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

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

#261

Post by rayiner » Wed, Oct 28, 2015, 4:06 AM UTC

pen2l wrote: post #238

rayiner wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why do you think that? I'd wager impulsiveness and attention span are normally distributed, and there are gains to be had tracking those say more than 1 SD below the mean into classes specially equipped to handle them.

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

#262

Post by pavement » Wed, Oct 28, 2015, 4:11 AM UTC

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…

  better, smarter, well-paid, un-stressed, empathetic teachers

Totally, but a teacher in charge of usually 30 children, for probably 8 hours a day, still isn't going work miracles.

Divide your attention across thirty energetic people in 8 hours. You'll still feel spread thin.

When elementary school gives way to high school, this ratio of time per teacher, per student becomes even more distributed. Possibly up to 8 classes of 30 students per teacher, each class lasting an maybe an hour. If you were to parcel out direct attention, such that each teacher spent an equal amount of time with each student, across the entire day, every student would get 2 minutes from each of their 8 teachers, in such a scenario. Maybe that's a 2 minute chess game, or 2 minutes in the confessional.

Obviously lectures don't actually work that way, but you see the point I'm driving at.

Parents with 4 kids feel stressed out by their own kids. 4 kids is a large family. Teachers probably feel the least stressed when there are no kids, or perhaps when only their well-behaved favorite students are present.

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

#263

Post by TeMPOraL » Wed, Oct 28, 2015, 4:12 AM UTC

avemg wrote: post #242

TeMPOraL wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What is the point of your comment exactly?

That people whine about kids spending time doing some thing instead of the one they're supposed to do, while the kids are just choosing the thing that is not total bullshit and is actually useful for something.

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

#264

Post by learc83 » Wed, Oct 28, 2015, 4:20 AM UTC

ericssmith wrote: post #143

munificent wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's look at my first-grader's schedule. Kids need more sleep than adults, so we aim for about 11 hours. (For teens, they recommend 10, last I checked.) School is 7 hours. 1.5 hours for gymnastics, sports, or some other extra-curricular activity. An hour of transit. Another hour for breakfast and dinner (assuming all they do is sit down and eat, and don't help prepare anything or do the dishes). An hour for a bath.…

Since I appreciate seeing someone else's schedule, figured I would post ours. I have 6 and 8yo. and we live quite close to school. 10.5 - sleep 0.75 - morning routine (teeth, dress, find lost things) 7 - school 0.5 - transit 2.75 - free time 0.5 - dinner 0.5 - evening routine (pjs,teeth, don't take bath every day) 0.5 - workbooks & parent tutoring or school homework 0.5 - independent reading of chapter books 0.5 - st…

>Because we personally tutor our kids, I'm sure we will resent an increased homework burden as they get older, especially as we are able to tutor to a relatively high level for most subjects.

Yep, just wait a few more years and you're tutoring will consist more of helping your kids figure out the instructions for ridiculous homework assignments than actually teaching subject matter.

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

#265

Post by dgrant » Wed, Oct 28, 2015, 4:22 AM UTC

teddyh wrote: post #199

dgrant wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

You sound like you’re assuming that today’s kids get about the same amount of homework which you did. My impression is that the amount of homework has increased enormously since you were a kid.

Hadn't really thought about that, but I felt like I had tons of homework (in the 1990s). Part of it was not that I had tons of homework, but that my parents instilled in me a desire to not just to the minimum. So stuff took longer because I put more work into it. Even with math, I probably always did a bit more questions than the teacher had assigned. I spent countless hours perfecting essays, writing research reports. Now that I've thought about it, I'd have a tough time believing that kids nowadays get more homework than I did.

So... what I'm saying is, there is the amount assigned, and then there is the amount that kids are actually doing, which are somewhat independent. So it's possible that the assigned amount has increased? or not. It's also possible parents are "better" now (this is true, I think parenting overall has evolved little by little for the better) and are keeping better tabs on their kids, making their kids do more homework, more than just the minimum.

Another data point, I was tutoring some kids in high school math around 2005 or so. There was very little math homework assigned, it was a complete joke, and these kids were going to private school. I remember thinking "what the hell is going on here, what has happened to education!" There was actually some Supreme Court ruling in the province of British Columbia that said that teachers couldn't give homework unless they were going to mark it. Or that they couldn't give "participation marks" for homework, it had to be marked on its merits or not at all. So a lot of teacher's scaled back the assigned homework I think. That's what I heard, I can't find a reference to the court case.

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

#266

Post by a-nikolaev » Wed, Oct 28, 2015, 4:27 AM UTC

svachalek wrote: post #237

plaguuuuuu wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I did not go to a US school myself, but many of my friends who did are saying that studying diligently and doing well in class negatively affects your reputation.. and if you are doing any nerdy extracurricular work or go to a STEM camp, you are just doomed.. ) And then these people go to college, and cannot do simple multiplication.. I think this is not how it should be..

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

#267

Post by learc83 » Wed, Oct 28, 2015, 4:27 AM UTC

If we're talking about high school, bring back study hall. Kids can't absorb information from lectures 7 hours a day, so why try?

7 hours a day 5 days a week (most of the year) for 13 years is surely enough time to prepare for college/trade school/apprenticeship/unskilled labor.

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

#268

Post by nosuchthing » Wed, Oct 28, 2015, 4:42 AM UTC

gk_brown wrote: post #142

riot504 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sports teach kids about teamwork, working together, and how hard work pays off. I have found more use from what I learned in sports than any homework assignment.

And yet, most of the population won't end up making a living from their sporting accomplishments. However, they will get a job based on what they learned (or didn't learn) in school.

Sports and athletic activities provide experiences, self awareness, entertainment, and teamwork lessons that are incredibly useful beyond academic or (pro-sports) career-centric pursuits.

Athletic activities are experiences in their own right, that can be appreciated in and of the act and experience of the moment itself, rather than the assumption that all things must be a task so in order to establish some future goal.

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

#269

Post by a-nikolaev » Wed, Oct 28, 2015, 5:02 AM UTC

dgrant wrote: post #265

teddyh wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound like you’re assuming that today’s kids get about the same amount of homework which you did. My impression is that the amount of homework has increased enormously since you were a kid.

Hadn't really thought about that, but I felt like I had tons of homework (in the 1990s). Part of it was not that I had tons of homework, but that my parents instilled in me a desire to not just to the minimum. So stuff took longer because I put more work into it. Even with math, I probably always did a bit more questions than the teacher had assigned. I spent countless hours perfecting essays, writing research report…

While reading the discussion, it seems to me that individual student's attitudes and preferneces plays the major role in this issue. Maybe even more important than the official policies.

I had largerly the same high school and college experience as yours (at least I would describe it in a very simiar way), even though I received my education in a different country, where all educational policies must be significantly different.

So I think, it's not surprizing at all that it's hard to come up with a single resolution regarding homework that would fit every class and each individual student and their family.

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

#270

Post by aianus » Wed, Oct 28, 2015, 5:17 AM UTC

JshWright wrote: post #154

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?

I don't know about the U.S. but in Toronto school ran from 8:45am to 3:15pm which is 6.5 hours. My poor dad had to shift his schedule to work 7:15 to 3:15 to pick me up. It would have made a lot more sense to extend the school day by 1.5h to a standard 8h day and not assign homework.