I am going to come right out and admit that I still have not come up with a solution to the homework problem. I assign homework twice a week, and I ALWAYS have some kids that don't do it. They don't care that it lowers their grade. They don't care that their parents will be informed. They don't care that they won't get tickets that day. They don't care that they won't get any free time on Friday. They don't CARE, period.
I tell myself that I should just enforce those consequences and move on. Yet I always find myself angry at these kids and stressing over the fact that they're not doing what they were supposed to!
Latest example: I knew I was going to be out yesterday at a meeting, so I told the kids that the homework I was giving them on Tuesday would be due on Thursday morning when I returned. So they had TWO days to complete the homework instead of the usual one. The homework was 5 word problems. I also told the kids that anyone who did not turn in their homework would not be going on the field trip with us after TAKS. That is a pretty severe consequence!
This morning, I had 3 kids in my early class who didn't do the homework. One girl's excuse was that she left the homework in her desk. REALLY? You left it there two days in a row??
In the afternoon, I had 2 boys that did not do all of the problems, and 3 kids who didn't bring it at all.
I'd love to hear from veteran teachers and new teachers alike how you feel about this. Do you just not care and move on? Or do you hammer the kids until they do the HW? Or have you found that happy medium?
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Showing posts with label homework. Show all posts
Showing posts with label homework. Show all posts
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Friday, September 10, 2010
Words escape me
Today was NOT the greatest Friday in the world. By 8:20, I had already put one kid in time out in another classroom, ripped up one kid's homework and thrown it across the room, and taken two kids down the hallway to the phone to call their parents.
I've had better mornings, to say the least.
My rage just continued to simmer all morning long because of my homeroom's seeming apathy about their education. We've been studying number forms this week. Standard form, expanded form, and word form. For most of the 3rd graders, this is the first time they have been required to know how to read a 4, 5, or 6 digit number. On Tuesday, we went over expanded form, and Wednesday and Thursday, we went over word form.
Expanded form never ceases to frustrate me. It is, quite possibly, the absolute SIMPLEST type of problem in all of 3rd grade. It involves adding, every question has plus signs in it, to remind you to add, just in case you forgot, and mostly, you are adding zeros!! A typical question is "What number is represented by 300,000 + 20,000 + 500 + 40 + 8?"
Year after year after year, I have kids that stumble all over these problems, merely because of the fact that they refuse to actually add the numbers. They would rather cherry pick the first digit off of every "piece" and string those numbers together. For the above question, I would get a ton of answers that read 32,548. (Or worse, 3,2548)
I pull my hair out, grind my teeth, and stress out big time while I plead and cajole and try to convince them that if they would just stack these numbers up vertically and add them, they would get the right answer every time. I am usually successful in this endeavor during the day or two that we practice expanded form in class, and sometimes I can get the kids to do it on their homework for that night. When the test rolls around, all bets are off.
Going over the word form strategy on Wednesday and Thursday, I felt I was making some progress. It's overwhelming at first for the kids to see these large numbers and even larger strings of words. But I have a strategy called "Three easy boxes" where we chunk the numbers and words into 3-digit groups, and when the kids do this, they are almost always successful.
Yesterday, I worked with small groups for the first time this year. I was pretty pleased with myself, as time management and small groups are among my weak points that I'm trying to improve on. The kids I worked with got it, and they were telling me all the steps while they did three easy boxes on the number words and turned them into standard form. Before each class dismissed, I passed out the homework, and we did a couple of example problems so that they kids would know exactly what I expected to see.
So this morning, I was incredibly disappointed to find that ONE out of my 15 homeroom students had done her homework correctly. I have 17 in my homeroom, but 2 were absent, so I have no idea if they did it right. And I don't mean that the other 14 wrote down the wrong numbers, I mean that the other 14 didn't try to turn the words into numbers at all. They just bubbled in answers.
Some of the kids hadn't even done the work on the problems that I did in class.
One girl had done nothing BUT the 2 problems that we did together in class, and she said, "Oh, were we supposed to do the other ones?" I had to struggle very hard not to use adult language. Instead, I marched her down to the phone. Call number 1.
