Homework, sigh...

[dingit]

2 weeks in and ds and I have had our first major bust up. I check his planner every day and ask him about homework.
Just found out this morning that he had a piece due in today. He's just spent 20 mins rushing it, which IMO is not good enough by year 9.
He knows that the consequences of this is we take his x box away, this time I told him it will be until the weekend, so that he learns that homework comes first.
At this point he lost the plot and called me an arse
I'm going to speak to dh tonight, but what do you do about behaviour like this? It's not the first time, I don't know how to get through to the little toad, his gcses are going to be disastrous if he carries on like this.

Excuse me for a brief aside- Rabbit- you do know about this, don't you?

Sorry, as you all were, back to homework. I am an unapologetic fanatical whip cracker. An hour a day minimum (unless there are excellent reasons). Even if the school hasn't set any!

"I do hope all these people who don't involve themselves with homework aren't going to get a shock at GCSE time- only to very brightest can get good grades without some independent study- (and only the very brightest can do it if they pay attention in lessons.)
"

Key word here is independent
If they won't do it you cannot force them - they are bigger than you, they are stronger than you, and they are adults or very close to it.

Hak NO!!!!! I didn't! And today, I have to finish doing materials for a 2 day conference next week (ahem. While DD1 is great at getting on with her work, I'm more like DS ) so I can't read it right now. :(

But I have bookmarked it.

Is this a thing then, Kingscote fanfic?? Is there more??? I sense a new 'bad habit' just itching to form...

Thank you.

Hak - do you really make your DS do homework if the school hasn't set any?? I have suggested to DS that it would be a sensible course of action to read up on the day's lesson topics when he gets home everyday, in case there is something he has missed or not grasped (his hearing is still a bit dodgy but he will never ask anyone to repeat anything). I think sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn't. DD1 is always reading something on topic, I'm more likely to tell her to stop. DD2 - well, it's early days.She will have to be very disciplined about her HW or the EC activities will get the chop - I've made a list of doom for her - first problem tap bites the dust, then hip hop, then piano, then flute, then ballet, then singing, then recorders and finally if the wholesale destruction of everything that makes her life 'worth living' hasn't worked - the drama school. I'm fairly confident that I'll never need to cut anything though. She is nothing if not driven.

"Hak - do you really make your DS do homework if the school hasn't set any?? "

Yep [evil mother emoticon]
It's a pretty broad interpretation though. He loves to read- but there is a pile of "mum thinks I should read this" books in his room- he could spend the hour with one of those. Or on the boring bits of music theory or scales. Or a TED talk. Or listening to some "mum approved" music. (That's how he discovered he quite likes opera).Or having a go at a new sort of writing. There's plenty of choice. Just an hour of academic/intellectual/cultural brain exercise of some sort. We quite often do it together.

DD is always over run with homework so that's never an issue. If she manages a night off we all breathe a sigh of relief.

Conversely, DS gets very little and it's often quite intangible. Over the Summer he agreed that year 11 would be a good time to start working an hour a night.

Cue a text last night saying he was staying at school for a maths clinic. Great I thought. That's his hour. Until I discovered its a GCSE maths clinic ! And he's already bloody done it!

Oh, OK, if we are counting practice as homework then all mine do something every day, for sure. All the music and books my kids listen to/read are 'mum approved' since I'm the one with the iTunes account, the ibooks account and the waterstones card! However it cannot be denied that a fair amount of cabin pressure and bleak expectations gets listened to. But that's fine.

DD2 is desperate to do sudokus and crosswords with me. I am resisting her demands though. She (and DS) often do recreational maths just because it's a nice way to multitask while listening to Douglas winning every time.

Hakluyt - I'd love to see you with my kids.
But they all have actual real issues.
DC1 finds reading hard, can work twice as hard for the same output.
DC2 procrastinates but also puts themselves under a lot of pressure. If you try to force - will stubbornly dig their heels in. If you let them decide to do it themselves - actually works pretty hard. It was only when I backed her up in giving up Choir, that she became remotivated in her music (still does choir, and is working on her piano too, as well as...)
DC3 school work is so not the problem, you wouldn't believe. Doing homework can be relatively relaxing.

But there's mum approved and mum approved!!!

And ds will practise for hours-but scales need the whip.........

DD2 is resisting practising double tonguing. She says she won't ever need it, so why bother. It is true that you can get past grade 8 without ever needing it but on the other hand it's such a useful thing to crack, and there's definitely not a dyspraxia issue, I never had a problem with it and DD1 can triple tongue so that excuse is out of the window. But I can't (and won't) make her do it. Partly because I don't have a sufficient quantity of arse and partly because - well, it's a physical impossibility. You can't force a kid to do double tonguing practice. You can stare at each other for hours in a mexican standoff but that's it. No problems with scales for her, DS is different he'd rather not do them, but they know they have to, so they do.

There's only one type of mum approved book in this house - if I think it's worth reading I'll buy it (or I already own it), if I don't I won't. Hence Twilight was banned from ever passing our portal and I see no double standards in the fact that we have every last bit of vampire/taltos tat written by Anne Rice - I'll buy good derivative stuff, I'll buy original tat, I won't buy derivative tat.

Hopes that Word doesn't turn out to be 'woman who wrote Twilight'

I wish!

No you don't. I hope.

Not totally hands off, because DH fusses about HW far more than I do.

We went to very different schools, my comp was far more laid back than his grammar, but we both got good results and went to seriously good universities.

In the end what mattered is we both wanted to do well, had parents that valued education and had peer groups that wanted to succeed.

A given at DH's school and luck at mine. My year and the year above had a critical mass of ambitious DCs who encouraged each other and friends who might never have thought of higher/further study. My DSIS cohort were the exact opposite.

