The Case Against Homework?

[WildHoneyAlways]

I am not saying that a $25K/year salary is a myth. But it is by no means standard across the board and across the world either.

From the site US Department of Labor website:

Median annual earnings of kindergarten, elementary, middle, and secondary school teachers ranged from $41,400 to $45,920 in May 2004; the lowest 10 percent earned $26,730 to $31,180; the top 10 percent earned $66,240 to $71,370. Median earnings for preschool teachers were $20,980.

According to the American Federation of Teachers, beginning teachers with a bachelor’s degree earned an average of $31,704 in the 2003–04 school year. The estimated average salary of all public elementary and secondary school teachers in the 2003–04 school year was $46,597.

I was fully aware how much I would make when I chose teaching as my profession. $82K/year is most definitely the exception, not the rule.

 

[Dreadsox]

The American Federation of Teachers issues a Teacher Salary Trends report each year to survey the pay levels of U.S. educators. In 2002 (the latest data available), the average teacher salary was $44,367.

The study ranks the states according to teacher salary, with California ($54,348), Michigan ($52,497) and Connecticut ($52,376) at the top of the list. South Dakota had the lowest average teacher salary at $31,383.

 

[melon]

Is there another profession that endures the bullshit we get from the public? Do people set medical policy by referendum? Do people put require lawyers to submit to the whims of the politicians to determine how they do their jobs?

You're working in a publically funded, quasi-governmental institution. Public schools are never going to escape this heavy scrutiny, and I think many people get pissed off, because they look at the heavy tax bill they get each year to fund schools and then get told that it's still not enough. And that's where a lot of tensions are flaring, I think.

People cannot set medical policy by referendum, because they are privately funded; but with the few aspects of medicine that are publically funded, Bush obviously has done an awful lot to infuse politics into what publically-funded medicine can and cannot do.

Melon

 

[WildHoneyAlways]

One of the biggest differences I've noticed between public and private schools is that private schools generally have wider latitude to enforce discipline, with parents having less recourse to complain.

I'm also a fan of fairly strict dress codes (although one of my major complaints with how they are applied is that they are generally made of clothes that are grotesquely unfashionable and poorly made).

I know that the laws are rather screwed up in these regards, although I see more and more public schools choosing uniforms these days. I do think that there needs to be something seriously done, legislatively, to clarify and strengthen disciplinary action, without resorting to draconian "zero tolerance" policies. Private schools generally don't have those either.

Melon

Here's the thing about private schools though: They can choose who they want as students.

Private schools have no obligation to keep students who have discipline problems or academic problems. They can kick them out for any number of reasons.

 

[melon]

Private schools have no obligation to keep students who have discipline problems or academic problems. They can kick them out for any number of reasons.

I never knew the private schools I went to kick out someone who had underperforming academic performance. However, they also felt free to flunk students and not advance them to the next grade level. I knew a few students who had then opted to go to public schools after that experience, but I also knew a few that kept going after being held back.

However, I do know that they also didn't have a problem suspending or expelling students with disciplinary problems; but these were actions that were generally used as a last resort. I went to school with some rather insufferably bad kids, and as much as I hated them and wished they'd get expelled, they ended up graduating with me.

Expulsion was only reserved for the absolute worst offenses that you can imagine, but I also know that there's some really terrible offenses that can get you expelled from the public school system too.

Melon

 

[yolland]

The new teachers coming into the profession, while full of energy, and ideas, I think lack the complete skill package that it would take to not leave a child behind.

IYO, why do they lack it?

 

[anitram]

There must be lines outside the district employment office. Lines, I tell you.

It's actually relatively difficult to get a full-time position (most of the people just graduating go to LTE positions first about 2-3 years on a probationary basis).

 

[anitram]

There is not a single teacher in any of the surrounding towns making anywhere near 82K a year.

That is the starting salary of a principal working almost full year.

But this is also because most people here constantly frame every argument from their (ie. American) POV which is fair enough, but the fact is, it isn't like that across the board in other places.

Teaching is not seen as a poorly paid profession here, and with good reason.

 

[Dreadsox]

IYO, why do they lack it?

In my opinion, there are AWESOME young teachers, but there is something to be said for experience in dealing with children, parents, and the demands of the job.

