Excitement about the new painting aside, I spent yesterday feeling pretty miserable.
Emma is in a different school this year. It’s different from her old one and the transition, for the most part, has gone fairly well. But there is one big difference: Testing. The first school had a policy of noncompetitiveness… there were no grades (only comments) on the report cards and there was no testing in the traditional sense. I remember when we kids sat down, with pencil and paper (often under duress!), to answer a series of questions with a time limit of which the outcome was a grade.
The old school didn’t do this. It took Mark and I awhile to get used to this idea. How could they possibly know how the kid is doing? Well, the teacher made an assessment based on assignments (which didn’t get grades), school work, and on what s/he learned about the child in other ways, like talking to them or having them write a story… things like that. The theory was that there are less stressful ways to find out how a kid is doing in school.
The new school is not like that. Their philosophy seems to be the same as when I went to school.
Emma had a quiz about the provinces/territories and their capitals yesterday. I thought she just needed to know the capitals. I spent the week giving her pop-questions. I tried making it fun and low-pressure. i.e. On the way to the park the other night I’d point to her and shout: Saskatchewan!
Turns out we probably shouldn’t have gone to the park, but spent the evening staring at a map of Canada.
Yesterday morning – quiz day – I learned that she needed to know the provinces/territories, capitals AND where they went on a blank map. Oh, and spelling counts. Did I mention they were fairly loosey-goosey with spelling at her old school?
Emma left the house in tears, angry with herself, and it’s entirely my fault.
I had asked her to take a piece of paper and list the provinces* and their capitals. After she was done she read them out to me. She got them all right. Then I asked her to carefully check her spelling against the map while I washed the dishes. By the time I was done I had less than five minutes to look over her work.
I asked her if she had checked her spelling. She says she did. I found a half-dozen spelling mistakes, pointed them out and corrected them for her. While I was doing this I asked her again.
“Are you sure you checked your spelling?”
“Yes.”
“Because I asked you to check letter for letter and it looks like you didn’t.”
Unspoken translation: you did a crappy job. And I expect better.
Hello tears.
Ugh. I still feel terrible. I want to help her without making her feel like an idiot. I tried to sound as upbeat and positive as I could, but clearly it didn’t work.
What I need to do is make sure she has time to study. This studying thing is going to take some getting used to. Study time is different from homework time. When you do homework you just do it and stuff it back into your backpack when you’re done. But when you’re studying you need to find a way to learn the stuff, and make sure it sticks in your head before you’re done. It’s not a matter of do-it-and-be-done-with-it like a row of math questions.
Most importantly, I need to make sure she doesn’t stress about it. She’s only in fourth grade.
Any homework-related tips you could share would be helpful. Me: I need to be better at this homework thing. Gah.
* Here’s a great way to memorize the provinces and territories, from West to East. Imagine a note Nanny wrote her monkey as he was about to visit Queen NaNaNa’s pretty exciting island:
Be A Sweet Monkey On Queen NaNaNa’s
Pretty Exciting Island.
Your NaNny
