Who Invented Homework? • Hacker News Board

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#91

Post by cholantesh » Thu, May 05, 2016, 3:40 PM UTC

Morgawr wrote: post #12

KON_Air wrote: post #4

I thought geeks an nerds enjoyed homework for the fact it is mental exercise if nothing else. Bazinga generation nerds and geeks get out of my cyber-lawn!

>I thought geeks an nerds enjoyed homework for the fact it is mental exercise if nothing else. Not really. Obviously there are different types of "geeks" and "nerds", but generally those type of people enjoy tinkering and playing around the stuff they care about. They certainly don't like being forced to perform menial and repetitive tasks (as often homework is) because somebody else told them to.

What about people who are motivated by the prospect of academic achievement?

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#92

Post by guard-of-terra » Thu, May 05, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

lukewrites wrote: post #87

guard-of-terra wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I would unlikely have learned english unless it had been taught at school" You could as well play a lot of video games in English and dabbling in programming. That's how I learned. Everybody who relied on school for learning English - still barely understand it.

Out of curiosity, does this mean that you didn't have any English lessons in school? I ask because in the field of Second Language Acquisition there's a pretty strong consensus that the optimal path to language learning involves a combination of classroom instruction augmented by interaction with (reading, listening) & use of (speaking, writing) the language. I've spent most of my career as a language teacher, and th…

I did have some, they began slightly later than I've got hold of a PC.

I do think that some school lessons contributed their share. I just don't think that sitting behind a desk for two hours per week, for ten years, is necessary or desired. After a few years I did not need much "training wheels" and could continue to increase proficiency regardless.

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#93

Post by dmgd » Thu, May 05, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #77

bprieto wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you do. Please read this: http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/docs/brainwash.pdf Maybe "training to be slaves" is hiperbole, but as Seth Godin puts it, training to be "cogs in a machine" is quite right.

Slaves were, and are, born into poverty, often forcibly removed from their parents, treated and sold like cattle, worked hard at all times for no benefit to themselves, had no rights and no legal protections, and had no prospect of removing themselves from slavery. In no way is this comparable to receiving a relatively high quality education during the formative years of your life. Teachers work hard for little rewar…

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Wage+slave

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#94

Post by gamuni » Thu, May 05, 2016, 3:44 PM UTC

I hate homework.

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#95

Post by yolesaber » Thu, May 05, 2016, 3:55 PM UTC

bendykstra wrote: post #62

auxym wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>burn time plugging things into (-b +- sqrt (b2-4ac)) / 2a I swear to god, I had so much of that to do, I got tired of it and learned enough python in one night, at 15, to get the computer to do my homework for me.

I did that too, though in BASIC on a TI-83+. When I showed it to my math teacher, she said that I could use the program on any future homework and tests as long as I turned in a paragraph explaining step-by-step how the program worked.

Ah looks like you actually had a smart math teacher. Mine retroactively failed all my take-homes and homework after I showed her the program I used and explained why I did it (rote memorization is terrible, I was more interested in the theory and algorithms). I had to appeal to the CS teacher and principal at my school to reverse the grade which would've prevented me from graduating

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#96

Post by kamaal » Thu, May 05, 2016, 4:01 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #20

My feelings now are that there really shouldn't be any mandatory homework. - If you do it badly, you may as well not do it. Who else remembers flipping through "The Catcher in the Rye" so fast they don't actually remember any other character than Holden Caulfield? - It's an easy way for teachers to not teach, yet gives them an alibi. "Look I'm teaching, they have loads of books to read. Can't help it if they don't."…

>>If you already understand it, you don't benefit from solving more quadratic equations. You benefit from doing whatever the next step is. You just burn time plugging things into (-b +- sqrt (b2-4ac)) / 2a. And you learn the wrong lesson, which is that you have to get it exactly right, rather than why that's the equation in the first place.

As some one who works in Data Analytics, I can tell you many people lack the ability to plug things into a formula properly, many have issues with even simple approximation and back of the envelope calculations. I wouldn't say, practicing this is a bad thing.

