scores of children the same attention that I can give my own? Am I cheating my boys more by stepping in or standing back? Should the roles of parent and professional ever be mixed?

False consciousness!

The Core Question is not Should the roles of parent and professional ever be mixed?

The Core Question is What is my child learning at school, if anything?

My fifth grader's teacher has specifically asked us not to help," said Jacqueline Ghosen, who also has a fourth grader, and who is more than able to help with math because she teaches business classes at the University at Buffalo School of Management. "Her thought is that if the children are not getting the concept, she is not teaching it well," she said. "But if our child gets it wrong, regardless of whose fault it is, he still gets a lower homework grade. Also, if he is the only one who didn't get the concept, she is not going to reteach it."

That's a problem, alright.

Two words: formative assessment

So every night Ms. Ghosen and her husband spend at least three hours reviewing their sons' math, one equation at a time, telling them how many problems are wrong and sending the children back to find the mistakes themselves.

A big, fat, red 'A' to Ms. Ghosen and her husband for logical reasoning.

If the teacher isn't teaching to mastery, somebody has to.

Who's it going to be?

Other teachers have the opposite request: they want parents to take the reins. Ms. Jacobson recalls a recent parent-teacher conference where she was told "that the only way to keep kids achieving at the high level expected by the school district is to teach at school and then have the kids go home and be drilled and helped and tutored by the parents."

Another big, fat, red 'A' to Ms. Jacobson's teacher for logical reasoning.

This teacher would no doubt thrive in a DI system.

She is not teaching in a DI system.

So she's leveled with the parents. If the school isn't teaching to mastery somebody has to do it.

Unless you have a live-in tutor (that's another story) it's going to be you. Us. The parents.

The real story here, the story that should have been written, is the story of why the schools aren't teaching to mastery.

She's looking at the symptom of school failure.

Not the source.

p.s.

I just spent a couple of seconds looking at that picture.

It's great, isn't it?

Totally undermines the article, something I've seen more than once.

Here we have an anxious child, bewildered by the indecipherable schoolwork he's supposed to complete at home, on his own, with neither competent instruction nor help. The teacher has written some stuff on the board, or the child and a couple of classmates have discovered some stuff in a small group, and now he's supposed to know it.

And here we have a mother glaring at the books her school has sent home—glaring from clear across the room. She's also looking semi-bewildered, but bewildered in a mad way, not a say way.

Wait! she's saying. Is it a 'feature story'? Is it a 'persuasive essay'? Is it a 'major research PRODUCT'?

Plus, she's so ticked off she has apparently acquired the ability to project herself across the room telepathically, double in size, and change colors; she's so ticked off she's turning into THE HULK.

I could send this out as a Christmas picture.

Of course the good news is that parents who possess supernatural powers terrify school administrators.

a personality change, too

Plus the mom was a happy, nice, non-hovering, non-helicopter parent before she got a look at the incomprehensible junk they sent home for her child to do.

I think the TIMES should forget about writing articles, and just have the artists draw the stories.

helicopter parents, part 1
helicopter parents, part 2
helicopter parents, part 3
helicopter parents at the AFT
news from nowhere, part 6 (AP students)
helicopter parents of the word, unite
helicopter parents of the world, unite part 2a (t-shirts)
MiddleWeb says hovering is good

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When it comes to art projects, etc, parents helping could raise the bar so much that parents have to help.

E.g. without parents helping, kids' works are compared by the teacher to each other, and are graded on a curve.

Then one parent starts to help and their work looks so much better than the others that the kid gets an A and every other kid gets a slightly worse mark because the teacher subconsciously is adjusting for the difference. So more parents start helping their kids, and eventually you reach a point where everyone is getting the same grades as if the kids were doing all the work themselves, but every parent is putting a lot more effort in.

This of course doesn't apply to subjects like maths where there's clear right/wrong answers. And, since the kids do tests in class, all a parent can do is make sure they know the subject matter thoroughly, the parent can't actually do the test for the kid. So if it's a parent that makes sure the kid can pass a maths test, the kid can own their 'A'.

But I can see the concern about helicoptor parents in the fluffy subjects.

-- TracyW - 11 Dec 2005

I've had so many developmentally inappopriate projects handed to my kid that I feel no guilt whatsoever about helping him at times. Unless you have a child in grade school you have no idea what they're doing these days. It's really something else.

I read them over and if they are ridiculous I go ahead and help him with the stuff that only high schoolers could figure out on their own. The hours wasted on some of this nonsense is unbelievable.

An entire blooki could be started on this subject alone.

