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Spreading Homework Out So Even Parents Have Some - The New York Times

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Spreading Homework Out So Even Parents Have Some - The New York Times

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Some parents, he added, seem happy to revisit their high school years.

"There was one parent last year who would write pages and pages of stuff. It was great, so good to read," said Mr. Frye, who graduated from Montclair High in 1994.

Others are more resistant. "When my daughter told me about the homework, I looked at her and said, 'You've got to be kidding me. I graduated. I'm done,'" said Lydia Bishop, a local real estate broker whose daughter Vanessa was in Mr. Frye's class last year. "I did it very resentfully, but I did it."

Sometimes, Ms. Bishop said, she got out of the homework assignment by logging on to the blog that Mr. Frye created for parents and writing, "I really don't need this today, I have stuff to do."

The excuse, she said, was enough to keep Vanessa from being penalized and, despite her reluctance to do homework, Ms. Bishop still thinks Mr. Frye is "one of the best teachers we've got."

Some parents say they like the assignments because they can spark intellectual conversation with teenagers who are normally less than communicative. "Searching for meaning in literary works is like stretching brain-cell-taffy in this household of literal interpretations and men of few words," one mother wrote on the blog.

Others refrain from complaining to Mr. Frye but figure out the most mature way to say, "The dog ate my homework," or persuade their spouse to comment on the parent blog instead.

In three years, Mr. Frye said, the assignments have met with only one flat-out refusal. He has received strong support from his bosses - Peter Renwick, an assistant principal at Montclair High, called the approach "very innovative and creative" - and some cautious interest from national teaching experts.

"I think it's great," said Gerald N. Tirozzi, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals. "It's wonderful to involve parents in this way, very meaningfully, and directly related to the instruction the children are receiving in school." Mr. Tirozzi said he had not heard of any other teachers making similar assignments, and added that he would be interested to know if the students were performing better.

Carol Jago, the incoming vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English, said, "This is one of those really good ideas that has the potential to do what we really want in society.

"It has to do with what we talk to our students about, and what kind of models we are for our children as readers," she said, adding that in her 32 years of teaching, she has often asked parents to forgo hiring tutors and instead just read the books their children were reading.

"With 10th graders, the parents often really did tell me that it was the one place where they could talk with their student without fighting, without arguing about their hair," Ms. Jago said.

But she also cautioned against penalizing students for something that their parents cannot or refuse to do.

"Common educational wisdom is that you don't assign homework that kids can't do on their own," she said.

In fact, Mr. Frye has not penalized students whose parents have told him outright that they will not post responses. But in one case, when the parents neither did the homework nor explained why, a student did lose points - but not enough to lower the student's overall grade, he said.

He said he got the idea for the homework assignments from a district kindergarten teacher he sat next to during teacher orientation one year, who asked parents to write about what their children had done over the weekend.

Experts say that while many elementary school teachers ask parents to write letters introducing their children at the beginning of the school year, few teachers subject parents to a weekly regimen of reading and writing.

Mr. Frye, 30, teaches 65 ninth graders, in three sections, in a classroom where student art and album covers from Stevie Wonder and John Coltrane decorate the walls. As part of the school district's efforts to reduce the achievement gap between black and white students in this Essex County suburb - a topic Mr. Frye studied for his graduate thesis - every freshman, regardless of earlier performance in school, takes a world literature course, considered a high honors class, like his.

He said that all the students' parents had computer access and that only two had told him that they were not fluent in English; one posts on the blog anyway, one sends her responses to him privately, by e-mail. Another parent phones responses in to him.

Tony Lopez, a corporate lawyer who posted a lengthy reaction to the Kennedy speech, given the day after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, said he was actually glad to do the weekly homework

"I take it as giving back to the teacher what he is apparently giving to our kids, a lot of attention and a lot of requirements," Mr. Lopez said. He added that he had been impressed with Mr. Frye's preparations for the class.

"As a family, we opted to meet him at least halfway," he said.

Tracy Parsons, whose son Danny is the second of her two boys to be a student in Mr. Frye's class, said that the weekly assignments had changed the way she approached homework with her children.

"In high school, to some degree you have to back off from homework, so they can gain independent learning skills," Ms. Parsons said. But teenagers, she noted, "leave a lot out. You ask, 'What'd you do in science?' and they say, 'It was fine.'"

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Spreading Homework Out So Even Parents Have Some

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Some parents, he added, seem happy to revisit their high school years. "There was one parent last year who would write pages and pages of stuff. It was great, so good to read," said Mr. Frye, who graduated from Montclair High in 1994. Others are more resistant.

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Paying me $125,000 won’t make me a better teacher -- Quartz

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Paying me $125,000 won’t make me a better teacher -- Quartz

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Greek philosopher and head of Aristotle's school in Lyceum, Theophrastus, once stated, "Time is the most valuable thing man can spend." This is how a school leader felt in 290 BCE, and nearly 2000 years, the sentiment still stands-little has changed in how we educate our children.

