I am eternally grateful that I went to dumb kid rural high school with a 50% drop out rate. I only did homework or studied for a test a couple of times per semester. I has more than enough time for sports, friends, and video games. Much, much better than laborious studying no matter how useful or not useful it may be.
My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me
81–90 of 347 posts
Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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) f…
It just means you should choose a better calculator From my calculator (Genius Mathematical Tool): genius> sqrt(200)*sqrt(200) = 200.0
Well that is also wrong, or at least the .0 shows that the calculator is not doing the equations, it is just calculating. It doesn't know know that sqrt(2) x sqrt(2) = sqrt(2 x 2) = sqrt(2^2) = 2
And that is the kind of thing you get to understand if you do the calculations by hand.
Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me
#83OT but early on there's a quote from the homework: "its [sic] significance" Why is the sic in there? Is that not the correct use of 'its' in this context?
The start of that sentence mentions finding three quotes, so it should be their significance.
Your interpretation explain the use of "[sic]".
But personally I think the "its" refers to the section and not the quotes, making the "[sic]" unnecessary. But I don't have access to the original text.
Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me
#84What stood out for me from this article wasn't the homework load, which only seems slightly more than what I remember from my own youth, but rather that: 1) a teacher can accuse a parent of "cyberbullying" for an email sent in purported confidentiality to others, and that the claim can be taken seriously. Obviously I didn't read the email, but the author seems well-read and reasonable, so I'm inclined to conjecture t…
Totally agree, especially with your second point. Both my parents are career educators (teachers, counselors and now professors). They personally tell me about how "helicopter parenting" has increased in the time since they've gotten their degrees up to now. Parents are getting more and more involved (read: obsessive) about their childrens' education, sometimes to the detriment of the school process. Very often they'…
> Very often they'll blame teachers when their kids don't do well in class
> (not necessarily incorrect)
Parents being involved in their kids schooling isn't inherently bad, but it can be taken too far. Just like the kids have limited time to be able to handle 5 hours of homework a night (!), teachers have limited time to handle every parent.
That said, the fact it was done a lot through email is kinda neat, and would possibly make parent-teacher interactions scale better?
Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're forgetting transportation to and from school in your daily calculation, which could take up to an hour and a half total. And socialization which is non-negotiable. At least an hour for that? Oh and some people might need 9 hours of sleep, and another HN comment actually cited that this is recommended for a 13 year old. You see the problem with cutting it so close that homework just, just barely fits in the rem…
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>No I'm not. Lab is a public school restricted to district 2 in NYC. Assuming a drive (I wouldn't put a 13 year old on a subway in NYC alone) it's a 15 minute commute from the furthest possible location in the district to the school factoring in morning traffic (according to Google).
I said up to an hour and a half, In this case you have to tack on a half hour if your numbers are right, but it's not like the issue doesn't apply to rural areas with longer travel times. In addition, you didn't address the larger point that it's simply cutting it too close; you can never account for mitigating circumstances people have in their lives that shave off available time for homework, meaning they have to choose between finishing their homework or getting enough sleep. And the fact that many people that age need 9 hours not 8 hours of sleep.
>Socialization in addition to lunch, recess, and homeroom on weekdays?
Homeroom and recess is not socialization for kids that age. Socialization is hanging out with your friends after school for two hours discussing things of interest and relevance to you or doing something you actually enjoy. You can't assume the time in homeroom, recess, lunch, etc. are actual socialization; opportunities for socialization in school are usually very restrictive and arbitrary. If it isn't socialization by the choice of the student on their own time you can't assume it's actually happening.
>I'm sorry but if you're aiming for academic rigor sacrifices have to be made somewhere.
Sacrifices of what? Adequate sleep? Eating breakfast in the morning? Having free time to hang out with friends after school? You're not addressing the fact that according to the author, empirically many students were sleep deprived according to their parents, so clearly it's the school giving unreasonable burden.
Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me
#86I 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…
Also strongly agree with the second point about lack of coordination among teachers in schools and university. It really, really annoys me.
Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me
#87There 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 (…
Oddly enough, I like doing maths by hand. Pencil and paper were my friend throughout all of high-school and university (Maths and Chem co-major).
Something about it being tangible makes me appreciate and understand the process better. I then check my answer with the calculator :)
Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me
#88When 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…
Thanks for the interesting perspective. I guess I was lucky in having teachers who were more concerned with aptitude than homework (luckily before no child left behind). Almost none of my homework was graded -- this seems to be a european thing? You'd know better than me. So I did the amount of homework needed to learn the material, and no more. Like college.
I do wonder if the big issue is that this approach can really burn kids out on cool areas. How many kids think math puzzles are fun in elementary school when taught as a game? I think actually a surprisingly high number. But when you turn it into work it's a totally different approach, and it really doesn't seem to work.
There seem to be some promising alternative possibilities, like Khan Academy, but when you're giving kids so much work that they can't read Feynman's lectures out of actual interest you're being counterproductive.
Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me
#89Earlier 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…
Huh, so I'm not the only one who goes most-sig to least-sig when doing it in my head. Really makes things easier, oddly enough -- you end up with big numbers with lots of zeroes on the end, and add them to the smaller numbers.
Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did an experiment in college where I tried to see just how much work I could take on and stay sane. I'm very successfully academically (PhD at 26 from a very respected institution), and I found that if I did not have at least eight hours of unscheduled, unplanned time to just do nothing useful it severely impacted my ability to perform on any task. And I'm an extreme outlier in terms of innate skill, I say without…
This is why education is not a one size fits all model. For students like yourself there are dozens of schools in district 2 one could attend instead of this institution. Like I previously mentioned, people who attend this school do so by choice. Additionally, innate skill does not translate to the ability to handle stress, discipline, or work ethic. Your schedule is entirely unrealistic outside of academia today (or…
I hate the fact that it is possible to push yourself 80 hours a week and get ahead. That kind of work pace is possible, but hardly healthy, and in my experience tends to produce outbreaks of mental illness.But if it is possible to push yourself that hard to get ahead professionally, then of course a ton of people will be doing it, because if they don't they fall behind.
It's even more depressing when you realize that the majority of people that push themselves to these unhealthy extremes aren't even working on the kind of stuff that matters.