Who Invented Homework?
geekandnerd.org
geekandnerd.org
- If you do it badly, you may as well not do it. Who else remembers flipping through "The Catcher in the Rye" so fast they don't actually remember any other character than Holden Caulfield?
- It's an easy way for teachers to not teach, yet gives them an alibi. "Look I'm teaching, they have loads of books to read. Can't help it if they don't."
- If you already understand it, you don't benefit from solving more quadratic equations. You benefit from doing whatever the next step is. You just burn time plugging things into (-b +- sqrt (b2-4ac)) / 2a. And you learn the wrong lesson, which is that you have to get it exactly right, rather than why that's the equation in the first place.
- You end up testing which kids have peaceful homes, and parents who care. Some kids just can't do any homework with the home environment they're given. School should be such that it doesn't matter if your parents are drunks or academics.
- Totally fine with doing like in University: here's a mega list of interesting things related to the subject, go and browse around, get a feel for what the landscape is like. Come back more interested.
I swear to god, I had so much of that to do, I got tired of it and learned enough python in one night, at 15, to get the computer to do my homework for me.
I also typed all my papers and assignments because my handwriting was atrocious. Only a few teachers took issue with this, and as an adult, I can't say I've had to do any cursive or write out an essay on paper for any reason.
In high school, I would have never had the restraint to learn the material first. All of my homework would have been copy-paste jobs from W|A.
They are leaving the hard stuff for homework.
From there, students use those techniques to move away from the to develop good mental math strategies. If you were doing 17 + 35 on a ten frame, you'd fill in 1 full 10 for the 17 and have 7 left over. You'd then fill in 3 full 10s for the 35, and have 5 left over. You can take 3 of those 5 and fill in the missing spots on the 7 out of 10 ten frame, making a 5th full ten frame, and leaving 2 lonely chips/colored squares in sixth.
The goal is to eventually get students to do all that mentally. 17 + 35 = 10 + 7 + 30 + 5 = 10 + 30 + 7 + 5 = 10 + 30 + 7 + 3 + 2 = 10 + 30 + 10 + 2 = 50 + 2 = 52.
You might have figured out that kind of mental math trick on your own. If so, the lesson's not there for you. It's for all the people out in the real world who didn't develop it on their own and will readily tell you that they're "not math people".
The same technique will be revisited to work with fractions, first with the same denominator and then dissimilar denominators, and similar techniques will be used for multiplication, the distributive property, etc.
The sane way is to try matching against a pattern, then if that fails you fall back to the traditional algorithm with the numbers lined up one over the other and doing the carries. Yes, you can run the traditional algorithm in your head, for this and for much larger things. Fully in memory, 4-digit plus 4-digit is quite doable. (can your method handle that?) While staring at the numbers on paper to avoid forgetting, and writing down the answer as you go, arbitrary sizes are doable.
It so happens that I do see a pattern I can fit, but this shouldn't be expected. I convert to 17+(172+1) and then to 173+1 and I know 17*3 is 51 so the answer is 52. It's forgivable to not spot this shortcut.
It's not "my" method. I'm not quite sure what I did to merit attitude and hostility, but to answer your question:
Yes. Third-graders are expected to do it with 3-digit numbers. You'll have to take my word for it that I'm capable of adding 4-digit numbers.
http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/3/NBT/#CCSS.Math.C...
BTW, my shortcut got mangled by Hacker News. Multiplication turned into italics. I did 17 times 3, which is great, but I don't think that anybody should be expected to see that path to a solution.
You like "the old way" because that is how you learned it. But when push comes to shove, I bet you actually use pflats method to do math in your head.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/03/07/abou...
(in this case the pattern involves knowing that 17 times 2 is 34 and that 17 times 3 is 51)
My speed and reliability allowed me to focus on understanding higher-level math. With little effort, I easily blew past my peers for years afterward.
Using pflat's method, my reliability would drop. There are too many extra numbers to account for.
And then I found out that my father used to think the same way, but not my mother, who was a teacher a long time ago and just for few years.
And my breakthrough for that didn't happen when using all those squares (for 1s and 100s) or rows (for 10s).
Large amounts of homework exercises probably don't teach much. Actually I'm not even too sure about large amounts of exercises, for reasons similar to the ones you listed.
