The Case Against Homework?
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What do some of the teachers in here think about this? Is there anything to Kalish's ideas? Do you agree with her (fleeting) analysis of the teacher's POV? What are your biggest gripes about homework (besides grading it ;) )? Do you have a rule of thumb about how much to give? How about parents in here (which includes some teachers, of course)--do you feel that your kids get too much homework, or that it often adversely affects their enjoyment of learning? High school or recent high school students--what do you think? |
As if 8 hours a freakin day isn't good enough to teach these kids!!! Homework (in general) steals precious time with family, friends and interests and does little to actually help these kids learn.
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I do believe that the problem isn't in the amount of homework but in the quality of those activities.
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Homework is evil. You have 7 classes then you come home with 7 classes of homework, those in sports or drama or whatnot would get very little sleep, etc. etc.
I myself wouldn't do the assignment if I could get away with it so I could have more free time, or if I could I'd do my homework during classes :shrug: Now that I'm in college I have more time to do it, so I actually do do it. |
I don't know, but I tend to agree with yolland about what impact this may have longterm. Even looking back to my first year of university, the courses where I had excellent, demanding teachers in high school who did assign us a fair bit of homework and expected a level of independence (biology, physics), I did very well on in university with much less studying than some of my peers. Other courses, like chemistry, where I had either a bad high school teacher or one that expected very little to nothing of us, I had to put in double the effort to get the same grade. And I don't think it had to do with my aptitude either because by the time I got to 2nd year, I found all of these areas to be of comparable difficulty. So it was an adjustment period.
Also, let's get real, a lot of us are taking work home these days. It's true that people who do manual labour or a number of service jobs, etc, get to stop working when they are off the clock. But how many doctors go home to read medical journals, how many lawyers take case files home, teachers, professors, instructurs are all expected to do work outside of their "normal" hours of operation, businessmen, and so on. In that sense they too are doing homework so I don't know how valuable it is to tell a child that because he finds an activity to be tedious, he doesn't have to do it anymore for fears it will ruin his love of ___ (insert subject). In the real world, nobody will give a shit, and I'm not saying we should treat an 8 year old like he's an investment banker, but we also shouldn't let them go through 12 years of education thinking that this has any bearing to reality. |
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Thanks yolland for posting the article.
I teach language arts in a public middle school and from what I hear from students and parents, this excessive homework in our district is happening in elementary schools. One of my nephews was in kindergarten last year and had homework every day. It often took one to two hours to complete. I have a degree in early childhood and actually taught in preschool for several years. I finally had to go, for peace of mind, to the middle school level because others teachers/others thought that all my four and five years old students were doing in my class was playing in the block area and finger painting. Too many American schools have pushed the curriculum too far down the grade levels. "Thank God I recieved an education in spite of having to attend a public school." ~Mark Twain |
In 4th and 5th grade I would get home around 3:30, start my homework, stop for supper around 6:30, start it again at 7, and wouldn't be done until about 9:30. It was HORRIBLE.
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I teach fifth and sixth grade in a public elementary school, and I agree 100% with Kalish. Our district policy limits homework for primary grades to 30 minutes a night maximum and 60 minutes a night max for upper grades, with no homework assigned over the weekends except for long-term projects.
I know teachers who over-assign homework. I don't assign very much homework, and my kids do fine. I do find a correlation between accurate homework completion and performance on assessments. The homework I assign is practice relating to the concepts taught that day, with some review homework tossed in now and again. If my students don't complete their homework, they don't get adequate practice and so they don't do so hot on the assessments. But I also think that 10 problems does the job for practice, and 40 problems is overkill. There should be good after-school programs supervised by teachers that have other things that kids are missing out on, like exercise, which ironically is so important to cognitive development. This is where she may have some problems. Funding a program like this gets expensive; we don't work for free you know. ;) As for iron horse's observation: Too many American schools have pushed the curriculum too far down the grade levels. He's absolutely right, but in California, this comes from the state in terms of grade level content standards. Teachers, students, and parents all know that many of our state content standards are too difficult and not developmentally appropriate, but who wants to be the politician that gets to "dumb-down" California curriculum? |
I just graduated this June and my experience over the past eight years (I didn't get--or do, perhaps--any before that) has been that the teachers who gave less homework generally were better teachers. The ones who gave legitimate, thoughtful homework occasionally were the best, I think.
