homework for kindergarteners

[Cindy]

I don't think kindergarteners should be assigned homework.

But if you are going to assign homework to a kindergartener, it should be homework she can reasonably complete on her own. Last night I spent more than an hour helping a cute little kindergartener with a lot of unreasonable homework. She probably had at least 30 pages of assignments, none of which were intended for a kid to complete on her own. For instance, one problem just had a big number 6, and then there were four multiple choice answers under it: 4, 5, 6, and 7. I was confused at first, but then I noticed that there were instructions written in a footnote at the bottom of the page in a small font, clearly intended for a parent to read to the kid. These instructions said to pick the number greater than 6, and when I told Ajaibu this, she promptly filled in the circle under the number 7. This was consistently true -- she understood all of the concepts, but she needed someone to explain the instructions to her, since the instructions were all down in the footnotes for parents.

Another set of problems just had a whole bunch of dots, then a fill-in-the-blank spot that said, "__ vertices." Ajaibu had tried to do her homework on her own ahead of time, and she gave this problem her best guess by counting every single dot -- all 100 of them -- and writing this number on the blank line. As it turns out, the parent's instructions at the bottom said to draw a hexagon, "place counter around each corner or vertex of the hexagon," and then "count the number of corners or vertices." This kind of problem assumes that every kid has parents who are willing and able to help them with all of their homework, and that's definitely not true.

Ajaibu's parents are Somali refugees with limited English skills (and probably limited literacy in general). For various cultural reasons, Somali refugee parents aren't generally very involved in their kids' schoolwork either. Ajaibu is a smart kid, but she doesn't have parents who are willing or able to sit down with her for an hour to read all of the instructions for every homework problem to her. She's not the only kid in that situation either. And it seems to me that this kind of homework assignment just sets up these kids for failure. They're already at a disadvantage, and they don't need to be made to feel dumb by homework that they can't (and aren't really expected to) complete on their own.

[Digit]

Wow, my second-grade daughter's assigned homework consists of writing five or six sentences and three math problems. I guess she'll be working for Ajaibu someday.