Hacker News Reader

Comment by christofosho | Hacker News Reader

As a teacher of ages 4 up until 14, I think parents and people in general need to be concious toward what constitutes "over" parenting. Too often we as teachers see students that are behaving poorly, or having more trouble in school, because they do not have enough help or consistency at home. Parents reading articles like this might take them too literally and step too far from their child's life. Parenting should be a balance. You should know, as a parent, what is happening with your child's schooling, and be there to help. But you should not micromanage the child. Parent involvement leads to more academic confidence and success[1], and more behavioural[2] success.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3020099/ [2] https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/media/users/sm6/McCormi...

View on HN

Let me turn this around.

As a parent, I think that teachers should pay attention to research on homework that says there is on average no academic benefit, but there is a huge cost in family conflict. You have enough time in the classroom to teach and provide practice time. Free family time up for what parents see best.

As a semi-academic, practice supervision sounds like a horrible use of limited teacher/classroom time. But I guess that is true at the high end (in universities and higher performing kids) but not at the lower end where professional practice supervision is much more necessary.

My child goes to a very good school and they often teach math "upside down". In this method, the homework is to watch the teacher give a recorded lecture. Then, in class they work on the homework (math problems) while the teacher goes around watching them work and helping them with the parts they don't understand. He loves that method and seems to lean a lot from it.

That's great! FYI, it's called a Flipped Classroom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom

I tried it when I was teaching Calculus...

Turns out, recording video lectures so that they are lively and watchable is hard.

The students loved the couple of videos I posted, but then I burned out making them - since doing that was in addition to actually being in class, grading, and working on my thesis.

So I went back to the more traditional (and ineffective setting) - one thing I regret about that semester.

However, looking back, I'd need an entire semester just to develop the materials. Of course, that was not an option.

Why did you feel it necessary to invent the lectures yourself? Surely there are world class lectures out there that you could leverage and then use your time more effectively in the person to person setting?

Seems like we are missing the whole potential of the digital (infinitely scalable one to many lectures) by constantly reinventing the wheel.

It's like asking why people still produce music when there are world class records out there.

Or why people still write books.

Teaching is a performance art as well.

That aside, as a graduate student I didn't have that much freedom (or didn't understand how much freedom I actually had) in making changes - and also, it was my first time as an instructor of record, so I was trying different approaches. If I teach again (currently I'm in the industry), I'll know how to direct my efforts better.

I thought this was a brilliant idea when I first heard of this approach. It's obviously the correct way to instruct, because the instructor is available to assist when you're actually doing the work where the most frustration and education happens.

Students also need to write down questions about the lecture they didn't understand, which mandates some effort towards integrating understanding before practice the following day.

Flipped classrooms are increasingly common in universities as well, but the 4 hours of outside work for every hour of class still applies.

Why does it still apply?

If the work is assigned in the beginning, what's stopping them from skimming it to make sure they understand it, and if they do, simply not bothering to watch the lectures?

I never believed that "4 hours of outside work for every hour of class" thing one bit. I hardly ever did work outside of class and I graduated with a 3.7.

Actually you are dead wrong on that.

Homework is unsupervised extra practice. Extra practice is helpful if done right, harmful if done wrong. When done unsupervised it go either way.

According to research, school homework on average is neutral, but when you dig in is helpful to harmful depending on the educational support that the parents can supply. So it helps rich kids, hurts poor ones, depending on how well the parents can teach.

For a book-length treatment of the issue, including references to relevant studies, see https://www.alfiekohn.org/homework-myth/.

That book doesn't go into the university level, but there the situation is simple. There is not enough lecture time to actually teach the material fully, so supervised practice is not an option. So homework is the only option, and it is your problem if you can't figure out how to supervise yourself.

University-education researches also recommend supervised practice. When I got a job as a TA in college, I had the same attitude you did, and the TA lead / education researcher scolded me about it.

Are you in physics? Sections in CS courses are more for discussions and Q&A, they aren’t coding their assignments during that time.

> As a semi-academic, practice supervision sounds like a horrible use of limited teacher/classroom time

Research shows the opposite: lecture is a horrible use of limited teacher/classroom time.

