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There Is No Homework In Finland

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Re: There Is No Homework In Finland

#31

Post by jessaustin »

wklauss wrote: post #20
pflats wrote: post #10

According to the article, 7% of Finnish children don't graduate high school, compared to 25% of US children. 22% of US children live in poverty. 4% of Finnish children live in poverty.[1] Strange. Furthermore, it's my personal policy that anyone who creates an infographic with a bar graph that starts at 520 and goes up to 570 should be ignored. Either they are trying to intentionally skew interpretation of the data b…

Yes, Finland is a great country to live in. Also Sweden, Norway and Denmark. But people start loosing interest the moment you mention taxation. This things don't come cheap and in the US is hard to sell the idea of "high taxes = better quality of life".

In the USA that's a hard sell because many voters have never observed it to be the case. While many people consider relatively highly-taxed California, New York, etc. to be the best the USA has to offer, many others consider them social, governmental, and political disasters. That's why they're all moving to Colorado! (seems like it anyway...)

I haven't lived in Scandinavia, but my observations of other parts of the world lead me to suspect that politicians and bureaucrats in that blessed region are simply less corrupt and inept than those in the USA. Given more resources, they deliver more benefits. In the same situation, their American counterparts just inspire more outrage.

No, I don't have a solution for these depressing observations.

Re: There Is No Homework In Finland

#32

Post by mathattack »

cs702 wrote: post #8

In Finland, teachers are selected from the top 10% of college graduates.[1] In the US, nearly half of all new teachers come from the bottom third of college graduates.[2] Homework or no homework, Finnish students are learning directly from -- and personally interacting with -- some of the brightest minds in their country, every day. -- [1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands... [2] http://www…

When you combine the top 10% with a 12 to 1 student to teacher ratio, great things can happen. This seems more like the US private school model.

I'm surprised they didn't mention that Finnish students start school at 7 years old. [1]

I would be interested to find out about the dispersion of the Finnish results. Do they huddle around the mean, or are there very positive outliers? I don't have any personal data points, and haven't seen anything published on this.

[1] http://www.thedailyriff.com/articles/the-finland-phenomenon-...

Re: There Is No Homework In Finland

#33

Post by sp332 »

mrbgty wrote: post #29
sp332 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Since Finland students only get one standardized test, it's very difficult to determine. I have no idea why that's listed as a positive thing in the graphic; you can't improve what you don't measure! 2. According to the article, Finland's average PISA scores are higher than Hong Kong or Japan. 3 & 4. Since the degrees are subsidized by the sate, there are a lot more people getting them. This helps recruit enough t…

Re 1. Standardized tests reminds me of software dev managers who want to track bug counts to measure productivity. There are so many factors to education that the result of any standardized test is questionable. Everyone thinks and problem solves differently and what the tests do is encourage teachers to teach students to all think in the same way in order to get the best result on the test. They teach to the test in…

Ah, I was hoping to avoid this argument. If your students aren't doing well, having a "questionable" measurement is better than nothing.

Re: There Is No Homework In Finland

#34

Post by nissimk »

MattGrommes wrote: post #18
sp332 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also doubt that the average US 5th grader has 50 minutes of homework every day.

I don't know what the actual average is but as a parent of middle-schoolers that sounds right. I've always fought my kids' teachers to keep them from wasting too much time doing homework but if I didn't they'd probably have at least this much. A friend of my wife had to email her son's 6th grade teacher the other day explaining that the son was sent to bed early and could "only" spend 4 hours on the homework that _da…

US party line seems to be 10 minutes per grade:

http://www.nea.org/tools/16938.htm

But many parents report that their kids require far longer to complete the assignments. When my son had more than 15 - 20 minutes of homework in 1st grade (5 repetitions of "write a sentence in Spanish that includes the following word") last year we told him to stop and we sent a note to the teacher. I have a friend whose kid takes 2 - 3 times longer than his classmates to finish his homework. It's hard to tell if it is helpful or not for him, but he's definitely not happy about it and he's still a small kid.

Re: There Is No Homework In Finland

#35

Post by Dylan16807 »

pflats wrote: post #10

According to the article, 7% of Finnish children don't graduate high school, compared to 25% of US children. 22% of US children live in poverty. 4% of Finnish children live in poverty.[1] Strange. Furthermore, it's my personal policy that anyone who creates an infographic with a bar graph that starts at 520 and goes up to 570 should be ignored. Either they are trying to intentionally skew interpretation of the data b…

>Furthermore, it's my personal policy that anyone who creates an infographic with a bar graph that starts at 520 and goes up to 570 should be ignored.

I strongly disagree. It's misleading to shift the bottom of the graph some, because it still looks like an unshifted graph. But if you shift the bottom of the graph all the way up to the lowest value, it does not look at all like an unshifted graph, and should not mislead anyone. Finnish children are obviously not getting scores 20 times higher than other countries.

