I'm not saying they should do away with homework as a way to gage whether students are understanding concepts, just that it shouldn't be graded - I agree with my son on that. It's too easy to cheat. If a student gets a 100 on their homework but a bad grade on their test, it does make one wonder.

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I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers so far...

I know there are some kids who freeze up on tests. That's where teachers and parents come in. They should work together with the child to help them work out their anxiety.

My son had so much anxiety about presentations in middle school he'd refuse to do them. He would rather take an F rather than try. One of his teachers alerted us to it since his report card wasn't noting it and we just thought h was screwing around. We all worked with him to help him through it. It took us two years.

He's currently taking a college course from James Madison University that is being given at his high school during regular hours - Geospatial Integration Systems. It combines computers and satellite data. Today, he had his midterm - since college still has them - which was a presentation of his 1st semester project to a JMU computer professor. We checked with his teacher, who said he did a great job.

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I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers so far...

Awesome about your son!

I don't tend to freeze up on tests. That was the weird part with the electrical engineering stuff. It was something about the test design and my own understanding or lack thereof of the material compared to the homework and quizzes. I couldn't make the leap to what was on the tests. Kinda freaked me out as I'm not used to that.

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Eagle Whisperer

I took calculus and AP physics in the same year, and the AP physics required calculus because calculus was used in the physics class. Something like that might have helped.

I envy the fact that my husband was in a gifted program that combined English and history such that they'd be reading in the historical period they were studying and got to discuss a lot more context. So much more interesting than "memorize event + person + date."

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Eagle Whisperer

I didn't entirely divorce them in my mind, but my memory of high school history was a lot of memorization of fact/date/person and multiple guess tests with perhaps some fill in the blanks, and I suck at memorization. University history classes with their essay exams and a lot more context and less memorization of what felt like empty facts were much more interesting and started giving me a love of history. (Plus being able to choose which time periods I was most interested in, I suspect.)

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Eagle Whisperer