Teachers often have no say in wether homework is assigned. The district in which my wife teaches and my son attends had a mandatory homework policy put in place by the school board. In addition to mandating that homework be assigned Monday through Thursday they specify that it should contain at least 10 minutes of reading per grade level (10 for k, 20 for 1st, 30 for 2nd, etc) as well as additional materials for other subjects. The homework load for my son has been as little as 20 minutes per night as his teachers and administrators feel the same way about homework as you but are forced to assign it. My niece and nephew also attend school in this district but at a different school. Their homework averages between 45 minutes and 90 minutes. Their principle mandates additional homework on top of the boards mandate. The new board has since voted to change this policy and leave the decision on homework up to each schools administration meaning there will be wildly different policies at different schools and still likely not within the teachers control.

> it should contain at least 10 minutes of reading per grade level

Dear god, by the time a kid is in grade 5 or 6 they've lost an hour a night to reading alone. In my experience homework was rarely of use - the in class practice was enough, and home time was for the fun you didn't have while in school.

What homework does is lets the school tell parents, "Your kid's test scores may suck, but you can see that we are trying everything that we can."

In other words, they prioritize visible effort over achieved results.

Yup "we're sapping the joy of life from your kid, clearly their not learning isn't OUR problem".

By the time they're in high school, they'll be doing more reading per night than I was doing while working on my master's.

After devoting so much time to education theater, do the kids even have any energy leftover to put into actual learning?

When did reading become "education theater" ?

I hope your master wasn't in statistics, because you made a poor extrapolation from data.

Reading that's strictly there because you have to isn't going to engender a love of reading, it's going to smother it. I also doubt that it'll be effective at teaching the skill of reading - it'll be works that ignored from those who don't care to do it.

I read because I loved it and was exposed to it at a young age from home, not because school required me to read.

For that matter, it's not that I'm opposed to asking the kids to spend time reading. It's an excess of assigned reading as homework that seems worrisome to me, precisely because it might mean that the only exposure some kids get to reading is a bunch of crap busywork reading. As soon as you start regimenting a thing like this, you suck all the joy out of it.

What if, instead, schools simply set aside a chunk of time out of the school day for reading, maybe 15 minutes, maybe 30, and leave it entirely up to the individual kids to decide what it is that they read?

As the parent of a smart 10 year old with ADHD, homework has actually been invaluable. We use the larger assignments to help him learn to manage his time and attention level. For example, we take a 5 minute scooter break after 20 minutes of work. For very large assignments, we also break things up into manageable chunks.

The homework is also very useful to have a chance to review topics and ensure understanding of things that maybe he missed in class due to not paying as close attention as he needed to.

It's been very gratifying to see his confidence levels improve and for him to start to self-manage his time or even decide to skip a scooter break because he was on a roll.

Clearly all of these are probably ancillary to the stated purpose of homework and are my own specific situation.

I wouldn't say they're ancillary, most of what you said is the claimed benefit of homework (regardless of the correctness of that claim). I'd say you're mostly using the homework as a guide for tutoring, which isn't something that actually requires homework to be assigned by the school if you're willing to be proactive.

Some parents need a little nudge to support their children's education beyond "school is daycare while I work".

I wonder how many actually bridge that gap - if education is just something to keep a kid occupied, homework will be same, I'm sure.

You aren't going to find a lot of overlap between homework being done and turned in and parents that view school as daycare.

As every parent learns, there is no shortage of assholes who are quick to explain how you are doing it wrong. No matter how you parent, someone thinks that they know better and has no trouble explaining that in an insulting tone.

Thank you for being a case in point. It doesn't matter what else I do, (see http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2012/10/my-sons-flashcard-routi... for example), I can always be accused of being lazy from the peanut gallery.

More practically speaking, most parents do not have the breadth of knowledge to spontaneously tutor their kids in every subject. Homework can provide fodder for parents to engage with their children on academic subjects the parent might not know well, or might not think to bring up.

I know some people are taking offense to your comment, but the reality is that even parents who very much wish to be involved in their child's education often need a nudge on what, exactly, to talk about.

Even parents who home-school their kids usually buy academic materials to use for this reason.

As the parent of a smart 13 year old with somewhat serious ADHD and a complex home environment (divorced, remarried, 2 houses, multiple children around), homework has been an unmitigated disaster. The best thing about his going on an IEP was that we could get a no homework policy for him. This immediately improved his grades, reduced stress, and made his attitude towards school improve.

So mileage does vary on these things. By a lot.

Are you saying that exposing a child to a complex home environment has 0 impact on their ability to complete homework at home?

