Why Your Kid’s Math Homework at The Beacon School Looks Different Than Yours Did
I was sitting in a folding chair in the music room at The Beacon School last fall, trying to follow what the math department chair was saying, when I realized I had stopped listening. She was talking about “equitable discourse” and “vertical alignment,” and my eyes had drifted over to the tall windows overlooking West 61st Street. The lights were coming on in the Lincoln Square apartments across the way. I was tired. I was also nervous about the math thing.
My son Alex started there in September. Eighth grade. He came in from a public middle school in Brooklyn where math was pretty traditional—textbook, quizzes every Friday, a clear answer key. He’s always been okay at math, which I mean the way parents usually mean it: he gets through it without complaining too much. He does his homework at the kitchen counter. He doesn’t love it. He doesn’t hate it.
The Beacon is different. I’d heard that before we applied. It’s a small, progressive public high school with an arts focus, so I expected some newness. But I didn’t expect to feel so lost at a curriculum night designed to explain math—math, the thing I had been doing for years, the thing I have an actual degree in.
After the presentation, I walked up to a table near the door where a younger teacher named Ms. Osei was stacking papers. On top was the packet we’d been given on the way in. It had sample problems on it. I’d already looked them over and gotten that faint, hot feeling of being dropped into a conversation halfway through.
“These word problems,” I said, holding up the sheet. “Are these… the assignment? Or more of a guide?”
She looked at me with what I now recognize as the face teachers make when they’re being patient with a parent who is about to ask the real question. “The whole packet is a guide. Their actual work is to choose one problem and present it to the class. They need to show the reasoning, not just the answer.”
“Right. But the answer is right, though.”
She laughed. “Yes. The answer is right. But when they present, we’re asking them to show us why the answer is right—not just that they got it.”
I nodded like this was helpful and walked out with the packet folded in my coat pocket. This is your problem, I thought. You’re an adult with a master’s degree and you’re not sure if you know what the phrase “reasoning” means anymore.
A week later, Alex did his first presentation. It was on a problem involving two cyclists traveling toward each other, which I vaguely remember as a thing that happened in grade school with trains. He practiced at the kitchen counter Tuesday night. I asked him, “What do you think the answer is?”
He said, “Why are you asking me the answer? That’s the boring part.”
That stopped me.
“Then what’s the interesting part?”
He pulled out a sheet with diagrams on it and said, “I need to show what happens if they leave at slightly different times. I’m using rate triangles.” He said rate triangles like I was supposed to know what that meant. I didn’t. We looked at his diagram. He was drawing the two cyclists as time and distance axes, showing how the gap between them changed. He was really trying to make the numbers connect to something physical. I asked him why he didn’t just find the answer with algebra.
“Because that’s not the question,” he said, like this was completely obvious. “The question is if I can explain the pattern.”
I want to pause here because this is the moment where I think a lot of parents get lost. I did, for a while. The anxiety you feel when school doesn’t look like school is real. You worry they’re not learning the skills. You worry the teacher is doing something too experimental. You worry your kid is going to get to high school—wait, this is high school—and be behind. All of that happened to me in small waves over the first few months.
What helped me was watching Alex work through a problem he didn’t get right away. At his old school, if he didn’t get a problem instantly, he’d write something in pencil, erase it, write it again, and end up stressed. At Beacon, the homework structure forces him to slow down. He can’t just answer. He has to say something like: “I think this could be solved with a proportional relationship, but I want to test that assumption.” He’s actually writing out sentences. Math sentences.
The thing that finally made me relax was a conversation I had with my neighbor Carol, who’s an accountant and whose son graduated from Beacon two years ago. I asked her what she thought about the math teaching, expecting her to have complaints. Instead she said, “My kid’s first year of college calculus was okay because he knew what to do in a group. I don’t mean that sarcastically. The professors put them in problem sessions and everyone panics. He didn’t. Because this school made him explain himself out loud.”
That’s not a cure-all. He still didn’t love math. But he knew how to be confused in a group of people without melting.
If you have a kid at Beacon, or you’re considering applying, I can tell you a few things I wish I’d known sooner.
The assignments aren’t always in the online portal the way you expect. Yes, there’s homework. But sometimes it’s a video recording of them explaining a problem to their own phone camera. Sometimes it’s a one-page write-up with three different approaches. The first time Alex had to record himself on video doing math, he said no. He actually said no. The teacher handled it without a big scene—she let him do it to me instead. He explained the problem to me at the kitchen counter while recording on my phone. It took him ten minutes and about 14 false starts.
Ask your kid what they did in math class, and if they say “nothing,” ask them to show you what they wrote down. This was a huge thing for me. Alex always said “nothing” or “I forget.” He wasn’t lying. The work is conversational. It often doesn’t look like work to a parent who grew up with worksheets. But there’s always traces of it—a messy chart, an argument he made to his group, something he crossed out.
Don’t try to re-teach the way you learned. I tried for two weeks to go back to basics with Alex on some problems and it just made him more anxious. The school isn’t asking kids to abandon the basics; it’s asking them to understand why the basics work. When I sat with him and just read the problem out loud instead of explaining how to solve it, he got further. He found the steps himself, fumbling, slowly. It was uncomfortable to watch. But he got there.
The grades look different in the fall of freshman year. A lot of kids from traditional schools have to adjust. There are more rubrics and fewer percentages. For a while, I worried Alex didn’t know where he stood. His first report card didn’t have a clear “B+” or “A-” next to math. It had descriptions of what he could do and what he was developing. That was confusing for me, honestly. You need to know someone at the school who can translate.
What helped the most wasn’t any single program or parent workshop. It was figuring out that the messiness was the point. Math at Beacon isn’t taught as a straight line from problem to answer. It’s taught as a conversation. Some kids thrive on that. Alex mostly tolerates it. But I’ve noticed he says “I think” a lot more during homework than he used to. He corrects himself. He draws diagrams now. That feels small, but it isn’t small. The presentation he gave on the cyclists? He got the answer right. And he got extra credit for the way he explained it.
I don’t love everything about the school. Some of the language around the teaching feels too jargon-y and I’m still not sure how I feel about the school’s stance on homework volume. But I’ve stopped worrying about the math. Not because I understand it all. I don’t. But because I see our kid wrestling with ideas instead of just completing assignments. That’s a trade I’ll make, most days.
He still doesn’t love math. But he no longer says “I’m bad at it” before he even opens the book. For a teenager in Manhattan, a city that swims in math anxiety, that’s something. Not everything. But something.
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