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My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

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Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#211

Post by joshuahedlund »

callmeed wrote: post #198
mcphilip wrote: post #40

I was homeschooled K-12. My days consisted largely of 1-2 hours of bible study with my 3 brothers followed by a few hours on my own working through a set number of pages in math, science, literature, etc textbooks. I'd usually get done by 2 and then play Nintendo until friends got home from school. I was never tested in homeschool. There were no grades or report cards. The only accountability was mom checking that th…

This might be a weird question and totally based on anecdotes but: are you a good speller? I have a lot of friends who were homeschooled and/or homeschool their kids. I've also hired some and gone to school with some. One thing I noticed about several of them is they're bad at spelling. I've always wondered why.

Probably anecdotal. In my (also anecdotal) experience homeschoolers tend to read more and be more likely to participate in spelling bees.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#212

Post by archon »

callmeed wrote: post #198
mcphilip wrote: post #40

I was homeschooled K-12. My days consisted largely of 1-2 hours of bible study with my 3 brothers followed by a few hours on my own working through a set number of pages in math, science, literature, etc textbooks. I'd usually get done by 2 and then play Nintendo until friends got home from school. I was never tested in homeschool. There were no grades or report cards. The only accountability was mom checking that th…

This might be a weird question and totally based on anecdotes but: are you a good speller? I have a lot of friends who were homeschooled and/or homeschool their kids. I've also hired some and gone to school with some. One thing I noticed about several of them is they're bad at spelling. I've always wondered why.

I was homeschooled and have many once-homeschooled friends, and the ratio of bad spellers is about normal in my experience.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#213

Post by einhverfr »

Karawebnetwork wrote: post #166
lgieron wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go…

Without looking it up, I would guess a city named after Juan Mariscal Sucre (or is it the other way around?) must be in either Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, or Bolivia. I would probably guess Ecuador on a hunch but that's probably wrong as their former currency was the Sucre and it would be funny to have a city named the same.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#214

Post by a8da6b0c91d »

altrego99 wrote: post #169
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 sur…

> Focus should not be on memorizing anything

I have to disagree. At that age the things you memorize get seared into your mind permanently. I can still effortlessly rattle off a few Shakespeare soliloquies a teacher had us memorize, for example.

I think having 13 year olds memorize things is a great idea, but the things should be important and useful. I wish we had extensively drilled on mental arithmetic.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#215

Post by chiph »

tptacek wrote: post #133
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…

The "cyber-bullying" thing seemed janky when I read it. We don't know exactly what he wrote to the other parents, or the tone of the conversation they had. We know that one parent was alarmed enough by the conversation to (apparently) forward it to the school administration. It may have been nastier than the author is crediting it for.

This is the same teacher who gave his child a C on an assignment because they didn't put their answers in a separate column. Granted, we only have one side of the conversations, but I wouldn't rule out the chance of the teacher being petty & vindictive.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#216

Post by TuringTest »

mkr-hn wrote: post #210
TuringTest wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it have to be either/or? A systematic approach guarantees that you have seen each capital city at least once.

Why are the capitals so important? Maybe I want to travel to Kyoto or Makati instead of Tokyo or Manila. I can see the value in knowing the countries and a little about them, but capitals aren't the entirety of a country, and knowing about them won't tell you much about the country as a whole. I can learn about the capitals if I ever plan to go there.

Capitals are the most important part of a country (by definition). What little information could you learn about a country before knowing its capital?

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#217

Post by pc86 »

alt_f4 wrote: post #173
mcphilip wrote: post #40

I was homeschooled K-12. My days consisted largely of 1-2 hours of bible study with my 3 brothers followed by a few hours on my own working through a set number of pages in math, science, literature, etc textbooks. I'd usually get done by 2 and then play Nintendo until friends got home from school. I was never tested in homeschool. There were no grades or report cards. The only accountability was mom checking that th…

You lost me at the emphasis on 1-2 hours of bible study.

Believe it or not, some families are religious. That's not necessarily a bad thing, even when that translates to structured education.

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#218

Post by [deleted] »

TuringTest wrote: post #216
mkr-hn wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are the capitals so important? Maybe I want to travel to Kyoto or Makati instead of Tokyo or Manila. I can see the value in knowing the countries and a little about them, but capitals aren't the entirety of a country, and knowing about them won't tell you much about the country as a whole. I can learn about the capitals if I ever plan to go there.

Capitals are the most important part of a country (by definition). What little information could you learn about a country before knowing its capital?

[deleted]

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#219

Post by stmchn »

imperio59 wrote: post #6

She is not learning about what she is studying, she is learning to become a well trained parrot. Society has no use for parrots. These kids need to be taught to look up the words they don't know in a dictionary appropriate to their age and gain an understanding of the new words they come across as they are studying. That is the only way to understand any subject one is studying. No amount of "guessing" or "memorizing…

I think this is an interesting point. I remember being so intimidated when I started my CS degree thinking that software developers just "know" all these things. Now, I know me and my co-workers look stuff up on Google all day long and it's not a big deal. But that's not something you learn to do in school.

In fact, I think there's some kind of stigma related to not knowing the answer without looking it up. The vast majority of my schooling at least involved a lot of memorization. As a student, you take a test which gauges how well you've memorized things for the most part and that's what determines your "worth" in terms of grades as a student. But that's not how the real world works. In reality, trivial things can be trivially looked up.

I think the results we get for our coding interviews are pretty telling. Everyone that applies for a software developer position where I work has to take an online assessment. They've got 30 minutes on 3 questions and it's made explicitly clear that you can look up information for it and give the sources. Out of the many people that have taken the quiz, only one or two people have given any sources. It's as if people think they'll be penalized for not knowing everything off the top of their head (which I guess is in fact the precedent in traditional whiteboard technical interviews).

Re: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

#220

Post by archon »

mcphilip wrote: post #40

I was homeschooled K-12. My days consisted largely of 1-2 hours of bible study with my 3 brothers followed by a few hours on my own working through a set number of pages in math, science, literature, etc textbooks. I'd usually get done by 2 and then play Nintendo until friends got home from school. I was never tested in homeschool. There were no grades or report cards. The only accountability was mom checking that th…

> College was relatively a breeze since I had spent all my grade school years teaching things to myself - college was just an extension of this method of learning.

This was exactly my experience as well, as another former homeschooler. I remember being kind of disappointed when I got to college and thinking, "wait, is this all there is to it?" I expected a radical change and got more of the same. It was actually kind of demotivating for a while.

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