In the higher grades, the curriculum demands that the teacher spend a good portion of each class teaching new material. Ideally a teacher would like to assign practice material to reinforce the lesson, and then spend considerable time helping students while they work on it. Unfortunately there is seldom enough time in a class to do all of these things, and often students will find that some of the practice material remains undone, requiring them to finish it for homework.  When students don't do the homework, the material they have learned in class does not get reinforced, and may not be retained. They will likely have more difficulty recalling it for the test and the final exam.As well, the student will not know whether they could have done all the questions correctly, so problems in understanding remain undetected. Homework attempted, even if done incorrectly, is more valuable to a student's learning than homework not done at all. This is the reason that many teachers collect and mark homework. It helps them discover the difficulties students are having, and it tells them who is not doing the assigned practice. How Parents Can Help With Homework: The most important thing is that you don't actually do the homework for your child. You can ask your child questions from the notes or homework to help the child reason out the answer. Resist the temptation to give the answers to the questions. If working together on examples or discussion of ideas doesn't seem to help, you might consider including a short note in with the homework that tells the teacher that your child had difficulty with the questions.  With mathematics homework, it is also important that you don't attempt to help by teaching the student to do the problems using a method different than that taught in class. Although different approaches to problem solving can be a valuable technique to learn, the method used in class may be one that the student is required to master, in which case a different technique may just cause confusion. Look at the examples in the notes, and try to show the student how to do the problems that way.Remember too that the mathematics curriculum is very different now than it was even as little as ten years ago. Calculators play an important role in all math courses up to the end of grade eight, and their use and mastery is required in courses after that. Nevertheless, Jr. High students who expect to be successful in Senior High math courses still need to be proficient in many basic mental skills, including estimating, times tables, and integer operations. Talk to your child's math teacher to learn which skills are important, and which ones aren't. The teacher can also suggest extra activities that might reinforce skills that are poor. How Do You Know If Your Child Has Homework? That's a trick question. You don't. Students are encouraged to use an organizer to keep track of their assignments, but if they don't bring anything home, how are you supposed to know? If your child is having difficulty completing homework assignments, it is likely you will find out about it through contact with the teacher, or a midterm report card. Sometimes parents can solve homework problems by helping their child. Here are some suggestions:
Students can often be helped by providing a rigid structure for homework completion, which involves having both the teachers and the parents keep track of it using a homework completion form.  Here's a sample form so you can see what we mean. The form is filled in by the teachers or student each day, and the homework assignments are signed by the teacher. If there is no homework, the teacher must sign for that too. After the student completes the homework, you sign it as well. The purpose of the form is to let you know that there is homework; but encouraging its completion will be your job. The teacher can also provide encouragement with the usual system of rewards or penalties. However, it's really going to be up to the student to do the work. At least now you'll know when there is work to do! Here is a form you can download, and then print and use. It's a Word document (in zipped format), and only 3K in size. It looks just like the sample form above.
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Homework has been a part of the school experience for thousands of years, and with good reason. Students learn best by doing, not by watching. They need to struggle with concepts covered in that day's classes, and put them to use by practicing them.