By senior year the attitude toward homework was pretty much "fuck that" because there was just SO MUCH of it that you needed to copy off someone else for the stupid stuff so you could slog through it to the stuff that mattered. Homework can be a crutch for lazy and/or ineffective teachers (I can't teach you this so... figure it out yourself on 32424 problems), or it can enhance the work of a good teacher, if given in moderation and with thought. Also, I find there are certain people (like me) who just don't do well with homework. I may be lazy, but I've never been able to have the mindset to sit down dutifully to four hours of stupid crap so I can get another check mark in a book that will count for 10% of my grade, especially if I already know the material. The kids who do their homework every night tended to be the absolute superachievers who were smart to boot or the kids who were struggling the most (but were hard workers). Most of my friends and I did not fall into this category, and our grades would suffer not because we did poorly on tests, projects or essays, but because our homework average wasn't great. They would keep telling us "but it's so simple! you could have a straight A!" but it just wasn't worth wasting so much time of my life. And that's one thing I don't regret about high school, not wasting hours on meaningless assignments. (I keep adding thoughts!) Time management comes up as a concern... I suppose I could be considered to have time management problems. I've pulled a few all-nighters, but so have other people, and those tended to also be the people who WERE doing their homework every night, who just couldn't work fast enough to learn all this stuff. The all-nighters haven't scarred me, and they've made me better at time management, I suppose, but I believe that kids learn from experience, not from their parents shoving schedules down their throats. I may be an exception, though, I HATED when my parents tried to interfere with my homework or anything, really, relating to school, insisted the whole time that I could handle it, and I did. I learned on my own how to handle homework and assignments, how much I could put off things, and how fast I could work and learn. This went over well with teachers who would assign reading (I love reading, I wouldn't even consider it homework) because I would just read it. The author is right in that asking kids to answer questions at the end of a chapter instantly signals the "skim" response in the brain and the reading loses impact. |
I went to a private HS, so it was not unheard of for me to write a paper a night, on average. It also didn't help that I liked the elitism of being in honors classes, so they tended to pile it on even more.
Oddly, I seem to have handled it quite well. The problem, however, was that once I hit a case of "senioritis," it didn't go away for six years...heh. As such, I understand the nature of "burnout." I've been much happier since I completed my degrees, and I doubt I'll ever go back again... ...although, once in a while, I think about going to art school, but then I look at my student loan balance and forget about it. I finally had time for a social life starting two years ago. Once in a while, I look back at the wreck one would refer to as my "youth," and regret that I never had much of one. School always came first, and I always came second. Melon |
like martha said, extra practice and review are appropriate uses for homework. the student should NOT be required to actually learn new concepts at home.
i taught middle school (specifically grade 6) for a few years, and my philosophy on homework was always this: if you (the student) did not finish your work in class, then it was for homework. i wasn't one of those teachers that taught until the bell rang and said, 'oh and the next 3 pages of questions are due tomorrow,' as the students filed out of the room. i gave ample time for them to finish their work in class, in fact i told them that i'd prefer that they finished their work at school because then i would be there to help them if they needed it. i also agree with anitram that kids shouldn't be coddled either. teaching kids how to prioritize and manage their time is part of the hidden curriculum. obviously a high school english teacher is not going to read every page of a novel with her class. nor is a science teacher going to go through pre/post-lab write-ups for every experiment she does with her students. sometimes homework is a necessity. of course, 4 hours of homework in middle school is too much, and 1 - 2 hours in kindergarten is unconscionable, but applied in a judicious and conscientious manner, homework can be extremely useful for teachers and students alike. |
People need to stop complaining about homework. A huge majority of my Year 10 mates come home and sit watching TV or sit on the computer all day. Homework reinforces what is learnt in school. The amounts of time allocated to homework are ridiculous (for example in Yr 12 they suggest we study 4 hours a night) but homework is essential. Otherwise bad habits set in and kids become lazy for life.
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never never did homework or left it till late in the night cos i couldnt be arsed.
or copied someone else. Homework is the most pointless work possible. |
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