-- SusanS - 11 Dec 2005

SusanS^? - out of curiousity, outside maths - what are they giving out that's so developmentally inappropriate?

And I can still see how parents helping could lead to a spiral in which parents must help. If teachers give out developmentally inappropriate projects and parents don't help and schools are confronted with kids bursting into tears they are getting a signal to lower their expectations. While if some parents do help then teachers think that the kids can handle these projects and thus keep handing them out. However, the learning process for the teachers if parents don't help is brutal on the kids, so I can see why a sensible parent would start helping.

-- TracyW - 11 Dec 2005

A developmentally inappropriate project is when you have about 10 longwinded detailed instructions for 3rd graders on, say, making a 3 dimensional art replica of a favorite book. 2 or 3 might be doable, but 10-12 explicit instuctions that involves measuring, glueing, building, summarizing, etc. is pretty much out of the reach of most 7-8 year olds without assistance. You often don't realize how off base a lot of these things are until you are in the middle of them. And then, you think something is wrong with you. It takes a while to find out the other parents are also irritated and by then the year's over.

I'm sure they do have kids that aren't coming in with anything and I believe they write them off as being those unreachable kids that won't amount to much.

I've also spoken out to a couple of teachers who appeared to be listening, but I don't know if anything ever changed.

Keep the projects simple. A little glueing and drawing, a little writing, all without mom and dad's help. And don't have them do 15 throughout the school year.

Writing-wise, developmentally inappropriate to me is when they ask for middle school cognitive skills in grade school, like the ability to extract a main point from a paragraph, or the ability to develop a thesis through an essay before they even know what a sentence is.

-- SusanS - 12 Dec 2005

I've had so many developmentally inappopriate projects handed to my kid that I feel no guilt whatsoever about helping him at times.

Our schools have been remarkably non-crazed about this.

But if Christopher were getting handed these assignments, we'd just do them. Period.

We did do his 'personal timeline.' He was fully involved, but Ed did it.

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Dec 2005

What I can't bear, here in middle school, is the off-topic stuff.

Christopher got a 'D' on his 'photo essay' because it was messy.

This is in English. They gave the kids cheapo disposable cameras, shlepped them to the Botanical Garden, had them take pictures, then glue the pictures to a poster board and write.....captions?

Christopher left his camera in his locker, so he pulled photos from the web (which MRS. ROTH had said would be OK), but then apparently the glue stick was old and the photos fell off.

So he got a D and was humiliated in front of the class for 'not trying.'

Part of the problem is that I'm on strike. This woman is teaching him nothing, and I'll be damned if I'll pull an all-nighter to glue pictures of plants on a posterboard.

Ed says, however, that from now on we are going to obediently do whatever the teachers assign.

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Dec 2005

There should be NO gluing and writing in 6th grade English.

Or in 6th grade social studies. (Endless m-effing over neatness & color-of-the-ocean in that class.)

I can't pay taxes at this level to have teachers grade my kid on coloring.

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Dec 2005

OR.....a PERSUASIVE ESSAY at the beginning of middle school, only assigned as a FEATURE STORY, and then graded as a 'MAJOR RESEARCH PRODUCT.' (Mrs. Roth's sole comment was that Christopher's paper was short for a 'MAJOR RESEARCH PRODUCT.')

In a coherent writing course, persuasive essays come last, not first (and they are never, ever, under any circumstances, called 'feature stories' or 'major research products.')

Persuasive writing is the hardest writing; college kids can't do it.

Ed's entry-level Masters candidates can't do it. They learn to over the year, but they come in not doing it.

If these people managed to teach decent expository prose & structure in 6th grade, they'd be way ahead of the game.

Instead they're having the parents stay up all night writing persuasive feature-story-research-products.

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Dec 2005

If teachers give out developmentally inappropriate projects and parents don't help and schools are confronted with kids bursting into tears they are getting a signal to lower their expectations.

Doesn't seem to be the way it works.

The fact that Christopher is now possibly needing therapy due to turning in a student-written paper had not the slightest effect on Mrs. Roth until Ed wrote his eff-off-and-die letter.

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Dec 2005

I've had it.

And we only get one week of Xmas vacation this year.

Mistake.

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Dec 2005

Ouch - extracting themes, etc.

I have something sillier than grading kids at age 12 on colouring in English and Social Studies.

Grading them on colouring at age 16 on colouring in English class.