Been there, tried it. Didn't work. I wish it did, but it didn't.
There's a reason teachers assign homework. We're not a craven group that goes out of our way to say, "Look I'm teaching, they have loads of books to read. Can't help it if they don't." We are, universally, strapped for time. Classroom time is best served teaching new topics, not reinforcing old ones.
When would you prefer students read books for a literature class? During the school day, during lit class, taking time away from discussion/analysis? During the school day, during a study hall, taking time away from electives? In reading sessions before school/after school, taking time away from sports/extracurriculars and requiring additional costs? Or at their leisure, where their free time allows?
>If you already understand it, you don't benefit from solving more quadratic equations.
Yes, you do. Understanding is only the second domain, out of 6, in Bloom's taxonomy of learning. Application—properly using a formula to solve an equation, which you're probably actually referring to—is the third domain. And being able to use the quadratic formula to solve a problem doesn't signify that you know anything more than how to memorize a formula and plug numbers into it.
There are some incredibly bright students out there who can master a concept in a single lesson without reinforcement. You might be one of them. I was. That doesn't mean all students are like you. Most of them require more practice than can be given in a single class period to master a topic. Some "get it" in the class period, and require practice to cement it in their memory. Other think they get it, struggle with the homework, and then get the help they need the next day. Every student is different.
>You end up testing which kids have peaceful homes, and parents who care. Some kids just can't do any homework with the home environment they're given. School should be such that it doesn't matter if your parents are drunks or academics.
That would be nice. Unfortunately, it's impossible. Family life affects far, far more than just whether or not students do their homework. It's hard to get a student from a loving home whose parents don't care about <subject> to care about <subject>. It's hard to convince a student who doesn't have a safe, secure, loving home life that literary analysis is worth studying. It's hard to convince a junior who got a job at Starbucks and is making more money than his parents ever did that finishing school is important.
>Totally fine with doing like in University: here's a mega list of interesting things related to the subject, go and browse around, get a feel for what the landscape is like. Come back more interested.
But K-12 is not University. We educate young folks, the same people we don't trust to vote, drink, smoke, or choose whether or not to attend school in the first place. The same people who pay through the nose for car insurance when they can drive. K-12 students are not good at weighing short-term and long-term decisions. Their brains aren't fully developed.
Given the option to not do homework with no obvious penalty, most of them… won't do homework. I ran a junior/senior Precalculus class once with optional homework. Some students did well on the assessments. Some did not. Many more than usual failed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, test grades correlated strongly to homework completion. Failing a test did not encourage students to study more in the future.
Halfway through the year, I put an end to the experiment and required homework. Test grades and student understanding improved.
It's our responsibility as teachers and as the adults in the room to ensure a student learns. It could be an excellent life lesson for a student to fail a high school class because he or she did not do the homework. You might be okay with that. I'm not. The end result is that the student has spent a year in a classroom and has not learned the material, which will have cascading consequences on that student's education. That's a lot to trade for a life lesson.
[1] http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
Real learning is achieved with context. Government schools mostly teach theory without context, which is why the students have such a hard time.
The local paper once had a story about the challenges faced by teachers of children who were learning English. The story told of how the class was reading a book abou a dog. Some of the kids didn't get the word 'panting', so the teacher imitated a panting dog. I wrote a letter saying that languages are actually easy to learn, and that a human acting like a dog is no substitute for a trip to the dog park.
You need parental permission, a way to transport kids (probably via bus, which costs money and has to be scheduled), and extra people around to help watch the kids and make sure they don't wander into trouble.
Parents, especially nowadays, are extremely litigious (or call for a teacher's resignation) for such minor things nowadays, that trips in general become risky.
I'm sure most teachers schedule as many of these trips as they can get approved, but they probably only get one or two approved per class.
Sure you might not like all the red tape, but it didn't appear out of nowhere. It's the school protecting itself and covering its ass, just like every other industry out there.
Have you checked with kids who are several years out of education? My sense from talking to people is if they didn't give a shit in school, they will not know it once they're out. And they could have done perfectly fine in tests, because of course they were forced to study.
In general, I get the feeling the kids who retain things after school are ONLY the ones towards the top of the class. Anyone who did middling or worse definitely won't remember the quadratic formula let alone calculus. The top section will have some kids who really cared and learned it properly, and some who were good at doing as they were told but never really cared much, and won't have retained anything either.
