So my previous response was unnecessarily snarky. Sorry about that.
But my question for you is, years later, did those grueling hours of study produce substantially better results than a comparable set of non-Asian students with the same economic and parental educational background?
I just suspect that there’s not a lot of marginal utility to those extra hours.
@Lexicat re:60 hour drones
It took me to see over half the replies to see yours, which is the one I agree most: indeedy, the purpose of one-size-fits all education is to produce compliant. obedient people, and for many, that is Good. Not all people can do entrepreneuring - much less do it successfully. For most people, the best they can expect in life is to try to become some cog somewhere, take what the Man gives them, and smile, and hope he will be gentle.
The goal, then is to give kids stupid, boring, mostly useless assignments - and see if they comply. If they do, the teacher can sleep happy in the knowledge that he is, in this non-intuitive way, helping those kids become whatever nowadays passes for Good Citizenship - do not forget it, today the Powers That Be do not want engaged, active, participating citizens. They want obedient consumers.
@heng
yop, socioeconomics. Engaged, educated parents has more value in the outcomes than anything else. It broke my heart to judge that 3rd grader Science Fair project, where obviously she did her very, very best (and it was good), but obviously also her parents merely had gotten her a few Radioshack parts - as fourth in the grading, she didn’t make it to City. Number one place went to the kid who had extra music classes, and a very bright presentation, with printed pictures etc. His parents were within the allowed boundaries.
@author What cheese do you want with your whine? you, madam, have no business printing a picture of a South American mammal for your second graders. At that age they should make their own drawing if they want full credit (were I their teacher, they might get a 90% at most with mommy’s picture, while the child-made drawing would get 100% - of course I would have spoken with y’all beforehand about my criteria) So, let me add the the teacher as part of the problem. BTW, when teachers (even good ones) give large projects as homework, we also set a long time to complete them. However, kids leave them for the last minute, pretty much always. So? Well, let’s also blame the teacher here, if he did not break down the project in chunks no longer than a week from each other.
School is not a business. Government is not a business. That is an intentionally propagated lie.
Business is not sacred . Business is not beloved by Jesus or God. A business is for making profit A government is not for making profit.
These are good questions. You can’t learn your multiplication tables without practice, and we’ve just been through that, so I have thoughts. We were calling out multiplication problems to him from the dreaded times tables, and he just wasn’t getting it. And of course he had all the worksheets and workbooks. And the timed tests at school. But he just wasn’t getting there. Then we had him make his own flash cards, and then we drilled with the flashcards and knocked it all out in two weeks. But despite that success, the worksheets and the workbooks kept (keep) coming. We’re at the maintenance level with his multiplication tables, but the work coming home is indifferent to that.
After writing my original post here, I realized that there are two points I want to make. Our school takes a one-size-fits-all approach to homework. Everyone gets the same work, regardless of positive/negative results, and regardless of a child’s mastery or lack thereof in a particular subject. There aren’t the resources to truly tailor a curriculum to individual children.
The other point I want to make is this: someone reading my previous post about workloads might infer that my son’s teacher is not doing a great job. This is not the case. She’s compassionate, professional, and really seems to like my kid. Every time I talk with her, I’m impressed. But the principal at the school recently said something that really stuck with me–our state legislature is constantly setting and adopting new standards, and each of those standards has to fit into a curriculum that was already planned at the start of the year by a professional educator. Between the new Common Core and this 3rd Grade reading test, a lot of my son’s classroom time is dictated by the state legislature. If the LAW says you have to give 3 reading quizzes a week in the classroom, then other classroom activities have to go. And even if every child in the class masters the quizzes this week, the poor teacher is bound by law to keep administering them through the end of the year.
the legend is that the owner of CP/M had to go gliding when he was scheduled to have a meeting with IBM types when the PC was coming together. They then decided to use that Tiny-Bland company’s software instead.
I never learned my Table of 4, or 6, or 8, or 9. Yet, of my classmates, I am probably the one that does more advanced math than any. (by my 40s I noticed that, maybe due to practice, some of those Tables were starting to come up automatically)
Again, the principal purpose of one-size-fits-all schools is to breed compliance, not so much to teach what is actually useful, meaningful, disruptive, etc.
