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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

#121

Post by madaxe »

girvo wrote: post #79
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…

Oh gosh, I would have been absolutely ropeable if the principal had accused me of "cyber-bullying" in that manner. That is entirely, utterly, disgustingly bullshit. And it doesn't surprise me. Surely it's the bias that is put forward by news media, but the stories that I hear of the American education system scares the shit out of me -- and I went to school in Queensland (which is terrible in and of itself)! Zero-tol…

I had the benefit of attending the British, German, and American school systems.

Schooling in America has little to do with education, and much to do with indoctrination.

Pretty much the only thing I learned was the pledge of allegiance - over which I repeatedly got suspended, as I refused to recite it along with the rest of the class, every morning.

Everything else they "taught" was years behind what I'd been learning elsewhere, and none of it was teaching - it was all just OBEY. I used to kick like a mule whenever they tried to teach us something factually incorrect by rote - and got in trouble for it.

THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#123

Post by mgkimsal »

code_duck wrote: post #28

My high school in Connecticut declared that you should spend 1 hour doing homework for each academic class every day, which adds up to 12 hours each day focused on attending school, or more. I have no idea why this sounds reasonable to administrators and teachers. The idea of 'memorization' as learning has always bothered me... The most reliable long-term way to recall things is to learn and comprehend them.

Couple of thoughts:

There's some things that need to be memorized - basic multiplication tables - I memorized those (9*8, etc). Basic articles/phrases in Spanish. Some basic world/state capitals, etc. But at some point memorization doesn't get you anything any more (except passing a test, maybe) - memorizing a few basic building blocks helps for the larger problems, and eventually the truisms of the building blocks become apparent (if there are any - capitals doesn't matter).

On 12 hours per day - some of the teachers I know definitely put in that amount of time, on average (grading homework, meeting with parents, planning, etc). They may be thinking "If I'm doing it, so can they", but... The teachers already KNOW their stuff - they're not LEARNING for the most part - they're doing the job of a professional. The student, by definition, is not a master at any of this stuff. A 12 hour effort, day in day out, by students, is simply going to wear most of them down.

This seems like a simple scheduling thing - teachers could coordinate between themselves better, individually or by subject - to stagger workloads effectively. Foreign language may get to pile on big assignments on Mondays, Sciences on Tuesdays, etc., with an understanding of minimal homework requirements the rest of the time. But if "read 79 pages and do a one page summary of 3 topics from it" is considered "minimal", there are bigger judgement issues going on.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#124

Post by tptacek »

GotAnyMegadeth wrote: post #120

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 wi…

How caustic a lesson to teach your kid, that they should organize to cheat on homework, so they can artificially inflate their grade. I suppose it does set them up for a productive life of investment banking.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#125

Post by maxerickson »

rtpg wrote: post #29
cookiecaper wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Effective schooling could never occur on such a federated level. There's such a broad range of individual personalities and skills along varying axes that the idea of "let's put all the kids born within 10 months of each other in our geographic area in a classroom, and threaten force on people who don't want to cooperate" is never going to function well. I hold the opinion that the proper training and education of on…

school isn't just about learning, it's also about meeting your peers. The last thing we need is even more social segregation because all the rich kids don't know what it's like to not be able to afford 3 homes.

There's really not any reason that socialization and academics have to be mixed though. It is just convenient and probably cheaper than the alternative.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#126

Post by dsego »

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…

Why isn't this type of mental calculation actually taught at schools? Not every kid thinks of these "tricks". Instead, they do how the teacher showed them and do it on paper the long way. Seems like we are crippling our kids.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#127

Post by belorn »

edtechdev wrote: post #111
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/…

Thanks for an excellent comment with that link for further digging into the subject. The study could have easily been a interesting article on HN by it self. The only thing I wish the study explored is what would be the calculus instructors' preferred teaching method, and compare that to the students'.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#128

Post by GotAnyMegadeth »

tptacek wrote: post #124
GotAnyMegadeth wrote: post #120

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 wi…

How caustic a lesson to teach your kid, that they should organize to cheat on homework, so they can artificially inflate their grade. I suppose it does set them up for a productive life of investment banking.

I never saw school as a place to learn facts, but as a place to learn how to socialise and how to deal with life. Learning how to get a good grade is important, but only because people think that it represents your worth as an employee. My parents/TV/books/the internet taught me most of what I know.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#129

Post by dsego »

Tichy wrote: post #68
kaybe wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

The driving factor for mathematics is laziness. I didn't even memorize the basic multiplication table (1-10) for a long time, but I remembered some shortcuts (like multiplying stuff by 9 was easy) and got by.

The multiplication table really bothers me. It's considered to be the least a child can learn in elementary school. And kids that haven't learned to do math mentally just memorise it like a poem. I really don't think this is the correct approach.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#130

Post by tptacek »

Some quick thoughts, as the parent of a high school freshman:

* If you anticipate your child being assigned 3 hours of homework in a typical evening, it is negligent to allow them to start that work at 8:00PM. Instead of allowing his daughter to watch episodes of Portlandia on her computer all afternoon, he could consider a rule suggesting homework gets completed before electronic entertainment; that's our rule this year (for the first time) and it's working better than I thought it would. Another rule we have: complete or not, homework is done at 9:30PM.

* Japan (a) does not outperform the US (at least on PISA) when normalized for income, which normalization also normalizes for homework load, and (b) has the some of the longest school days in the world, with an abbreviated, homework-encumbered summer break to boot. Japanese students probably do not work less hard than US students, or to greater effect.

* If your daughter answers "Texas City" as the state capital of Texas, the discussion of how she's struggling academically might range farther than homework load, eh? Neither my son in high school nor my daughter in middle school has ever to my knowledge had state capitals homework, and neither would give that answer.

* If your daughter has spent middle school staying up until 1:00AM completing homework†, so much so that you are in open conflict with the school over that load, why oh why would you go out of your way to enroll the kid in a highly selective public school that is virtually assured to maintain or increase that load? We had homework-intensive school options for the boy, too, and (sanely) decided not to avail ourselves of them. Is this a status obsession thing? Because if the end goal is a push to get your kid into an Ivy, stop bitching about workload. You're choosing to make your kid compete.

Minus the cannabis (I substituted Unix exploit development), I had a similar high school experience to this author. I'm not generally in favor of homework and would if asked by any of my kid's teachers --- who do actually coordinate to even out the workload --- vote for less of it. But I think the parent in this article is suffering from a couple problems of his own creation, and has probably not come up with an indictment of the US school system.

† Never once has either of my kids had a middle school workload that kept them up late at night.

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