What I'm getting at is whether you can really learn anything without having some sort of intrinsic interest, and whether it's worthwhile to force people to learn stuff that they will forget even existed in a few years. I don't mean that people inevitably forget a few things (can I solve competition questions I used to do? Probably not), I mean that it is as if they never even knew that certain fields of knowledge existed and that they actually possessed some of that.
You end up with a you-know-how-to-learn-for-life idea, but that's always been unsatisfying for me.
Public schooling (in the US) will always feel like it's torn between the two extremes of giving a strong liberal arts, "learn for life" education and giving a strong vocational, "useful in the real world" education. In my experience, it's actually neither. Education is an equalizer.
>What I'm getting at is whether you can really learn anything without having some sort of intrinsic interest, and whether it's worthwhile to force people to learn stuff that they will forget even existed in a few years.
Yes, 100 times over, to both of them. The former is not like riding a bike, but maybe like cooking a favorite meal you haven't made in years. An adult might have forgotten the quadratic equation, how to apply it, and how to use it, but give them 5 minutes of instruction and most will be right back in the swing of things.
The second half, though, is so important, that I think it's worth quoting again.
>[Is it] worthwhile to force people to learn stuff that they will forget even existed in a few years
It is incredibly important to force people to learn stuff that they might forget even existed in a few years. A free and appropriate public education is one of the greatest things we as a civilization can provide to our citizens. Education is possibly the greatest civil right we possess.
If we, as a collective people, do not mandate schools offer classes on how to analyze text and history, write a persuasive essay, solve advanced algebra and geometry problems, and the natural sciences, then some schools simply will not offer those courses. If we do not mandate that every student take these courses, then some students will not take those courses. And if they don't have access to these courses, then they don't have equal access to higher education. (Not to mention how important some topics in Algebra I and II are to managing your finances and understanding compounding interest.)
These will generally be the schools and students that are already the most disadvantaged. The inner-city schools that are counting every dollar. The children of the drunks that you mentioned, the children of loving and well-meaning parents that work three part-time jobs that simply don't have the time to follow up on the minutia, and the special education students that are just as smart as their peers but require support to show that. These students all deserve the opportunity to take those classes. If the classes aren't required, they might not even get that chance.
To put it another way: I'm guessing you and your peers were likely exposed to computers by the time you were, I dunno, 16? Not all of you went on to work in tech and post on Hacker News. But all of you had the opportunity to work in tech and post on Hacker News. If you didn't ever get to interact with a computer until you were an adult, and even then you had to seek it out yourself, how would that change things in your life?
Education has to do that for every student, in every subject.
I believe in this ideal as well.
But I do wonder how it can be that there are TV shows filled with people who appear to have learned absolutely nothing in school. How can it be that even though schooling is free in most of the west, I've personally interviewed fewer people who knew the expectation of a dice roll than people who didn't (by a gigantic margin)? And that's selected from people with degrees in STEM. I wonder whether the problem is how schools are organized, what values they instil in the kids, which people teach the kids.
As some one who works in Data Analytics, I can tell you many people lack the ability to plug things into a formula properly, many have issues with even simple approximation and back of the envelope calculations. I wouldn't say, practicing this is a bad thing.
By the way if you think this is wrong. A little scaled up version of this is what is tested in current day interviews. Asking people algorithms is basically testing their ability to remember a heuristic and their ability to plug in numbers and demonstrate mental acrobatics.
Especially as these days it's highly likely to be a simply photocopy of a page from some study guide. Quite often with printed mistakes and bad grammar in them. Much less need to put in teaching time.
I've nothing against homework in the run up to exams, say 15 years on, but going on my youngest's experience, homework has become common down to as young as 9 or 10. I don't see that as a benefit for anyone except politicians wanting to be seen to do something about ejucashun. :)
Sadly governments are putting too many other tasks on teachers that leave them with little choice. Form filling, over frequent testing, sus checks to make sure the student isn't a potential terrorist or illegal immigrant and so forth. Little wonder it was recently reported in the UK that >50% of teachers now want to leave the professions.
