Monday, Dec. 31, 1984
Help from the Hotline
By Ezra Bowen
Students get fast relief from the headache of homework
It is 4:30 in the afternoon in Los Angeles. At station KLCS-TV, Channel 58, the show is ready to roll. A phone rings and the man before the camera picks it up. "Welcome to Homework Hotline," he says. "I'm Ira Moskow ... I have John from Hughes Junior High on the line." When John, whose last name is Kellenberger, explains that he is having trouble converting 397 millimeters to meters, Moskow holds up a metric chart and asks, "Can you find meters on the chart, John?" Silence. "John?" "Yes." Gradually Moskow leads John out of his quandary, never providing the solution directly but taking him through the steps of moving the decimal point until John hits the answer.
The exchange is typical for Hotline, the latest hit show among the call-in homework programs that are bringing aid and comfort to homework sufferers around the nation. Hotline is aired from 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday by the Los Angeles Unified School District. Its targets are math and English for junior high schoolers. "That's where the homework really starts to pile up for the first time," says Producer Bob Greene. Launched as a pilot last spring, Hotline drew 3,500 calls in twelve weeks, including a daily ring from Avery Smith, 10, a straight-A student (he just loved shoptalk, it seemed). The district allocated $170,000 to bring it back full time for the 1984-85 school year.
Moskow, a math teacher at Los Angeles' Foshay Junior High School, is one of eight Hotline regulars who run the show, rotating 15-minute stints on-camera. Says he: "I love talking to the students. When one takes the time to call Homework Hotline, he really wants to understand." Hotline opens the phones on its special number, 1-800-LASTUDY, from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., with the teachers joined by a squad of college student tutors who help keep up with the weekly average of 600 calls. Routine questions are dealt with quickly. The more intriguing ones like Kellenberger's are held over to be showcased next day on TV.
Although a few other school districts, including those in Jacksonville, Fort Wayne, Ind., and Anchorage, provide televised homework help, only Jacksonville has drawn a response comparable to that in Los Angeles. Yet a growing number of cities, using only telephones, operate thriving hotlines. Brooklyn's Central Library, with funding from the New York City board of education, runs a homework hotline Monday through Thursday from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. for all twelve grades. Another New York student service, Dial-A-Teacher, gets a fair number of calls from mothers and fathers trying to be home tutors. "Parents generally say to us that math is taught so much differently from when they attended school," observes Betty Holmes of the sponsoring United Federation of Teachers.
Philadelphia, Houston and Charlotte, N.C., operate similar programs. Houston's hotline corps includes a bilingual teacher to handle questions from Spanish-speaking youngsters. The math hotline in Lorain, Ohio, not only shepherds school-age callers but graciously fields inquiries from college students and, in season, adults wrestling with tax returns.
Even the televised Los Angeles Hotline gets its share of adult calls, including one of the few stumpers the program has ever received. Once a contractor phoned to ask Math Specialist Hall Davidson how much cement to pour for the foundation of a house whose dimensions the man did not know. Baffled, Davidson turned to Producer Greene. His helpful comment was "Make sure he doesn't do your house."
--ByEzraBowen. Reported by Mary Wormley/Los Angeles, with other bureaus
With reporting by Mary Wormley