Who Invented Homework?

>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 reinforcing old ones.

When would you prefer students read books for a literature class? During the school day, during lit class, taking time away from discussion/analysis? During the school day, during a study hall, taking time away from electives? In reading sessions before school/after school, taking time away from sports/extracurriculars and requiring additional costs? Or at their leisure, where their free time allows?

>If you already understand it, you don't benefit from solving more quadratic equations.

Yes, you do. Understanding is only the second domain, out of 6, in Bloom's taxonomy of learning. Application—properly using a formula to solve an equation, which you're probably actually referring to—is the third domain. And being able to use the quadratic formula to solve a problem doesn't signify that you know anything more than how to memorize a formula and plug numbers into it.

There are some incredibly bright students out there who can master a concept in a single lesson without reinforcement. You might be one of them. I was. That doesn't mean all students are like you. Most of them require more practice than can be given in a single class period to master a topic. Some "get it" in the class period, and require practice to cement it in their memory. Other think they get it, struggle with the homework, and then get the help they need the next day. Every student is different.

>You end up testing which kids have peaceful homes, and parents who care. Some kids just can't do any homework with the home environment they're given. School should be such that it doesn't matter if your parents are drunks or academics.

That would be nice. Unfortunately, it's impossible. Family life affects far, far more than just whether or not students do their homework. It's hard to get a student from a loving home whose parents don't care about to care about . It's hard to convince a student who doesn't have a safe, secure, loving home life that literary analysis is worth studying. It's hard to convince a junior who got a job at Starbucks and is making more money than his parents ever did that finishing school is important.

>Totally fine with doing like in University: here's a mega list of interesting things related to the subject, go and browse around, get a feel for what the landscape is like. Come back more interested.

But K-12 is not University. We educate young folks, the same people we don't trust to vote, drink, smoke, or choose whether or not to attend school in the first place. The same people who pay through the nose for car insurance when they can drive. K-12 students are not good at weighing short-term and long-term decisions. Their brains aren't fully developed.

Given the option to not do homework with no obvious penalty, most of them… won't do homework. I ran a junior/senior Precalculus class once with optional homework. Some students did well on the assessments. Some did not. Many more than usual failed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, test grades correlated strongly to homework completion. Failing a test did not encourage students to study more in the future.

Halfway through the year, I put an end to the experiment and required homework. Test grades and student understanding improved.

It's our responsibility as teachers and as the adults in the room to ensure a student learns. It could be an excellent life lesson for a student to fail a high school class because he or she did not do the homework. You might be okay with that. I'm not. The end result is that the student has spent a year in a classroom and has not learned the material, which will have cascading consequences on that student's education. That's a lot to trade for a life lesson.

> It's an easy way for teachers to not teach

Especially as these days it's highly likely to be a simply photocopy of a page from some study guide. Quite often with printed mistakes and bad grammar in them. Much less need to put in teaching time.

I've nothing against homework in the run up to exams, say 15 years on, but going on my youngest's experience, homework has become common down to as young as 9 or 10. I don't see that as a benefit for anyone except politicians wanting to be seen to do something about ejucashun. :)

Sadly governments are putting too many other tasks on teachers that leave them with little choice. Form filling, over frequent testing, sus checks to make sure the student isn't a potential terrorist or illegal immigrant and so forth. Little wonder it was recently reported in the UK that >50% of teachers now want to leave the professions.

Pay teachers a commercially competitive rate and free them enough to teach. Of course that would free them to teach outside whatever dogma is de rigeur. Homework will remain a growing part of education until we back away from the production line and over-reliance on national standards for everything.

I agree. I went to private school for a year and did well. I went to public school after that because private was too expensive to maintain, and it was not so good. A few non-burned out teachers who made a difference, mostly just soul-crushing apathy and stockhold syndrome all around. And I would love to have learned to program and read earlier, I am not sure how I managed to go that long without reading, I guess I was just different developmentally.

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, you'd fill in 1 full 10 for the 17 and have 7 left over. You'd then fill in 3 full 10s for the 35, and have 5 left over. You can take 3 of those 5 and fill in the missing spots on the 7 out of 10 ten frame, making a 5th full ten frame, and leaving 2 lonely chips/colored squares in sixth.

The goal is to eventually get students to do all that mentally. 17 + 35 = 10 + 7 + 30 + 5 = 10 + 30 + 7 + 5 = 10 + 30 + 7 + 3 + 2 = 10 + 30 + 10 + 2 = 50 + 2 = 52.

You might have figured out that kind of mental math trick on your own. If so, the lesson's not there for you. It's for all the people out in the real world who didn't develop it on their own and will readily tell you that they're "not math people".

The same technique will be revisited to work with fractions, first with the same denominator and then dissimilar denominators, and similar techniques will be used for multiplication, the distributive property, etc.

I don't think slavery was about making people feel bad if they didn't work outside your "agreed working hours", unless you mean whipping or beating them until they feel really bad.

A more nuanced discussion of what you seem to be trying to get at can be found at http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/. But please don't use the slave analogy unless we're really extracting economic goods out of a working group by force.