Possibly, but it’s not like I was in the minority spending that amount of time doing classwork as an engineering undergrad. When your professor assigns problems, and there is a lab AND group study along with the class, then yes there is a lot of work to do (and no the class assigned problems are not for group study, there are separate problems for that). While that wasn’t the majority of my classes I had plenty of professors that seemed to think their class was the most important and if you didn’t get it the first time they presented the material, well you needed to figure it out yourself.
Yay for going to a bog standard comprehensive, I guess. I don’t think I even had homework every night, let alone 3 hours of it. Never did me any harm.
Who says we’re only allowed to pick one?
If someone expresses concern that Pepsico is setting nutritional standards at elementary schools, that doesn’t mean they don’t care about cuts to the arts programs. If someone brings up cuts to the arts programs, that doesn’t mean they don’t care about teacher salaries or the obsession with standardized test scores. The problems are many, and this is one of them.
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Perhaps these children, with a mere 15 hours a week of extra work, could become an account manager or maybe even one of the vice presidents?
When I was student teaching (a career I decided not to pursue), I was told that homework has minimal educational value, especially compared with the effort involved for students and teachers, but parents demand it.
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You highlight another problem here of course; that of peer pressure to do what everyone else is doing, not to work out the correct/best strategy for yourself. It’s very hard to avoid!
At the UK university I attended (and I think similar to the tendency across the UK), all the assessment was put at the end of the year in one big set of exams. There were a few course work components, but these were exceptionally well defined and, for the most part, it was easy to achieve the necessary marks just by having diligently performed the work (which was not overly onerous). The beauty of such a system was it was entirely up to the individual how to structure their time. That’s not to say there wasn’t (copious amounts of) ongoing out-of-lecture work and progress monitoring, just that if you ignored everyone’s pleas to work harder you could easily be vindicated come the end of year exams.
That might be true in the USA but I only ever see Neo-liberal used by socialists, communists and anachists in Britain.
A little bit of liberal history in the UK:
In the 1980s some members of the right wing of the Labour Party split to form the Social Democratic Party who then joined with the Liberal Party as the SDP-Liberal alliance, a few years later they merged to form the Liberal Democrats. During this time period they were to the right of the Labour Party though the gap decreased over time and changing Labour party leaders (Michael Foot>Neil Kinnock>John Smith>Tony Blair, each more right wing than their predecessor with the exception of Foot)
We only had about a decade of liberals being the left wing of parliament, roughly the time period between Blair getting rid of Clause IV of the Labour Party constitution and Clegg becoming leader of the LibDems and pushing the Orange Book ideology.
This is also what I’ve also been told by teachers and administrators in our school system…that if teachers reduce the amount of homework, the school will receive complaints from parents.
I think the right homework can be helpful…about 50% of the homework my son brings home is relevant and he enjoys. The other half is simply busy work and not worth doing.
With less people around, and even less educated people, things were much easier… for people in that niche.
The article quoted explains it’s the average from very top high schools among upper-middle class Californians.
The biggest thing impacting your child’s education is student/teacher ratio. If you have more than 12 students per teacher, your child is getting less education than they can optimally absorb.
Homework doesn’t matter unless your child is doing poorly in an area where repetitious drills are useful, as in math or spelling.
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Care to share your citations for your claims here? Particularly about “Asian” students? You’re being very, very vague. It’s almost as if you’re basing your opinions on stereotypes!
I have heard about several people who claim that study (traditionally reading, but now we can have lectures on the internet) should be done at home, then work is done at school where any questions and uncertainties about the subject can be answered by the teacher. Most schools seem to have it backwards.
I really wish I had some sources for these claims.
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No doubt, but they also crammed a lot more info into the few short years of schooling.
The biggest thing impacting your child’s education is your involvement. Any parent that delegates the responsibility of educating their child to a school is a fool and their child will be duly educated as such.
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I agree. I remember getting reading assignments and whatnot to take home, where it was covered and reinforced the following day in class.
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Just to add to this… I strongly suspect this is by far the biggest block on social mobility - poorly educated parents being unable to compete with educated (and engaged) parents in competitive child rearing. It’s sad, but I have no idea how to solve it. Any child that receives the state’s best efforts in addition to constant attention and stimulation of parents is always going to do better.
Many schools have moved to a model where the only assigned grades come from exams and large projects. Everything else, from quizzes to labs to homework is used for formative assessment. The idea is that homework is practice and you shouldn’t punish kids in the long term because they didn’t get a concept the first time.
My experience with teaching in this system was largely positive. Students did as much or as little work as they felt like doing. This was constantly compared to their previous marks on exams and overall performance patterns.
The other idea was that students should be given enough work to fill the class period. It’s a contract: come to class prepared and ready to go, and the school will respect your extracurricular life.
The end result? Smart kids (the independent self-directed let abets) were still mastering the material. The other end of the bell curve was still populated with kids that had massive problems–personal ones that couldn’t be reconciled by one teacher–but at least they didn’t have to worry about homework. The kids in the middle figured out what they needed to work on to get a good exam mark, and extracurricular review opportunities were provided, of course; but in the end everyone was graded according standards: what they know, not how well they can plow through piles of worksheets.
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Early literacy programming is huge. Your child doesn’t need to know how to read to reinforce pre-literacy skills. There is a mountain of supporting evidence correlating early literacy programs with life-long learning potential. Check your local library!
Check out Finland:
http://www.thedailyriff.com/articles/the-finland-phenomenon-inside-the-worlds-most-surprising-school-system-588.php
“Finnish students rank top of the charts in international studies of standardized testing (PISA).”
“… Finnish schools don’t assign homework, because it is assumed that mastery is attained in the classroom.
Finnish schools have sports, but no sports teams. Competition is not valued.
The focus is on the individual child. If a child is falling behind, the highly trained teaching staff recognizes this need and immediately creates a plan to address the child’s individual needs. Likewise, if a child is soaring ahead and bored, the staff is trained and prepared to appropriately address this as well.
Partanen correlated the methods and success of their public schools to US private schools. We already have a model right here at home.
Compulsory school in Finland doesn’t begin until children are 7 years old.”
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