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More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

philly.com

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

#181

Post by TeMPOraL »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #89
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…

Repetition, when overdone, leads to an absence of learning. And repetition in the context of rote memorization is often actively harmful to learning. The biggest thing missing in modern public education is synthesis, because there's no time for it, but that's how learning truly sinks in and becomes valuable. Otherwise it's all just disconnected trivia.

Yup. Repetition and rote memorization are useful tools, but should be viewed as putting data in L1 cache, and just that. Memorizing the multiplication table or solving equations ad nauseam gives huge speedups which can not only improve learning harder subjects but even enable the whole new sets of knowledge and skills that are unfeasible to learn otherwise.

But turning entire learning experience into cramming stuff into cache memory? That's a recipe for disaster, it leads only for data to be quickly purged, and the time being wasted on re-entering it instead of letting the brain to generate connections and new insights in the main memory. The result is basically what you described.

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

#182

Post by isolated »

I graduated from high school recently. Homework was the true bane of my existence. It gnawed at my every waking thought and put a tinge of anxiety to my every moment. Am I doing it? Did I forget some? What do I need to be doing that Im not? The entire school experience is a depressing prison of course but homework is how it goes from an seven hour affair to a twenty four hour project. More than anything else it makes sure youre always at school, always worried about the evaluation of unrespectable teachers and disgusting sadists.

You start to wonder if theres a way out, like any prisoner examining the prison with obsessive dedication. You follow the vine to its end and back pacing your room going through the mental anguish of knowing youre trapped and theres nothing you can do about it. (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.fr/2008/10/programmers-view-of-u...) I used to have this fantasy where Id go down to the school building in the middle of the night when nobody is there with a barrel of kerosene. Id douse the schoolhouse walls with the fetid substance and light it ablaze, laughing as the walls go up in smoke before throwing myself on the tickling flames crying and screaming and laughing in agony as I burn.

Im so glad to be free.

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

#183

Post by Mz »

plonh wrote: post #180
Mz wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bonus: A lot of elementary school teachers are there because they can't cut the math for some program they wanted and their college shunted them off into early education. These are, unfortunately, very often women. As a mathy woman who homeshooled my sons and spent considerable time getting my oldest over the math phobia school instilled in him, I harbor the opinion that sending math flunkies in droves to teach our c…

Indeed, I have read that women can be the most rigid and cruel sexists.

plonh: Indeed, I have read that women can be the most rigid and cruel sexists.

I have no idea what your point is.

But let me use this as an opening to suggest that men with math challenges are not being routinely encouraged to give up on challenging careers and go spend their days with small kids. In fact, men who want to spend their days with small kids face the challenge that people look askance at them and assume they have nefarious motives and are probably child molesters. So I don't think women who are bad at math being actively encouraged to go teach elementary school is evidence that women are overall inherently worse at math than men. I think it just means that when we don't readily get something, people cluck at us about how nature designed us to spend our days with small children and why don't we go do that in some capacity.

My ex husband sucked at math. I tutored him when he took college math classes. He got really frustrated sometimes and threw his pencil across the room. He did not give up and no one suggested that, well, maybe you should just go do something easy, like teach small children basic things in elementary school.

You are welcome to clarify if your remark is an ad hominem or not.

Have a good day.

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

#184

Post by Dowwie »

"Let kids be kids" means something different for each household. In mine, that meant video games and sports, but mostly the former.

Not sure what's going to come of any no-homework generation while this happens elsewhere:

"Teens in Shanghai spend 14 hours a week on homework" http://qz.com/311360/students-in-these-countries-spend-the-m...

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

#185

Post by TeMPOraL »

relaytheurgency wrote: post #171
RogerL wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a pretty wide gulf between no homework, ever, and the kinds of loads being placed on some kids. You talk about "a few" words a week. My friend's kids (I have none) end up staying up until 1am, forgoing family and friend time, just to keep up with the work demands. We invited a family to do something with us - the response was that they might be able to do something in 6 or so months due to the kids schedule.…

You know I hear this all the time, even from my students who I never gave much homework to when I was teaching. I wonder how much of that "time until 1 am" is spent staring at a cell phone. I know a lot of time in class is.

