More parents, students saying 'no' to homework • Hacker News Board

Re: More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

#151

Post by derefr » Tue, Oct 27, 2015, 8:08 PM UTC

phil21 wrote: post #109

jbob2000 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's important to assign blame here. Teachers welcome praise with open arms, but the minute we criticize them, "oh you know, the issues are complex, it's not my fault". They are the sum of the education system, it is wholly represented by the person leading the classroom. Just like we blame a president for a shitty economy, so too must the teachers carry the blame for a shitty classroom.

I'm not so certain. I've been in many educational environments ranging from home school to private college prep high school, to suburban high school, to inner city high school, to the ghetto school in the area. There were good and bad teachers in all of those. However, the good teachers may as well have not had existed in the inner city/ghetto schools. Their talents were 100% wasted, and those classrooms would have b…

> a police officer in front of the classroom who was enabled to boot the dysfunctional future criminals from the classroom

Well, that sounds like a way to make more future criminals. Maybe send the police officer to the parents instead. If the goal is to systematize the production of healthy, non-broken adults, we want to get those children more of a healthy environment, and less of an unhealthy one—send those police officers to watch the parents, and boot them out if they're making their child dysfunctional. (Really, if we had as many social workers as we had teachers, a lot of things about lower-class life could be fixed.)

Re: More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

#152

Post by pdpi » Tue, Oct 27, 2015, 8:09 PM UTC

ahallock wrote: post #29

Homework is an abomination. It steals time a child could be spending with their parents, siblings, friends, etc. You spend all day in a classroom, sedentary, which isn't healthy to begin with, and then when you go home, you're expected to sit more. Children need to play and explore the world. Schools are failing if they have this overflow of work that must be sent home.

I get (and agree with) your sentiment, but to call homework an abomination is misguided. I don't want the totality of kids' academic learning to be in the class room, I want them to have to do thing by themselves, unsupervised -- which is what homework is meant to achieve. As you say, though, that shouldn't come at the cost of their play time. Personally I feel more inclined to say that we should aim towards fewer classes and more homework.

Re: More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

#153

Post by mikeash » Tue, Oct 27, 2015, 8:10 PM UTC

gk_brown wrote: post #146

mikeash wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A healthy adult's productive routine doesn't involve taking an additional 1-2 hours of work home from their job and doing it in the evenings. Why should a child's?

I agree that 1 - 2 hours of homework may be excessive. However, 10, 20, or even 30 minutes seems reasonable to me, assuming that it reinforces what is being taught in school.

Schoolwork, yes, but it ought to be done at school, just as work is done in the workplace.

Re: More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

#154

Post by JshWright » Tue, Oct 27, 2015, 8:10 PM UTC

Overtonwindow wrote: post #144

I think homework is necessary for some subjects, like math and physics, because practice is where the learning comes from IMHO. In other subjects, homework is anachronistic. I think we should extend the school day like Japan, and build homework and social networks into the school setting.

You want to _extend_ an 8 hour day even further?

Re: More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

#155

Post by bobthechef » Tue, Oct 27, 2015, 8:10 PM UTC

bpizzi wrote: post #121

s_dev wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Repetition is an important part of learning. Expecting all children to understand what was taught in class is unrealistic. This is why homework is assigned - so the student may take their time to review the parts they themselves didn't fully grasp in class. The time spent doing homework varies from child to child and this is important - kids who need longer to accomplish the same task will have that time because they…

Understanding is a far more important part of learning in my opinion. You know where repetition is really important? In sport. Muscle memory really work that way, with a "conscious enabled" repetition. But for learning? Frankly you don't learn multiplication by repeating the tables, you really learn it by visualizing the repeated additions, thus by understanding it. That being said, homework can be smart if it promot…

Of course understanding is the most important, but what you're presenting is a bit of a false dichotomy and a bit of a caricature of the understanding process. The way you get good at playing the piano is repetition. I'm not talking about brainless repetition. I'm talking about reinforcing, improving, and strengthening certain mental pathways which happen during repetition. Understanding on its own doesn't create good habits of mind. They're established through repetition, whether that means playing the same song on the piano 50 times or solving the same kind of problems 20 times. Each repetition can also reveal a bit more insight.

Also, understanding is not the same as doing, which is a distinction you fail to make. Understanding arithmetic multiplication is one thing. Performing it is something else, hence the distinction between mathematics and calculation. Calculation is very useful in mathematics, it's what K-12 and most college math is, but it's only one part of what mathematics concerns itself with. A physicist may be good at doing physics, but he doesn't necessarily possess an understanding of physics per se until he begins reflecting on it. Furthermore, there are many things you must learn before you can understand them because they require that you known things in aggregate and from a certain mature perspective. You must know the "what" before you can explain the "why" or the "how".

