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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

#161

Post by danielford »

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).

Here's a link to either the study you're looking for, or a similar one: http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/139295/1/2002%20NASSP%2...

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#162

Post by anaphor »

I'm in an honours program at university and I get orders of magnitude less homework. Of course the work requires much more thought and maybe more reading, but the people designing public school curriculums really need to learn how people actually learn.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#163

Post by patio11 »

tptacek wrote: post #130

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…

Japanese students probably do not work less hard than US students, or to greater effect.

Wait wait, people really think American students do more work than Japanese kids?

HAH. HAH. HAH. HAH. That's a good one.

Seriously: Japanese schools don't assign 3 hours of homework because that would conflict with the 3 hours of "not required but it will ruin your life if you don't do it and then fail your next admissions exam" cram school that the top 30% of Japanese kids/parents assume is inevitable.

If you want I can run down to the train station and take a photo of one of our local cram schools. It's 8:45 PM right now so the middle schoolers should be just about halfway finished for the evening.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#164

Post by Gmo »

dsego wrote: post #126
neltnerb wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, I was educated in France and I was taught those tricks.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#165

Post by [deleted] »

lgieron wrote: post #159
rorrr2 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood how the knowledge of the capitals of states or countries is useful in any way. It's meaningless. It can be easily looked up, if you need that information. I can't even imagine a practical scenario when one would need to know it.

It's hard to function in the world without some rudimentary knowledge of it. As for practical scenario, imagine your boss wants to send you to a conference in Paris, and you answer back with "Where?".

[deleted]

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#166

Post by Karawebnetwork »

lgieron wrote: post #159
rorrr2 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood how the knowledge of the capitals of states or countries is useful in any way. It's meaningless. It can be easily looked up, if you need that information. I can't even imagine a practical scenario when one would need to know it.

It's hard to function in the world without some rudimentary knowledge of it. As for practical scenario, imagine your boss wants to send you to a conference in Paris, and you answer back with "Where?".

To which he answer "the capital of France" and everyone keep going.

If I tell you that you need to go to Sucre for a meeting, do you know where that is? Probably not. You will google it, spend 5 seconds on the internet and boom, you know where it is. Putting countless hours to learn all of them is useless. This is time that could be spent learning things that are important in the modern world. The computers aren't going away. You will never have to search for the name of a town in a dictionary or encyclopedia for hours anymore. It's a 5 seconds tasks.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#167

Post by FedRegister »

madaxe wrote: post #121
girvo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 learni…

The role of public school in the United States, especially when it first started, explicitly was to churn out factory workers[1]. The fact that non-industrial knowledge is also taught is a side effect of later developments.

[1] http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#168

Post by alanctgardner2 »

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/…

I don't know how much stock I'd put in self-reported reasons for attrition. At my school the undergrad professors for calc are all excellent - well reviewed by students, winning awards, etc. Still, a lot of STEM students drop out when they're taking first-year calc, because STEM programs are also just very hard. Even if we axed the first-year math requirements, I suspect those people would make it two or three years in before getting caught up on another class, and ultimately leaving anyways.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#169

Post by altrego99 »

tptacek wrote: post #130

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…

* Kids should not be penalized for knowing which is the capital of what, nor which part of Americas grows the most bananas. It is useless information unless the kid loves that kind of stuff.

* Focus should not be on memorizing anything, unless they are a building block of something which they will understand later, and better, with the memorization. May be the Spanish language verb forms are one of those, I'm not sure. From my experience I know a lot of knowledge do fall in this category, e.g. trigonometric manipulations, algebra of integration/differentiation, etc.

* Kids of that age, 13, have a fairly developed brain to decide which subjects they like, and which they are not interested in. They should be allowed to choose not to study Earth Sciences in favor of Physics, if they want to. Or to study Linguistics in favor of Maths (I assume they already know a basic level of mathematics to get by), if they want to.

I wonder how these kids gonna grow up, will the relentless homework on often useless subjects, create the discipline in them that is their most probable intention? Will this discipline help them to do better in life, as opposed to the Captain Kirk types?

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#170

Post by chris_wot »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #152
tptacek wrote: post #130

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…

* 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 thoug…

The author's child is still a kid. I think she's in year 8? Here's my feedback: a. Let her be a kid. b. let her get enough sleep (it's hard to learn without enough sleep). c. Stop taking cannabis. It can lead to mental illness. d. If you are concerned about too much homework, do something about it. For real.
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