No doubt. What’s your point?
Unlikely. History was “shorter”, for starters; and lots of scientific development had not happened yet (biology and physics have changed dramatically throughout the entire XX century). World literature produced numerous masterpieces that are now taught in most schools. Also, computers didn’t exist so nobody had to learn how to operate a desktop OS, a browser and office programs (at a minimum; many now also learn how to code). Knowledge of foreign languages was “exotic”, now it is essential.
They might have learnt some subjects in more depth (greek, latin, the classics, maybe algebra), but overall I don’t believe modern kids learn “less” than previous generations. If anything, they now have to deal with a continuous information overload.
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As with most problems at schools, the source of this conflict comes from pretending that all students learn in the same way, at the same stage of development, and that there’s a particular amount of homework that works for most kids. There isn’t.
If parents complain that there’s not enough homework (or too much), must the school respond by giving all the students more or less homework? As long as we continue to treat every student as if there’s a particular way of learning that they must adhere to (because it works for some kids!), there will always be large numbers of kids who are being provided with unpleasant and unsatisfactory educations.
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Our observations do not contradict each other. In my house, the teacher/student ratio is never worse than 1/2; frequently 1/1.
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So these kids already wake up at the crack of dawn to take the bus to school, they spend a working day’s hours there with no pay, they are given excreble food to eat, they eventually get bussed home at the end of the day, and then they’re told to spend another three hours on busywork which if they don’t do can cause them to fail their classes.
This eats into their already curtailed family and social life, leaving barely enough time for them to eat and sleep (remember, a lot of kids wake up well before sunrise for school), and they do it all over again five days a week. Then on the weekends they might get to spend some time with their families - unless their parents don’t have weekends off.
And you consider this a “minor” problem.
There are only 24 hours in a day. When school takes up 12 of them, and sleep another 8, that leaves kids with 4 hours a day to call their own.
Homework is absurd. If your employer foists an extra three hours onto your full time schedule, you get paid overtime, or you can refuse the extra hours, or you can find another job. Kids don’t have a say - and they don’t get compensated for their time, either in pay or in meaningful education.
Today’s children are being robbed of more and more of their youths. If you consider that “minor”, perhaps you are the one with screwy priorities. After all, I would suspect most BB readers haven’t been in primary schooling for a very long time - it’s easy to assume that schools are still exactly the way they were when you were a kid - or worse, how you remember school through rose colored glasses - and to brush off complaints about the treatment of students as being overblown hyperbole.
Three hours of homework? Bah! Why, back in MY day…!
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Apparently all that practice you speak of didn’t include basic reading comprehension. No statement was made that all repetition was pointless: only pointless repetition of things that the student has already mastered. But of course the idea that different students could progress at different rates, let alone that methods other than repetition could be appropriate or even necessary for some students, is entirely absent from assembly line education.
This “one size fits all” monomania is why, for example, about one tenth of students gain no physical skills at all from “Phys. Ed.” and never engage in any athletic activity as soon as it ceases to become mandatory in school. These are the students who don’t learn kinaesthetically. The same can be said of most people who are "bad with math’. If the first hundred identical repetitions didn’t turn on the light bulb the next thousand won’t either.
And for some people, such as myself, all repetition is pointless: but fortunately also unnecessary. I have never learned one single skill from “practice”. This includes learning to chew and swallow my food without choking and gagging on it, which I instantly learned from reading a book when I was eight. I literally can’t imagine what it is that you neuro-typicals get from this “practice” rubbish but have to admit that there is some evidence for it’s efficacy in at least some limited circumstances.
For the record, a few of the other methods of learning are by: observation, gestalt, analogy, and pattern recognition.
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Some people are hard workers who grind through tasks and achieve excellence through determination while others test well but are incapable of any achievement that takes more than four hours of dedication. In the real world, both types are essential to human progress and happiness. It pisses me off when I see highly functional achievers get branded with poor grades because they test poorly. Most important efforts in real life are the opposite of a school exam, and persistence and determination will count at least as much as test-taking ability.
In general I’ve found the more a school uses buzzphrases like “formative assessment” the less likely I am to want my children anywhere near the place.
The best school my children ever attended had no grades at all.
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I taught in China for four years and I heard plenty of parents lamenting the fact that they and their kids were denied a childhood through excessive pressure to perform.
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Spare a moment of pity for the teachers who have to assign grades to all this mountain of pointless repetition too. I have a friend who’s a teacher. He has three or four classes a day with about 30 students in each class. Heaven help you if you don’t assign at least one piece of homework every night in every class so that’s about 90 to 120 assignments every night after you’re done with lesson preparation, battling Ministry of Education bureaucrats. discipline problems, extra-curricular activities, over-all assessments, PTA and so on.
The union suggests that the nightly 2 hours of marking (if you’re at the 45 seconds per paper level) be done in front of a window visible from the street to help counter the “teaching is a soft job because they get the summer off” rubbish.
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Exactly. I went to high school in the 1980s and I hardly had any homework nor did I study particularly hard even though I did quite well. Both these things came back to bite me when went to university – at least the first semester when I had no study skills to speak of. I eventually recovered and went on to grad school, but if high school had been more demanding I would have been more prepared.
A brief comparison with homeschooling:
Every state has different standards, but generally speaking, in states where the minimum amount of time per day spent homeschooling is directed by the State, those limits are generally set at 3 hours which (as I recall) was based on how much actual instruction within a typical public school day.