In the US, most people work 250 days a year. Yet we expect our students and teachers to make one full year of academic and social growth with 70 fewer days, missing a huge chunk of time during the summer months and numerous snow days, assemblies, fire drills, standardized testing days, etc. that subtract from the 180 total most districts employ. Furthermore, by most district contracts, teachers are expected to show up 10 minutes before school begins and are allowed to leave 20 minutes after the last bell. During the day, they are given roughly 50-100 minutes of lunch and prep time, most of which is used up by meetings and supporting struggling students. When you take a step back and look at the actual number of hours teachers have to plan, confer, observe other teachers, and reflect upon their practice, it is no wonder that a dollar value placed on quality of the educator is irrelevant if they aren't given the time to learn and grow into highly effective educators. This kind of time can be easily worked into the current model of school structure by adding 50 more minutes to the school day (essentially one more class period) and providing students with an additional elective period. With a model of adding a school period and an additional elective, the overall cost to a district is far less than what it would be to pay teachers $125,000 and not essentially change the practice of teachers working in silos to plan, assess and review student work with a teacher team.

Before I applied to The Equity Project Charter School in New York City in 2009, I had what I thought was my dream teaching job. I was teaching English at the high school I had graduated from and had made huge inroads to lessening the achievement gap between white and black students. I basically worked with the school administration to develop a schedule that provided me time to check in on students and meet with other teachers. In short, I could not have asked for a better teaching circumstance-with the two exceptions: class periods were only 44 minutes and I was barely making enough money (even though it was my 10 year in the classroom) to support my burgeoning family. Classes were so large, some nearly with 40 students, that it became impossible to work with specific groups for a significant enough time to remediate or push reading and writing levels beyond where the students entered.

I was extremely dismayed by the fact that a new teacher coming into the district would be making only $10,000 less than I was and more senior teachers (15-plus years) were making nearly $40,000 more than I was. Moreover, the district's union had just ratified a new contract where my pay increase for the next three years was only $400 per year! All of this was more so muted by the fact that I worked really, really, really hard and others, who were paid much more than I was, did not.

I arrived at school every day between 7-7:15am (one hour earlier than the start time) to run a study club for students who struggled with homework and other assignments; I never took a lunch/prep because I was working with other teachers to design projects and grade work together; and I would leave anywhere from 5:30-6:30pm only to go home and work for another 2-3 hours per day. This was how I worked almost everyday for 10 years until I saw the 2008 article in the New York Times about this guy named Zeke Vanderhoek who wanted to start a school that paid teachers $125,000, gave them time to teach and learn from each other, and saw the teachers as the leaders of the school.

I excitedly put the application together, went through the rigorous interview process, and found myself sitting in a room with the eight best teachers out of the 400 who applied. That initial summer, we tossed around ideas, laughed, disagreed, but most importantly, by the end of the summer, we had co-designed a school. Because salaries were not an issue, I felt free to think and challenge the other teachers. Each summer, the staff would meet to refine practice and rethink school policy. This was time dedicated to teacher growth; some of the lessons I learned, I still use today in my role as Special Assistant for Curriculum and Instruction for the Newark Public Schools in New Jersey. Yet the one thing we all bought into was the idea that student growth and our own development was going to be a long term process-a process that did pay off as the initial class at TEP had academic gains that were a year and half beyond their regional peers (as shown in the recent Wall Street Journal article).

As the school year wore on, it became obvious that the $125,000 was actually not a mark of the quality of a teacher in these circumstances. Sure, a $125,000 teacher in an all-white suburban neighborhood could truly deserve her salary as her outcomes are better than other teachers' in equitable circumstances. Part of the TEP's charter was to take a representative sample of the Washington Heights neighborhood, and so we had about one-third of the population of the students with some kind of special need/English as a Second Language classification while other students had read the entire Harry Potter series in 4 grade. In the first couple of years, a number of teachers quit mid-year. The rigor of the job got in the way of what was the best part-having the extra time to work with each other to solve problems and think critically about students.

Eventually my desire to move into some kind of administrative role took over my desire to spend another year teaching and I ended up leaving TEP shortly before my 3year. However, the relationships I forged with the people who were working, learning and growing alongside me are wholly based in making time to discuss our practice as leaders and teachers. We chose to make time to learn more about our craft and that lesson of time has been the most valuable thing I have taken away from my experience at TEP Charter School. To be honest, most of us would have given up the $125,000 (but not for too much less) for the experiences we had in shaping and developing what has become a truly successful project in providing equity for a largely underserved population of students and an under-appreciated population of phenomenal teachers.
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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Paying me $125,000 won't make me a better teacher

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Greek philosopher and head of Aristotle's school in Lyceum, Theophrastus, once stated, "Time is the most valuable thing man can spend." This is how a school leader felt in 290 BCE, and nearly 2000 years, the sentiment still stands-little has changed in how we educate our children.

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Engaging Parents Beyond the Parent Conference by Using a Shared "Parent Journal" - Vialogues

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Engaging Parents Beyond the Parent Conference by Using a Shared "Parent Journal" - Vialogues

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Engaging Parents Beyond the Parent Conference by Using a Shared "Parent Journal"

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Damion Frye discusses his TC Record article, Engaging Parents Beyond the Parent Conference. Frye teaches English at TEP Charter School. #ParentalInvolvement #TheVoice