As a society we've decided that working more than 40 hours ina week is so onerous for adults that they deserve time and half pay for the extra time.

But, we require kids to work far more than that and we tell them to suck it up.

I hate homework.

"I realize now that expecting kids to come home from a long day of school and then expect them to slave into the evening and more on school work is a bad idea. You need breaks to not burn out"

You act like school is a full day of work. It isn't. There are numerous breaks in a school day. At least there are if the school is well managed.

"The evidence we found suggests that students who spend more time doing homework don't necessarily get better grades."

Of course they don't. Grades are normalized to the local environment. They have no objective meaning. Which is why people insist on standardized tests. Didn't we just have an article about positive racism where the guy went from a straight A student to a C to D student when he went to college. He didn't change. The grading criteria did.

"From what I've seen with my own students, those who seem to spend a lot of time on homework are usually struggling to understand what they are being asked to do."

Obviously. If you've mastered the task then you can do it very quickly. When you don't understand you take much longer to get it done.

If you want people to actually be proficient and actually know what you are teaching them then the repetitive 'homework' has to be done. They need to practice the skills and not just hear about them. That said this work doesn't have to be done at home after school hours.

I don't know; from what I've seen of students' homework these days, a lot of it strikes me as just busywork -- it's neither teaching them anything, nor is it helping them practice their skills. Part of the problem is the curriculum, though. Anyone who advocates whole-language reading and Common Core math should be shot out of a cannon into the sea. The ridiculous contortions that you go through to solve problems in these are non-productive and don't teach anything. The students wind up guessing at answers (because they aren't being taught any fundamentals) and then doing a lot of work to build rationalizations for their guesses, in the form that the textbooks advocate.

Another problem in public schools is that the curriculum, and the pace of progress, are usually tailored to the slowest students in the class. Homework in this case doesn't help anyone; the slow students don't learn anything because they don't have the teacher there to advise them, and the faster students are simply repeating work that they've already done.

My attitude toward homework wasn't influenced in high school or college. It was during my days in the Army, when I was sent to the Defense Language Institute to learn German.

One of my instructors was actually in the military, and he told us that those of who were in the military (as opposed to civilian spouses or federal agents) were under lawful orders to complete all our homework.

And I found myself complaining to the instructors that I would like to learn the language I was sent to learn, but I have too much homework to do it.

How about instead you just tell me what I'm obligated to learn and then let me learn it my own way, in a way I know works for me, instead of dictating what exercises I'm supposed to do in a book, whether it's helpful to me or not?

Another problem in public schools is that the curriculum, and the pace of progress, are usually tailored to the slowest students in the class. ~ Cousin Dave at August 14, 2019 6:33 AM

This.

Homework is usually assigned to make up for the fact that half the lesson plan had to be abandoned so the slow kids wouldn't get lost in class. It's dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.

A computer-based learning system in which the teachers act as proctors would allow students to learn at their own pace and in a manner that best suits their learning styles. Slower students could find their own niche and not hold an entire class back.

When I entered college (with the deficient study habits described in a prior thread), I had to take a "Survey of Calculus" course for my business major. It was math for dummies. Instead of determining the area under the curve using a formula, we were drawing boxes and triangles under the curve and measuring them. I washed out. I finally gave up and took the calculus class that science majors had to take. Suddenly, everything fell into place and I got it, handily passing the class.

Same thing with learning a bowline knot in Boy Scouts. The rabbit-and-hole trick didn't work for me. A straightforward knot tying lesson worked for me.

Like Patrick and his language class, I had to find a learning style that worked for me - and it wasn't the one the instructor was pushing.

Hum. My experience with military schools was the opposite of Patrick’s. Very little homework. Lots of tests that pretty much directly covered the material they wanted you to master.

That said, I think the best homework is practicing things that students need to learn to master the subject area.

Since most public school teachers and textbooks, kind of wander aimlessly with no real mastery goal in mind, *homework* tends to be a mishmash of busy work, and non directed practice. In other words, next to useless.

College courses are, for the most part, similarly disorganized.

There are a lot of good studies out there that tell us, individual self paced learning broken up into small blocks is best for almost everyone. Computers, used correctly, are opening up a golden age of learning, but the professional education clerics are digging in their heels, and covering their rice bows, wanted to debate *homework* instead of the total failure of classroom instruction, in public institutions.

I can agree with everyone else here. The problem isn't homework. It is the entire course design.

Here is a simple example, knowledge doesn't exist independent of other knowledge. Layers build on previous layers. If you are missing foundational knowledge then you are going to have a very difficult time grasping the concepts that build on that foundation. Yet we teach lots of subjects as if they were fixed packets of data that have no relevance to anything else.

