Strong Foundations Charter School

Middle School

Homework Policy

If you are in 6th or 7th grade please see my Math Course I or Course II sections for expected time requirements.

(1)   ONE missed or incomplete assignment:

     -Missed or Incomplete Work Form sent to parents/gaurdians.

(2)   TWO missed or incomplete assignments:

      -Missed or Incomplete Work Form sent to parents/gaurdians; lunch detention.

(3)    THREE missed or incomplete assignments:

      -Missed or Incomplete Work Form sent to parents/guardians with notice of detention date and time

       (typically 24 hours after 3rd form sent home); 45 minute AFTER SCHOOL DETENTION.

(4)     More than (3) three missed or incomplete assignments:

      -Missed or Incomplete Work Form sent to parents/guardians;

        -After school detention for each new missed assignment;

        -Mandatory parent/guardians with teachers meeting.

In all cases, class grading policies apply to the work, but the student will be expected to make up the missed work.  Missed work tally will reset to 0 at the start of each new grading quarter.

Report card grading is as follows:

                  A  +    98-100                           
                A        95 - 97                         
               A -      93 - 94                       

               B +     91 - 92                      
               B        87 - 90                      
                B -      85 - 86                      

                 C +     83 - 84                      
               C        80 - 82                   

C -      78 - 79    

             

               D +    76 -   77                  

                   D        72 - 75                       

D -     70 - 71     

F        Below 70

We appreciate your assistance in working with us to make your child's education the best possible.  Parents and guardians are their child's first and best teacher, and only with your support can we succeed in our mission as educators.  As always, if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me or any member of the middle school team.  Thank you in advance for you diligence and support of our school year together.

Your choices + your actions = YOUR LIFE.  CHOOSE YOUR LIFE!

Work hard = get smart!

 "When students are in a fixed mindset, where everything and everybody is judging how smart they are they see effort and difficulty as meaning they're dumb. But when they're in a growth mindset, they come to understand that effort and difficulty mark the times that they're getting smarter.  These are the times that their brains are growing new connections and they'rereally, really learning.

We have a long line of research showing that the self-esteem movement was wrong. Praising kids' intelligence and talent is harmful. It puts them in a fixed mindset, it makes them afraid of difficult tasks, it makes them less resilient and less persistent when they hit errors. They only care about looking smart and never doing anything that would contradict that. Parents think the greatest gift they can give to kids is this gift of praising intelligence. It isn't. It saddles them with a big liability. Instead, what should you do? Praise the child's process, the strategies they, they use, the effort they put in, the persistence they show, their focus on doing the problem. This gives them a growth mindset. And it tells them what they can do when they're struggling. Those same things, it tells them how to overcome obstacles, not just why they succeeded but what they can do to be successful in the future. This is the greatest gift we can give to kids. We published a study recently showing that mothers praise to their babies one to three years of age predicted the child's mindset and desire for challenge five years later. So that praise is powerful.

Recently, Stephanie Freiburg, a professor at the University of Illinois did a big growth mindset intervention at a Native American Reservation where she grew up, actually the whole school was transformed in terms of the growth mind set. Kids were asked to spend and required to spend six hours a day in school growing their brains. And the, the educators explain that it's because we care about you. We want you to have six hours a day growing your brain. The younger grades, after one to one and a half years of that growth minds that message, went from the bottom of the district to near the top of the district, in terms of their reading readiness, and reading Comprehension. The higher grades gain substantially in reading and math, but it wasn't just agrowth mind set message. It was a growth mind set message that was tailored to the communal values of that culture. So they weren't just told that they could grow their intelligence, they were told they could grow their intelligence and thereby help their families and their communities better in the future.

So originally, the students were told, listen, you can get smarter, but in that culture it wasn't an inherent value. In a lot of mainstream culture you tell kids you can get smarter and they are riveted. They're thrilled, they're in, but here, it's really it was a really strong value on helping your family and contributing to your culture. And when the growth mindset was framed in terms of getting smarter in order to contribute more to your family andculture, it really took off.

Recently we did an intervention with the  Kahn Academy. This was led by one of our graduate students, Dave Panesku, where before each fractions problem, kids received either the standard kind academy, no, nothing before the problem or a growth mindset message. Remember, the harder you work, the smarter you get in math. Or remember, when you work hard to solve this problems your math  brain will grow. We also had a third group that received encouraging statements. Like this one's hard, do your best, or if at first you don't succeed, try again. Now that may sound a lot like growth mindset, but just exhorting kids to try is not the same as teaching them that when they try. They grow their math brains and become better at math problems. So, what happened? First, we found that when the growth mindset message was before each fraction problem, the students solved more problems. Than the kids in the other two groups.   The encouragement alone did not do better than nothing. Also that improvement in a number of problems solved continued on future units, where they were no longer receiving those growth mindset statements.

Also, the students who received the growth mindset statements, mastered many more, or significantly more units after that fractions unit. Even though they were no longer getting that growth mindset message. So, it means that the message that working hard at math grows your math brain. Not that it means you're dumb like in a fixed mind set, but it grows your math brain. Teachers and parents should spend time listening to the fixed mind set messages they have in their head. The things they tell themselves about themselves, they things they're thinking about kids. Don't get defensive, we all have those thoughts, but start to hear them. Don't evaluate them, just start to hear them, and eventually start talking back to the with growth-mindset messages. But it's very, very important to understand, we all have somefixed-mindset ideas, and we need to be aware of them in order to change our talk and practice to truly reflect a growth mindset."

Carol Dweck, professor of pyschology at Stanford University, words on fixed or growth mindset.  This was taken from a video interview on the free online Stanford University class I took the summer of 2013 by Jo Baeler.

link to the video:

https://class.stanford.edu/courses/Education/EDUC115N/How_to_Learn_Math/courseware/63fb32017aa64f49b4105a3a7b9e05a9/34fa03d470684c119b4b40d7a835b17c/?discussion_page=65