I am not certain schools are putting enough emphasis on classroom management. Classroom management will make or break a new teacher. You can have the greatest ideas in the world, but if you cannot manage the classroom with realistic expectations, it will not work. I also believe veteran teachers are better equipped with the experience to get children to understand the difficult concepts and move through the curriculum.



That said, a well run mentoring program, will help a young teacher get through the first years. I would say it takes three years for a new teacher to feel comfortable in their skin. In the first five here in MA a Master's degree has to be finished on top of learning the profession.

 

[yolland]

So, is a mentoring program standard then? How does it work and what commitments on the part of the mentor(s) does it entail? Are you saying most complete it before completing their M.Ed (meaning "student teachers" then, I guess)?

Also, what would you say are the major skills involved in "classroom management"?

(anyone can answer these by the way, I'm not necessarily asking Dread in particular)

 

[Dreadsox]

Mentoring programs are pretty much the assigning of a veteran teacher to help a new teacher through their first year. It has nothing to do with the MA.

 

[WildHoneyAlways]

Mentoring programs help move new teachers from their initial certificate to their standard certificate in IL.
There are a number of ways to move from initial to standard though. (Attending seminars, workshops, grad school classes)

 

[martha]

Are you saying most complete it before completing their M.Ed (meaning "student teachers" then, I guess)?

Don't confuse a graduate degree with experience in teaching. I don't have an MA, but I have plenty of experience.

 

[yolland]

I'm not; I'm just trying to figure out what these mentoring programs are like and how they fit into the overall picture of preparing one to teach.

I am very unclear on what the rules are concerning the relevance of an MA/M.Ed to one's professional status--my impression is they vary from one place to another. I have known people who were turned down for teaching positions, in both public and private schools, because (so they were told) they did not have a master's in education.

 

[Dreadsox]

In the State of MA, you need to double major in a subject and education. You need to pass the teacher's exam. You then get a provisional teacher's certificate.

After you are hired

you must complete a Master's Program within the first five years of your teaching career to get a professional certificate.

------------------

A mentoring program is run by the town you are employed by.

 

[martha]

In California, it varies by district. In my district (which won the Broad Award in 2004 ) we don't need an MA, but we do need to earn 60 units (or its equivalent) beyond a BA to advance to the top of the salary scale. Which is quite generous here in OC, but a teacher here isn't yet able to afford a house on her own. (And I realize that isn't a unique position here in CA.)

 

[maycocksean]

Well that may be the case, but it is not here. The salary is not deferred, they are paid over the summer time. If you elect to teach summer school, you get more $$.

In her school board, once you have 12 years of experience + an MA or MEd in your field + a specialization (requires you to complete 3 courses), you earn $82K/year.

That is an incredibly well paid position compared to many other people I know. Some teachers are poorly paid but in other areas they are very, VERY well compensated.

You find me another profession which pays $82K annually here in Ontario and whose workers get about 10 weeks of vacation per year, not to mention the extremely generous pension plan and excellent governmental benefits. There is no other such profession here.

I am not saying that a $25K/year salary is a myth. But it is by no means standard across the board and across the world either.

I haven't read all the posts yet so maybe I'm being redundant but I had to respond to this on the spot.

First off, I'm frickin' moving to Canada when I go back to North America. $82,000 a year?!? That's fantastic! And 10 weeks of PAID vacation!?!!!

I think one thing you might of missed, anitram, is that we're talking about the United States here. We're looking at the uniquely low status of teachers (esp. at the elem and high schoo level) in the U.S., not across the world. In fact, in earlier post I discussed at length how differently teachers are viewed (and perhaps compensated) in other parts of the world.

 

[maycocksean]

I believe that our entire approach to education needs to be completely overhauled, really.

But as I've pointed out already, that is unlikely to happen, not least because, as Melon implied, educators are involved in providing a universal public service that every single person in the nation is to have access to. To create a rigorous teacher training program that includes several years of "residency" similar to what happens in medicine, an approach that treats teachers as true professionals with the accompanying demands, and involves a professional-level payscale, while wonderful to think about is probably too impractical.