No, and I have no idea why you would extrapolate that from what I said.

I listed factors that will make homework harder for him. He is older, so more homework. A complex home environment, so harder to stay organized and consistent. More children, dividing parental attention. The more serious that ADHD is, the harder that staying on task becomes.

Put it all together, and homework becomes a lot bigger issue for him than it is for a normal child.

"reading" is technically homework but not the kind of homework that education researchers are opposed to. The bad kind of homework is loaded down worksheets and projects that are high-stakes (perform or fail) and prone to cheating. Telling students to read has none of these problems, it's purely for the student's benefit and has no penalty attacked.

In this case the reading is in addition to other homework. So if you are in 3rd grade you are expected to read for 40 minutes and also complete some other tasks. This might be math worksheets, projects or something else. So for my child for example he was getting homework that took about 20 minutes in addition to his required 40 minutes of reading. My niece would routinely have 90 minutes of homework in addition to her 40 minutes of reading and her brother would have usually around 40 minutes of homework on top of his 60 minutes of reading. I'm not sure when they are expected to go outside and play or do their other after school activities with a full day of school and all the additional work at home.

I'm no homework fan either, but in teachers' defense, when they don't assign much or any homework, the unfortunate outcome is that they get flamed by some parents (not all) for not giving more of it.

Why dont these parents realise they can assign as much 'homework' to their own kids as they want?

No idea... But I could come up with a few hypothesis off the top of my head. Perhaps they were assigned homework as kids and haven't ever wondered if it was good or bad for their own education. Or, slightly more precisely, they think working hard at school (or later in life) means taking and completing work at home. Or, they're not as well informed on the topic as to what the research is suggesting.

Because they feel it's the teacher's job to educate their kids.

Same reason the salesperson at the car dealership (or th hiring manager at your new job) has to "talk to my manager" about your offer. Deferring to a synthetic external authority is a powerful negotiating technique.

There's actually another way entirely to do it - have the time in class for working and have the time after for actively learning. So the students read and learn new concepts at home and practice them in group settings at school. Unfortunately, that depends on the home environment being conducive to learning.

> Unfortunately, that depends on the home environment being conducive to learning.

So, in practice, does success in traditional school environments, even if the structure makes people think it should insulate from that concern.

The problem with admitting that the home environment is the biggest key to academic success is that it means policy actually needs to focus on improving that environment which lots of people (for different reasons) have ideological objections to. So we pretend that school is isolated from home and that if we can just configure school right, we can get results while ignoring the home environment. And we blame any failures on doing the wrong things to the school environment, not the fact that we are focussing on the wrong environment.

A big part of the idea behind an inverted classroom model is to try and smooth over those problems. If a kid has a home environment that's not conducive to concentration, but they're just reading or watching videos or whatever in that time, then the damage is fairly limited and is something the teacher will get a chance to smooth over the next day.

Whereas if they're supposed to be working on homework during that time, it will not only prevent them from cementing what they're supposed to be learning, there's not really any further recourse, and it will also immediately result in poor marks, which will then engender further trouble on down the line. Especially in the Taylorist nightmare that US schools have become over the past couple decades.

The unspoken distinction you are making is that high-stakes homework is the problem.

> Taylorist nightmare that US schools have become

What's this?

Schools have migrated toward standardized testing uber alles, not homework/classroom grades. Are you referring to the grade-level standards that don't allow students to progress at their own pace below grade level? That's not really a matter of homework vs not -- if a student can't learn the standard material in 6hr/day, then they either need to do homework, "fail" at school, or escape.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylorism

> there is on average no academic benefit

What? This sounds BS. If you don’t practice what you learn in school, how will you ever master it? Eg. How will you learn integration if you don’t do some practice problems?

Parent also wrote "You have enough time in the classroom to teach and provide practice time" so he/she agrees with you but argues that there is enough time for that practice to take place at school.

Exactly right. Practice is essential, but it is essential that it be correct practice. According to research, supervised practice in the classroom is both superior to homework, and sufficient for learning.

Not everyone needs that practice to master concepts. There is a point at which homework becomes a burden with no academic payoff for every person, depending on their understanding of the topic.

+1. It's been a couple of decades since high school, but I remember making a genuine effort at homework being one of the critical differences between success and failure. I find it hard to believe that there's enough time for all the practice during class.