Furthermore, there is difference between comprehension and understanding. Most of what you know in the empirical order is comprehension of someone else's claims. You verify very little of those claims yourself because it is impossible for anyone to verify everything they learn. You take it on a practical kind of faith and trust that those who make these claims have done their jobs. If you end up working in the field, you may verify some of those claims, but in practice, science is a body of culture that is transmitted and only when anomalies begin to crop up do certain theories begin to undergo examination, verification, and reformulation by some scientists.

There is something to be said about teaching subjects with more context and coherence and being guided along a logical progression. Frankly, most teachers are awful, and compared to the classically trained, are a miserably uneducated bunch with little pedagogical skill. That and the idea of universal education is very problematic because it doesn't take seriously differences in students and the families they come from.

Re: More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

#156

Post by neap24 » Tue, Oct 27, 2015, 8:11 PM UTC

Why the all or nothing approach? At my high school, I think we have a great policy for math homework (I am the teacher). It is assigned every day but never checked or graded. At the beginning of each class we go over any problems the students had trouble with, then move on. Students eventually reach an equilibrium where they figure out how much time they personally need to spend each night on math homework. For students who are failing tests and doing no homework, we generally suggest they do a little more.

Re: More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

#157

Post by eitally » Tue, Oct 27, 2015, 8:15 PM UTC

neap24 wrote: post #156

Why the all or nothing approach? At my high school, I think we have a great policy for math homework (I am the teacher). It is assigned every day but never checked or graded. At the beginning of each class we go over any problems the students had trouble with, then move on. Students eventually reach an equilibrium where they figure out how much time they personally need to spend each night on math homework. For stude…

This is totally the way to go. In my experience (I was in high school '92-'95 so this is dated), this method worked great in the advanced classes, but a lot of the remedial and "normal" track classes still focused heavily on rote memorization and quantity of work, for whatever reasons. The fact is, the best students will succeed no matter what, either because they have supportive families & social groups or because they're autodidacts, so the challenge is tackling the other 80%.

In your experience, does this method work equally well no matter what the class is or who the students are?

Re: More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

#158

Post by tonydiv » Tue, Oct 27, 2015, 8:16 PM UTC

guimarin wrote: post #136

guimarin wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with your comment about better teachers. Teachers are simply a conduit for learning. They don't scale, which is why there is still a power-law distribution in educational outcomes despite tons or research and data and training and testing that should combat that. Basically rich people get richer because all rich people who are generationally consistently rich have one thing in common. They are autodidacts.…

And just to be clear. The answer for children is to make learning to love learning play. And the way to do that in a way that scales is through a video game. That is the future of education. Games for children that teach them how to learn, that they then use to set their own educational path. With teachers, schools, mentors, and advisors helping along the way.

If you truly believe this, I would love to share what I'm working on with you: http://playlingoland.com

We are building a World of Warcraft-esque game for students learning languages, and we have people playing for 3-5 hours upon signing up (we had one student who signed up and played 10 hours within the first 24 hours of signing up). Students absolutely LOVE it.

I do believe the future of education is gaming. Unfortunately most of the world believes that it is gamifying things that aren't games inherently. MMORPGs with levels, items, and avatars are games. Flashcards with points are not.

Re: More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

#159

Post by smokeyj » Tue, Oct 27, 2015, 8:18 PM UTC

bitL wrote: post #140

dgrant wrote: post #129

This is crazy, I don't know where I would be today if I hadn't done homework. Homework was where I really and truly learned. Independent work is so important, and it's totally different than doing something with a bunch of students in a classroom setting. Sure, the education system probably could be improved a lot. But you can't just remove homework from the current system and expect there will be no negative consequ…

You and your daughter will end up as people that can contribute something great to the society; most of the ones skipping the homework without innate talent not, and they will complain about how unfairly are they treated because they are smart. One of my piano teachers was forced to practice through tears as a kid because they saw the talent she had. She went on to becoming a world famous child prodigy playing grade…

> One of my piano teachers was forced to practice through tears as a kid

She was traumatized by figures of authority to learn piano, and she became a piano teacher. I'm not seeing the inspiration aspect of this story.

Re: More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

#160

Post by tonydiv » Tue, Oct 27, 2015, 8:19 PM UTC

JamesBarney wrote: post #45

I am in total agreement that children have better things to do than homework. Such as learning how to play and interact with others. Learn how to deal with adversity. How to deal with the sadness of a break up or not being included. Learning how to lead a team via Counter Strike or WOW. Learning computers by writing a mod for a favorite computer game. These things taught me far more than a worksheet on a very idealiz…

I completely agree! Please look for my other comment above (control-F "tonydiv"). You will be pleasantly surprised about what we're working on here at Lingoland!