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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

#231

Post by unsignedint »

learc83 wrote: post #192
Dowwie wrote: post #184

"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...

When I was in elementary school in the 90s, they used to try to scare us into working harder by telling us stories about how Japanese kids went to school half a day on Saturday. When my parents were in school it was about keeping up with the Soviets. These days, it's kids in Shanghai doing 14 hours a week of homework.

I remember half-day Saturdays!

It was more of a global thing in Japan. Many workers actually did half a day on Saturday, so naturally were schools. Most of companies adopted 5 working day per week perhaps around the end of 80th.

School was a bit late on this one, when I was in Japan (1st year in middle school; 1992) was when they were start transitioning from 5.5 to 5. Although, I have only experienced having only second Saturday of a month off.

After I left Japan, in 1995, they've transitioned to 2nd and 4th Saturdays off, but It was not until 2002 schools in Japan transitioned to complete 5 day a week schedule.

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

#232

Post by JshWright »

ilovefood wrote: post #227
JshWright wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So just to be clear, you feel that 2-3 hours of homework is appropriate for a kid, after they spent 7-8 hours in school?

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

#233

Post by analog31 »

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.

My observation as a parent of two kids: I think that homework is already moving in that direction. An increasing amount of homework is done at the computer -- hours and hours of it.

Unfortunately, the stuff that's designed for education is Lame -- intellectually superficial, and boring for the kids -- and they know it. The companies that make that stuff are politically connected and mainly good at selling to school administrators.

It's been this way since the birth of the educational software industry.

Now I admit that I've never played video games, but I can't imagine creating an artificial learning environment that's as rich as going outside to play, making things, or writing code.

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

#234

Post by mhuffman »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #169
NiftyFifty wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowledge cannot be taught it must be inferred.

Exactly. Knowledge and insight is what you get when you take the facts you've been taught (or learned yourself) and internalize them. Schools nowadays focus too much on the first at the cost of the second, because former is easily testable and the latter takes time.

One of the goals of Common Core was to fix that situation ... but then, you know, teaching to the test kind of defeated it.

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

#235

Post by bradbatt »

pdpi wrote: post #152
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 cl…

If they are in school all day and then pressured with all sorts of homework at night, when do they actually get to learn something they want to learn? Something they are really interested in, but isn’t assigned by a teacher?

I think there is value in giving kids time to learn things that at outside the subjects that a school teaches. Eliminating homework gives kids more of a chance to do that, not to mention the other things that people have mentioned like spending time with family, playing, etc.

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

#236

Post by pdpi »

bradbatt wrote: post #235
pdpi wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cl…

If they are in school all day and then pressured with all sorts of homework at night, when do they actually get to learn something they want to learn? Something they are really interested in, but isn’t assigned by a teacher? I think there is value in giving kids time to learn things that at outside the subjects that a school teaches. Eliminating homework gives kids more of a chance to do that, not to mention the othe…

Like I said: I agree with the general sentiment of giving kids more time to be kids, to play and to learn non-academic stuff.

What I'm advocating, though, is that this should be, at least partially, at the expense of structured lectures, rather than homework.

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

#237

Post by svachalek »

plaguuuuuu wrote: post #228
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…

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"

Probably. It seems to me that in China and some of the nearby countries, there is a belief that doing well in school will practically guarantee success in life, an idea that most Americans would find laughable. I don't know if it's actually a lot more complicated to get ahead here than it is there, but certainly there's a lot more awareness here that life is not so simple.

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

#238

Post by pen2l »

rayiner wrote: post #170
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…

> Arguably you could cover everything again the next day but thats hardly a graceful solution and doesn't cater to that variance of time needed for homework across different children as contact hours are very limited as it is. Repetition is important. But kids are already at school for 7-8 hours a day. If that is not enough time to engage in adequate repetition, the solution is not to shift work to home hours. It is:…

> 2) Do more with the time given, by cutting students who disrupt class.

If you keep doing that for a long enough time, no more students will be left in the class. So I don't think this a practical solution that will yield better results than whatever we have going on today.

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

#239

Post by cossatot »

rayiner wrote: post #170
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…

> Arguably you could cover everything again the next day but thats hardly a graceful solution and doesn't cater to that variance of time needed for homework across different children as contact hours are very limited as it is. Repetition is important. But kids are already at school for 7-8 hours a day. If that is not enough time to engage in adequate repetition, the solution is not to shift work to home hours. It is:…

What do you view as non-essential? STEM? Arts? Social studies? Recess/PE?

And how much time do you actually think is wasted on dealing with disruptive students? 10% of the day? 35%?

To me, this sounds like a recipe for creating an upper class of uncreative, poorly-rounded conformists and a lower class of people who are undereducated and permanently pissed off at the society that fails to serve their needs.

I think it's pretty unlikely that this would be a substantial improvement in modern American society or many others.

Kids misbehave at school for a huge number of reasons (many of them socioeconomic but definitely not all), and it's not really the public school system's responsibility to fix that, but it is the school system's responsibility to give them an education so that they can properly integrate into society as an adult. Shoving the problematic students to the side exacerbates this.

Bonus points if the education system can encourage more independence of thought and action, creative and analytical problem skills, and the tenacity and wisdom that come from actually having gotten some hard things done.

A better system would be one that is more capable of demonstrating the value of education to the students (incentivizing them to learn, and making learning at any level more rewarding), as well as one that can accommodate a larger degree of student interests and learning styles. I don't really know how to do this without having more internships and so forth, which aren't necessarily feasible for younger children but may be for teens. Maybe somewhere in the world or at some point in history this has been practiced more?

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

#240

Post by aperrien »

douche wrote: post #167
guimarin wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Can we turn Watson towards childhood education somehow?
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