"Static Images" was an important feature of 5th and 6th form English. We were to learn how to interpret and design "Static Images". I did great on "Static Images". This was because I was doing Technical Drawing in 5th form and Grapic Design in 6th form and was actually being taught how to design and draw and interpret drawings. Which didn't happen in English class. It was a School Certificate multi-choice question on the English exam on "Static Images" that was so badly written that they had to mark every answer right.

A group of us held a party after our last English class because now we were going into 7th form and were finally able to drop triply be-dratted English.

-- TracyW - 12 Dec 2005

And on the Mrs Roth problem - I think some of her confusion may be due to all the other parents helping their kids. So she's not getting a signal that the project is beyond the cognitive abilities of all of her kids, she's getting a signal that it's beyond some. So she can blame it on those kids.

And she is just a bad teacher to start with. As others have said, criticising someone in public like she did is just incredibly stupid.

-- TracyW - 12 Dec 2005

Grading them on colouring at age 16 on colouring in English class.

you know......when Christopher was in grade school & everything was easy I could find this stuff amusing

now I find it either irrelevant or infuriating or both

I'm too old for this stuff

I should probably waltz myself down to the school, introduce myself to all the teachers, and say:

Look at my face.

I am not a 35 year old parent.

I am not staying up all night writing feature-story-persuasive-essay-major-research-products.

Consider yourself warned.

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Dec 2005

She's an idiot.

I'm past the point of diplomatic speech on the subject of Mrs. Roth.

On Back to school night she said she wouldn't send any writing home because we parents would get our 'grubby little fingers on it.'

I've been keeping notes on her, and found another gem (there are a lot of them).

One of the students asked her why they were 'going so fast.'

None of the other classes has finished their feature stories; they aren't even close. The other classes are working on the papers in class, getting feedback, doing drafts, doing revisions, etc.

Not Mrs. Roth's class.

She handed them a one-age outline of a persuasive essay and that was the end of it.

They do this with everything. She just whizzes them through every piece of content they're supposed to be learning.

So a girl in the class asked her why they were going so fast.

Mrs. Roth said, 'Doing everything slow and going into detail makes me vomit.'

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Dec 2005

He is SO out of that class.

They can take him out, they can make him stay in.

He's out of there no matter where he happens to be sitting.

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Dec 2005

2 periods a day with this woman

2 periods of zero-instruction

added to the 1 period of zero-instruction in study skills

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Dec 2005

I don't even know what this means.

Static Images.

In English.

One thing I'm starting to get cranked up about is the complete and total Loss of Mission in public schools.

Ravitch talks about this, too.

They've all had a zillion edu-entrpreneurs sell them fancy programs—character education, health education (which is HUGE), Static Image education—they have no idea what their core mission is.

Our new superintendent last year spent months hammering together a sexual harrassment policy; that was apparently a Top Priority. (Of course, seeing as how the superintendent she was replacing had been arrested for stalking, perhaps it was.)

This year she has established a Wellness Committee.

And of course we have character education up the ying-yang, though not for the people who could use it (Mrs. Roth?)

In English Christopher is getting graded on neatness, Word Art, large font size, glued-on photos.....it just goes on and on and on.

Meanwhile his young years are passing us & them by.

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Dec 2005

I just helped my son (4th grade) complete his report/map/craft project on Chirstmas in Greece. (All of the kids had a different country.) As with his other projects, the problem is that the school doesn't prepare them to do the job. They may talk a little bit about what to do, but they don't see what goes on at home. The kids just can't do the project by themselves. If I let him do the project all by himself, it would be horrible, take FOREVER, he would learn very little, and he would get a poor grade. I end up doing the teacher's job. I don't do it for him, but he needed major help in organization, reducing the information down to a reasonable size, and putting it all into his own words. No parent I know likes school projects like dioramas, research reports, and other thematic displays of educational pedagogy and feel-good-ness. Perhaps they expect and want parental involvement?!? I'm more than willing to do my part, but, I really don't want to do their job. Please don't ask me again to practice basic math with my son at home.

-- SteveH - 12 Dec 2005

Actually I think I have managed to work out the logic that lead to "static images".

Employers tell politicans that they want employees who can communicate clearly.

Some of the said politicians get elected and tell the education ministry that employers say students should be learning to communicate clearly.

Educators sit down and think deeply about what communication is. They come up with a list that includes written communication, spoken communication and visual communication.

So they decide that students should learn how to read and write clearly, make speeches, and interpret and design images.

The next question is which exams should this be included in? (The time I was at school the 5th and 7th form exams drove the curriculum decisions by schools, there was no separate national curriculum). The answer was English - written communication was already part of English.