 

[wthrwthoutyu]

Well, honestly...is it really fair to force children who are more than capable of the work to wait on children who can barely keep up?
Seriously, you don't know how insulting it is to have to sit there in the 8th grade, and read crap you read in fifth grade simply because a good half of the class can't do any better, all the while scoring into the mid-high school grades in reading. Made me want to kill something. I cannot tel you how bored I was.

AMEN!

General Science, 9th grade. At the end of the year, I did not turn the book back in -- I took it out and burnt it. Paid for it out of my allowance. It wasn't just a matter of being able to do some work faster than the other students in the class, it was that I was already beyond that class in terms of what I had learned on my own by being constantly pinned to PBS and devouring the science section of the local library.

I hated despised loathed that class.

I knew the stuff that was in the text book by the time I was 10 years old -- and now I was sitting in a room with a bunch of ... (I'll be nice here, or try to be) slow pokes who still didn't know, at the age of 14, that "Everything is made of matter." And to make matters worse, I could finish whatever was assigned three times faster than most of them. I'd finish in class work, put my head down and take a nap--and the teacher would call on me and ask me why I wasn't doing the work... I did, however, have the satisfaction of showing him a finished piece of work when he called on me.

Why was I even in that class, you ask? It was required.

That wasn't the only class I loathed for that reason, either. It was just the worst offender.

 

[maycocksean]

AMEN!

General Science, 9th grade. At the end of the year, I did not turn the book back in -- I took it out and burnt it. Paid for it out of my allowance. It wasn't just a matter of being able to do some work faster than the other students in the class, it was that I was already beyond that class in terms of what I had learned on my own by being constantly pinned to PBS and devouring the science section of the local library.

I hated despised loathed that class.

I knew the stuff that was in the text book by the time I was 10 years old -- and now I was sitting in a room with a bunch of ... (I'll be nice here, or try to be) slow pokes who still didn't know, at the age of 14, that "Everything is made of matter." And to make matters worse, I could finish whatever was assigned three times faster than most of them. I'd finish in class work, put my head down and take a nap--and the teacher would call on me and ask me why I wasn't doing the work... I did, however, have the satisfaction of showing him a finished piece of work when he called on me.

Why was I even in that class, you ask? It was required.

That wasn't the only class I loathed for that reason, either. It was just the worst offender.

What would you suggest be done to meet the needs of people who outpace their peers intellectually?

 

[wthrwthoutyu]

What would you suggest be done to meet the needs of people who outpace their peers intellectually?

Well, some of our classes were tracked (if that's the term for it), but General Science and several others weren't. I'm not sure why--perhaps because General Science covered such basic science. In a perfect world, they would have said "She's knows this stuff already, let's just let her move along to Biology before she get so bored she goes into a coma..."

Same for Alegebra I. For some reason, we were all lumped together for Alegebra I, while the following year in Alegebra II we were divided into the "smart asses" and the "not-so-smartasses." By the end of year, Alegebra I was just downright tedious.

But speaking to other classes where we were divided up--we all used the same text book, we all finished the text book by the end of the year--but I know in some classes we had more time for class discussion and to spend investigating details that weren't covered in depth in the text book. In Biology, my class had more time to spend class room hours working on Science Fair Projects once or twice (because the Science Fair was an extracurricular activity and participation was not required, teachers were only required to give us a couple class hours to work on our projects.)

The extra stuff was most noticeable in English and Literature and in Social Studies--I remember spending lots of time on classroom discussion in Literature, and knowing full well that one of my friends didn't get the same kind of interesting stuff in her lower-third of the smart-assness classes because it took them longer to get through the required work

In short, I don't think I was given an opportunity to "learn more", per se, but I do know that more fast paced classes (and time for more class discussion) kept me interested where I might only have been frustrated and discouraged.

And yes, I'm pretty sure other classes had classroom discussion, particularly in Literature--just not as much as us.

And I'm sure somebody here will condemn that, saying "They didn't get an equal amount of whichever..." Sorry. Letting the bright students progress as quickly as they are able is a small price to pay for keeping those self-same bright student from getting so bored they have to gnaw their own feet to stay awake in class.

 

[maycocksean]

Well, some of our classes were tracked (if that's the term for it), but General Science and several others weren't. I'm not sure why--perhaps because General Science covered such basic science. In a perfect world, they would have said "She's knows this stuff already, let's just let her move along to Biology before she get so bored she goes into a coma..."

