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More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

philly.com

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Re: More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with your comment about better teachers. Teachers are simply a conduit for learning. They don't scale, which is why there is still a power-law distribution in educational outcomes despite tons or research and data and training and testing that should combat that. Basically rich people get richer because all rich people who are generationally consistently rich have one thing in common. They are autodidacts.…

And just to be clear. The answer for children is to make learning to love learning play. And the way to do that in a way that scales is through a video game. That is the future of education. Games for children that teach them how to learn, that they then use to set their own educational path. With teachers, schools, mentors, and advisors helping along the way.

> And the way to do that in a way that scales is through a video game.

Well, that's one way. Any teacher who has used word-searches, acting, rhyming games, etc has found other ways. Don't get me wrong, there are a wealth of awesome startups in this space making apps, and I think they have a lot of potential, but they are certainly not the whole story, until we have something out of "The Diamond Age: A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer".

Lots of good actual science takes place in the real world, and a video game can certainly be part of the solution, but there's a lot of room for engineering and whatnot that can be part of an autodidactical solution that won't live in an app.

Re: More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

#162
post #129

This is crazy, I don't know where I would be today if I hadn't done homework. Homework was where I really and truly learned. Independent work is so important, and it's totally different than doing something with a bunch of students in a classroom setting. Sure, the education system probably could be improved a lot. But you can't just remove homework from the current system and expect there will be no negative consequ…

Given your daughter is in a french immersion school, I would love to hear your feedback on what I'm working on: http://playlingoland.com

Language immersion from home!

Re: More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

#163

The problem with homework is it's used as a form of accountability. My French teacher used to joke when collecting papers : "Ou est votre dette a la societe?" (Apologies for missing accents.) Of course what it should be is like at university. The professor can't spend all his time with you, so you get a rough list of what you should know about. It's then up to you to judge whether you need to read a bit more or a bit…

> You don't need a whole page of quadratic equations, in fact you don't understand it if you get to the end and think you need more. OTOH, if you only do the first two and you think you get it, you might be enlightened when you look at some further questions.

You do a couple of them and you get superficial understanding. You might even have a decent mechanical grasp of how it works. But I'm yet to meet someone who can take topics of adequate complexity and actually internalise them without a fairly large amount of (progressively harder) repetition

Re: More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

#164
post #69
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming you mean the sports practice: I also personally value homework more than sports practice, but it seems callous and self-centred to assume that our own preferences are automatically right for others.

Broadly, I think there's a price to be paid for any given life choice. You don't get to have it all for free. In this case, the person chose to pay in sleep. I'm suggesting that they had other options on offer. Yes, I understand it can seem callous. In this case, I honestly believe that my preferences are superior in the vast majority of instances (although demonstrably not all).

FWIW, sports was not actually my choice. My parents saw it as very important (and they had to pick me up from school after practice every day, so they thought it was worth 1.5 hours of their time in addition to my time).

Not that dropping sports typically helped, based on other students. I was really paying for sports with my GPA; people who didn't play sports typically had better grades and about the same amount of sleep (the 2-3 hour average was pure homework; I didn't learn to study until college, largely because there simply wasn't time).

Re: More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

#165
The real argument is not about whether we need homework or not. It's more about can you learn more than 7 hours or so a day? Kids are at school from 8-3 being taught by the teachers and then they have to spend an another 30min to 1hour at home. This is just too much.

Homeworks are important. It's the only time that they can think by themselves and put what they learn in practice. But after being taught so long at school, kids are tired to learn. They want to play!

Re: More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

#166
post #151
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so certain. I've been in many educational environments ranging from home school to private college prep high school, to suburban high school, to inner city high school, to the ghetto school in the area. There were good and bad teachers in all of those. However, the good teachers may as well have not had existed in the inner city/ghetto schools. Their talents were 100% wasted, and those classrooms would have b…

> a police officer in front of the classroom who was enabled to boot the dysfunctional future criminals from the classroom Well, that sounds like a way to make more future criminals. Maybe send the police officer to the parents instead. If the goal is to systematize the production of healthy, non-broken adults, we want to get those children more of a healthy environment, and less of an unhealthy one—send those police…

I feel like everyone in this thread should go watch season 4 of the The Wire. There is a lot of relevant work there, including the various pressures on, and requirements of the educational system.

tl:dr; Teacher's can only ever be a part of a solution to the complicated educational needs of our society. And given what we're willing to spend, they can't even be a particularly effective part in poorer parts of the country.