Parental nagging can only go so far.
They also schools that foster and support that peer group encouragement.

DCs heading easily for university do it themselves, but I think many other DCs need a lot of help. An awful lot of DCs don't seem to get past a vague if I get a C for English, I can do something at collage or stay on at school.

Not much help to parents trying to encourage a work ethic.

Hakluyt, I am like a Hakluyt-light version myself...

DSs have to do 30 mins homework each day, this includes 5-10 mins violin practice. If there is no homework from school, it is reading, spelling activities (My DC can't spell!!! I want MN-kids....sigh) or an occasional maths test (just for fun).

They like maths, it is in the mix to keep them happy. Both my kids are not very good at English though, and do need help. This is my little-and-often approach

If I had effortlessly academic kids I would not bother.

Mine need a bit of help though.

And every little bit helps, IMO

But my oldest DS is now in Y7 and the resistance is growing. With the increased independence comes an increased sense of leave-me-alone-mummitis.

So watching this thread with interest. How old is your lot Hakluyt?

Getting a C for English is dyslexic DS's dream. He's predicted an A* for maths though so, not all bad...

My most 'approved' books currently are the GoT ones, not because I like them (although I do) but because they are the books that finally made him someone who could see a point in reading for pleasure, and although it took him ages (probably 4 months - cf DD1's one week) he has read the lot - probably about 3000 pages - so I will be forever thankful to GRRM for that. It remains to be seen whether he has now got the reading bug or whether he will remain reluctant to countenance anything non GoT (he has made me order him his own copy of the forthcoming tome and to be honest I was delighted to do so, even though 3 copies for one house seems a tad excessive). I think there is a message here though, relevant to this thread - I couldn't MAKE him read. He lives in a house where you have to navigate round piles of books on the floors, every wall is covered with bookcases (there is no clear wall space at all) and he has a large library of audio books (which he does listen to - he loves plot). But I couldn't MAKE him do it. The key was him wanting to do it and then being facilitated (DD1 was a bit sniffy about lending him her copies but clearly I wasn't going to lend him mine...;) ). It's a fine balance really - if the will isn't there, it won't happen, whether it's homework or anything else. Going through the motions doesn't really cut it.

I don't have a teenage child, or in fact one that can even read so feel free to ignore me completely

I can safely say that I did the bare minimum at school unless it was something I found easy and enjoyed. My parents [father] expected good grades but did not supervise or assist in my homework in any way generally. Substandard grades resulted in undue parental supervision and nightly reviews/testing of my homework. I utterly hated it, so it was within my interests to maintain a threshold iykwim.

I grew up in Ireland where a LOT of homework is the norm. Circa 3-4 hours per night at second level. 1-2 from age 10 at primary.

We were allowed 30 mins of TV after school or pre dinner [Neighbours heigh day] to wind down, then it went off even if Mum had to remove the cable. No TV or computer until homework completed. Arriving into the living room in time for the 10pm news usually resulted in "I hope it's all done"; or testing. Random spot checks were the norm. It made for an easier life just to get on with it.

My school didn't do siting in a classroom detentions. It did manual labour - you had to scrub out fetid classroom bins or similar, at a cold outdoor tap with no rubber gloves. Nice. Doubt anyone would stand for it now.

I had a number of manual labour type PT jobs as a teen. I found it pretty motivational that this would be what I would spend my life doing, for similar reward if I didn't put in at least some work at school. No disrespect to gardeners or window washers but it didn't do it for me. I saw school as my gateway to the life that I wanted and did the bare minimum to get through it and achieve what I wanted

In my personal experience, any sort of electronic equipment in your bedroom is highly diversionary and likely to result in a total neglect of school work.

You are probably right (about the temptations posed by computers) but when you have 3 kids all of whom do homework on the computer even if you have an extra room (in our case, the former playroom now music room) you will still have at least one probably 2 kids who have to work in their rooms. Thus, computers in rooms are unavoidable. And they all have phones and tablets anyway so banning a desktop/laptop would be an empty gesture.

DS - the one who needs more whip cracking - is the one most likely to be ordered to do his homework in the playroom/music room. But if theres a lesson going on in there or one of the others is practising then that's that. And of course, mine craft is in the playroom/music room...so it's probably a better idea to have him in his own room unless someone (DH) is actually able to be glancing into the music room on a regular basis.

DD2 would like to do her homework in the living room. But it's not going to happen.

I used to do my homework in front of the telly at their age (well, not DD1's age, but certainly when I was DSs age and younger. I didn't get a desk in my room till I was nearly 16 - like, a week before).

What are they actually doing on a computer? Is it all submitted online now or something?
I get that if you have to research something then t'interweb will be useful, but if you've had to write an essay on symbolism in Hamlet or some such, then you presumably work from a text? or an exam crammer guide so you can avoid reading the play

Or should I crawl back under my early 90's learn by rote educational rock and come back out when my kids are old enough for me to have an opinion

All of it. 2 Dyspraxics and 1 dyslexic - they do all their written work on computer. And some of it e.g. maths is computer based anyway. Plus, they have to access their online classroom things etc.

Even if it isn't online work, most of what mine had to do needs to be typed - which is just as well given his Godawful dyspraxic handwriting.

He rarely brings exercise books home.

So can they bring a laptop into an exam then? Or are they expected to suddenly write like fury for 3 hrs non-stop

The school or exam centre provides a computer, yes. I don't know what software they use to write their scripts, never occurred to me to ask - but all the usual WP functions are turned off so literally all you can do is type. I also don't know if it;s printed off at the end or submitted to a secure drive - I can ask DD1 though, she did GCSEs last year and some ASs this year.