Whew!

I (more than) survived the first students' day back. Lots of hugs and stories of what happened over break. A wee bit-o-whining because I made them work AND gave "homework" (which if they worked hard they could have finished in class) on the "FIRST DAY BACK". I forgot to mention that on Monday when we were at staff development, and I was in a room with about 50 or so other teachers from various departments, a question was posed to everyone. The speaker asked, "who assigns homework every day?". ... And who were the only teachers to raise their hands? Math teachers.

Some of the comments that came back were, "I used to assign homework, but they never did it, so I stopped", "they don't do homework" ... I can't imagine that we're not doing the students a disservice by this happening. Someone else's comment was that he heard a statistic that 80% of our students who go to a local community college after high school fail in the first year. Yikes. Then someone else asked if they determined how many of those kids had to work full time and were not supported at home. ... A very complicated situation at our more than 50% free and reduced lunch school where, yes, some/many of these kids are working from 5pm until at least 10pm nightly. No, I wouldn't want to come home and do homework after that either. ... There has to be an answer.