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My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

theatlantic.com

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Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#111

Post by edtechdev »

belorn wrote: post #59

> 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 exi…

Virtually every class focuses on memorization and not conceptual understanding, unfortunately. That's what students have to do to survive high school and college courses, because that's how they are taught and assessed.

A recent study of calculus courses found for example that almost 80% of the test questions simply involved recalling and applying a procedure (i.e., "plug and chug"). http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/cspcc/TSG13_Bress...

The students don't want it to be this way: "74% preferred to make sense of mathematics rather than simply memorizing it and 72% saw the role of the instructor as helping students to reason through problems on their own rather than showing students how to work the problem".

And yet because it is easier to test and grade rote learning and memorization, we end up killing students' interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) and most students who enter college as a STEM major end up changing majors, transferring, or dropping out. "students leave STEM majors primarily because of poor instruction in their mathematics and science courses, with calculus often cited as a primary reason."

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#112

Post by MakeUsersWant »

girvo wrote: post #93
Afforess wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A boys school actually did a test where they started the school day at 10.30am, and nearly every teenagers grades improved, sometimes dramatically. I wish I could find that reference, but it proved to me what I knew: I really would've done better if I'd not had to get up at 6.30am so I could walk the hour to school (both parents worked).

It was a school study done in Minnesota.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#113

Post by comex »

mistercow wrote: post #103
comex wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

I have to disagree with this a little bit. The skills you use for mental arithmetic are very similar to the skills for pen and paper. I would view pen and paper as training wheels. It might be argued that mental arithmetic should also at least be taught , but the only way I know of to do that which will tend to generalize to a majority of students is to teach them to use an abacus (seasoned abacus users eventually st…

It's my impression that doing basic mental arithmetic effectively tends to depend on understanding what happens to the magnitudes of numbers after various operations and making good approximations, which has very little resemblance to the brute force long multiplication/addition/division that is taught, but is teachable; yet approximations are almost never acceptable in school, despite being very useful in real life. Meanwhile, more advanced stuff requires random numerical tricks like these:

http://m.litfile.net/read/139440/139850-140188?page=80

which may be harder to teach, but are also quite unrelated to what schools attempt to teach.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#114

Post by gambiting »

But it can be done better. My sister attends a private boarding school in the UK and they only have 2 hours set per day for homework(always between 7pm and 9pm). Teachers coordinate between each other to make sure the work never takes more than these two hours,but also that it doesn't take any less. So my sister spends two solid hours each day working on her homework,and it doesn't cut into her sleep pattern - they need to be in bed by 10.15pm after all.

Obviously a non-boarding student doesn't necessarily have the regime at home to solidly sit down for 2 hours and work without access to their phone/ipad/computer/playstation for that period like at a boarding school, but I believe that if the system was better teachers really could coordinate between themselves and arrange homework that was manageable.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#115

Post by nicholassmith »

With the education system pushing for rote memorisation over comprehension it's going to grind the enthusiasm to learn out of kids before they even have chance to start enjoying education. I hated doing homework that was just memorisation and didn't have a component where you had to either comprehend or be able to rationalise as it felt like all I was doing was trying to avoid looking something up in a book. If you're just training memorisation you may as well play a memory game.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#116

Post by gambiting »

VargardObyron wrote: post #98
neltnerb wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rea…

There is no marks for having homework, there are only negative marks for not having it.

Yup, the same here. Teacher would always only check whatever we had homework,not how well we've done it. I don't remember ever getting a grade for my homework,except when I didn't have it - it always meant an automatic "1"(fail) added to my grades.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#117

Post by kalleboo »

This has turned into a circumcision/spanking debate. "Let me tell you what MY parents/school imposed on me and why that's the best way, and as anecdotal evidence, I present myself, who as you can see turned out to be a perfect individual." I can read those on Reddit, Hacker News readers have no particular insight here. In fact, Reddit readers are probably better suited to this debate as there are more students and teachers posting there.

Haven't there been any actual studies on this? The article mentions how on a international scale there's no correlation between homework load and results. Have there been any studies on a smaller scale (such as intra-class, using the same teachers/assignments)?

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#118

Post by [deleted] »

acabal wrote: post #19

What 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…

[deleted]

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#119

Post by klmr »

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…

School in Germany also doesn’t last the whole day, it usually ends around 2pm, so even if you have several hours’ worth of homework you can realistically do that before dinner – or, if you prefer, spend the afternoon doing other stuff and then do it after. It was a workable system. Then I moved to France, where school lasts until 5pm and I got home past 6. After a few months spent working until well into the night I stopped doing most of my homework to get enough sleep. Doing anything else during the week if you were actually doing your homework conscientiously wasn’t possible at all.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#120

Post by GotAnyMegadeth »

The Author and his daughter haven't learnt the tricks of the trade. I was set 3+hrs of HW a day, but I certainly didn't do that much.

First, they need to assess which teachers "Don't mind" if you don't do the homework. This could mean they stand you up in front of the whole class and shout at you, but if they don't give you an after school detention, don't do it. Getting in the teachers good books previously helps with this.

Second, if you've got a joke subject before one with homework due, do the homework then. Geography before Maths for example.

Third, have a homework team where you take it in turns to do the easily copied homework (Maths, DT, Science) and then copy each other in the mornings before school. Of course you need to cover your tracks.

Fourth, always cut corners. No calculator? Lol, use a calculator, but purposely get a few wrong. Use Google for everything (I didn't have a computer until yr8). Never read a book when you can read a synopsis/ watch the film whilst playing Pokémon.

Fifth, work as a team at home. The parent will have to remember things from their childhood, where as older siblings only need to remember from the year before. I used to do my middle brother's compulsory homework, whilst he did my littlest brother's, and my mum did mine.

Other tricks: Try leaving all of you books related to that subject at home one day and claim you thought it was Thursday.

Miss out a question at the bottom of a page, they might not even notice.

Pretend you are/were ill.

Cry

Hand in last weeks homework again. This one only buys you time, but works well on a Friday.

Tell your teacher you'll hand it in tomorrow, then the next day tell them you handed it in yesterday and they've lost it.

Band together with the other kids in your class and tell the teacher they said the homework was due for next week, or that they didn't even set it.

If you are asked to hand something in on lined paper, just don't do a whole sheets worth. More convincing if both sheets start/end in the middle of a sentence. I've done this before and they didn't even comment, I suspect they felt guilty they'd lost it.

Note: I successfully used all these tricks on several occasions. I would say that it definitely had no impact on my education (Got a AAAB at A level, 1st Class degree in Electronic Engineering w/ Hons), and a very significant positive impact on my life as a whole.

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