So far this is reasonably logical. But no one appeared to have had much of an idea about how to teach interpreting images and what to teach about designing them. Let alone trained any English teachers in doing so. They should have talked to the graphic design teachers and the art history teachers.

"Static Images" didn't need to be slack. My Graphic Design paper was tough. Technical Drawing was rigorous. "Static Images" got interpreted as another art class.

-- TracyW - 12 Dec 2005

I'm with Steve and Susan on this one.

Let me just say that my 4th grader had to write a five-paragraph "persuasive essay" this weekend on why students should be allowed to return to the classroom unescorted if they forget their lunchboxes. I didn't help him with that one, except to correct his spelling. In fact, I was bursting with pride that my son figured out 3 different ways to state his 1 reason, so that he could form an essay body of 3 short paragraphs... he deserves a gold star for recognizing and attempting to execute the convention of using 3 independent supports for his argument. Even though he didn't.

But in regards to developmentally inappropriate writing assignments for 3rd graders:

The Book Talk, that comes home with these instructions, in this order:

1. Give the name of the book and the author.

2. Tell your favorite part.

3. Tell what other books this book reminds you of.

4. Show your favorite illustration from the book.

5. Tell the first sentence of the book.

6. Would you recommend this book to others?

Seem reasonable? Except there is no instruction for:

How much or how little to describe the main and supporting characters that are featured in your favorite part, so that when you read a paragraph from your favorite part, it will make sense to your classmates.

How much or how little plot information to give so that your favorite part will make sense to your classmates.

How to pick a good favorite part that you can read to your classmates and have them grasp what is funny or scary or mysterious in one paragraph.

Whether your favorite part should match the favorite illustration you pick.

Whether the best order to answer questions 1 - 6 in your book talk is 1 - 6.

And don't forget the poster for your talk!

As Steve said, it's (finding,) organizing, reducing, and localizing the information with your child that is so incredibly hard. Important, yes; easy, no. It just still takes me by surprise when I'm called upon to teach my child how to write in these situations.

But for a science fair project? It's much more pleasant to teach my son how to write in that context. That is entirely parent-driven, and it's not a surprise: I know I'm on the hook for how clearly my child presents his information. Children have not developed the ability to step outside themselves and figure out what their audience needs to know, and when they need to know it.

-- BeckyC - 12 Dec 2005

"Children have not developed the ability to step outside themselves and figure out what their audience needs to know, and when they need to know it."

Exactly! I have noticed that writing skills greatly lag reading skills, as one would expect. When a book report is given, it is for a book at their reading level: 75-150 page chapter books. (although he has read all of the Harry Potter books) He is given a two/three page form to follow for writing the report with maybe a page allowed for writing a description of the book. Even I would have to work at reducing a description of the book down to one or two pages. The times I have worked with my son on these projects (he could never do them himself), it has been a struggle. In class, they talk a lot about editing (they call it SCOPE) and correcting a rough draft, but not much time on the more difficult task of coming up with the first draft and have it close enough to even begin the SCOPE process. I tell him that it is like reducing a Harry Potter book down to movie length, since we have spent a long time talking about what is in the book versus what is in the movie. He can see that the more you have to reduce, the more difficult it becomes.

-- SteveH - 12 Dec 2005

As with his other projects, the problem is that the school doesn't prepare them to do the job. They may talk a little bit about what to do, but they don't see what goes on at home. The kids just can't do the project by themselves. If I let him do the project all by himself, it would be horrible, take FOREVER, he would learn very little, and he would get a poor grade. I end up doing the teacher's job. I don't do it for him, but he needed major help in organization, reducing the information down to a reasonable size, and putting it all into his own words. No parent I know likes school projects like dioramas, research reports, and other thematic displays of educational pedagogy and feel-good-ness.

Absolutely—Steve, I'll get this up front. This is an excellent description of what parents are doing, which gets characterized as 'hovering.'

I'm reteaching everything in English & math.

I'm reteaching nothing in science, social studies, music, & Spanish—though it looks like I need to be reteaching music and Spanish.

Given what we're paying in property taxes, this is appalling.

It's appalling in any case.

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Dec 2005

my 4th grader had to write a five-paragraph "persuasive essay"

developmentally inappropriate

College students can't do this; entry-level Masters candidates can't do this.

None of these students understand using analytical writing to create & support an argument.

It's a larger problem than this, however. Entry-level Masters candidates frequently do not understand that texts are arguments.

We are asking students to write persuasive compositions before they understand that nonfiction writing is argument.

-- CatherineJohnson - 12 Dec 2005

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helicopter parents in the TIMES

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