Pay teachers a commercially competitive rate and free them enough to teach. Of course that would free them to teach outside whatever dogma is de rigeur. Homework will remain a growing part of education until we back away from the production line and over-reliance on national standards for everything.
Profound.
Once I learned how to complete the square, I decided I'd rather do that than try to remember that formula. I'm actually exaggerating when I say I "decided" - I forgot the formula so much that I was completing the square for a general quadratic equation just to remember it.
Plug-and-chug is pointless. People shouldn't be taking physics before they take calculus.
In an ideal world, you're absolutely right. In practice, it's hard to arrange. Assuming a US high school student even takes calculus, it's going to be senior year. So, if physics is taught senior year (don't know what the norm is), at best you're teaching in parallel. To be sure, derivatives are taught fairly early-on in calculus and they're probably most relevant to physics at the high school level.
But, you're right, there's a lot of plug and chug in physics without calculus. On the other hand, physics also helps get students into other things like dimensional analysis etc.
Also, to be fair, the issue of prerequisites comes up a lot of places. There are often facts in intro classes that have to be taken on faith until the topic can be dealt with more deeply later on.
There may well be more of a correlation with drunk and academic than not
Caring/not caring would be a better comparison.
Not being pedantic, its a great point I hadn't thought about, that shouldn't be held down by the drunk reference.
Except I got to spend seven years hanging out with my brothers doing fun stuff and my friends had to spend it training to be slaves. There is no reason for the strange masochism that is mass schooling. It is not productive, does not produce smarter or more learned people.
You may consider it conspiracy theory, to me it's just obvious.
I would like to disagree, but I don't have anything to back up my claim that mass schooling makes people smarter or more learned.
Like you, I just have anecdotes.
But one thing is for sure. I would never have gotten to where I am today. If I hadn't learned english at school. Having lived in two countries, neither of which had english as a native language, I would unlikely have learned english unless it had been taught at school
By learning independently of school, I learned way later in life, and learned in a way that was right for my stage of development.
My anecdote about it not being productive is purely subjective, but the science on development theory is clear. If left to their own devices, almost all people learn native language, writing and math on their own timeline in about 100 hours. School makes this process far less effcient, and teaches things like grammer that program the brain to read slowly and without depth.
Obviously my anecdote is hyperbolic, I speak primarily as someone who had a great unschooling experience and then went to school and saw the difference, and a little bit as someone who has read extensive child development theory.
This is very much a to each their own thing. It worked well for you but it also sounds like you had a uniquely active family and community to support this. The primary problem with homeschooling and unschooling is the lack of family support. Either by apathy or by lack of economic opportunity. Or simply their own lack of education preventing them from even being aware of these options (such as finding a community to coordinate with to make up for their on educational deficiencies).
I can't speak for all public schools, my parents deliberately chose better than average schools for my sister and I to attend. But good public schools exist. Good teachers exist. But just like good home schooling and unschooling experiences, this requires either luck of birth (well-to-do parents) or deliberate effort by parents to improve their children's position.
He did however manage to learn quite good Norwegian in that year.
You could as well play a lot of video games in English and dabbling in programming. That's how I learned.
Everybody who relied on school for learning English - still barely understand it.
I ask because in the field of Second Language Acquisition there's a pretty strong consensus that the optimal path to language learning involves a combination of classroom instruction augmented by interaction with (reading, listening) & use of (speaking, writing) the language.
I've spent most of my career as a language teacher, and the typical successful learner is one who isn't necessarily a language nerd, but almost always is someone who does some heavy lifting in the target language outside of class. I love students that have a goal for language use because they help me to target my instruction to bits of language that will be immediately useful to them. (One of the best jobs I had was teaching English to software developenow here I am.rs; as I researched the language they needed, I started to learn programming and )
I do think that some school lessons contributed their share. I just don't think that sitting behind a desk for two hours per week, for ten years, is necessary or desired. After a few years I did not need much "training wheels" and could continue to increase proficiency regardless.
Every teacher's dream outcome. Congratulations! :)
I learned English from Japanese videogames that had been translated to English by Ted Woolsey.
Did you set us up the bomb?
I remember having an interesting discussion with my Spanglish-speaking friends about whether "All your base" was supposed to mean "your entire base" or "each and every one of your bases". My Engrish-speaking friend could immediately tell that the second interpretation was the correct one.