I told the kids that I had planned on giving them a little inside recess at the end of the class, but that instead, that time would be used at the beginning, for them to work on their homework, doing it the right way. After about 15 minutes, which involved the second call and placing the third kid in time out in another room, we went over most of the homework problems, which involved doing the strategies of changing words to numbers over and over and over. Over and over and over, I kept saying, "This is what I expect to see on your tests. THIS is the work I want to see BEFORE you fill in a bubble."
When the test started, it was as if I had never spoken a word about it. I walked around and had to stop by about 8 kids' desks, noticing that they had filled in bubbles for questions 1 and 2 without showing a lick of work. No stacking and adding, no three easy boxes, NOTHING.
I understand that these kids are babies at the beginning of the year. Understanding that is not the same as liking it, though, and I was in a terrible mood for the whole morning.
The spelling test went just as poorly, but I won't even go into that.
My afternoon class walked in, and as they did their calendar activities, I started glancing at homeworks to check their work. The first I flipped over looked just like the morning class's. My heart sank. The next one I flipped had all of the work completely done. So did the next, and the next, and the next. Out of the 15 kids in the afternoon class, only 3 had NOT done their work correctly.
After wanting to punt my morning class through the nearest uprights, I just wanted to hug this second class.
I still had a lot of the same issues during the test. For some reason, there is a major disconnect with 3rd graders between work in class and work on tests. But I was a lot more pleased and proud of the 2nd group.
The other high point of my day involved a nice little piece of evidence that I now have in my possession.
One of the kids in the morning class told me that he was going to do the homework the way we practiced it in class, but his mother had told him not to do it that way. I explained that since she wasn't present in class to see how we did things, that HE would have to be the one to show her how we did these problems. He kept saying that she told him not to do it that way. I kept telling him that if she said that, he needed to tell her, "This is the way Mister Teacher says we have to do it."
Eventually, he said, "She said not to listen to the teacher."
Oh, really?? I asked him to repeat it, and then I repeated it myself to be sure. "Your mom actually told you not to listen to your teacher?"
He nodded his head. So I went and got a piece of paper and told him to write that down, explaining the whole time that I wanted to be able to show that paper to his mom when we sat down to talk, and that I wanted to be able to show that paper to the principal and assistant principal when they asked about his work.
Most kids would back away from a claim like that at this point. But my munchkin persisted, and wrote down his statement.
Should be very interesting next week to actually talk to his mom and verify or shoot down this claim.
I've had better mornings, to say the least.
My rage just continued to simmer all morning long because of my homeroom's seeming apathy about their education. We've been studying number forms this week. Standard form, expanded form, and word form. For most of the 3rd graders, this is the first time they have been required to know how to read a 4, 5, or 6 digit number. On Tuesday, we went over expanded form, and Wednesday and Thursday, we went over word form.
Expanded form never ceases to frustrate me. It is, quite possibly, the absolute SIMPLEST type of problem in all of 3rd grade. It involves adding, every question has plus signs in it, to remind you to add, just in case you forgot, and mostly, you are adding zeros!! A typical question is "What number is represented by 300,000 + 20,000 + 500 + 40 + 8?"
Year after year after year, I have kids that stumble all over these problems, merely because of the fact that they refuse to actually add the numbers. They would rather cherry pick the first digit off of every "piece" and string those numbers together. For the above question, I would get a ton of answers that read 32,548. (Or worse, 3,2548)
I pull my hair out, grind my teeth, and stress out big time while I plead and cajole and try to convince them that if they would just stack these numbers up vertically and add them, they would get the right answer every time. I am usually successful in this endeavor during the day or two that we practice expanded form in class, and sometimes I can get the kids to do it on their homework for that night. When the test rolls around, all bets are off.
Going over the word form strategy on Wednesday and Thursday, I felt I was making some progress. It's overwhelming at first for the kids to see these large numbers and even larger strings of words. But I have a strategy called "Three easy boxes" where we chunk the numbers and words into 3-digit groups, and when the kids do this, they are almost always successful.
Yesterday, I worked with small groups for the first time this year. I was pretty pleased with myself, as time management and small groups are among my weak points that I'm trying to improve on. The kids I worked with got it, and they were telling me all the steps while they did three easy boxes on the number words and turned them into standard form. Before each class dismissed, I passed out the homework, and we did a couple of example problems so that they kids would know exactly what I expected to see.
