Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Who Invented Homework?

geekandnerd.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 124 posts

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#101

Post by branchless »

pflats wrote: post #88
branchless wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So sick of my 7 year old getting math work and asking him what he did that day only to hear much of it was little more than coloring in. They are leaving the hard stuff for homework.

If he's seven, he was probably coloring in ten frames, which are used to build a stronger conceptual understanding of our base-10 number system. The model starts out with physical objects, moves to visual representations of those objects ("coloring in"), then to abstraction. From there, students use those techniques to move away from the to develop good mental math strategies. If you were doing 17 + 35 on a ten frame…

yep I know about the "drawing as math" - it's often not that. I am not a happy bunny with their school work!

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#102

Post by antisthenes »

nibs wrote: post #46
coldpie wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my friends had to spend it training to be slaves Oh, get over yourself.

... where I am from, elementary school is basically obedience training for high testosterone boys. It is a battle of wills that the boy almost always loses. Eventually, they rebel hard. I upvoted you though because it was hyperbolic, this subject is just very passion-inducing for me.

Could you elaborate? I'm honestly interested in how you came to that strong conclusion. What policies exactly are being applied towards boys?

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#103

Post by ghaff »

lucb1e wrote: post #36

If I work somewhere and it's 5pm, I'm off unless there is some important deadline the next day that can't be moved. And if I work extra hours, I'll get something extra (usually money but it might also be holidays or something). In school, teachers have the power to invade our private lives, even our set holidays(!) with pointless tasks. Apparently 40 hours a week is not enough to spend on school, we also need to give…

You're in for some very rude shocks in the work world.

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#104

Post by teslabox »

pflats wrote: post #82
lordnacho wrote: post #20

My feelings now are that there really shouldn't be any mandatory homework. - If you do it badly, you may as well not do it. Who else remembers flipping through "The Catcher in the Rye" so fast they don't actually remember any other character than Holden Caulfield? - It's an easy way for teachers to not teach, yet gives them an alibi. "Look I'm teaching, they have loads of books to read. Can't help it if they don't."…

>My feelings now are that there really shouldn't be any mandatory homework. Been there, tried it. Didn't work. I wish it did, but it didn't. There's a reason teachers assign homework. We're not a craven group that goes out of our way to say, "Look I'm teaching, they have loads of books to read. Can't help it if they don't." We are, universally, strapped for time. Classroom time is best served teaching new topics, not…

John Gatto used to send his 7th grade students out into the real world, to learn from adults doing real things. He would have them write a report about what they'd learned. [1]

[1] http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

Real learning is achieved with context. Government schools mostly teach theory without context, which is why the students have such a hard time.

The local paper once had a story about the challenges faced by teachers of children who were learning English. The story told of how the class was reading a book abou a dog. Some of the kids didn't get the word 'panting', so the teacher imitated a panting dog. I wrote a letter saying that languages are actually easy to learn, and that a human acting like a dog is no substitute for a trip to the dog park.

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#105

Post by ghaff »

pessimizer wrote: post #98
lordnacho wrote: post #20

My feelings now are that there really shouldn't be any mandatory homework. - If you do it badly, you may as well not do it. Who else remembers flipping through "The Catcher in the Rye" so fast they don't actually remember any other character than Holden Caulfield? - It's an easy way for teachers to not teach, yet gives them an alibi. "Look I'm teaching, they have loads of books to read. Can't help it if they don't."…

> You just burn time plugging things into (-b +- sqrt (b2-4ac)) / 2a. And you learn the wrong lesson, which is that you have to get it exactly right, rather than why that's the equation in the first place. Once I learned how to complete the square, I decided I'd rather do that than try to remember that formula. I'm actually exaggerating when I say I "decided" - I forgot the formula so much that I was completing the s…

>People shouldn't be taking physics before they take calculus.

In an ideal world, you're absolutely right. In practice, it's hard to arrange. Assuming a US high school student even takes calculus, it's going to be senior year. So, if physics is taught senior year (don't know what the norm is), at best you're teaching in parallel. To be sure, derivatives are taught fairly early-on in calculus and they're probably most relevant to physics at the high school level.

But, you're right, there's a lot of plug and chug in physics without calculus. On the other hand, physics also helps get students into other things like dimensional analysis etc.

Also, to be fair, the issue of prerequisites comes up a lot of places. There are often facts in intro classes that have to be taken on faith until the topic can be dealt with more deeply later on.

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#106

Post by ghaff »

auxym wrote: post #29
lordnacho wrote: post #20

My feelings now are that there really shouldn't be any mandatory homework. - If you do it badly, you may as well not do it. Who else remembers flipping through "The Catcher in the Rye" so fast they don't actually remember any other character than Holden Caulfield? - It's an easy way for teachers to not teach, yet gives them an alibi. "Look I'm teaching, they have loads of books to read. Can't help it if they don't."…

>burn time plugging things into (-b +- sqrt (b2-4ac)) / 2a I swear to god, I had so much of that to do, I got tired of it and learned enough python in one night, at 15, to get the computer to do my homework for me.

