Parents and homework

Parents and homework

I have discovered that many schools regularly hand out homework that is too difficult for many of the kids to do by themselves. For some reason, which I do not understand, all children in a class are frequently given identical homework to each other, even though some of the kids are on special programs, or cannot reading it.

This work gets taken home and frustrated parents try their best to help their children to complete it.

This is very bad idea and please do not do this.

Parents are not trained teachers. Parents do not know how the child has been taught to do the maths or sound out the words. Parents can get the homework wrong and the teaching methods wrong and confuse their kids.

Parents are not teachers

If just anyone could teach your child then they would not need to train teachers. Would you let just anyone plumb your house or build it? Would you take your child to a random person when s/he is sick? Of course not. Teachers are trained to teach and should be teaching your child.

Homework should consist of what the child has been taught that week and be used to ascertain whether the student has properly understood and retained the information. It should not be random. If your child cannot do the homework then s/he has not understood that work and the teacher should know this and give special help.

By doing the homework for your child you are effectively telling your child’s teacher that your son or daughter completely understands the work and then s/he will be moved onto harder work which s/he cannot actually do resulting in him/her getting further and further behind, loose self esteem and misbehave at school. This is how some kids end up getting labelled as ADHD.

Schools have to understand that the child cannot do this homework and new homework must be set. Both parents and teachers should get together and decide just what homework the child should do. And the child should be able to do the homework by him/herself. If the parents are involved then they have to be taught exactly how to teach the child.

I always set small amounts of homework for my parents to do with the child and they sit in on the lessons so as to learn exactly how to help the child. Also further detailed instructions can be found in the book “Dyslexia – how to win”.

If you are a parent who is giving regular and extensive help with your child’s homework then stop and make an appointment with his/her teaching and sort this out. If your child has been given detension or punished for not completing homework that s/he cannot do, as many of my students have, then create a stink about this!

If your child’s teacher has a problem with this then print out this article and take it in with you. That way you can blame me!

There are plenty of games and simple learning tricks in my book and perhaps some of them could be done instead.

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