So, if you’re doing homework for 3+ hours, you’re doing full-time homeschooling (along with your public schooling). Does two school days = better scores?
(No interest in answering trolls re:homeschooling, thx.)
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Ignoring the snide ad hominems, do you really think there are people that can build a solid mathematical foundation without practice? I did note that repetition is not the only way to achieve practice, but suggested that it was one way.
You’re absolutely right that a substantially more nuanced approach to education would be preferable, where the kids have the teaching tailored for them, but teachers are not renowned for there adoption of exciting new techniques. I refer to my other post about not leaving the education of one’s child to a school.
My son is 14, in the 8th grade, in a very well ranked and small school district. I encourage him to get as much homework done at school, whether during the class itself or during a study hall. When he does bring some home, it is usually less than 30 minutes worth. He and I discuss school topics and results every day, I often look over old papers, can access his grades and homework assignments online, and often share things I know that exceed the details of his school teachings or are perhaps tangential. He also teaches things to me. The thread is that knowledge is fun and with his ipad or laptop, he can access detailed and scholarly info on any subject in mere moments, as long as he knows how to frame the question. My son was always the subject Teacher conferences during elementary school, where I defended his behavior with his obvious boredom. Every time the teacher gave him more work, the issues were resolved. That being said, I have always raised him to Question Authority (which he does regularly, including me, but with respect and logic) and Don’t Trust Whitey (we are Irish EuroMutts). So far, so good. My dream is for him to make his own place in the world by pursuing his passion, even if it is YouTube videos on gaming (80% of his multimedia diet) and carve out his life according to his desires. Stay tuned!
I run a small business and thought about doing an MBA or some specific post-grad courses. I could squeeze the classes in my schedule – but I didn’t even try because I knew the “homework” was insane and would draw all off-class time. I would end up stressed, failing classes or with a mediocre GPA – and a waste of money.
Some people are hard workers who grind through tasks and achieve excellence through determination while others test well but are incapable of any achievement that takes more than four hours of dedication. In the real world, both types are essential to human progress and happiness. It pisses me off when I see highly functional achievers get branded with poor grades because they test poorly.
Just a followup: If formative assessment is done right, any reasonable educator would notice the student that “grinds through tasks and achieves excellence though determination” suddenly tanks an exam. This is a tension that needs to be reconciled: either the student is faking his way through the practice assignments, or there are other issues that are leading to performance anxiety. In either case, the teach has more information at their disposal to come up with better strategies.
Of course this has nothing to do with national standards-based assessment like the SAT… but for a classroom environment, there are loads of options at a teacher’s disposal for doing assessments. It just requires attention and creativity on the part of the teacher.
tl;dr Formative assessment is an awesome tool when it comes to assigning grades–and even when they aren’t!
While I’ll agree that there’s a meaningful discussion to be had about the quantity and (more important) quality of homework assignments, I’m picking on more than a whiff of privilege.
When there are clashes between extracurricular activities and curricular assignments, the conversation shouldn’t be “well this isn’t fair; I have no free time now” or “how can I minimize the impact of that work tied to the curriculum,” but “which of these optional activities do I need to cut back on?”
Because when Junior is 25 and starting out at that hot-shot financial services firm, he’s not going to be able to slack off during tax season just because his basketball buddies at the rec center want him to come practice with them every evening.
Hmmm…seems my experience (lets cut to the chase, say more than twenty-five years) as a tutor exclusively in the Asian community didn’t happen?
I caught up in math when teachers taught the principles.
I fell behind in math when teachers spent the whole period going over the last night’s problems, didn’t have time to teach the principles, and just told us to read the book and do another thirty problems.
I could spend three, four, five hours doing these asinine problems, unable to decypher the horrid books [something about the writing style], and nursing my injured hand.
I understand these drills for language classes, but not math, and I didn’t have time to do both. I made the mistake of doing the drills for math, and I regret it.
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The problem with school homework is that you are at highschool all day from about 9 to 3,30ish, about 6 hours altogether with whatever lunch breaks you have. At university you have three to four classes depending on your loading with each class only having two to three lecture hours each week and tutorials and/or lab workshops. So the comparison is not the same, because you are expected, as a university student, to use your excess time studying the course material.
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I grew up on Long Island, I’m 27 now. I always used to say that after the summer following 7th grade, I never really had a whole day off - that is, a day where there wasn’t some assigned work I was supposed to be doing for someone - until after college, when I had a so-called “full time” job. Then, masochist that I am, I went to grad school, but I left after less than 2 years.
So yeah. I had time in my day as a kid for structured activities - sports and music classes and the like, which I definitely enjoyed. But from middle school on I only spent maybe 1 unstructured afternoon or night a month with my friends. Junior and senior year of high school I never got more than 6 hours sleep. The activities I joined I chose freely, my parents would have been just as happy if I hadn’t wanted to do all that stuff, but there is a general atmosphere of pressure to do everything you can do. It’s an arms race for getting scarce (and overvalued) “opportunities,” no one wins, and I lost out on a lot of fun along the way.
I was extremely lucky in many ways, and it all worked out well for me. Partly because it wasn’t until college that I developed a healthy disrespect for unearned authority, and willingly put up with far too much BS before that.
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