Every public school math course I took had that form. If we were teaching addition we only did addition. Once we moved on to multiplication addition may as well have vanished. By the time you got to the next level where addition was a necessary prior skill students had become rusty because they hadn't been practicing it for months to years. This trend repeated over and over again. But once you get to calculus you can't forget about symbolic arithmetic. You need that for any real world problem. At the college level the whole point of Fourier analysis is to use calculus to convert a problem largely unsolvable in arithmetic with calculus into one that is easily solved with simple addition and multiplication. You need all of it!

Agreed on the common core stuff. It is new math all over again. The whole point is to make things noncomparable so school funding laws that punish schools for poor performance don't get implemented.

The '+' sign was invented in 1544. Arithmetic goes all the way back to the Romans and the Greeks. Calculus was invented back in the 1600s. For high school math you've got a minimum of 300 years of teaching history. Claiming you've got a new way that is better than anything is pretty unlikely.

School is too stressful, as evidenced by the decrease in admissions and census on my adolescent psych unit from late June through August, and the dramatic increase in mid September.

Instead of eliminating homework, keep homework at two hours a day three or four days a week, and eliminate the six or seven hours a day spent at school. That worked well for my kids, and it's working well for all eight of my grandkids who are proficient at reading, writing and arithmetic, have spending money that they had time to earn, and spend many hours skiing, mountain biking, hiking, rock climbing, swimming and loafing around with their friends, drinking iced tea and watching the clouds pass over.

"A computer-based learning system in which the teachers act as proctors would allow students to learn at their own pace and in a manner that best suits their learning styles. Slower students could find their own niche and not hold an entire class back." - Conan

Unless the outcomes were the same across all skin colors, I have a feeling that would end up being "racist".

Unless the outcomes were the same across all skin colors, I have a feeling that would end up being "racist".

Ken R at August 14, 2019 9:40 AM

Well the dems are going to beat that dead horse through November 2020, but when the teacher’s pension systems start failing in the big blues, radical changes are coming.

In order to get decent educational outcomes, we are going to have to stop checking diversity boxes, and focus on individuals.

It was never anything more than rent seeking to begin with.

Awwww poor babies!

Long school day?

I went through the Yeshiva day-school system. That meant school started at 8 with morning prayers and breakfast, followed by a full curriculum of Judaic studies - Biblical literature with commentaries, Talmud, and philosophical works.

Only after lunch did we *begin* to learn all the subjects you poor babies did. Including lotsa AP math and science courses for the future doctahs, lawyahs and accountants (and engineers like me).

School day ended at 5:30 from Junior High on. Clubs usually came after.

And yes, there was homework. Because it's never enough to just watch the teacher work some examples.
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And yes, I agree with the posters here that point to student-directed learning and the ability of software to facilitate that by dynamically responding to student input/errors.

But the other side of that coin is motivation. Which has been gutted since the 60s by various infantilizing trends - not just in the Ed biz, but in the general culture. Including soft, immature parenting ("think of me as your friend..." EWWWWWWWW).
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One thing missed in discussion of "curriculum dilution" is that the Ed schools have shifted the focus to the *teachers'* desire to be "creative". Problem is that this year's kids need to learn exactly what you taught last year's kids. We don't care about your "creativity" for its own sake.

So - lemme tell you what the most successful service school does, such that no one - no one - has to wait for a copy machine or get a book out to deal with an emergency.

At Nuclear Field "A" School and Naval Nuclear Power School, the student's school day starts with an early muster and roll-call. Classes are 50 minutes, from 0700 to 1600, with a couple of study halls. Depending on the student's performance, he or she will be assigned 20 to 40 hours of homework per 7-day week. These range from "suggested" hours to "ordered" hours.

The school is actually allowed to discipline students. That's a hint.

The student is restricted to the classroom to do this "homework" because the material is classified "Confidential/NOFORN", dealing with the construction of actual nuclear plants whenever possible, to reduce apathy on the idea that anything is abstract.
The student appears at the classroom and logs in with the classroom monitor on a roster. Periodically, a senior instructor will patrol the classes to be sure that no other activity is occurring - opening your personal mail, etc. while logged in will get your hours crossed out. The monitor clears the classroom and turns in his log at 2300.
There are keys to this activity:
• All of the material has to do with operating submarine and surface ship propulsion plants. There is no "diversity" or other "training" offered like this.
• The distinction is made that while you are at the classroom, you will work on your subject matter. You are to play when you are somewhere else. This will be the case at sea when in the propulsion spaces. You will NOT bring distractions of any kind there.
• It is constantly emphasized that your actions or inaction at sea could be fatal, and that the hazards are known, they are these, learn them well, you will not have a book in hand if in combat.