Same for Alegebra I. For some reason, we were all lumped together for Alegebra I, while the following year in Alegebra II we were divided into the "smart asses" and the "not-so-smartasses." By the end of year, Alegebra I was just downright tedious.

But speaking to other classes where we were divided up--we all used the same text book, we all finished the text book by the end of the year--but I know in some classes we had more time for class discussion and to spend investigating details that weren't covered in depth in the text book. In Biology, my class had more time to spend class room hours working on Science Fair Projects once or twice (because the Science Fair was an extracurricular activity and participation was not required, teachers were only required to give us a couple class hours to work on our projects.)

The extra stuff was most noticeable in English and Literature and in Social Studies--I remember spending lots of time on classroom discussion in Literature, and knowing full well that one of my friends didn't get the same kind of interesting stuff in her lower-third of the smart-assness classes because it took them longer to get through the required work

In short, I don't think I was given an opportunity to "learn more", per se, but I do know that more fast paced classes (and time for more class discussion) kept me interested where I might only have been frustrated and discouraged.

And yes, I'm pretty sure other classes had classroom discussion, particularly in Literature--just not as much as us.

And I'm sure somebody here will condemn that, saying "They didn't get an equal amount of whichever..." Sorry. Letting the bright students progress as quickly as they are able is a small price to pay for keeping those self-same bright student from getting so bored they have to gnaw their own feet to stay awake in class.

I see where you're coming from. Stepping out of my role as a teacher and thinking back to when I was a student--I was also one of those "brighter" students, though I was probably less motivated than you were. I didn't want to do any extra work--especially projects. I was content the easy stuff, so that I could get it done quickly and spend my time on things that really interested me. The fact is there are some bright kids (like me) who don't really care to be challenged--at least not by their teachers. (If you read some of my previous posts you'll find I was more than nerdily happy to challenge myself). I did enjoy class discussions though, as you did, because it gave me a chance to air my everpresent opinions (the same reason I love FYM!)

 

[yolland]

Spreading Homework Out So Even Parents Have Some

By TINA KELLEY
New York Times, October 4

MONTCLAIR, N.J. — The parents of Damion Frye’s ninth-grade students are spending their evenings this fall doing something they thought they had left behind long ago: homework.

So far, Mr. Frye, an English teacher at Montclair High School, has asked the parents to read and comment on a Franz Kafka story, Section 1 of Walt Whitman’s 'Song of Myself' and a speech given by Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Their newest assignment is a poem by Saul Williams, a poet, musician and rapper who lives in Los Angeles. The ninth graders complete their assignments during class; the parents are supposed to write their responses on a blog Mr. Frye started online. If the parents do not comply, Mr. Frye tells them, their child’s grade may suffer — a threat on which he has made good only once in the three years he has been making such assignments.

The point, he said, is to keep parents involved in their children’s education well into high school. Studies have shown that parental involvement improves the quality of the education a student receives, but teenagers seldom invite that involvement. So, Mr. Frye said, he decided to help out. “Parents complain about never getting to see their kids’ work,” he said. “Now they have to.”

Some parents, he added, seem happy to revisit their high school years. “There was one parent last year who would write pages and pages of stuff. It was great, so good to read,” said Mr. Frye, who graduated from Montclair High in 1994. Others are more resistant. “When my daughter told me about the homework, I looked at her and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. I graduated. I’m done,’” said Lydia Bishop, a local real estate broker whose daughter Vanessa was in Mr. Frye’s class last year. “I did it very resentfully, but I did it.” Sometimes, Ms. Bishop said, she got out of the homework assignment by logging on to the blog that Mr. Frye created for parents and writing, “I really don’t need this today, I have stuff to do.” The excuse, she said, was enough to keep Vanessa from being penalized and, despite her reluctance to do homework, Ms. Bishop still thinks Mr. Frye is “one of the best teachers we’ve got.”

Some parents say they like the assignments because they can spark intellectual conversation with teenagers who are normally less than communicative. “Searching for meaning in literary works is like stretching brain-cell-taffy in this household of literal interpretations and men of few words,” one mother wrote on the blog. Others refrain from complaining to Mr. Frye but figure out the most mature way to say, “The dog ate my homework,” or persuade their spouse to comment on the parent blog instead.

