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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

#221
I never did homework in school.

Got a lot of hate from the teachers, but it only lowered my grades one mark.

Finished school with C+ so with homework I'd probably got B+

When I got home I played video games and later surfed the Internet and chatted all day.

This changed massively when I started my undergrad studies. I didn't have to come to university, like I had to go to school, so I stayed at home. After I failed all my Math classes in the first semester I started working at home really hard in the second semester to get all the Math done. After the first year I knew how to find out what was expected in the exams, something I was missing in school. I stopped showing up at classes and just created a list of stuff that was needed for the exams. I learned this at home a month or a week before the exam and kept working/partying the rest of the semester.

For my post-grad studies I switched to a remote university entirely and saved a bunch of time and money with this.

Since I had to work with remote teams on group projects in the post-grad studies, I also decided that I wanted to work remote in my 'regular' job also.

Long story short, I hated homework as a kid, now I only do "homework".

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

#222
post #221

I never did homework in school. Got a lot of hate from the teachers, but it only lowered my grades one mark. Finished school with C+ so with homework I'd probably got B+ When I got home I played video games and later surfed the Internet and chatted all day. This changed massively when I started my undergrad studies. I didn't have to come to university, like I had to go to school, so I stayed at home. After I failed a…

The thing that sucked about homework wasn't the fact that it was doing 'work' at 'home'... it was that it was often rote, boring, and time consuming work that did little to stimulate the brain.

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

#223
As a current high school student (at a private high school that is consistently ranked as one of the top in the country, so AMA if you want), homework sucks. That is true.

But the benefit to homework is that it teaches time management skills. Thanks to having hours of homework every night, I have learned to manage my time very well. For example, I spent the summer working in a University Lab. While there I spent ~10 hours a day at work, yet this still felt like a vacation to me. So yes, being busy sucks--but it ensures that students will learn how to manage their time effectively.

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

#224

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…

As far as dealing with adversity, I would argue that the impossible amounts of homework give that element of hard ship to students.

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

#225
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I blame video games for making me into a history buff. And maybe Legos, combined with the History Channel before it was the RedneckAliensJesus Channel. Civilization, Lords of the Realm, Caesar II, Robert E. Lee: Civil War General, Close Combat, Total War, Pirates!, Anno 1602, Europa Universalis/Crusader Kings/Victoria/Hearts of Iron, Age of Empires Or to go way back, Math/Word Rescue, Treasure Mountain, Midnight Resc…

Shoutout to the Encarta trivia game with the jester! That was the best.

Really a beautiful game, especially to have bundled into an encyclopedia. I'm a little surprised there isn't a version built for Wikipedia... There's this (http://www.wikimaze.me/) but it's not quite the same

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

#226
I'm really not sure if abandoning homework is a good idea. I went to school in the Soviet Union/Russia, we had ca. 5 hours school a day and around 2-3 hours of homework, 6 days a week. I surely can't provide solid scientific evidence linking homework to results in learning, but I don't think it was unreasanable.

I have to admit, I mostly remember math homework, I loved math and loved math homework, it was always great fun to hack those problems and then problems with * and and * (stars for the higher difficulty). We learned concepts in the class, but we also needed to train mechanics with pure repetition. Some commenters wrote about scaling - I think repetition is exactly something which scales well in the homework, you don't really need to do this in the class with a teacher.

The same for foreign language, for instance. You don't really need a teacher a classroom to memorize new words, that's perfect for the homework.

So I don't think homework is unreasonable, I think it's a valid approach to "outsource" mechanical/repetitive tasks which don't require classroom or supervision.

Having said that, 7 hours of school PLUS 2-3 hours of homework is definitely too much.

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

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They both tend to improve our ability to adapt in a hostile environment: real life. Like I said, evolution.

I don't dispute the fact that education and vaccination are both good things. The flaw in your argument is that you are assuming that "education" and "hours of homework" are equivalent.

Parents weeping about their kids' "hours of homework" is the educational part here. I'm really shocked about the article and truly enjoying the comments.

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

#228

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…

Is the "skip school and become an entrepreneur" meme chiefly an American idea? Everyone I know from China be like "get the best marks in the entire region and become an entrepreneur"

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

#229
I'm good with a bit of homework when the kids are not too little; there's something to say for sitting down by yourself and trying to focus and figure things out or memorize a little bit (it can be done at school too or instead of at home); if students don't have a minimum of study habits, how are they going to go about hard STEM courses in universities?

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

#230

The main benefit of homework is instilling the habit of working to a deadline without direct supervision, instead of giving in to distractions.

So I guess maybe my schools were too easy on the homework - I managed to slip through doing as little as I could, electing for self-driven learning instead (known to me as "whoa, this thing is cool!" when I was a kid), and the end result is that I absolutely can't do bullshit work on a deadline without direct supervision. It makes me feel at the same time both smart and totally unfit for the contemporary workplace.

Me too, my friend. I've spent too much time here this week because I have something important I'm putting off. Sigh.
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