(Were you impressed with Legasov's explanation of the Chernobyl reactor explosion? There are hundreds of USN reactor operators, all of 22-or-so years old, who could explain that while showing you the reactor operation equations, not just placards about reactivity.)

This type of instruction can't or won't be applied or enforced by most parents, many of whom have no idea what their kids are being taught in the first place - and teachers no longer have the amount of real-world experience they once had. College-to-classroom has nowhere near the authority that Army-college-classroom does.

So your kids struggle, having in many cases no idea why someone is requiring them to know things.

Let us not forget that there are two types of helicopter parents: the get-everything-perfect type, and the what-are-you-doing-to-my-precious-child type. You're not going to find the former, or the USN's nuke-school graduates, complaining about being "triggered".

Somewhat related may be my question, "Why is the school closed for so much of the week?"

"The distinction is made that while you are at the classroom, you will work on your subject matter. You are to play when you are somewhere else. This will be the case at sea when in the propulsion spaces. You will NOT bring distractions of any kind there."

Will play somewhere else, huh? Funny, My buddies and I had plenty of fun both in Nuke school and in the Engine Room. I sat a million hours at the RPCP as RO and SRO and gotta say life would be pretty miserable if all you ever did was discuss scram drills and the BFPL curve.

I got a lot out of homework in high school. Math homework was a chance to practice what we learned in class (and puzzle stuff out at my own pace). Writing papers and doing research taught me to organize my thoughts and manage my time.

I’ve never been great at learning things in the moment and on the spot. Homework was a structured way to revisit and take a closer look at things I wasn’t quick enough on the uptake to understand in class.

I do think there’s a thing as busy-work and too much homework, especially for grade school. For high school, instead of forcing kids to pack in so many electives the whole school day, maybe make two hours of study hall the norm, so less homework goes home.

"Will play somewhere else, huh? Funny, My buddies and I had plenty of fun both in Nuke school and in the Engine Room."

And not once did you have a magazine or gaming device there. The exception, as you know, was the "Engineering Bitch Book", as filled-in by the nucs, because senior people knew it was a great way to learn of problems before they came out in some other way. And that occurred in the environment where everyone had already learned that the enemy of sleep was inattention to the plant.

"The student is restricted to the classroom to do this "homework" because the material is classified "Confidential/NOFORN","

Often to excess. A friend came home on leave after either pre nuke power school or nuke power school, saw my textbook for a standard math class in our university's engineering core curriculum (It was either multidimensional calculus or differenial equations) and said "that book is classified material"

I've always believed homework should be optional, but that you should be allowed to turn in the successfully completed assignments after a bad exam score to partially mitigate the the missed points or be eligible to retake the exam. In other words, if you can learn the material without it, don't do it, but if the test indicates you were wrong, you can course correct.

I remember being lectured by ed school grad that military schools were inherently bad because they were all “teaching to the test”

My response, if you aren’t “teaching to the test” what the hell are you teaching and what are you testing?

Homework is the same. If it doesn’t reinforce the course and the testing, what are you giving it for?

My response, if you aren’t “teaching to the test” what the hell are you teaching and what are you testing? ~ Isab at August 16, 2019 7:52 AM

When teachers go off script, they delude themselves that they're teaching beyond the test, passing on wider knowledge to students who would otherwise be limited by the test parameters.

However, they're not. Without the parameters provided by the test requirements, they usually end up teaching less than the test requires or spending too much time on a pet topic to the detriment of the subject as a whole.

Test requirements provide guardrails and keep traffic flowing in a uniform direction.

"Teaching to the test" is bad when the test is bad - when it is outdated, erroneous, incompletely covers the subject, or covers more than can be taught in the class. When this is the case, the problem is either that the test actually needs fixed but bureaucracy prevents this, or that the school insists on following a different curriculum, without finding or creating a test to match their curriculum. Either way, it is a confession of incompetence!

When done right, the test is a sampling of the full range of the subject, with nothing from outside the curriculum and nothing left out. Then teaching the subject well and teaching to the test are the same thing - because students who understand the subject can do the test.

And the other thing that happens is that they hire teachers who have never fully understood any subject, and who therefore have never learned that the easiest way to do well on the test is to understand the subject. And they fill the classroom with an arbitrary selection of children who are matched by age, but not by ability or interests. And some of those kids don't belong in that class because they lack the raw ability, they are unwilling to put in the work required, or their earlier classes didn't give them the background they need. And so the stupid teachers try to have the kids memorize hundreds of pieces of disconnected information rather than a connected whole - and this makes the smart kids stupid.