When Mom and Dad can’t help

Kids’ homework now stumps many parents

Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Brian Lewis⁄The Gazette Ethan Lott, a third-grader at Piney Branch Elementary School, works through an algebra problem. Students are taking on advanced concepts at a younger age, and parents are being confronted with more complicated questions about homework. Click here to enlarge this photo Brian Lewis⁄The Gazette Emily Rawson, a third-grade teacher at Piney Branch Elementary School, works with her students recently on balancing equations.

On a recent afternoon, his 10-year-old son Michael Jr., or M.J., was explaining to his father the concept of a stem and a leaf from his fifth-grade accelerated math class.

‘‘If you have a two-digit number, one number is the stem, the other is the leaf. But why is that relevant in the real world? I’m not certain,” said Pauls, listening to his son rattle off the latest math concepts he’s tackled in class so far: frequency tables, misleading statistics and the dreaded stem-and-leaf.

‘‘I have my master’s [degree], and sometimes I say, ‘What in the world are you doing, and why did they send this home for me to help you with?’ ” said Pauls, a Silver Spring resident who has two sons at Piney Branch Elementary School in Takoma Park, adding that if they are coming home in fifth grade with math that he was unfamiliar with, he is concerned about what will happen when the children get older.

After decades of concern among educators and parents that excessive homework gives children less time to be kids, homework today is more fast-paced than ever, according to the U.S. Department of Education 2003 report ‘‘Homework Tips for Parents.” And as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and rising academic standards to catch up with other nations, even what younger students bring home can look foreign to their parents.

‘‘Kids are expected to do more sooner,” said Scott DeGasperis, magnet coordinator at Takoma Park Middle School. ‘‘They’re reading before I did, doing fractions before I did. The county’s set a goal of 80 percent for all eighth-graders to get algebra before high school.”

Pauls said new methods of teaching can add to parents’ confusion, even if the subject matter is familiar. And while his sons’ school doesn’t give parents a crash course on new teaching styles or how to help with homework, he is confident that tutors and accessible teachers at Piney Branch can serve as a resource. A countywide cable TV show called Homework Hotline Live, a dial-in program that comes on after school hours, also is available.

John O’Flahavan, associate professor and elementary education program coordinator in the college of education at the University of Maryland in College Park, said many educators don’t want parents helping, since homework is a ‘‘reliable instrument to use” that helps teachers judge whether the student understood the work done in class.

Leah and Daniel Muskin-Pierret, 12-year-old twins in Takoma Park Middle School’s math, science and computer science magnet program, get most of their homework help from the homework club after school, or meeting with their teachers before or after class.

‘‘Radicals ... blehh ... they’re terrible. It’s not that hard, it’s not impossible ... they just rack your brain,” Leah said.

‘‘We’ve got all this crazy stuff with HTML,” her brother Daniel said of creating Web sites in his computer science class, which with his science class are his favorite subjects. In science, the seventh-graders recently made ‘‘ublech” slime, or solids suspended in liquid made of corn starch and water.

‘‘They passed me up in terms of what I remember in sixth grade,” said Carol Muskin, the twins’ mother. Muskin refers all math-related inquiries to their husband, who has a Ph.D. in economics, or their 14-year-old brother, Joel, who is in the magnet program at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring.

‘‘He tells me I should know what I’m doing already,” Daniel said of his brother. ‘‘He says he helps by not helping.”

Early independence

Many of the kids taking accelerated classes don’t seem to need much help. And often these students are self-sufficient enough that if they do need help, they’ll seek it from teachers or peers, O’Flahavan said.

‘‘It’s very difficult to get into these programs. When [magnet programs] select those kids, they tend to be very articulate, very compliant in their motivation,” he said.

In Emily Rawson’s class, it seems easy to get the students excited about math. The second-year teacher instructs third-graders in the accelerated math program at Piney Branch Elementary School.

‘‘Sometimes, your parents and guardians, they may know it, but they need to be refreshed,” Rawson said before the class. She then prompted the students to give her the rules for the numbers three and nine in the world of exponents.

They are beginning to evaluate expressions this week, a steppingstone to algebra. They are taking on arithmetic at least two years ahead of their peers, and were placed in the class after a series of recommendations from parents and teachers, and a school-system wide test called the TerraNova.

‘‘Oh, x is unknown ... well ... I’ve been doing unknown variables for like two or three years,” said 8-year-old Eli Leizerov, leaning back in his chair in the back of the class, the first one done with his classroom exercise.

Looking ahead in his packet, the student’s eyes became wide behind their wire-framed glasses.

‘‘Robbie, look at the last page!” he exclaimed to his neighbor Robbie Fitzpatrick, also 8, who was placing Yahtzee-like cubes onto a laminated sheet of paper, attempting to balance equations visually before transferring his answer to the packet of problems in front of him.

‘‘Wow, do you think we can work ahead if we’re done?” Leizerov said.

Martin Creel, director of the division of accelerated and enriched instruction in the Montgomery County Public Schools, said he sees the acceleration even in his first-grader. Children overall are exposed to more than they were a generation ago, but there are also those students whose parents and teachers wish were more intense about academics.

‘‘They’re ready for it,” Creel said. ‘‘Kids that aren’t challenged, tend to get bored and turned off by education.”

Closing the gap

As children become more comfortable with technology and math or science processes their parents aren’t used to or were never exposed to, even those on a standard track are challenged.

‘‘There are more expectations to match the levels the children are at,” said Marc Elrich, who has taught fourth and fifth grade for 16 years at Rolling Terrace Elementary School in Takoma Park.

Elrich said students coming in to see him during lunchtime and recess are both those who need help with their homework and those who want to know more.

Michelle Harvey’s 12-year-old son, Cas, is a seventh-grader in Takoma Park Middle School’s gifted and talented program, and while he is more at ease in the school’s music program than exploring set theory in a math class, he, too, feels the effects of a more pronounced emphasis on academic achievement, according to his mother.

‘‘The challenge isn’t just for the accelerated kids who are flying past this stuff,” said Harvey, president of the school’s PTA. ‘‘A parent who isn’t used to working online at all, or who’s never dealt with advanced math ... it’s a challenge across the board for parents. That’s the flip side.”

But although parents must often admit they can no longer be as reliable a resource for their children’s homework help, they usually see the trend as a positive, and want their children in the most aggressive programs.

‘‘We’ve been fortunate enough, that when [M.J.] was in fourth grade, they saw great potential in him,” Pauls said. ‘‘It’s difficult ... it’s the pace ... but it’s great motivation for him.”