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There is a pretty wide gulf between no homework, ever, and the kinds of loads being placed on some kids. You talk about "a few" words a week. My friend's kids (I have none) end up staying up until 1am, forgoing family and friend time, just to keep up with the work demands. We invited a family to do something with us - the response was that they might be able to do something in 6 or so months due to the kids schedule. And no, this wasn't a blow off, it was an honest assessment of the demands on their kids. It is just barking mad.

You know I hear this all the time, even from my students who I never gave much homework to when I was teaching. I wonder how much of that "time until 1 am" is spent staring at a cell phone. I know a lot of time in class is.

> I wonder how much of that "time until 1 am" is spent staring at a cell phone. I know a lot of time in class is.

That's probably where the actual learning happens. Also, it used to be "video games" before, and "TV" before that.

What is the point of your comment exactly?

That people whine about kids spending time doing some thing instead of the one they're supposed to do, while the kids are just choosing the thing that is not total bullshit and is actually useful for something.

> while the kids are just choosing the thing that is not total bullshit and is actually useful for something.

This assumption borders on absurd.

Does it? Or maybe the assumption that children aren't naturally curious beings with agency and emotional life, but just a hard drive to write on (or slate, if you like) is something that borders on absurd.

One friend of mine essentially refused to take breaks after school. He'd get home and immediately start working on the day's homework. It would frequently take him until after 9 o'clock to finish up work that shouldn't have taken anywhere near that long. I know he's an intelligent fellow, and not prone to distraction. He'd just get stuck.

I'm /certain/ taking a break would have gotten him into a fresh mindset, and let him finish it all up faster. And, if I had /not/ put some hours between getting home and doing my homework, that it really could have taken me many hours to finish.

Just one speculative data point, but there it is.

Like another commenter said... I wonder what the kid's evening actually looks like. Staying up until 1am sounds/smells a lot to me like the kind of household where homework gets pushed until the end of the day. I sort of speak from experience as someone who constantly was up late during my university years, and it started in late high school. It all had to do with me not doing my homework right away, putting it off, or not working on it productively. Once it started to get late though, that would light a fire under me and I'd start working faster.

Contrast that to my wife, and other people like her, who did their homework immediately after school (with a small break between of course) and got it done before dinner time, or perhaps a little after, then had some time to relax and watch some TV or chat with friends on the phone (pre-Internet days), before going to bed.

You sound like you’re assuming that today’s kids get about the same amount of homework which you did. My impression is that the amount of homework has increased enormously since you were a kid.

When I was in high school, the general attitude was that an hour of homework per night was reasonable. Your English teacher agreed with this idea, so you'd get an hour of English homework. Your math teacher agreed with this idea, so you'd get an hour of math homework. Your science teacher agreed with this idea, so you'd get an hour of science homework. Your social sciences teacher agreed with this idea, so you'd get an hour of social sciences homework. And so on. I knew a lot of caffeine addicts in high school.

So I generally didn't finish it all in the 90 minutes or so between arriving at home and dinner time.

My school improved this by switching to a "block schedule" with 3 rotating classes a day for 2 hours each instead of all 6 in one day. The side effect was that it was easy to wait to do the homework until the night before it was due and forget what was discussed in class the day before.

I'm in my early 50s, and I had remarkably little homework in school.

Hadn't really thought about that, but I felt like I had tons of homework (in the 1990s). Part of it was not that I had tons of homework, but that my parents instilled in me a desire to not just to the minimum. So stuff took longer because I put more work into it. Even with math, I probably always did a bit more questions than the teacher had assigned. I spent countless hours perfecting essays, writing research reports. Now that I've thought about it, I'd have a tough time believing that kids nowadays get more homework than I did.

So... what I'm saying is, there is the amount assigned, and then there is the amount that kids are actually doing, which are somewhat independent. So it's possible that the assigned amount has increased? or not. It's also possible parents are "better" now (this is true, I think parenting overall has evolved little by little for the better) and are keeping better tabs on their kids, making their kids do more homework, more than just the minimum.

