Homework is eating American schoolkids and their families

boing
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I think that will depend on how you define and measure success, but to a large extent it’s going to be self-fullfilling prophecy anyway. I personally test far above my actual ability - I can figure out from the phrasing of the questions what the answers should be despite knowing nothing about the subject being tested - and my son is much the same. Because I scored very well on the SATs, Stanford-Binet v2 & 3, and the Weschler cognitive test, I have been given opportunities that are not extended to people without these “paper qualifications”. Yet, I do not think that the particular type of problem-solving ability these tests measured has always been truly critical to whatever successes I have had (although it often did help, I admit!). In fact I think being willing to take responsibility for a problem has mattered more (for me) than being capable of solving it efficiently or even effectively; and I think character usually counts towards success more than book-learning.

Meaning no disrespect to book-learning - I love books. I just don’t like being graded on how well my interpretation of them fits an instructor’s testing regimen.

[quote=“ben_ehlers, post:120, topic:25817”]
OR: Do we recognize that there are greater measures of a person than test-taking or rote repetition, and instead try to work with individuals to best equip them with the tools they need to succeed?[/quote]

Apologies for chopping up your post, but I think that line shows we’re thinking about the same goals, no matter how differently our methods might be constrained. Thanks for giving me another viewpoint to think about!

[quote=“ben_ehlers, post:120, topic:25817”]
My point is that if I see an ostensibly hard-working, earnest student that suddenly falls flat on their face during an exam, I could still come up with alternative assessment that proves they are knowledgable and capable. But do I know for sure that other people will do the same? Will college admission boards be so considerate? Professional accreditation bodies? Government agencies? Most likely not. Do not mistake me; I have seen how rampant credentialism disempowers and alienates people. But this problem is bigger than the classroom, bigger than the education system, really.[/quote]

Very solid points! I have to agree that you as a teacher have to work with a limited set of tools and that your own opinions and values necessarily have a severely limited reach.

The one experience that I have had with an institution of learning that eschewed grading entirely was very positive, though. When my kids left NCCL, we were concerned that their lack of test scores and grades would limit their options for high school. However, NCCL’s been around since the 1970s so all the local high schools (including the private, charter and magnet schools) are familiar with the history of academic ability that NCCL graduates have shown and will happily waive their grade and test requirements. Which makes me think that if you find a better way, you really only have to convince one institution to do a better job, although it might take 30 years before everyone realizes you’ve made a difference.

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What made the assignments necessary? How were the teachers destroyed?
Certain assignments are necessary based on state education requirements. The other types of homework could in fact be subjective and thereby judged as unnecessary by some.
Parents and their desires often outweigh the experience of the teacher. Parents attend Board meetings write letters of complaint against well-meaning teachers who eventually quit because of all of the outside pressure in their classrooms coupled with the enormous paperwork required that has very little to do with educating a classroom of students. Teaching, that is, real teaching is an art. It is really not a learned discipline regardless of all the degrees required to teach.
It seems rather obvious that it can be. Sometimes it’s not, but it’s a fact that it often is.
We are in fact at loggerheads in your assumption - homework in all situations is not necessarily a bad thing. Again, the neccesity to complete a given task in a given time frame teacher responsibility. Just think about all the busywork teachers now have to do instead of teach?
“…Also, if one wants to teach a student to complete a task in a timely manner, it matters whether or not the task has any meaning to the student. And in too many instances, homework has no meaning to students.”
There are many of life’s lessons that have no meaning to students and yet many of the things that should happen in a classroom, and at times do, should in fact be taught. You are addressing a meaning to the interests of students as a paramount necessity that encourages learning. There are many tasks that hold very little interest to many students, think about the last time you visited a McDonald’s and the computer did not calculate the change due a customer and the ‘cashier’ had great difficulty in making said change because he/she had no interest in learning how to count money in elementary school? Learning how to properly brush your teeth, I bet, did not hold a lot of interest to you as a child, but in fact learning to properly brush your teeth i a necessity.
That depends entirely on the nature of the homework and the interests of the sophomore.

Different people want different things in life. You love knowledge and learning for its own sake, which is great. But lots of people are interested in a smaller scope of knowledge, and that’s fine, too.

I grant you that people want different things in life but we also should have a foundation of knowledge that serves us in a future profession and more importantly binds us to our communities.

Students should have every opportunity to be well rounded (whatever that means, as it’s terribly subjective).
Again, I beg to differ with your interpretation of ‘well-rounded’. I cannot tell you the number of students that I have taught that never visited the beach (I taught high school in So Cal for over ten years), never visited a museum or attended a concert. What has been removed from public schools impairs students from being well rounded. I am certain that there are many people who cannot pass a third grade science test, but they should be able to. Letters behind someone’s name does not make them great teachers or human beings. For many of those who receive advanced degrees are also the very ones who prohibit the truly talented in their fields from advancing.
The evil in our current educational system is not homework. We have a broken system because we have an on going war between the uber parents and other parents who are people who should have never conceived and brought children into the world. The parents are rich and poor and mostly either too over involved in the lives of their children or not enough. To leave the issue of whether or not students are assigned homework based purely in the interest of the student, in my view, is shortsighted. The brains of our young are not even fully formed until after the age of twenty-one and yet we should expect for them to make rational choices about their futures? Respectfully, I would think perhaps you should rethink your position that interest only should guide assigned homework.