Re: More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with your comment about better teachers. Teachers are simply a conduit for learning. They don't scale, which is why there is still a power-law distribution in educational outcomes despite tons or research and data and training and testing that should combat that. Basically rich people get richer because all rich people who are generationally consistently rich have one thing in common. They are autodidacts.…

And just to be clear. The answer for children is to make learning to love learning play. And the way to do that in a way that scales is through a video game. That is the future of education. Games for children that teach them how to learn, that they then use to set their own educational path. With teachers, schools, mentors, and advisors helping along the way.

I blame video games for making me into a history buff. And maybe Legos, combined with the History Channel before it was the RedneckAliensJesus Channel.

Civilization, Lords of the Realm, Caesar II, Robert E. Lee: Civil War General, Close Combat, Total War, Pirates!, Anno 1602, Europa Universalis/Crusader Kings/Victoria/Hearts of Iron, Age of Empires

Or to go way back, Math/Word Rescue, Treasure Mountain, Midnight Rescue, Carmen Sandiego, Oregon Trail, the crazy game that was part of Encarta, Dr Brain, Maxis Sim games all taught me math, geography, history, logic, physics, etc.

Re: More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

#168
post #156

Why the all or nothing approach? At my high school, I think we have a great policy for math homework (I am the teacher). It is assigned every day but never checked or graded. At the beginning of each class we go over any problems the students had trouble with, then move on. Students eventually reach an equilibrium where they figure out how much time they personally need to spend each night on math homework. For stude…

This is totally the way to go. In my experience (I was in high school '92-'95 so this is dated), this method worked great in the advanced classes, but a lot of the remedial and "normal" track classes still focused heavily on rote memorization and quantity of work, for whatever reasons. The fact is, the best students will succeed no matter what, either because they have supportive families & social groups or because t…

It seems to work equally well for advanced and non-advanced students, it's just that the normal track students take a little longer to figure what the "right amount" of homework for them to do is.

Re: More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with your comment about better teachers. Teachers are simply a conduit for learning. They don't scale, which is why there is still a power-law distribution in educational outcomes despite tons or research and data and training and testing that should combat that. Basically rich people get richer because all rich people who are generationally consistently rich have one thing in common. They are autodidacts.…

Knowledge cannot be taught it must be inferred.

Exactly. Knowledge and insight is what you get when you take the facts you've been taught (or learned yourself) and internalize them. Schools nowadays focus too much on the first at the cost of the second, because former is easily testable and the latter takes time.

Re: More parents, students saying 'no' to homework

#170
post #82

I am in total agreement that children have better things to do than homework. Such as learning how to play and interact with others. Learn how to deal with adversity. How to deal with the sadness of a break up or not being included. Learning how to lead a team via Counter Strike or WOW. Learning computers by writing a mod for a favorite computer game. These things taught me far more than a worksheet on a very idealiz…

Repetition is an important part of learning. Expecting all children to understand what was taught in class is unrealistic. This is why homework is assigned - so the student may take their time to review the parts they themselves didn't fully grasp in class. The time spent doing homework varies from child to child and this is important - kids who need longer to accomplish the same task will have that time because they…

> Arguably you could cover everything again the next day but thats hardly a graceful solution and doesn't cater to that variance of time needed for homework across different children as contact hours are very limited as it is.

Repetition is important. But kids are already at school for 7-8 hours a day. If that is not enough time to engage in adequate repetition, the solution is not to shift work to home hours. It is:

1) Do less, by cutting less important subjects;

2) Do more with the time given, by cutting students who disrupt class.

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