You expose another issue that comes up frequently which is the idea that the cost per pupil is somewhat fixed in a region (for administrative purposes anyway) and so regardless of the school a parent choose for their child, the state should pay that school. As an extension, if the parent would choose to home school, that parent might be paid the prevailing rate for a child.
I don't think that works on a number of levels (again, poor parents probably can't afford to not work for $6k for 9 months of the year). Perhaps combined with other social programs (such as a UBI), this would be more reasonable. I think there would be a huge media backlash over kids who end up with effectively no education due to parents just taking their kids UBI+their UBU+school fees and then letting the kids play video games all day (regardless of whether this actually happens or not). Standardized testing would probably become even more important as a means for the state to make sure that your children are actually being educated.
Public education must be - or at least have the appearance of being - a good deal economically.
http://www.statisticbrain.com/television-watching-statistics...
Perhaps if the average American cut down their TV watching time in half, they'd suddenly have time to spend more on their children and help them through the subjects studied at school.
Going by the provided statistics, is it any wonder Asian Americans (least amount of TV time) do better in school than other demographics? I have no doubt that parents in those households spend an above average amount of time helping their kids with schoolwork and make absolutely sure they don't fall behind.
Oh, get over yourself.
Maybe "training to be slaves" is hiperbole, but as Seth Godin puts it, training to be "cogs in a machine" is quite right.
Teachers work hard for little reward to provide the education they give and it is a slap in their face, the faces of the descendants of real slaves, and the real slaves that continue to exist today, to imply that the good work they do is equivalent to what slave owners and masters did to their victims. The analogy to slavery is disgusting and juvenile and it's ludicrous that I had to explain this to you.
As an analogy, you can't say it is invalid by stating differences between the analogues, all analogies are pretty much aware of these differences. If not, they would be identities, not analogies.
"Juvenile", "disgusting" and "ludicrous" are not arguments sufficient to invalidate the analogy either.
What you have to do to invalidate the analogy is to refute the similarities between schooling and slavery, some of them:
- kids are forced to go to school;
- kids are brainwashed to think that school is the only alternative they have besides starving and ultimately dying after an horrible life;
- kids are trained to be submissive to teachers and other in liderance positions.https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....
In school, teachers have the power to invade our private lives, even our set holidays(!) with pointless tasks. Apparently 40 hours a week is not enough to spend on school, we also need to give up part of every evening, part of most holidays and part of many weekends.
I really hate that system. It's completely unfair, especially if you're in school just to get that shitty piece of paper in the end. I can code already, I taught myself perfectly well, but the prerequisites for HR usually include a diploma, and your salary and career opportunities is often dependent on which diploma you have. I'm just sitting it out and hate almost every assignment we get. It's outdated and moreover, boring stuff that nobody would ever want to use in practice.
Should Spanish class-time be spent memorizing vocabulary and conjugations, or practicing communicating in the language?
Should History class-time be spent reading from the book so you know what happened, or discussing those topics and their implications?
Should English class-time be spent doing silent reading, or talking about the books/authors/time periods that you read about?
If I work from home for a company, it's not called homework because it is under the same conditions as normal work: there are set hours, I receive compensation, the only difference is that it's not on-site.
So should Spanish class time be spent memorizing vocabulary? No, at least not in large parts, but neither should it take more than the time allocated for the subject[1]. It's nice that we can choose to do it either in school or at home, but the way it presently works, homework takes up more time than it should.
[1] Again, I don't mean allocated class hours, I mean the total number of hours students are expected to work on something. In Dutch terms, SBUs, or "hours the course takes from your life, class and homework and everything together". All courses should have SBUs that add up to 40 hours per week, give or take 5.
So either the curriculum should be made more challenging, or homework should be optional for everyone, like it was for me.
And something I regret more, but still wouldn't have done differently if given the opportunity to do it again, is I never read any of the books for my English classes. I would come to class and integrate what the teachers and other students said and come up with answers to questions that sounded insightful (and probably were, I guess) and learn enough just from class discussions to do well on tests.
Both my English and German classes were considered "honors" level classes in a highly ranked school district. I avoided AP-prep classes outside of math and science because the English and language AP classes involved significicantly more homework, to the point where I couldn't get away with not doing it and pass the class, even if I could pass the test anyway.