Another data point, I was tutoring some kids in high school math around 2005 or so. There was very little math homework assigned, it was a complete joke, and these kids were going to private school. I remember thinking "what the hell is going on here, what has happened to education!" There was actually some Supreme Court ruling in the province of British Columbia that said that teachers couldn't give homework unless they were going to mark it. Or that they couldn't give "participation marks" for homework, it had to be marked on its merits or not at all. So a lot of teacher's scaled back the assigned homework I think. That's what I heard, I can't find a reference to the court case.

While reading the discussion, it seems to me that individual student's attitudes and preferneces plays the major role in this issue. Maybe even more important than the official policies.

I had largerly the same high school and college experience as yours (at least I would describe it in a very simiar way), even though I received my education in a different country, where all educational policies must be significantly different.

So I think, it's not surprizing at all that it's hard to come up with a single resolution regarding homework that would fit every class and each individual student and their family.

Depends. I had friends back then who went to various forms of after-school classes (cram, prep, chinese, piano, etc). They would get home at dark, with even more homework in tow from the after-school classes.

My kids are typical "overscheduled" teenagers. There's music lessons, orchestra, sports, choir, etc. There's going outside before it gets dark.

This is going to sound weird, but we deliberately put some of those things at a higher priority than homework. First of all, the scheduled activities happen when they happen. Second, some activities take more mental focus, it works best for those things to be done first. Third, activities such as music come before homework in terms of their value -- they represent gaps in the school curriculum, that we are filling in ourselves.

So, homework can come last for good reasons. Also, some activities require awake parents. ;-)

Now, about the 1am thing, that only happens roughly once a semester due to an exponential distribution of homework assignments. Each teacher assigns homework, apparently at random, and they don't organize or coordinate it, so the late nights are usually due to a confluence of multiple teachers each giving out multiple assignments at once.

The island of stability in that sea of chaos is math. The math lessons come home at a steady, predictable rate, and none of the work involves a computer, so it gets an early time slot.

You and your daughter will end up as people that can contribute something great to the society; most of the ones skipping the homework without innate talent not, and they will complain about how unfairly are they treated because they are smart.

One of my piano teachers was forced to practice through tears as a kid because they saw the talent she had. She went on to becoming a world famous child prodigy playing grade 8 pieces by sight-reading with unbelievable ease.

Work is required if you want to achieve something. You just need to find the right balance, and it's neither "no work" nor "work all the time".

> She went on to becoming a world famous child prodigy playing grade 8 pieces by sight-reading with unbelievable ease.

...and did that get her anywhere as an adult?

It seems to me that so many people are excited when their children are ahead of the curve, doing "adult"-level things at a young age—and just assume they'll stay ahead forever, forging on beyond the norm, rather than reverting to the mean.

> One of my piano teachers was forced to practice through tears as a kid

She was traumatized by figures of authority to learn piano, and she became a piano teacher. I'm not seeing the inspiration aspect of this story.

> One of my piano teachers was forced to practice through tears as a kid because they saw the talent she had. She went on to becoming a world famous child prodigy playing grade 8 pieces by sight-reading with unbelievable ease.

These anecdotes (i've heard a gazillion) always bother me. So what, now she's good at playing the piano. But what would she have done or become if she had the choice? Perhaps a computer programmer, or a doctor? Leave the damn kids be kids already.

EDIT: I emphasise that i have nothing but respect for those who play an instrument professionally, so i'm definitely not deriding the "piano teacher" part of this story. I'm complaining about the perceived virtue of forcing a child to do something they may or may not actually want, or that may or may not in fact be good for them.

My kids (in preschool) _love_ Bedtime Math (the book) and often request it instead of bedtime stories. It's hard to tell if it's having any pedogogical effect --- my oldest is starting to be able to add, sometimes, if both numbers are less than or equal to five. But maybe that would have happened anyhow?

It definitely helps. We were at that stage, where all my daughter could do was questions that involved summing numbers that added up to 5. She would do them on her fingers. Now she can do those in her head and also memorized what 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 looks like on fingers, and can now recognize 6, 7, and 9, 10 on fingers. Can't do 8 yet... Keep at it!

Given your daughter is in a french immersion school, I would love to hear your feedback on what I'm working on: http://playlingoland.com

Language immersion from home!