I would agree that calming down is helpful in most situations. Unless your in a situation where quick reflexes and improved strength provided by adrenaline outweigh the benefits of clearer thinking. But unless you are being chased by an angry animal, or in a fist fight, I doubt that is the case. Anyways, time to take a right angle off the tangent, and into the center of the issue. <--that was a double entendre math joke.
There are many reasons that your son might be receiving low difficulty homework:
1. Repetition is the key to memory.
Imagine if I gave you a list off all the countries in Africa along with their capitals and asked you to memorize which capital goes with which country. You might make flash cards, and quiz yourself until you can pass a test. Then, if I waited a year, and gave you the same test, do you think you would still pass? Odds are you would have forgotten some of that information in a year. You see memories are formed in the brain by connecting nerve cells together. The more a memory is used, the stronger this connection becomes. Over time, unused connections will become weak, and eventually break. This is an important process because if your brain never severed old connections then you would have a lot more information to process while thinking; thus slowing down your thought process, and making it hard to pull out recent, relevant information due to all the cluttering memories.
This is why memories that are older are often less clear then more recent, or commonly used memories. For example, you still remember your name, even though it may be one of your first memories because you constantly recall your name, and thus re-strengthen the connection. But old information that you dont think about, such as the geography you learned in elementary, has long faded away because you dont use that memory often.
Thus, the key to retaining information, is to periodically think about it, and thus restrengthen the connection. For example, if you had taken a few minutes every week to review your flash cards, and think about the capitals in Africa then you would probably still pass a test on the subject even a year later. Likewise, your son's teacher may simply be periodically reviewing old information, not because she thinks your son is below average, but in order to re-strengthen the old connection.
From what you have told me, your son seems to have an above average memory, which means that his brain is slow to sever old connections (which may be part of the reason for his slower processing). But make no mistake, he will lose the memory eventually if he doesnt think about it. These occasional reviews serve to re-strengthen and bolster the older memories so they dont get lost as your son grows up. So long as the reviewing only happens occasionally, and doesnt become your son's only source of homework, I wouldnt consider it a problem. In fact I would consider the occasional review a good thing.
2. Grading assignments takes time.
Your son's teacher has a busy weekend planned, and doesnt want to spend time grading a bunch of papers. So she just gave the kids easy assignments like reviewing numbers, which requires no actual effort or time to grade. Overall, I understand that teachers have busy weekends too, so I can't fault her for occasionally giving out easy assignments like this. Just consider it a useful review, and dont worry too much about it. Unless this becomes a habit that hampers your son's ability to advance, dont get too worked up.
In either case, I wouldnt make too much out of it, if it happens again, you might ask why nicely, but you shouldn't start panicking over 1 easy assignment.
03 Feb 2009, 7:19 pm
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