> I wonder how much of that "time until 1 am" is spent staring at a cell phone. I know a lot of time in class is.

That's probably where the actual learning happens. Also, it used to be "video games" before, and "TV" before that.

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

#186

Post by bnj »

unquietcode wrote: post #113

Let's not forget that the inhabitants of this website are almost certainly the kind of people who saw through the noise and got their education on their own terms. As we raise our kids we help them tip-toe around all this garbage, but most parents have no tools at their disposal to review and revise and push back against bad practices in their child's education. The issue of education in this country needs to be addr…

It seems to me that the complexity of the issues facing our education system is often drowned out. Everyone went to high school, so they feel comfortable looking back on their experiences and inferring out from there.

I'm a high school teacher in NYC- the largest school district in the country, and the complexity of this system is utterly shocking. I agree with what you said about most parents not having the tools to effectively advocate for their child's education, and I think it's true that the teacher is in the best place to have real impacts on students educational outcomes.

I have to stop there- was teaching all day, lost track of what I wanted to button with.

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

#187

Post by bpizzi »

bobthechef wrote: post #155
bpizzi wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 goo…

> 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

Well, to me piano is like sport, you get good to it by leveraging muscle memory, and when I was saying "with conscious enabled repetition" I was merely saying "no brainless repetition". I see no contradiction in our point of view here.

> Understanding arithmetic multiplication is one thing. Performing it is something else, hence the distinction between mathematics and calculation.

Multiplication was a maybe too simple example to give. Take bezier curve as a more advanced example: can you refute that you really get it threw visualization rather than by reapplying the formula on a series of homework assignation?

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

#188

Post by shardinator »

jbob2000 wrote: post #60
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…

My significant other is a teacher and entered the workforce 2 years ago. I now firmly believe that the education system is the way it is because of the teachers, and not in a good way. The few who got into it because "they love children and teaching" are so massively outweighed by those who took it because there was nothing else. It's created a system that is center around Dear Teacher, a frustrated individual upset…

I think the real problem is that "marketing job" and "field marine biology study" are preferred to teaching. Finding a way to make teaching a job people want, and keep wanting after doing it for a while, is the key.

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

#189

Post by adrusi »

protomyth wrote: post #117
adrusi wrote: post #102

I figured I'd share a relevant anecdote: throughout most of my school (at least by seventh grade) I did virtually no homework. Not with the blessing of my teacher, nor of my parents. But I knew that my parents wanted to shut their eyes and pretend that my grades were improving for as long as they could until the report card came home. I knew that most teachers could be convinced into letting me make up some work at t…

Did you happen to have a job during high school?

No, I wanted to work, but my parents wouldn't allow it because they felt it would make my academic performance even worse.

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

#190

Post by dgrant »

RogerL wrote: post #148
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…

There is a pretty wide gulf between no homework, ever, and the kinds of loads being placed on some kids. You talk about "a few" words a week. My friend's kids (I have none) end up staying up until 1am, forgoing family and friend time, just to keep up with the work demands. We invited a family to do something with us - the response was that they might be able to do something in 6 or so months due to the kids schedule.…

Like another commenter said... I wonder what the kid's evening actually looks like. Staying up until 1am sounds/smells a lot to me like the kind of household where homework gets pushed until the end of the day. I sort of speak from experience as someone who constantly was up late during my university years, and it started in late high school. It all had to do with me not doing my homework right away, putting it off, or not working on it productively. Once it started to get late though, that would light a fire under me and I'd start working faster.

Contrast that to my wife, and other people like her, who did their homework immediately after school (with a small break between of course) and got it done before dinner time, or perhaps a little after, then had some time to relax and watch some TV or chat with friends on the phone (pre-Internet days), before going to bed.

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