The recent studies that talk about this are slightly more nuanced. But much of it comes down to, what I suspect to be, some combination of the 60hr per week fallacy (that someone working 60hrs/wk creates more value than someone who limits their work to 40hrs/wk), the play trade off, the physical trade off, and the sleep trade off.

The brain needs lots of downtime to properly learn new skills, and if you're trading downtime for studying, at some point you're going to get negative returns on investment. This seems to happen somewhere between 40 and 50hrs/wk for cognitive tasks.

There's also a growing body of evidence that play, hard as it may be to define, really has an enormous impact on learning, as well as mental health. One of my favorite anecdotes is by Richard Feynman who was completely burned out when one day he, for the fun of it, tried to calculate the wobble of a plate being tossed in the air, and this changed his attitude with long lasting effects on his work. http://sistemas.fciencias.unam.mx/~compcuantica/RICHARD%20P.... (search for "throws a plate in the air", though the whole book is a fun read)

I'm convinced, though I've not seen much research on the topic, that physical movement is essential to learning. Something related to stimulating the entire nervous system, or possibly just related to increasing non-circulator fluid exchange in the brain. Hell, it may just be a chance for certain areas of the brain to have downtime, while the centers related to muscle control take their turn. But if you're making this trade off, it'll start to have negative returns.

And then there's sleep. You're doing yourself a great disservice if you switch an hour of sleep for an hour of studying, your long term retention will go to shit, and the odds of you remembering some fact 3 months from now will greatly diminish, which mostly defeats the purpose. This may be the biggest problem with giving homework to highschoolers, who tend to have the habit of both procrastination and staying up late.

So, yes, I can see homework having almost no academic benefit when a student is in class all day. I can already see issues with my daughter in Kindergarten. There's so much pressure to teach too much content, that her school has made huge tradeoffs around play and exercise during the school day. I certainly don't want them forcing even more work on her, especially as she's getting old enough to start to have chores and other responsibilities that have nothing to do with school.

In theory, you are right. But experiment trumps theory.

> If you don’t practice what you learn in school, how will you ever master it?

I really don't recall many people mastering anything in normal school. Besides the few whizzes, most people are just bouncing about trying to figure out the easiest way to get an acceptable grade (for various definitions of acceptable, which mostly depend on your parents), and then forget it all by next year.

Some exceptions around math/physics, and people notoriously have difficulty with those.

"master" is a very strong term to use for anything going on in education...

My understanding is mandatory homework is all the way up to the university level. If I recall correctly its something along the lines of 2 hours of homework for every hour of instruction at the college level. I could be completely wrong and this might only apply is certain situations but it was a topic of debate in one of my college classes years ago.

I know personally, my grades from about 6th grade on dropped a lot because I stopped doing homework. I didn't need the extra practice to excel in the subject. Funny, because I remember teachers saying it will effect my work habits if I keep not doing homework but in a professional setting I have no problem completing my tasks and researching on my own time.

I personally think homework should be assigned based on individuals grasp of the subject. If the individual needs more practice assign it, if they don't... don't. It incentives learning while still providing resources for those who don't learn as fast or well.

There is a slightly different way to interpret that.

Some students, despite being in your classroom, are really being homeschooled. For example, my wife and I both got extra assignments from our parents. The parents aren't just helping. The parents are teaching. You aren't trusted to teach.

Other students have parents that trust you to teach. Your job is to teach, and these parents expect you to do it. In theory, they are correct.

I find this perspective interesting and I think this discussion needs to be taken further as I think it is unclear on both sides what the final expectations are to be upon completion of class/grade.

that being said, I am concerned that some parents expect that teachers are also doing the 'parenting' side of things which may be unrealistic. I think that in most public schools (the one I went to) some parenting needs to be executed by teachers otherwise a small handful of kids could derail any teaching getting done in the first place.

The "teachers shouldn't parent; parents stopped parenting" lesson is one I've heard from more than a few.

What if teachers ALWAYS "parented", and as societies grow more tolerant and diverse this obviously doesn't scale (parents disagree with teachers on what should be taught). Thus we decide on this image of teachers giving knowledge and means of learning, while parents give morals and social structures. But has this image every existed in practice? How do we know it is even achievable?

