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Parents in poorer countries devote more time to their kids' homework

economist.com

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Re: Parents in poorer countries devote more time to their kids' homework

#91

Post by FabHK »

meric wrote: post #81
ivanche wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, bold claim. India's GDP per capita for 2017 is $7,200, ranked 156th in the world. I'd say they're not far away from being poor. Source: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

By poorer I mean less income counted in GDP. The lower cost of living make it more viable for parents spend more time with children. I could also argue India is rich compared to, say, Japan, who don’t have much resources to spend on having children.

It's 156 in the world by GDP per capita PPP (purchase power parity) with under USD 8000 (USD 2200 nominal), so cost of living is taken into account, and a HDI of 0.624 (131st in the world).

Many positive things might be said about India, but the notion that it is not a poor country is objectively quite mistaken.

Re: Parents in poorer countries devote more time to their kids' homework

#92

Post by bsder »

dingaling wrote: post #27
bsder wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Never? I find that hard to believe. Writing, to take one example, requires practice. The amount of practice you can get in a single academic year maxes out at 180 hours without homework and you would have no time to actually teach. I can imagine that 5 hours a week of writing homework in English rapidly exceeds the amount of time you could ever spend in class.

If children aren't receiving sufficient formalised practice in 30 hours of school per week then the curriculum is too crowded. Imagine a manager saying "you need to brush up on your C++. But we're too busy to arrange training. An hour a day after work should help instead" Children need time to develop in ways other than rote education. Homework steals that time from them. I am quite happy to write "did not have time…

> If children aren't receiving sufficient formalised practice in 30 hours of school per week then the curriculum is too crowded.

That's fine, but don't complain about the education of the children not being very good afterward.

100 hours barely moves you out of the novice category for any subject.

> Imagine a manager saying "you need to brush up on your C++. But we're too busy to arrange training. An hour a day after work should help instead"

Funny, that's exactly what about 1/3 of the students in the CS classes that I taught were doing. Almost all of whom paid for the class themselves.

They disagree with your assessment to the tune of several thousand dollars of hard earned money.

Re: Parents in poorer countries devote more time to their kids' homework

#93

Post by jimmies »

westiseast wrote: post #31

Very surprised the article doesn’t mention a few things: 1. Some places just have more homework than others . Chinese kids have mountains of homework aged 7, vastly more than British kids. Chinese parents spend much more time either managing or literally doing their kids homework for them. 2. Efficiency/productivity - What are kids doing in school if their parents are still spending hours and hours after school helpi…

Guess I'm late to the comments game but I agree with you the title is a hasty and poor conclusion. As you have pointed out, the first problem was that the results are not normalized. Second, they have not studied what it is that the parents helped the kids. Maybe homework in some countries are more demanding (do those countries use a nationwide set of textbooks?). Who knows.

The third, I suspect that the time spent on helping children with homework has more to do with how education is viewed culturally than income. I can imagine if you ask the question of the percentage of income the parents spend on their children's education, the ranking is going to be very similar as well. Asian people and countries seem to devote a lot of time, and money, and they tend to steer to their kids more than other groups. That is even a stereotype now. I bet in America, rich Asian parents also spend more time to help their kids with homework. It just happens to be that Asian countries tend to be poorer so they float on top.

You can actually already see it in Singapore, which is not a poor country, being well above the average in terms of time parents spent helping kids.

Re: Parents in poorer countries devote more time to their kids' homework

#94

Post by haZard_OS »

bunderbunder wrote: post #69
CannisterFlux wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, I think that argument is made by people who don't have kids (with homework). It's not leisure for me at all. While I worry about being branded a terrible father for this comment, I will admit that I am a terrible teacher. I have no patience for it. My kids mess around, constantly want breaks ("Well I've written a line! time for a 10 minute break!"), waste hours doing shit that should take them minutes... When the…

It's really too bad the inverted classroom model hasn't become any more popular. In a nutshell, the idea is to take the traditional breakdown of what is done in class and what is done at home, and swap it: Kids do their readings and watch recorded lectures at home. And then they work on problem sets and projects in class, typically in groups. It's a really clever idea. Compared to the traditional model, it has so man…

It's a beautiful idea, it really is...except that I doubt it will ever work in my lifetime. I can't even convince my students at the University to complete assigned readings in preparation for classroom discussions. I can't imagine trying to invert a HS or middle school class (and I've taught those, too).

Re: Parents in poorer countries devote more time to their kids' homework

#95

Post by jchrisa »

el_benhameen wrote: post #70
jchrisa wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my kid's school had homework I'd probably start looking for a new school.

What type of school does your kid go to? I was told by a parent with older kids that our kindergarten has homework, which I'm not thrilled about.

It's a public Montessori elementary school.
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