If the school can't offer classes that actually require students to do regular homework, then they shouldn't demand that students do regular homework.
Unfortunately that is due more to excessive memorization and general work required than anything else, but I still find it better than the alternative, which is learn nothing at all.
I feel like the most important things in school at that age are:
- Exposing people to a broad range of subjects that they might be interested in (and thus curious enough about such that they end up learning by themselves)
- Having teachers that can teach their subjects with enthusiasm, so that other people can see what the teacher finds exciting so that they too can (potentially) share in that enthusiasm and curiosity.
For under 12s or so I dont see a reason for homework. For 12-18 year olds I think gradually moving to a more self-driven study environment would be a good thing given that most people will end up going to university by now where that is the norm.
Perhaps I'm projecting, but mostly homework taught me how to do the minimum possible so I could get back to playing video games.
I think I could have learned more if I spent more time talking and seeing my family doing things instead of having my mother in the kitchen, doing dinner, while I was in front of my notebook writing down again the things .
I'd like to see empirical studies to see if it actually makes for better performance as students, or if it's useless. I'm guessing the demagogues would never let 'no homework' happen, at least in this country.
It'd probably also be good for the teachers, considering many complain about having to grade outside of the paid teaching day.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2012/11/...
Unless things have changed substantially (and they may have), that was all the time I needed for everything but research papers and projects requiring more thought.
Self-discipline and time management can solve most of these problems. My parents forbade video games and TV until my homework was done, and I was honest as a kid (most of the time). So I got my shit done so I could do what I wanted to do (watch Batman and Animaniacs, run through the woods like a mad man).
Homework doesn't train you to be anything other than what you (really, your parents at that age) allow it to.
A more nuanced discussion of what you seem to be trying to get at can be found at http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/. But please don't use the slave analogy unless we're really extracting economic goods out of a working group by force.
Sometimes rote memory is also required (spellings, formulae, handwriting anyone?)
If anything, the education system in general and homework in particular makes learning very systematic and structured, glossing over broader issues of exploring topics on one's own, seeking out new resources and creating one's own structure and areas of interest. It conceals the deeper questions of education, handing the students only the low-hanging fruits of tests and homeworks.
The education system is so effective, once the pupil is out, learning anything significant becomes a daunting process. The inability to plan and structure one's own learning can lead many to give up early in the process.
And there's nothing to say that _homework_ is essential. It's perfectly plausible to have students get everything done during the regular school day.
Well thought out assignments are obviously good. Why do they need to be done at home? It's not as if third graders are listening to lectures from 8 until 3.
He told me that it's a good way to get students to do some study/open up the text book when they wouldn't have without a punishment if they didn't.
This, in my opinion leads to more stress and more work on those trying hard to study AND do homework. Each subject wants at least 1 hour of your home time and a student can have anywhere from 2-8 subject to study a night.
I used to sit and read my Ecce Romani! text-books at the weekends because my Latin teacher was such a wonderfully eccentric and inspiring person that I wanted to learn more for myself and to please her. I don't remember her giving us homework other than 'learn the conjugation of this verb'.
I didn't open anything else unless forced to by homework.
You weren't in the Berkshire area for school?
Bazinga generation nerds and geeks get out of my cyber-lawn!
Not really. Obviously there are different types of "geeks" and "nerds", but generally those type of people enjoy tinkering and playing around the stuff they care about. They certainly don't like being forced to perform menial and repetitive tasks (as often homework is) because somebody else told them to.
If I was doing mental exercise then there was always more interesting things to do it with than the homework my teachers set.
Camel's back, etc, I failed the class, got kicked out of the mostly white honor's program to being the only white kid in most classes. I got picked on less there and enjoyed life significantly more after that. Probably the best thing to happen in my life, actually.
>Is There a Bright Future if You Don’t Do Any Homework?
Heh. Nah, not really.
In hindsight my grades probably suffered, but only as far as the fact I didn't have all this still drilled into my memory. I doubt it made me any less smart, and instead of doing said homework, I played with my computer which blossumed into a highly paid career.
Just practicing math problems, or typing out notes and essays, or even practicing a new language... That's all stuff that is useful. Sure you can go without, and probably schools assign way more than they should (I know it was the case for me), but homework itself at least is not a negative thing.