So this morning, I was incredibly disappointed to find that ONE out of my 15 homeroom students had done her homework correctly. I have 17 in my homeroom, but 2 were absent, so I have no idea if they did it right. And I don't mean that the other 14 wrote down the wrong numbers, I mean that the other 14 didn't try to turn the words into numbers at all. They just bubbled in answers.
Some of the kids hadn't even done the work on the problems that I did in class.
One girl had done nothing BUT the 2 problems that we did together in class, and she said, "Oh, were we supposed to do the other ones?" I had to struggle very hard not to use adult language. Instead, I marched her down to the phone. Call number 1.
I told the kids that I had planned on giving them a little inside recess at the end of the class, but that instead, that time would be used at the beginning, for them to work on their homework, doing it the right way. After about 15 minutes, which involved the second call and placing the third kid in time out in another room, we went over most of the homework problems, which involved doing the strategies of changing words to numbers over and over and over. Over and over and over, I kept saying, "This is what I expect to see on your tests. THIS is the work I want to see BEFORE you fill in a bubble."
When the test started, it was as if I had never spoken a word about it. I walked around and had to stop by about 8 kids' desks, noticing that they had filled in bubbles for questions 1 and 2 without showing a lick of work. No stacking and adding, no three easy boxes, NOTHING.
I understand that these kids are babies at the beginning of the year. Understanding that is not the same as liking it, though, and I was in a terrible mood for the whole morning.
The spelling test went just as poorly, but I won't even go into that.
My afternoon class walked in, and as they did their calendar activities, I started glancing at homeworks to check their work. The first I flipped over looked just like the morning class's. My heart sank. The next one I flipped had all of the work completely done. So did the next, and the next, and the next. Out of the 15 kids in the afternoon class, only 3 had NOT done their work correctly.
After wanting to punt my morning class through the nearest uprights, I just wanted to hug this second class.
I still had a lot of the same issues during the test. For some reason, there is a major disconnect with 3rd graders between work in class and work on tests. But I was a lot more pleased and proud of the 2nd group.
The other high point of my day involved a nice little piece of evidence that I now have in my possession.
One of the kids in the morning class told me that he was going to do the homework the way we practiced it in class, but his mother had told him not to do it that way. I explained that since she wasn't present in class to see how we did things, that HE would have to be the one to show her how we did these problems. He kept saying that she told him not to do it that way. I kept telling him that if she said that, he needed to tell her, "This is the way Mister Teacher says we have to do it."
Eventually, he said, "She said not to listen to the teacher."
Oh, really?? I asked him to repeat it, and then I repeated it myself to be sure. "Your mom actually told you not to listen to your teacher?"
He nodded his head. So I went and got a piece of paper and told him to write that down, explaining the whole time that I wanted to be able to show that paper to his mom when we sat down to talk, and that I wanted to be able to show that paper to the principal and assistant principal when they asked about his work.
Most kids would back away from a claim like that at this point. But my munchkin persisted, and wrote down his statement.
Should be very interesting next week to actually talk to his mom and verify or shoot down this claim.
Saturday, September 04, 2010
A new way of doing things!
Yesterday morning, as the kids were returning to their seats after Calendar Math, I was walking around checking to see if they had shown their work on the homework from the night before. It was a set of 10 place value questions (ie, What is the value of the 5 in 498, 256?), and I had insisted that they show a place value chart for each question before choosing their answer. We had even done the first question and chart together in class the day before.
All of the kids had done their charts except one, A, who had not been doing his homework this year anyway. So that really didn't surprise me.
As I picked up his paper to look on the back, he watched me with a spark in his eye. I of course saw nothing on the back except the one chart that we had done in class, but before I could ask, "Where are your place value charts?" A proudly exclaimed, "I did it a DIFFERENT way!" As if he had independently discovered a new element.
I tried not to be TOO harsh as I told him that merely filling in an answer bubble without doing anything else was not actually a "way" so to speak.
All of the kids had done their charts except one, A, who had not been doing his homework this year anyway. So that really didn't surprise me.