In three years, Mr. Frye said, the assignments have met with only one flat-out refusal. He has received strong support from his bosses — Peter Renwick, an assistant principal at Montclair High, called the approach “very innovative and creative” — and some cautious interest from national teaching experts. “I think it’s great,” said Gerald N. Tirozzi, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals. “It’s wonderful to involve parents in this way, very meaningfully, and directly related to the instruction the children are receiving in school.” Mr. Tirozzi said he had not heard of any other teachers making similar assignments, and added that he would be interested to know if the students were performing better.

Carol Jago, the incoming vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English, said, “This is one of those really good ideas that has the potential to do what we really want in society. It has to do with what we talk to our students about, and what kind of models we are for our children as readers,” she said, adding that in her 32 years of teaching, she has often asked parents to forgo hiring tutors and instead just read the books their children were reading. “With 10th graders, the parents often really did tell me that it was the one place where they could talk with their student without fighting, without arguing about their hair,” Ms. Jago said.

But she also cautioned against penalizing students for something that their parents cannot or refuse to do. “Common educational wisdom is that you don’t assign homework that kids can’t do on their own,” she said.

In fact, Mr. Frye has not penalized students whose parents have told him outright that they will not post responses. But in one case, when the parents neither did the homework nor explained why, a student did lose points — but not enough to lower the student’s overall grade, he said. He said he got the idea for the homework assignments from a district kindergarten teacher he sat next to during teacher orientation one year, who asked parents to write about what their children had done over the weekend. Experts say that while many elementary school teachers ask parents to write letters introducing their children at the beginning of the school year, few teachers subject parents to a weekly regimen of reading and writing.

Mr. Frye, 30, teaches 65 ninth graders, in three sections, in a classroom where student art and album covers from Stevie Wonder and John Coltrane decorate the walls. As part of the school district’s efforts to reduce the achievement gap between black and white students in this Essex County suburb — a topic Mr. Frye studied for his graduate thesis — every freshman, regardless of earlier performance in school, takes a world literature course, considered a high honors class, like his. He said that all the students’ parents had computer access and that only two had told him that they were not fluent in English; one posts on the blog anyway, one sends her responses to him privately, by e-mail. Another parent phones responses in to him.

Tony Lopez, a corporate lawyer who posted a lengthy reaction to the Kennedy speech, given the day after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, said he was actually glad to do the weekly homework. “I take it as giving back to the teacher what he is apparently giving to our kids, a lot of attention and a lot of requirements,” Mr. Lopez said. He added that he had been impressed with Mr. Frye’s preparations for the class. “As a family, we opted to meet him at least halfway,” he said.

Tracy Parsons, whose son Danny is the second of her two boys to be a student in Mr. Frye’s class, said that the weekly assignments had changed the way she approached homework with her children. “In high school, to some degree you have to back off from homework, so they can gain independent learning skills,” Ms. Parsons said. But teenagers, she noted, “leave a lot out. You ask, ‘What’d you do in science?’ and they say, ‘It was fine.’”

Well, it's a novel strategy...

Any teachers in here ever tried anything like this, or known any teachers who did?

I assume part of the idea is that the parents discuss each assignment with their children as well as each other, but the article isn't really very clear on that.

 

[Lila64]

I got a question, probably geared more to the teachers.

How much homework, on average per night, should an 8th grader have? Should they have homework on the weekend as well? Just curious, as Maddy has been saddled with homework every weekend since school began this semester. Are the kids not allowed to have any time off? Down time? What if they have plans with their family/friends on the weekend? Sports/outside activities? Part of me feels trapped at home when she's stuck inside because of homework. I think she just finished an hour+ of math homework, which she said constituted about 1/2 of her weekend homework. She still has work due for 3 other classes. Don't the teachers know how much time (on average) it should take their students to finish the homework they are assigning and why so much on the weekend? I thought the guidelines for homework had something to do with being a school night I can understand some homework on occasion, but....

And next weekend she is participating in Relay For Life, which is a 24 hour event to raise money for Cancer. Is she supposed to schlep her schoolbooks along with her too

 

[thrillme]

AMEN!