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Well, I’m one example. I gained nothing from this “practice” business at any point in the math classes between kindergarten and the Honours Science BA in Engineering. You read the description of the theory in the text book and then you understand it or you don’t. Zero or 100 percent. If you do then the “practice” stuff in the exercises that get dumped on you are boring mechanical procedures that add nothing to the understanding that you already had. If the assigned textbook was unclear then I had to hit the math library for something else. English translations of Soviet text books were the best for Statistics for example. (The Commies were big on statistics.) If I couldn’t find an appropriate key book, as was the case in a couple of fields such as electro-chem, then I was screwed and wiped out of the course. So my transcripts all have marks ranging form 40 to 95%. This is still the way that I gain new skills: I never practice.

Of course I am, to put it mildly, an outlier. See any number of documented cases where some of my lower IQ brethren walk over to the piano in the long term care facility or at grandma’s house and start cranking out flawless piano concertos. I understand exactly how that works; it’s how this “practice” stuff works that baffles me.

Couldn’t agree more with you about not leaving everything in your kid’s education to an education factory.

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Well, I don’t think the fact that an assignment is based on state education requirements means that it’s necessary. There are state requirements all over the country which make no logical sense, whatsoever.

I certainly agree with this. And I agree that it’s a shame how little freedom teachers are given to practice their art.

In and of itself, this is true. However, when the task is meaningless, the responsibility it teaches is muddled by the resentment and frustration that comes with being forced to complete meaningless tasks.

I don’t know of any kids who don’t like to count money. I don’t think this is the best example.

The health of one’s teeth is not a very good example, either. I’m talking about school assignments, and how forcing a kid to temporarily memorize things that have no meaning in their lives and never will (unlike counting money or brushing teeth) is a demonstrably bad way to educate kids.

Again, those things might be important to you, but not to other people. And you can’t force someone to learn things in order to “bind them” to their community. It’s not just impossible, it’s subjective and authoritarian.

Why? Do you know so much more about what makes a valuable life that you can look into the eyes of a happy, kind, successful person and tell them that they’re not achieving what they should because they’re uninterested in science trivia?

We shouldn’t expect them to, no. But we should respect them enough to let them guide their own education, which is as personal an endeavor as there is. We know for a fact that forcing kids to temporarily memorize things they’re not interested in creates a resistance to real learning and diminishes the relationship between students and teachers. Homework is just another way for adults to tell kids that they don’t deserve to have any control over the way in which they interact with the world, which is what learning is.

I highly recommend reading this essay. I think it was written for people who disagree the way you and I do.

http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/duh.htm

The field of education bubbles over with controversies. It’s not unusual for intelligent people of good will to disagree passionately about what should happen in schools. But there are certain precepts that aren’t debatable, that just about anyone would have to acknowledge are true.

While many such statements are banal, some are worth noticing because in our school practices and policies we tend to ignore the implications that follow from them. It’s both intellectually interesting and practically important to explore such contradictions: If we all agree that a given principle is true, then why in the world do our schools still function as if it weren’t?

Here are 10 examples.

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I read the essay and as you have already stated it contains excellent ideas. Let me give you a personal example to explain my position that students must acquire certain skills, whether they like the subject or are interested. My daughter was sick for several weeks prior to graduating from 8th grade. Her Algebra skills suffered do to the number of days missed. She passed the course and was recommended to commence Honor Geometry as a Freshman in the fall. I knew that her skills were not up to par and required her to repeat all of Algebra 1. She was angry and embarrassed to say the least. A scant few later, enrolled in a Calculus course, my daughter thanked me for making her repeat Algebra. You see, over the years I have tutored many students who bombed Calculus. Based solely on my experience I knew that most of the the problems my students experienced was based on weak Algebra skills.
In a perfect world, adults and children would agree on subjects that should be learned and taught with gusto. Unfortunately we do not live in a perfect world. Despite the fact that my daughter was angry and embarrassed about repeating a course, she did not decide not to achieve the assigned knowledge. It’s like when she was being drummed into the soccer field, dirty, tears streaming dwn her face and I, her mom, demanded that she “get up and get back into the game!”
Learning can be as difficult as teaching. There is not a student that I have taught that did not teach me something. Some of life’s lessons and difficult and unpleasant and may appear to be meaningless on the surface. I can tell you truthfully that many of the trials that I gave faced in my life, and I have faced many, my experience of completing difficult tasks made me stronger helped me to prevail in the face of certain failure if I had not learned to do things I had no interest in or things that I considered too difficult!
In closing, because the thread is closing and not because I do not enjoy a reasoned discussion, I must reiterate that excessive (more than 30 minutes a night) homework for students in elementary grades does not build skills or understanding. Some rote memorization is not a negative like the times tables, ect. High school students should be required to complete reasonable homework assignments nightly. Waaay back in the day I and my fellow classmates were required to read, research and complete a 10 page research paper every other week. Today, even Honors and AP English do not require the students to write an essay once a month. Are you aware of how many colleges now teach rudimentary math and English classes to entering Freshmen? So, my point is something, in fact many things are not happening in our schools that should. Tests do not always reveal skills. What and how we teach must obviously change but change will not begin just by omitting homework.

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