BTW, I see one-size-fits-all schooling as a Crime Against Humanity
[quote=“doctorow, post:1, topic:25817”]
The school is a business that produces educated children as products. The teachers are employees. The administrators are managers. The government is the board of directors. The tax-payers are the shareholders. School-businesses must be “accountable,” which means producing quarterly reports in which numbers – test scores, attendance – go up, regardless of whether that reflects any underlying educational merit.[/quote]
This quote displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the system. The school is a “business” that is paid to warehouse children during the day. You can tell this by how student performance is largely irrelevant to government school funding, and how funding is actually based on the number of students in class and taking tests (remember that story last week?). The idea that school-businesses are “accountable” to parents or taxpayers is simply laughable - they rarely go out of business, and the response to failure is to give them more taxpayer money. The only people the schools are accountable to are the people who pay them … which would be the government, local and federal, and more specifically the local elected officials who have direct control over what money goes where. And that’s where the teachers come in - their compulsory unions support local politicians, who in turn reward the unions with job protection at taxpayer expense. That’s how you end up in a situation where bad teachers can’t be fired, and new good ones will be fired due to seniority rules.
Further, this business is based on the threat of force - if a parent does not send their child to school, or jump through the hoops required for homeschooling, their children will eventually be taken from them. The taxpayers aren’t shareholders - if they were shareholders, they could sell their shares and get out. Taxpayers are, essentially, coerced employees of the school system: their income or land is taxed to fund the schools, whether they have children or not, whether they think the school is doing a good job or not. They have zero say over what goes on in the schools, especially if they don’t have children. They only have a tiny amount of influence when they elect local officials … and the teacher’s unions use taxpayer money to ensure that the right people get elected to perpetuate the system.
If you want to know how broken the government school system is, you need only look at the President’s example. His two children go to an elite private school - one that costs only slightly more than the taxpayers are forced to spend to send other children to the failing D.C. government schools.
Excessive homework is merely a symptom of this disfunctional system and its risk-averse nature. Everything in the government school system is controlled from the top down, and becoming moreso all the time (see Common Core). This doesn’t allow room for variability, flexibility, or competition to get rid of failing schools and rewards successful ones. It doesn’t allow room for kids who learn differently or at different rates to work at their own pace in their own way. I mean, how stupid is grouping children by age when it comes to learning? Shouldn’t they be grouped - and taught - by their grasp of the material?
My kid’s 3rd grade teacher was the worse. My son would have 4-1/2 hrs of homework from her a night and most of it wasn’t worth the time. But he did it because as parents we’re suppose to demonstrate that the rewards should be in the work itself, blah-blah-blah. The homework nightmare repeated itself for him in 5th grade. It was diorama hell. Seriously, every 2 weeks he had a report and a freaking physical object to create to go along with it.
There’s homework that’s nothing more than busy work, like map coloring, and then there’s practice work, like math, that you need in order to get better. But even with math there’s a big difference between having 20 problems & 80 to do. At some point you’re no longer learning. You’re just grinding through the homework. There’s no more learning taking place.
Getting rid of all homework is not the answer. Books still need to be read & class time used to discuss them. Short practice drills need to be done at home to let the kid know if they’re getting the concepts. But 4 hrs of homework 6 nights a week is too much.
LOL. Wish you’d been my son’s 5th grade teacher. Nothing against the teacher my son had personally but he was the king of diorama hell. Got into his classroom more than 5 times over the course of the year for meet the teacher night, open houses, after the chorus events, etc. And each time I’d see rows upon rows of projects. And, ahem, it was obvious that 80% of the kids had their work done for them by older siblings or parents. And who could blame them? There was a project due every 2 weeks and three BIG projects due throughout the year. You could see the level of expertise in these things and I’d wonder why he’d believe that the kids did them themselves. (At events some of the parents would whisper to each other at how happy they were about some figure because they’d worked on it for 3hrs while the kid was at school.)
My biggest complaint was that the dioramas added nothing to the true learning. I’d rather the kids had done something during art-time, in class. The coursework could have been the direction for the pieces. But do schools have art for kids past 4th grade anymore?
9 is easy:
Put your fingers down on the table in front of you and count from left to right.
