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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

The problem with homework is it's used as a form of accountability. My French teacher used to joke when collecting papers : "Ou est votre dette a la societe?" (Apologies for missing accents.)

Of course what it should be is like at university. The professor can't spend all his time with you, so you get a rough list of what you should know about. It's then up to you to judge whether you need to read a bit more or a bit less.

The point is judgement. You can figure out when you understand something. You don't need a whole page of quadratic equations, in fact you don't understand it if you get to the end and think you need more. OTOH, if you only do the first two and you think you get it, you might be enlightened when you look at some further questions.

As a parent, it means instead of asking the teacher for more homework, which will annoy them, you can simply ask your kid some enlightening questions. It's probably a lot more interesting for them that way.

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> ... you can simply ask your kid some enlightening questions. It's probably a lot more interesting for them that way.

Part-time (law) professor here. Thinking of enlightening questions is often quite difficult.

This is where I think technology and legislation can really be helpful. A standardized structure for encouraging the top achievers combined with a national database of templates and problems to accommodate the wide spectrum of students would go along way.

> Thinking of enlightening questions is often quite difficult.

And this is a big piece of the problem with homework. Enlightening questions could be asked as homework, but various forces create an emphasis on quantity over quality.

As someone who's taught arithmetic to lots of adults, I use 'enlightening' in a broad sense. I hope most of us agree that grasping arithmetic requires practice (in or out of class), but that's not the same as repetition. Even simple arithmetic problems can be varied in deliberate ways that draw students' attention to those variations and at the same time reinforce the underlying pattern.

Asking about their assumptions on simple examples is a good start. And then asking about situation that break these assumptions.

It's a little evil but that makes it fun:) Example from the time I helped sister clear confusion between accelration and velocity:

- what's acc and vel of a rock lying on a ground (not 0 - a vector 0)

- ... of a car slowing down (vectors that poin in opposite directions)

- ... of a rock swinging on a rope (non-parallel vectors, one of them changing in direction)

I'm feeling for the teachers that have to teach something to 30+ kids without having the time to ask them about their wrong assumptions. Must be frustrating as hell when you see they don't understand, but can't help them with the time you have.

> Of course what it should be is like at university. The professor can't spend all his time with you, so you get a rough list of what you should know about. It's then up to you to judge whether you need to read a bit more or a bit less.

This does not reflect common US practice.

As a university level instructor, we still give homework and it's still a big part of the student's grades. It's still up to the student to decide if that's enough, but accountability is there. The students do not tend to ask themselves if they understand the material until they are in their later years of schooling.

I strongly dislike dealing with more homework so I tend to spot check and count participation in the exercise. Realizing that I only have three classes and not many students per class, I don't know how K-12 can possibly handle homework in any way but purely participation. They tend to have hundreds of students split among ~6 classes a day to deal with.

The way it is handled at large research universities is through rigorous testing. They don't care if you show up to class, they don't care if you do the homework, but the midterm and final are brutally difficult and count for 50-75% of your grade. You learn very quickly how much homework you need to do, or you fail. Personally, I find that approach far better than counting class exercises, participation, or any other subjective assessments.

> You don't need a whole page of quadratic equations, in fact you don't understand it if you get to the end and think you need more. OTOH, if you only do the first two and you think you get it, you might be enlightened when you look at some further questions.

You do a couple of them and you get superficial understanding. You might even have a decent mechanical grasp of how it works. But I'm yet to meet someone who can take topics of adequate complexity and actually internalise them without a fairly large amount of (progressively harder) repetition

"ceci est votre dette à la société?"

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