AI Homework

One of my subjects at highchool was technical drawing.

The teacher was a quite old man who was set on his ways. We would have to draw 3D pieces by hand, using our squares, bevels and compasses, and lining everything with an ink pencil afterwards, and he gave us a lot of homework to do, which he examined for imperfections.

I was incredibly bad a it. I would start a drawing, only to discover halfway through it that it didn't fit the sheet of paper I had and I had to change the perspective. My perpendiculars were never perfectly aligned. I would smear blots of ink with my tools and hands.

It was excruciating.

This is the point where I would usually say that I learned to enjoy the repetition and eventually came to appreciate it and be good at it. But that's not what happened.

Instead I started doing my homework using the computer, printing, and then tracing the points by hand. This resulted on cleaner-looking homework and took less time to do. What's surprising perhaps is that it enabled me to appreciate design more, now that I was no longer limited by the drawing technique, which was, I believe, my teacher's real interest (he was a painter outside of school. A very nice person, I didn't enjoy lying to him like that).

You might think that this would prevent me from performing well on exams, where a clean enough drawing (done by hand) was expected. The thing is: I could muster the effort to do a one-off drawing that was clean and precise, from time to time. Just not after every lesson. I actually got the maximum qualification on my province's technical drawing examination.

This is all to say: I agree with the Author. Once the tools are out there, trying to limit them is pointless. You must adapt your curriculum to the environment your pupils are in. If you don't, they will.

That would pretty much guarantee nobody would do any homework ever again.

Homework isn't effective at making students "dig into and really understand a subject" - it's a method of externalizing school expenses onto parents, because teacher time and school funds are finite, and the time of parents and children is... not the school's problem. Making the final grade conditioned on homework performance is just about the only way to ensure kids do it (or are made to do it) at all.

Now, I'm not saying homework is entirely a bad idea - I'm complaining that it's being treated as an externality, making it almost unbounded. Teachers don't coordinate among themselves the amount of homework each of them assigns, so the only thing limiting the total amount of homework is a good chunk of the class being systematically exhausted by it, or (hopefully) parents making a fuss before things reach this level. But, the only reason the teachers can push so much homework on kids in the first place is that homework grades matter for the finals.

I agree, and can we have a discussion in general about homework being included in the grade in general? It's purpose is to help students learn the material, which should be reflected on the test.

If the student can perform well on the test without that, then they shouldn't be forced to do it and penalized when they don't(which you can imagine happens often, as if the student understand the material well enough already the homework is just useless busywork.

If the student can't perform well on the test without that, they will be forced to do the homework. In this case, including homework as part of the grade might be detrimental because they can cheat/copy/us AI to complete homework and boost their grade enough to pass while not understanding the material well enough to pass the tests.

The counter-argument here(that I can think of) is that doing homework, even if - or especially if - it's just easy busywork for the student, prepares them for the future where such tasks will almost always be necessary to succeed. A lot of good learners end up not developing this skill/discipline because they aren't forced to work hard in school, which causes them to fail when faced with tasks/problems that require serious effort, and this would arguably make things more difficult for them. In my opinion this problem would be better addressed by funneling kids into classes that are appropriately challenging for them rather than forcing them to do busywork, but that's a much more difficult thing to do, and also learning to complete easy/"useless" busywork is a related but different skill than learning to focus on and complete challenging tasks

Really good article...very much enjoyed it. Thanks for sharing!

that's a good point, I just made a comment next to yours responding to the same original comment about whether homework should exist at all, and I think you're idea that it is a way to extend the "learning time" of students without requiring more time and resources from teachers is a good counter-point.

If you have the time to read my other comment, what would you think about the idea of only making homework mandatory for students who's quiz/test grades are below a certain level, say 70% for example