General Science, 9th grade. At the end of the year, I did not turn the book back in -- I took it out and burnt it. Paid for it out of my allowance. It wasn't just a matter of being able to do some work faster than the other students in the class, it was that I was already beyond that class in terms of what I had learned on my own by being constantly pinned to PBS and devouring the science section of the local library.

I hated despised loathed that class.

I knew the stuff that was in the text book by the time I was 10 years old -- and now I was sitting in a room with a bunch of ... (I'll be nice here, or try to be) slow pokes who still didn't know, at the age of 14, that "Everything is made of matter." And to make matters worse, I could finish whatever was assigned three times faster than most of them. I'd finish in class work, put my head down and take a nap--and the teacher would call on me and ask me why I wasn't doing the work... I did, however, have the satisfaction of showing him a finished piece of work when he called on me.

Why was I even in that class, you ask? It was required.

That wasn't the only class I loathed for that reason, either. It was just the worst offender.

I had several classes like that in junior high and high school, I just breezed through certain classes. I remember finishing a gen. science test in about 20 minutes, the class was an hour, the teacher said it was okay to quietly read or do work from another class. Had a few teachers who were like that, they'd say I could work on stuff from other classes when I was done with stuff from their class. I didn't have "home-work" quite often because I finished it at school. In fact, I tried to have a majority of my homework done while at school so I wouldn't have to do it at home and I could relax. Even in elementary school, if there was free time in a class, like after a test, I'd do assigned homework then.

I went to private schools up until the 8th grade, then I went to a public school, and a teacher told me, based on my scores from one of those standardized tests, that I should just stay in the basic math class and go for the easy "A." Which I did. Though in hindsight I probably should have went for the harder math so I'd be more prepared for it in high school.

I always viewed homework as a reinforcement of what you were taught that day. Practice. The more you practice something, the more you know about it.

 

[phillyfan26]

I got a question, probably geared more to the teachers.

How much homework, on average per night, should an 8th grader have? Should they have homework on the weekend as well? Just curious, as Maddy has been saddled with homework every weekend since school began this semester. Are the kids not allowed to have any time off? Down time? What if they have plans with their family/friends on the weekend? Sports/outside activities? Part of me feels trapped at home when she's stuck inside because of homework. I think she just finished an hour+ of math homework, which she said constituted about 1/2 of her weekend homework. She still has work due for 3 other classes. Don't the teachers know how much time (on average) it should take their students to finish the homework they are assigning and why so much on the weekend? I thought the guidelines for homework had something to do with being a school night I can understand some homework on occasion, but....

And next weekend she is participating in Relay For Life, which is a 24 hour event to raise money for Cancer. Is she supposed to schlep her schoolbooks along with her too

I've had homework on weekends since grade school. However, I think for the most part it's always been the same as the amounts on a normal weekday.

 

[martha]

I don't give homework on weekends. It's against my personal policy (and against districy policy).

 

[Irvine511]

How much homework, on average per night, should an 8th grader have? Should they have homework on the weekend as well? Just curious, as Maddy has been saddled with homework every weekend since school began this semester. Are the kids not allowed to have any time off? Down time? What if they have plans with their family/friends on the weekend? Sports/outside activities? Part of me feels trapped at home when she's stuck inside because of homework.

from 7th grade on, i remember a solid 2 hours of homework a night, and probably 4 hours on the weekend. by high school, it was 3 hours a night and a good half-day to a day on the weekends, and sometimes the entire weekend was all work if i had a major paper or something due. i also had a heavy sports commitment and a few clubs and student council. this was life -- and it continues to amaze me when people talk about how standards or whatever are slipping. all i remember doing was work.

 

[anitram]

I can't remember not having homework on a weekend once we got to about grade 6 or 7. I don't think it was a lot at that point, but 2-3 hours doesn't sound like an exaggeration. It was definitely more in high school. And during my undergrad and even more so during law school, a vast majority of my work was done outside of the classroom so in that sense I appreciated that I'd been trained to expect to take work home with me, even over the holidays.

 

[maycocksean]

I don't assign a lot of homework to my students in grades 8 and lower (generally, it's of the 'if you can't finish in class, finish at home'variety) and I don't usually give homework over the weekend if it can be avoided.

At the high school level, the homework definitely increases--especially reading and essays (essays are almost entirely expected to be done independently i.e. as homework) and I do give homework that would need to be done over the weekend.