By the way if you think this is wrong. A little scaled up version of this is what is tested in current day interviews. Asking people algorithms is basically testing their ability to remember a heuristic and their ability to plug in numbers and demonstrate mental acrobatics.

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#97

Post by oarsinsync » Thu, May 05, 2016, 4:04 PM UTC

saint_fiasco wrote: post #64

guard-of-terra wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I would unlikely have learned english unless it had been taught at school" You could as well play a lot of video games in English and dabbling in programming. That's how I learned. Everybody who relied on school for learning English - still barely understand it.

I don't know why this is being downvoted. Teaching a language to students with mixed levels of previous knowledge and motivation is extremely hard. The schools I went to could never manage it. I learned English from Japanese videogames that had been translated to English by Ted Woolsey.

> I learned English from Japanese videogames

Did you set us up the bomb?

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#98

Post by pessimizer » Thu, May 05, 2016, 4:13 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #20

My feelings now are that there really shouldn't be any mandatory homework. - If you do it badly, you may as well not do it. Who else remembers flipping through "The Catcher in the Rye" so fast they don't actually remember any other character than Holden Caulfield? - It's an easy way for teachers to not teach, yet gives them an alibi. "Look I'm teaching, they have loads of books to read. Can't help it if they don't."…

> You just burn time plugging things into (-b +- sqrt (b2-4ac)) / 2a. And you learn the wrong lesson, which is that you have to get it exactly right, rather than why that's the equation in the first place.

Once I learned how to complete the square, I decided I'd rather do that than try to remember that formula. I'm actually exaggerating when I say I "decided" - I forgot the formula so much that I was completing the square for a general quadratic equation just to remember it.

Plug-and-chug is pointless. People shouldn't be taking physics before they take calculus.

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#99

Post by tropo » Thu, May 05, 2016, 4:31 PM UTC

pflats wrote: post #88

branchless wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So sick of my 7 year old getting math work and asking him what he did that day only to hear much of it was little more than coloring in. They are leaving the hard stuff for homework.

If he's seven, he was probably coloring in ten frames, which are used to build a stronger conceptual understanding of our base-10 number system. The model starts out with physical objects, moves to visual representations of those objects ("coloring in"), then to abstraction. From there, students use those techniques to move away from the to develop good mental math strategies. If you were doing 17 + 35 on a ten frame…

That is a horribly complicated way to do 17 + 35.

The sane way is to try matching against a pattern, then if that fails you fall back to the traditional algorithm with the numbers lined up one over the other and doing the carries. Yes, you can run the traditional algorithm in your head, for this and for much larger things. Fully in memory, 4-digit plus 4-digit is quite doable. (can your method handle that?) While staring at the numbers on paper to avoid forgetting, and writing down the answer as you go, arbitrary sizes are doable.

It so happens that I do see a pattern I can fit, but this shouldn't be expected. I convert to 17+(172+1) and then to 173+1 and I know 17*3 is 51 so the answer is 52. It's forgivable to not spot this shortcut.

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#100

Post by antisthenes » Thu, May 05, 2016, 4:31 PM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #39

nibs wrote: post #30

As an unschooler who went to school and did "homework" or any kind of "schoolwork" for the first time when I was 12, it took me about a month to catch up to my peers in terms of abilities to do the coursework, and about a year to catch up to my peers in resentment and disengagement. Except I got to spend seven years hanging out with my brothers doing fun stuff and my friends had to spend it training to be slaves. The…

Thanks to the economic state of the US, most families can't afford the time to dedicate to their children to properly educate them in the breadth of subjects that schools (attempt to) cover. And this assumes that the parents are either educated or capable/willing to source proper materials to provide information (or the tools to access information) for their children.

I agree with you about the economic state of US, but "not having enough time" excuse has nothing to do with the economy.

http://www.statisticbrain.com/television-watching-statistics...

Perhaps if the average American cut down their TV watching time in half, they'd suddenly have time to spend more on their children and help them through the subjects studied at school.

Going by the provided statistics, is it any wonder Asian Americans (least amount of TV time) do better in school than other demographics? I have no doubt that parents in those households spend an above average amount of time helping their kids with schoolwork and make absolutely sure they don't fall behind.