HOMEWORK HELP

Our school here in Holyoke has begun a new program in the last two years which uses a homework center for all students in 1st through 12th grades. If a student fails to complete or turn in an assignment,

or if he scores less than a 70%, he must stay after school to either finish the assignment or to correct it. There are teachers available to give assistance and parents are notified through automated phone messages that their children will be detained.

Though I can't speak for all the parents in our district, I will say that the kids in our house have had a lot of success with the new program. Not only does it remove the conflict of making the children actually do their homework and turn it in, but it gives the kids a sense of self esteem when their grades rise.

Though there is a debate about the value of homework itself, in our school it is an accepted mode of learning and this additional aide is working. And since parents must come up with transportation for children who are detained, it gets them involved as well. Parents can also access a website where their children's assignments, attendance records and grade reports along with a direct email to the teachers. are available to them. These are invaluable tools, but meaningless unless parents use them.

And when the kids come home with assignments for the next day, the websites at the bottomof this page can come in handy.

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homework help:

IT FRUSTRATES THE HECK OUT OF ME!

HOMEWORK.

I went to school. I paid my dues. I did my homework. Sometimes. When Have Gun Will Travel was in re-runs. WHY SHOULD I HAVE TO DO IT NOW? I’M OLD!

I knew all the president's names when I was in school. And no wonder—there were fewer of them then. I used to think prison conjugal visits were where they punished the prisoners by making them recite verb tenses.

Anyway, my 14 year old needed help last year. On math. Algebra.

I found the answer, and I told him his was wrong.

“How’d you get that answer?” he wanted to know.

“Well, you take this number and put it over here and it becomes a negative and–”

“Why did you put it over there? Mrs. Brown says you have to add this number to it first, then subtract it on that side.”

“Why add it to that side if you’re just going to subtract it again?” I asked.

“Mrs Brown says—”

“I don’t give a rat's butt about Mrs. Brown. I want to know why you add—”

“I don’t know. You just do. It’s like the silent k in know.”

“What?”

“Nobody knows why there is a silent k in know. You don’t pronounce it, but you have to put it in when you spell the word.”

“That’s English. We’re doing math.”

“Yeah, but Mrs. Brown says–”

By then, I am a little testy, and more than a little immature. “Mrs. Brown. Mrs. Brown. Why don’t you call your precious Mrs. Brown and ask her the answer?”

He frowned at me. “No.” the 14-year-old said. “I’ll do it your way.”

“Our way,” I cooed and kissed him on the cheek. What a bright young man to see the wisdom of his older parent.

He was an hour late coming home the next day. I asked him why.

“Math corrections,” he said. “We failed.”

Ever been there? Well, there is hope and help online.

At www.homeworkhelp.com, there are online tutors. You have to register for the service, and it’s free, but they have an online store and encourage you to patronize it.

www.pathwhelp.org/path is a non-profit organization that has message boards, email help, live help in chat rooms, a knowledge bank and links to other resources.

www.homeworkspot.com has online encyclopedias and other resources.

www.math.com has math help from basic to calculus

www.knowitnow.org is an Ohio site with online tutors.

www.infoplease.com/homework/ has words of the day, online resources, daily spelling bees and homework helps.

www.schoolwork.org/math.html tons of formulas to work math problems, exercises and a cool game to try using math skills: ThinkQuest provides some interesting ways of learning math skills. One of them is the Hex Agency: a high-stakes espionage game with a little of Mission Impossible thrown in.

www.factmonster.com My personal favorite is a huge site with games and resources and cool facts. For instance—did you know The largest currently known prime, 2^30,402,457– 1, was found by Dr. Curtis Cooper and Dr. Steven Boone of Central Missouri State University on Dec. 15, 2005. It has 9,152,052 digits. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is offering a $100,000 award to whomever is the first to find a prime number with at least ten million digits; it seems likely that this will be claimed within the next few years.

And a couple of new ones: http://www.veritasprep.com which offers classes in how to prepare for exams ( though this is a school and not just online tips)

And Sum Dog which has tons of online math games to entertain kids and give them practice in math skills.

Anyway, I'm prepared this year. I know the sites. AND the silent K thing? According to my sources (online, of course) "The silent 'k' in words like 'knight', 'knock' and 'knob' is a remnant of Old English, and wasn't silent at all but was pronounced along with the 'n'. Nobody really k-nows why or when it became silent but this change is believed to have transpired sometime around the 16th to 17th centuries. For some reason the 'kn' consonant cluster became hard for English speakers to pronounce. Perhaps it's the result of foreign influences; after all, England began colonizing the world at a large scale around this time. This phenomena is just one of those mysteries of English language development -- along with the Great Vowel Shift."

What is the Great Vowel Shift?

Gee, I don't know. Maybe Mrs. Brown has a theory.