9x1 - curl your first (left pinky) under = 0 to the left of it, 9 to the right = 9
9x2 - curl your second (left ring finger) under = 1 to the left of it, 8 to the right = 18
9x3 - curl your third (left middle finger) under = 2 to the left of it, 7 to the right = 27
– etc. etc. until –
9x10 - curl your tenth (right pinky) under = 9 to the left of it, 0 to the right = 90
Yep, I had this one ecology class with a heavy reading load, and it wasn’t my major. It was an elective. Since I was taking other courses, and two of them were major courses, I had to economize and not read one of the books. The prof questioned me about it and I told him that since his policy was to drop the worst graded quiz from my average, I decided to save the time by not reading the book, take the 0 on the quiz and simply do better on all the other stuff. He thought my reasoning was sound.
I still think this way. I have about 70 or 80 years TOPS on this earth, if I’m lucky. If I’m not lucky, I have a couple decades left, maybe even less. That is scant time to do everything I want to do. Some people amass great wealth or piles of stuff. I view life as what I can do and learn. Not what I can “accomplish” as in ambition. I view it as the opportunity to do the things that interest me, love what I love, love who I love. If it brings me riches, so be it. If I live in poverty, so be it. If I am somewhere in the middle, so be it. The point is to use my time wisely, the best way I know how.
Is that a bad ethos? I don’t think it is. It certainly isn’t the only ethos. There are many, and some just as valid. If we could teach our kids about the value of their time, they’d see the value of their own thoughts, and therefore their own intrinsic value as a person.
Hours and hours of homework is ONLY a good thing if it’s something that interests you. If it’s just busywork, or make-work, then it’s pointless and is wasting that person’s precious life energy on the trivial. How about finding out what interests that person and then teaching them to do their own research and work on it endlessly on their own time, of their own free will? All this compulsory stuff is so 20th century. We need to move on.
Homework is a great tool for reinforcing skills that are easy to build via repetition. But not all skills are learned that way, and if you are having trouble with the concepts being taught, you’re going to fail at the homework. Especially since the curricula changes so drastically between generations that parents can’t really help their kids effectively without taking the classes themselves.
A great example is the controversial “new math” everyone’s all in a tizzy about. If you’re supposed to be using that, and your parents don’t understand how it works, they can’t help you. They can show you the way they know, and you’ll get the right answer, but you won’t have learned the lesson.
I suspect the reason why middle class parents (middle class in the Marxist sense) who are so gung-ho about homework, is that they’re the ones under the most pressure to conform ideologically; that pressure is passed on to their kids.
My fellow grade-level Math teacher and I started “flipping” the classroom this year and the students have been loving it. We give them their lessons at home (via streaming video); which we keep no longer than 10 minutes…We then assign their homework to be completed in the classroom. Instead of standing in front of my kids and wondering if they’re comprehending me, I get to work the room and help out my students while they complete their assignment. This isn’t my invention by any stretch, but my students parents have been loving it since day 1…
The worst are the homework assignments that are unrelated to the class contents because the teacher is off on some Socratic “hide the ball” That’s when the students best friend is Schaums outline. Used textbooks with answered questions are also helpful and cheap.
Flashcard drills never worked for me at all. I never memorized multiplication tables, I came up with simple algorithms, e.g. 9x = 10x - x. 5x = 10x ÷ 2. A little slower than rote maybe, but also more extensible. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was also getting a head start on basic algebra before I’d even heard of it.
Thanks for reminding me why I read the comments at BB.
Working at a company in Philadelphia a few years ago and some of my coworkers were Indian immigrants, and some Chinese immigrants. My kids were just still toddlers, most of them were parents so we were talking about raising kids, the challenges, etc and the vast majority of them said that they wanted to send their children to an American school, not to the type of school that they had back home because while they felt they had an early lead in terms of math, etc they completely missed out on a childhood, and their schooling was completely devoid of creativity or free thinking.
One of the Chinese guys guys said that by the time Americans get to college they’ve caught up in terms of the hard sciences, but they’re also able to make more creative leaps, be more social, and have a broader sense of the world. He said he thinks it crazy that we want to emulate schools in Japan, Korea, China, etc when, if anything, they should learn more from us.
Sure, it’s all anecdotal, and it’s from the mouths of immigrants, who may have a bias because they chose to come here in the first place, but it’s at least something to consider.
My experience with the term ‘neoliberal’ comes from The Economist, where it basically means ‘neoconservative, only before 9/11, when they went round the twist’. The idea was that the government should get out of the way (particularly of international trade) wherever possible.
Americans would call this ‘conservative’ or ‘libertarian’. But political labels such as these have nothing to do with descriptive accuracy; they’re all, to some degree, efforts at branding.