Re: There Is No Homework In Finland

#36

Post by pflats »

sp332 wrote: post #13
Zelphyr wrote: post #6

Except you read all the comments in that article and the people from Finland all say they do have homework. While not as linkbaity perhaps it should be retitled, "Finland has an excellent education system."

I also doubt that the average US 5th grader has 50 minutes of homework every day.

10 minutes per grade level is actually the rule of thumb that's taught in many education programs and is advocated by the NEA (a national teachers' union). Some longitudinal research has borne this out.

Whether it actually happens or not, I don't know.

Research: http://rer.sagepub.com/content/76/1/1.abstract Press info on research: http://today.duke.edu/2006/03/homework.html

Re: There Is No Homework In Finland

#37

Post by Dylan16807 »

sp332 wrote: post #33
mrbgty wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re 1. Standardized tests reminds me of software dev managers who want to track bug counts to measure productivity. There are so many factors to education that the result of any standardized test is questionable. Everyone thinks and problem solves differently and what the tests do is encourage teachers to teach students to all think in the same way in order to get the best result on the test. They teach to the test in…

Ah, I was hoping to avoid this argument. If your students aren't doing well, having a "questionable" measurement is better than nothing.

Why do you take that as a given? A bad measurement can easily lead to you going further in the wrong direction.

Re: There Is No Homework In Finland

#38

Post by berntb »

cesarbs wrote: post #28
wklauss wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Finland is a great country to live in. Also Sweden, Norway and Denmark. But people start loosing interest the moment you mention taxation. This things don't come cheap and in the US is hard to sell the idea of "high taxes = better quality of life".

Some of my colleagues at Microsoft have worked in Denmark and they all complain about the taxation there and consider it unacceptable. I honestly can't understand that. I'd rather give half my salary in taxes to the government and get free education, healthcare and whatnot. My wife and I definitely don't aspire to be rich, as long as we're comfortable we're ok, so maybe that's our difference. What I don't get is how…

Well, first let me say that the US health care system seems like the worst one in the Western world. We skip comparing with that.

[Edit: In Scandinavia] If you pay taxes for health care etc -- then someone else decides the priorities. This is potentially very bad for you. After paying taxes, you won't have enough money/insurance to go do expensive treatments in other places.

(Edit: Let me put it like this. Health care is centrally planned. Consider the size of that system per million people and realize it is very, very hard to make it work.)

My standard example, from me and others I know:

Sweden (and probably Finland) are internationally acknowledged to be bad at catching health problems. Doctors have lots of administration and just don't have enough time to do diagnosis for individual patients.

The worst part is that the doctors will tell you something, anything, to get you out of their hair.

(Anecdotally, Swedish doctors take jobs in Norway partly to get a chance to do their d-mn job.)

Me and others I know have had decades with e.g. losing your favorite sports (easily treated knee problems), tiredness (undiagnosed food allergies with few symptoms, lack of X, etc). And so on.

I have no idea if 0.5% or 10% of the population get their life quality seriously lowered by this. And no one else know either, since that question just isn't examined...

Re: There Is No Homework In Finland

#39

Post by SystemOut »

sp332 wrote: post #13
Zelphyr wrote: post #6

Except you read all the comments in that article and the people from Finland all say they do have homework. While not as linkbaity perhaps it should be retitled, "Finland has an excellent education system."

I also doubt that the average US 5th grader has 50 minutes of homework every day.

I don't doubt that. Especially if you include assigned reading time. I have a 4th grader and they're expected to read 30 minutes a day out side of school and keep a log of that. Some teachers require them to write at least a paragraph each night explaining what they read. Add to that the normal math and/or writing worksheets and you can get to 50 minutes pretty easily.

Re: There Is No Homework In Finland

#40

Post by berntb »

dirtyaura wrote: post #9
eshvk wrote: post #4

I am not sure what to make of this: 1. Sure high school graduation rates are higher in Finland than in the U.S., can you actually compare those across the board? Is what a high schooler studies in Finland the same as what they study in the U.S.? Maybe there are other societal issues why people drop out in the U.S. compared to Finland which I understand has a homogenous largely white population. 2. So there is no home…

Finland's success in Pisa scores is the reason that these practices are highlighted. Although homogenous population plays a role, Finnish scores are constantly better than almost equally homogenous Norway. However, the true reason behind the success of Finnish school system is yet unclear. One thing that certainly plays an important role is that teacher as a profession has traditionally been highly regarded in Finnis…

>>Finnish scores are constantly better than almost equally homogenous Norway.

Uh, considering the high immigration into Norway -- can you back that up? (Finland is more like the rest of the EU in immigration.)

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