Students who are doing well in school usually have a support team at home.  Instead of worrying about zeroes and grades below fifty and how these grades should not be recorded in the gradebook, parents should get their kids to value school work enough to do it and to do a quality job.  A WSJ article called "Raising the Bar:  ...

How much help should parents give their children with homework?  Should homework be the focus of every evening after school?  Over the Thanksgiving break I asked a young mom visiting from Illinois how things were going with her kids.  She laughed and said that she just loved spending two hours a night on homework because she had ...

Just when I think I've read everything, I see an article about parents being assigned homework.  ''No way,'' I think to myself.  A lot of the parents seem happy to do the work and feel that it is only fair since the teacher is giving so much of himself to his students.  Some are delighted that they have ...

I once had a student turn in a beautifully written composition that I knew was not his work.  When I talked to his mother, she told me, ''Of course, I did it.  You know he can't write.''  Parents sometimes feel that they have to help out with projects because other parents are raising the bar.  One of my friends explained to me ...

In My Teenagers' Homework Ate Their Free Time, an article written by Jay Matthews of the Washington Post, a mother wishes her children actually had time to watch TV.  In responding to a question about homework vs. TV, she wrote: Although homework can be valuable for reinforcing and applying learned material, I think it has spun out of ...