Deemphasizing grades

[mpeel]

My 6 year old is about to start school for the first time. I have been unschooling her but I cannot continue. I know the school will make a big deal about grades. I don't care one way or the other about them. How do I keep her from getting wrapped up in them? I will probably have to sign the report card. So, what do I say? I plan to ask her if she feels they reflect what she has learned. I just hate the whole idea of grades. Hopefully, we will not face homework for a couple of years. But that too has me worried. I feel it is useless. Kids more learn by doing active work, not sitting writing.

TIA.

[alexa07]

Wow, I am surprised your school has grades. No public school near where I live has grades until 6th grade! Until then they just have categories.

Like for a six year old it might be "Understands phoneme awareness" and then the teacher places an arrow along a line from "begining this task" to "secure in this task"

Are you sure your school has grades. If they do tell your daughter it does not matter what grades she gets as long as she works her hardest.

As for homework, here, six year olds (1st graders) have about 5-20 minutes of homework and it usually just enforces what they have done for the day (so it is easy for parents to keep up with what kids are doing) and it is not just writing. Yesterday, they had to cut out a 3 course meal from the food section ads of the newspaper and figure out how much the whole thing cost. My DD really enjoyed doing this. It took about 15 minutes. I enjoyed seeing what she could do.

[bestjob]

My daughter has had grades on her report cards since Grade One. Some parents around here seem to lose their minds when report cards come home and they say things like, "Gee, I didn't know little Bobby was good at math, but he got an A and so he must be doing okay." That shows parents who are just not engaged with their children's lives.

We don't make a big deal about marks, but they are part of school. They are not all bad, either, because they help a child learn about external standards and whether or not they are interested in what other people think about their work. The marks should be supported by some kind of comment on the child's work that term in that particular subject area. Learning to live with other people's opinions (positive and negative) is an important lesson in life, and though it doesn't have to be learned through report card marks, it can be.

The thing that I have observed with my daughter is that we talk about "learning goals" a lot. On the report cards my daughter brings home(these are three page documents that the teachers assure me are hell to produce, but I love them because there is so much good information in them for people who look beyond the letter grade), there is a section for the child to express her learning goals and a place for one of the adults in the family to write how they will help the child achieve those goals. If your daughter's report card doesn't include things like that, sit down together and write it out for yourselves. It isn't as flexible as unschooling, but it doesn't have to be driven by someone else's agenda, either.

[bestjob]

I forgot to post a reply about homework so here goes...

Some schools seem to rely heavily on homework and there are times when it seems to reach an insane level. My daughter's Grade Three class is working on a massive art project and preparing for a concert. In the meantime, they are also preparing for standardized testing in math that is to happen in about 3 weeks. What has happened is that my daughter's teacher has decided that her priority is the art project and the concert and that the math is something the children need to work on themselves for awhile.

They bring home massive assignments. Tonight my daughter was supposed to do 12 math worksheets. I will help both the teacher and my child. For example, I think that homework is part of school and that my daughter needs to do some homework, but if she has worked for half an hour (the amount that was suggested by the teacher in September as appropriate for that age of child) and she still doesn't have the work done, she can choose to continue working or she can fold up the work and play. If her teacher complains, I will tell her that my daughter couldn't get that much work done in half an hour. On the other hand, I'm the kind of mom who expects that if a child goes to school, she attempts the assigned homework, too, so the half hour of work has to be planned into the day. It can happen any time of day, but it has to be done. As I said in my previous post, this approach does not have the flexibility of unschooling, but it is not without the child's input.

[Sherricp]

Alfie Kohn has a good section in _Punished by Rewards_ on ways that parents can deemphasize grades (he also encourages parents to work to eliminate grades at the same time). I'm pretty sure it's in his "Hooked on Learning" chapter. Anyway, he basically recommends not talking much about grades at all but talking/asking frequently about other things. i.e. not "what did you get on the math test" but "what was the most interesting thing you did in school today? Do you know yet what you will be learning about next? Hmm, you sound really interested in learning more about that, do you want to go to the library to see if we can find some other books or perhaps see if there's a related exhibit at a nearby museum." As Kohn says, learning is fostered when we help kids focus on what they are doing rather than how they are doing (wouldn't it be great if instead of report cards schools sent reports of what the children were learning about and recommended books, exhibits, and local activities they could take advantage of if a certain subject really grabs them?).

Sherri