OMG Homework!!

[Claennister]

When DD (11) is at school they spend a lot of time doing differentiated work in groups and sets, getting help from each other at their tables and teams and any solo work is carefully graded to her needs. Not so homework. Homework comes as a single task for everyone in the class, and seems to be set at about the middle of the class range. By the time she has over-thought it, asked what half the words mean, forgotten, asked again, tried to come up with an answer, forgotten what she was going to put, needed a spelling, forgotten the whole thing again, gone "I don't know" a thousand times then disappeared into a shutdown, we are hours deep into a very simple piece of homework. I have on occasion sent it back scribed by me or printed out from the computer on speech to text, any adaptations we can think of, and never had any comment on that, but for the most part the tasks are just out of her wheelhouse. I'm exhausted explaining, and DH won't get involved at all because I'm a trained primary teacher and he knows he would pull his hair out on the third time she's asked what she just said.

School says "Homework should take no more than 25 minutes" and while she races through spelling and maths, homework which involves sentences or any kind of getting into the workings of another person's mind ("Why does Kitty not want to go into the dark house?") is just hours of torture.
"Because it's dark"
"So what does she not like about the dark?"
"The ... the darkness?"
"How do you think she feels?"
"That it's dark"
"So tell me something you don't like about when it's dark"
"You can't see"
"So, how do you think Kitty feels about the dark?"
"That it's... dark????"

And when we have finally wrestled through to the concept that she is scared of the dark house and you can tell that because the text tells you she goes in cautiously or whatever, she has a sentence, begins to write...
"Because... what was I going to write again?" rinse and repeat! At school she has a learning support teacher who helps her through all these stages and I'm guessing it takes the same amount of time there, but this is getting to be really unfair. Just me?

And what happens when you explain this to school?

I've just come back from a school meeting where the English teacher thought she was going to have a perfectly sane conversation and I ended up keeping her for a hour using words like torture, purgatory, serving time, soul destroying. All to describe the anguish and pain her English homework inflicts not only on DS's life but mine. Poor woman looked like a frightened rabbit. The outcome? DS's homework is now optional.

Honestly they don't seem to care about much because she's about to go to high school. Any questions - speak to the high school about that so they are ready for her. So this term is toast, then. But yes, that sounds exactly like my evenings. It is torture. My husband has to leave the room so he doesn't lose his mind.

She has turned in her homework faithfully every week for 7 years, though I sometimes wonder why we bother when she remembers nothing and it's not at all a reinforcement of what she's been doing in class, it doesn't check her understanding or any real purpose other than to be done - tick.

I don't mind her having homework, but it needs to be work she can handle. A massive page of maths takes about 10 minutes, it's much fairer.

"Homework should take no more than 25 minutes".

I suggest you do just that OP. Spend 25 minutes on it and then send it back with whatever she's done, saying it was too difficult for DD to cope with, and can they send homework that matches her needs next time.

Homework used to be torture here too.