Some of us didn't have the option of using either computers or calculators :-)

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#107

Post by cableshaft »

teslabox wrote: post #104
pflats wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My feelings now are that there really shouldn't be any mandatory homework. Been there, tried it. Didn't work. I wish it did, but it didn't. There's a reason teachers assign homework. We're not a craven group that goes out of our way to say, "Look I'm teaching, they have loads of books to read. Can't help it if they don't." We are, universally, strapped for time. Classroom time is best served teaching new topics, not…

John Gatto used to send his 7th grade students out into the real world, to learn from adults doing real things. He would have them write a report about what they'd learned. [1] [1] http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/ Real learning is achieved with context. Government schools mostly teach theory without context, which is why the students have such a hard time. The local paper once had a story about the challenges faced by…

At the same time, you can't realistically just take a trip anywhere you want to demonstrate every single individual concept as a teacher of a bunch of students.

You need parental permission, a way to transport kids (probably via bus, which costs money and has to be scheduled), and extra people around to help watch the kids and make sure they don't wander into trouble.

Parents, especially nowadays, are extremely litigious (or call for a teacher's resignation) for such minor things nowadays, that trips in general become risky.

I'm sure most teachers schedule as many of these trips as they can get approved, but they probably only get one or two approved per class.

Sure you might not like all the red tape, but it didn't appear out of nowhere. It's the school protecting itself and covering its ass, just like every other industry out there.

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#108

Post by michaelbuddy »

pflats wrote: post #88
branchless wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So sick of my 7 year old getting math work and asking him what he did that day only to hear much of it was little more than coloring in. They are leaving the hard stuff for homework.

If he's seven, he was probably coloring in ten frames, which are used to build a stronger conceptual understanding of our base-10 number system. The model starts out with physical objects, moves to visual representations of those objects ("coloring in"), then to abstraction. From there, students use those techniques to move away from the to develop good mental math strategies. If you were doing 17 + 35 on a ten frame…

Or you could teach somebody how to 'carry the 1' and get this done in a less mentally taxing way, being faster and still understandable. This looks like a brain dump of how 'somebody somewhere' conceptualizes math and now we're all supposed to put it in play en masse because it 'shows the work'. I look at this math and if I was in 3rd grade, I would know in my gut this is BS. Does anyone actually think that more written steps will remove mistakes, because less moves = less mistakes.

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#109

Post by [deleted] »

tropo wrote: post #99
pflats wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he's seven, he was probably coloring in ten frames, which are used to build a stronger conceptual understanding of our base-10 number system. The model starts out with physical objects, moves to visual representations of those objects ("coloring in"), then to abstraction. From there, students use those techniques to move away from the to develop good mental math strategies. If you were doing 17 + 35 on a ten frame…

That is a horribly complicated way to do 17 + 35. The sane way is to try matching against a pattern, then if that fails you fall back to the traditional algorithm with the numbers lined up one over the other and doing the carries. Yes, you can run the traditional algorithm in your head, for this and for much larger things. Fully in memory, 4-digit plus 4-digit is quite doable. (can your method handle that?) While sta…

[deleted]

Re: Who Invented Homework?

#110

Post by lordnacho »

pflats wrote: post #82
lordnacho wrote: post #20

My feelings now are that there really shouldn't be any mandatory homework. - If you do it badly, you may as well not do it. Who else remembers flipping through "The Catcher in the Rye" so fast they don't actually remember any other character than Holden Caulfield? - It's an easy way for teachers to not teach, yet gives them an alibi. "Look I'm teaching, they have loads of books to read. Can't help it if they don't."…

>My feelings now are that there really shouldn't be any mandatory homework. Been there, tried it. Didn't work. I wish it did, but it didn't. There's a reason teachers assign homework. We're not a craven group that goes out of our way to say, "Look I'm teaching, they have loads of books to read. Can't help it if they don't." We are, universally, strapped for time. Classroom time is best served teaching new topics, not…

Good to get the input of a teacher on this, I appreciate it.

Have you checked with kids who are several years out of education? My sense from talking to people is if they didn't give a shit in school, they will not know it once they're out. And they could have done perfectly fine in tests, because of course they were forced to study.

In general, I get the feeling the kids who retain things after school are ONLY the ones towards the top of the class. Anyone who did middling or worse definitely won't remember the quadratic formula let alone calculus. The top section will have some kids who really cared and learned it properly, and some who were good at doing as they were told but never really cared much, and won't have retained anything either.

What I'm getting at is whether you can really learn anything without having some sort of intrinsic interest, and whether it's worthwhile to force people to learn stuff that they will forget even existed in a few years. I don't mean that people inevitably forget a few things (can I solve competition questions I used to do? Probably not), I mean that it is as if they never even knew that certain fields of knowledge existed and that they actually possessed some of that.

You end up with a you-know-how-to-learn-for-life idea, but that's always been unsatisfying for me.

Post reply on HN