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My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

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Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#51

Post by comex »

Afforess wrote: post #39
tudorw wrote: post #26

Six and a half hours sleep, this is way too low, Millpond Children’s Sleep Clinic recommends over nine for a 13yr old. http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Childrenssleep/Pages/howmuchsleep...

I once asked a vice principal (way back, 10 yrs ago) why schools started so early when lack of sleep was known to be bad. He said it was so there was time for sports in the evening. If you started at 10 or 11 school would run until 6 and it would start getting dark. Sports are why kids sleep is ruined.

Maybe, but when I was a teenager, at least, starting at 8 or 10 would make no difference to me - I would just tend to fall asleep 2 hours later. At least in some cases, the real issue is the number of waking hours in a day demanded of a student.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#52

Post by Afforess »

anigbrowl wrote: post #45
Afforess wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly are very isolated from the world. Even if the author had a good math experience, polynomials do not appear in everyday problems. As for the start time, likely she is involved in extra-curricular activities, like cheerleading or sports. I wouldn't judge so harshly.

I can't believe I'm reading someone on hacker news saying 'polynomials don't appear in everyday problems.' As for the start time, likely she is involved in extra-curricular activities, like cheerleading or sports. 5 nights a week? Not buying it. I don't think I'm isolated from the world at all; I managed to deal with a heavy homework load and still have plenty of fun and get into various sorts of trouble (often at th…

I can't believe I'm reading someone on hacker news saying 'polynomials don't appear in everyday problems.'

Name a situation where solving a polynomial is something the average person has to do? The only one I can think of is compound interest.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#53

Post by kaybe »

rtpg wrote: post #27
vacri wrote: post #24

There are some concepts at odds here. "The measurements included numbers like 78 13/64, and all this multiplying and dividing was to be done without a calculator." is not 'rote learning'/'memorisation without rationalisation'. It's directly exercising an ability. I've had a university-level experience reach for her calculator to multiply 0.2 by 3, and when I forbade her from using it, she just stared dumbly at me. Th…

I spent a lot of time up until high school forcing myself not to use a calculator, because I wanted to work on my mental skills in arithmetic, but I always make a lot of small mistakes, even now. I have a hard enough time concentrating on 'easy' things , please don't ask me to hold numbers in my brain. I am a pretty "mathy" person but mental multiplication is not meant for the human thought process, too much is going…

It's a well-known fact here that mathematicians can't do calculations. I've had professors in class ask the class to do very simple calculations for their complex examples for them. (Or they get it wrong. A lot.)

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#54

Post by Tichy »

comex wrote: post #46
vacri wrote: post #24

There are some concepts at odds here. "The measurements included numbers like 78 13/64, and all this multiplying and dividing was to be done without a calculator." is not 'rote learning'/'memorisation without rationalisation'. It's directly exercising an ability. I've had a university-level experience reach for her calculator to multiply 0.2 by 3, and when I forbade her from using it, she just stared dumbly at me. Th…

One comment: there's a difference between mental arithmetic, which is as useful as ever to be able to perform quickly/effectively, and the pen-and-paper variant (which I assume the cited assignment required), which is not. Everyone should, of course, know how to do the latter, but doing long pen-and-paper operations usually doesn't save time over reaching for a calculator, and is error-prone. Unfortunately, schools (…

Do calculators even routinely work with infinite precision (like (sqrt(2) x sqrt(2) = 2)? I guess you could achieve some results with Mathematia or something like that, but I have my doubts about the average calculator.

Sometimes it is still useful to do calculations by hand, also to understand what is going on.

(Edit: just tested the OS X calculator, sqrt(2) x sqrt(2) works out by chance, but sqrt(200) x sqrt(200) fails).

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#55

Post by Someone »

neltnerb wrote: post #37
rtpg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a lot of time up until high school forcing myself not to use a calculator, because I wanted to work on my mental skills in arithmetic, but I always make a lot of small mistakes, even now. I have a hard enough time concentrating on 'easy' things , please don't ask me to hold numbers in my brain. I am a pretty "mathy" person but mental multiplication is not meant for the human thought process, too much is going…

I think a good part of the problem is that we learn to multiply and divide backwards. The standard US algorithm involves starting at the least significant digit and working your way up. It is much easier to do in your head if you do it from the most significant digit down. Or learn to convert hard multiplications into easy ones, for instance: 9x27 = 10x27-27 = 243 The other way to do this would be to multiply 9x7 to…

In my head, what I do in the end is 9x27 = 3^2 * 3^3 = 3^5 = 243 ('everybody' knows that, because of 7^3 = 343)

And 27 x 16 ends up being (32 - 5) x 16 = 512 - 80 = 432.