As I picked up his paper to look on the back, he watched me with a spark in his eye. I of course saw nothing on the back except the one chart that we had done in class, but before I could ask, "Where are your place value charts?" A proudly exclaimed, "I did it a DIFFERENT way!" As if he had independently discovered a new element.
I tried not to be TOO harsh as I told him that merely filling in an answer bubble without doing anything else was not actually a "way" so to speak.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Back to school blahs
Sunday has finally arrived. I know that I should be happy, grateful, THANKful to have just had a nice, long, relaxing break from school. Still, that doesn't change the fact that it is now the day before I have to go back to school (and have morning duty this week to make getting up even earlier!), and I'm wishing the break was longer.
Before break, we were studying geometry, creating and identifying 2- and 3-dimensional shapes. We made a flip book for logging 3-D shapes and did a little scavenger hunt around the room for examples. ie, a whiteboard eraser is a rectangular prism, a chair leg is a cylinder, etc.
I sent these flip books home with the kids over break and told them that their homework was to cut out pictures from newspapers, magazines, store fliers, whatever that showed examples of 3-D shapes in real life. They were to glue these pictures inside their flip books and then bring them back for display.
It will be very interesting to see how many flip books I get back tomorrow. I have to say, I'm really not expecting much. A lot of my kids have trouble bringing back homework or signed papers from the night before, much less from 10 days before, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if I only get about half of them back, and of those half, several are half-assed.
Oh well, in the meantime, if anyone is interested, I have set up a blog for my bride-to-be and me. It's got a little slide show and that's about it right now, but you might just see a softer side of Mister Teacher.
I hope everyone had a great break, and good luck in getting back to the grind tomorrow!
Before break, we were studying geometry, creating and identifying 2- and 3-dimensional shapes. We made a flip book for logging 3-D shapes and did a little scavenger hunt around the room for examples. ie, a whiteboard eraser is a rectangular prism, a chair leg is a cylinder, etc.
I sent these flip books home with the kids over break and told them that their homework was to cut out pictures from newspapers, magazines, store fliers, whatever that showed examples of 3-D shapes in real life. They were to glue these pictures inside their flip books and then bring them back for display.
It will be very interesting to see how many flip books I get back tomorrow. I have to say, I'm really not expecting much. A lot of my kids have trouble bringing back homework or signed papers from the night before, much less from 10 days before, so it wouldn't surprise me at all if I only get about half of them back, and of those half, several are half-assed.
Oh well, in the meantime, if anyone is interested, I have set up a blog for my bride-to-be and me. It's got a little slide show and that's about it right now, but you might just see a softer side of Mister Teacher.
I hope everyone had a great break, and good luck in getting back to the grind tomorrow!
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Lunch Bunch Crunch
Today, Ms. Jenn Ed and I held our very first lunch bunch rewards party.
Tired of too many kids not doing their homework, we made a big announcement at the beginning of this six weeks period. We wrote all 41 of our kids' names on whiteboards, and told them that every time someone didn't hand in their homework when it was due, their name would be erased from the board. We told them that after three weeks, whoever's name was still on the board would get to come to a very special lunch bunch with their teachers. There would be ice cream, juice boxes, Turkish delight (no wait, that's Narnia).
We kind of figured that at the end of three weeks, there wouldn't be that many kids left on the board. However, we also figured that if we really pulled out all the stops and made this first lunch bunch truly legendary, that the kids involved would go back and hype it up to the other kids, and that we might have a lot more homework being turned in after that.
That last supposition remains to be seen. But the lunch bunch today seemed to be a success. There were 11 kids (yes, out of 41). Those kids got to bring their lunch back to my room, where we gave them chips, candy, juice boxes, and ice cream. We ate with the kids and joked around with them.
I had made up a Christmas-themed CD for us to listen to. Interestingly enough, the song that really fired the kids up was Feliz Navidad (I want to wish you a Merry Christmas). I started singing "I want to wish ____a Merry Christmas," inserting the names of some of the kids in the room, and much hilarity ensued.
Now will just have to see how this success translates to the other kids turning their homework in.
Maybe we'll have 12 kids next time...
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