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Comment by lighthazard | Hacker News Reader

An argument can be made that doing homework with your child is the leisure.

Ha, I think that argument is made by people who don't have kids (with homework). It's not leisure for me at all. While I worry about being branded a terrible father for this comment, I will admit that I am a terrible teacher. I have no patience for it.

My kids mess around, constantly want breaks ("Well I've written a line! time for a 10 minute break!"), waste hours doing shit that should take them minutes... When they start "accidentally" dropping their pencils on the floor because they'd rather be faffing around picking it up than working, I often just lose my temper. Man, I'm getting slightly pissed off just thinking about it now! xD

There are brief moments of joy/relief where you can see they've grasped a concept or improved and you can be proud of 'em. But most of the time it is a frustrating experience, slow going, and a slog to get them to do anything. The worst of learning, with the worst of kids messing around, with a massive feeling of wasting everone's time.

If my kid's school had homework I'd probably start looking for a new school.

How many schools do you have available?

What type of school does your kid go to? I was told by a parent with older kids that our kindergarten has homework, which I'm not thrilled about.

It's a public Montessori elementary school.

^ I don't remember writing this comment, nor do I recognise the username, but I must have wrote it :-)

Take comfort in the knowledge that you are not alone. My mother often spent an hour or more just trying to get me to admit that I even had homework.

Exactly.

And on top of all that, you're lucky if the teachers even look at the homework they assigned.

My kid's teacher doesn't bother -- she emails photos of the answer sheets to the parents because I guess we are supposed to review the homework too?

Maybe this isn't obvious... but if I wanted to homeschool my kid, I would homeschool my kid.

Yes, plus my kid's elementary school has a dress up day or fundraiser of some sort almost every week for the entire year.

Ha ha, same issue with me last night. My 3rd grade boy brought home some horribly long reading comprehension homework. He HATES English homework. I do too. Fortunately my wife took over as I was becoming frustrated.

I do enjoy helping with math & science homework, but that’s it.

My 6th grade daughter is total opposite; never had a B student, science fair winner, violin & cello player. My son a video game & skateboard slacker; just like me. The joys of parenting.

Revenge of Your Parents!

It's really too bad the inverted classroom model hasn't become any more popular.

In a nutshell, the idea is to take the traditional breakdown of what is done in class and what is done at home, and swap it: Kids do their readings and watch recorded lectures at home. And then they work on problem sets and projects in class, typically in groups.

It's a really clever idea. Compared to the traditional model, it has so many interesting advantages: It levels the playing field between kids whose parents have time and inclination to help them with homework and those who don't. It makes the teacher much more available for questions and any necessary 1:1 assistance. Having kids work together (even on math problem sets!) helps them to learn better, and has the side benefit of giving them more opportunity to develop social skills.

I've heard it criticized for expecting students to have better access to technology at home than they necessarily do. In the case studies I've read about, though, the schools supplied equipment to students who needed it, and the most dramatic relative improvements were seen among the kids from less wealthy families.

I don't buy the 'level the playing field' argument, but it nevertheless might result in better learning.

Most kids won't do the home part - unless parents force them. Simple as that. Moreover, traditional model defined as "kids only lis ten in school and only do exercises at home" is a strawman not really done in practice. (That is how we know they don't read if they think they can get away with it.)

It's a beautiful idea, it really is...except that I doubt it will ever work in my lifetime. I can't even convince my students at the University to complete assigned readings in preparation for classroom discussions. I can't imagine trying to invert a HS or middle school class (and I've taught those, too).

So your 17 year old is just like mine.

(j/k it gets better.)

As the parent of a child in a poor South American country, the daughter was getting 2hours of homework most days from 7yr onwards and I Can assure you it was not leisure. The kithen table resembled a battlefield with screaming and cries every night.

Some reasons why there was so much home work 1) large class sizes so a lot of the time in the day the teacher is just controlling the kids not teachinig them. So teaching of new things was assigned for homework, then in class they would just do excercise based on what learned at home

2) No money for resources.I have read about issues with US schools and no money for text books and teachers having to buy them. Here you have to buy your own, nothing is provided, so a lot of the home is "prepare the materials that will be needed for class".

3) and honestly, the daughter didn't want to do it, so what should have taken 40 minutes would take 2-3 hours. It was turn off from learning. So much homework is self defeating, that at times I would just do it for her to save the battles and I just didn't have 2-3 hours to talk her through the concept. We also learnt how to use a calculator

No it is not. I mean, that would be like saying that argument can be made that sky is green - argument can be made, but is rarely true.

In Japanese, blue and green are considered the same color, just different shades. So is true in some places.

I did not used Japanese words, I used English words. And unless you are strongly colorblind, they are diferent looking no matter what your maternal language. So no, it is not true that they are same, that is frankly incredibly bullshit statement.

For that matter, light green and dark green are shades too, but they are not the same color and are not used intercheably.

Downvoted for the aggressive tone of your response.

Agree that blue and green are generally different although aquamarine is contentious.

In some contexts, that's true. In most, people can and do distinguish between ao and midori (and for that matter, sora-iro, kon, mizu-iro, and various other shades of these two colors). If you said "sora wa midori de aru," literally "the sky is green," nobody would nod their head yes.

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