And yes, I could be way faster at mental arithmetic if I just did the calculations instead of switching to cuter approaches halfway through all the time.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#56

Post by neltnerb »

anigbrowl wrote: post #45
Afforess wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly are very isolated from the world. Even if the author had a good math experience, polynomials do not appear in everyday problems. As for the start time, likely she is involved in extra-curricular activities, like cheerleading or sports. I wouldn't judge so harshly.

I can't believe I'm reading someone on hacker news saying 'polynomials don't appear in everyday problems.' As for the start time, likely she is involved in extra-curricular activities, like cheerleading or sports. 5 nights a week? Not buying it. I don't think I'm isolated from the world at all; I managed to deal with a heavy homework load and still have plenty of fun and get into various sorts of trouble (often at th…

Even purely from a practical perspective of "I have to get into college", if you are not very active in extracurricular activities you are screwed on your applications.

If you're doing athletics, you're spending five days a week for three hours after school every day during the sports season.

Even not during the sports season I was spending a minimum of two hours every day on extracurriculars including Boy Scouts, Academic Superbowl, Chess Club, and Science Olympiad. Those I all did because I had honest enthusiasm and got a lot out of all of those things (contributed more to my engineering and general life education than many classes for sure). But this kind of load is not and should not be unusual in children trying to find out what they enjoy in life.

Perhaps the problem is that there has been a shift from unstructured extracurricular activities to structured ones. I've seen this both in high schools and in universities. Writing poetry used to be something you did in an unstructured fun way, now it's a poetry club at school. So perhaps the difference is that what you define as "fun and trouble" is now a formal extracurricular activity.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#57

Post by VargardObyron »

NemesorZandrak wrote: post #14

When I was at school and that is not USA but Poland. We used to have 6-8 different subjects per day from biology, chemistry, geography, maths and history as examples. Everyone of this subjects converted to at least an hour of homework. What I learned as a kid is that it is impossible to learn all this things at home and I have to filter what is needed the most. Sometimes approximate and sometimes simply take the risk…

Same here. I think there is a massive overload of homework. School should focus on important bits but also don't leave general knowledge out of scope and going for full specialisation.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#59

Post by belorn »

> But when I ask her what the verb tener means (“to have,” if I recall), she repeats, “Memorization, not rationalization.”

I wonder where she got that from, or if it was something she figured out by herself. It just sound so soul crushing that the goal for children is not learning, but to memorize something until the test is done.

Memorization should never be used when rationalization could do better. Sure, there exist a few rare cases where memorization is the only option (such as remembering names), but those are exceptions. Languages are almost without exception best learned by actually using the language in communication or by consuming media (books, movies, and so on).

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#60

Post by mcv »

ygra wrote: post #31

I don't recall similar homework loads (Germany, school being 10–20 years ago), but that might be due to laziness on my part or simply the fact that it wasn't a good time for me anyway. By the later grades (11th and onwards) it definitely wasn't as much. I liked what our math teacher said regarding his homework: It's for practice and not strictly needed and thus voluntary. If we feel confident doing the homework ad-ho…

I have no idea how much homework I used to get (Netherland in the '80s), because I never did any. I was lazy and got excellent grades anyway. Well, not for languages, where you did have to memorize lots of stuff (rather than rationalize, which I'm much better at), so I dropped my languages as soon as I could.

My not doing any math homework did get me in trouble when I was 17 (5th class (penultimate before graduation) middle school in the Dutch system), because integration meant memorizing all those standard primitives and having used them a lot, and not having practiced them a hundred times meant failing grades for me. A year later math moved on to geometry and I got perfect grades and finished my homework during class for the first time ever.

I think it would have been better for me if I'd learned to do my homework; I never really learned to work during school, which might actually be a more important skill than all the stuff it seems to be teaching.

But reading 79 pages in a single evening? I hope it's a really easy book, because in anything moderately serious, that would take me a week. Oh yeah, required literature reading put me off of reading for a couple of years. (Until I discovered Terry Pratchett, i fact.)

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