A child is learning from EVERYTHING. Is it truly reasonable to expect that teachers aren't "parenting"? Even if they expressly attempt to focus on intellectual pursuits only, that is just showing a different set of parenting lessons (potentially about lack of accountability, or the division of social mores from everything else). Likewise, if the teachers have turned to this absent form of parenting, are we correct in assuming that other parents aren't doing their "jobs"? (After all, it's never MY kid that isn't getting parenting, it's everyone else's).

I don't have solutions or suggestions, but I want to raise the idea that maybe it's not "who" is or is not parenting, because everyone is, all the time, even if trying NOT to "parent". If so, then simply trying harder to ensuring parenting only happens from parents, and DOES happen from them, is doomed to failure, incompatible with the operating of developing minds?

this is an interesting point and I think is more valid than many teachers (and adults of all flavors) want to admit due to not wanting to accept the enormous responsibility, thanks for sharing!

>A child is learning from EVERYTHING. Is it truly reasonable to expect that teachers aren't "parenting"?

This is precisely why, as a non-religious parent, I actually appreciated attending a Catholic school and sent my son to a non-denominational Christian school. It wasn't about religion, but it was about being in an environment where elements of characters were also emphasized.

> I am concerned that some parents expect that teachers are also doing the 'parenting' side of things which may be unrealistic.

If you are an adult (or even the responsible older child), and you are supervising one or more children when their parents aren't present, you have to do the parenting side of things. It's not optional. Like, literally not optional, not merely morally not optional—if you are in that position you are standing in the place of a parent, whether you intend to be or not, and whether you do it well or not.

> teachers are also doing the 'parenting' side

Isn't this exactly what teachers must do, by law? This is what the term 'in loco parentis'[0] means - they are acting as parental substitutes.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_loco_parentis

Parenting is more difficult for a teacher than for a parent, because:

- the parent has 1 or 2 or 3 kids, the teacher has 20 or 30 at the same time;

- the parent spends plenty of time with kids, the teacher spends 45 minutes, and that's supposed to include teaching and examining;

- the parent knows the child for years, the teacher may meet the teenager for the first time;

- the parent can use a wild scale of rewards and punishment, the teacher... pretty much nothing, other than verbal feedback.

So you can see it is quite unrealistic to expect the teacher to do the same amount of parenting as the parents are supposed to do.

(By the way, in my experience the best behaving kids typically have at least one parent a teacher. I suppose it is because that parent has no illusions about how much parenting a school can do, and therefore does not try to outsource parenting to the school.)

Not sure what jurisdiction you're in, but I'm in Canada where we generally have good teachers. The problem we're experiencing is a curriculum that we feel is becoming easier over time and shifting away from core fundamentals. Teachers are powerless to oppose or address this, regardless of how they personally feel or want to teach.

Should my 10-yr-old learn coping strategies for anxiety? absolutely, but she should also be learning some Canadian and World geography, be able to multiply numbers beyond 8x8, practice word and logic problems and understand that computers are not just cell phones and ipad applications. If we relied solely on the public education system it would be questionable if any of these were covered.

I notice that The things you list are things that can learn online from youtube and video games.

- Geography Now: https://youtu.be/DxxZOsfsIUM

- Crash Course Computer Science: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtNlUrzyH5r6...

- 6.004 EdX: https://www.edx.org/course/computation-structures-part-1-dig...

- Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis, Sid Meyer’s Pirates, Railroad Tycoon, bunches of kids games teach geography or arithmetic

Whereas there isn’t really a good digital experience you can build to teach brain-management skills... or is there?

One of Coursera's top courses is a course on learning how to learn, which is really about learning the balance of self-discipline (both how to do it and why it works). It works not just for learning, but also for time management and other things:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

Don't know about online courses for things like emotional health, but I see no reason there couldn't be.

You know, thats a good course to reference.

Giving it a second think, a lot of CBT is skills-based, so I think I’d like to agree. Though, I suspect that such a mooc for anxiety does not yet exist

Not sure why this is downvoted. Learning facts is the easiest thing to do in any settings. Learning skills like "how to read and manage workloads, and advice on what to rea" is what needs guidance and training.

I don't know Canada, but in the USA:

> learning some Canadian and World geography

Social studies is not part of the multi-state standard, but part of (for example) Washington State) standard

http://www.k12.wa.us/SocialStudies/pubdocs/SocialStudiesStan...

(page 14)

> multiply numbers beyond 8x

is a 3th-grade standard http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/3/NBT/

> practice word problems

in the standard http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/4/OA/

> and logic problems

This sort of "math enrichment" subject area is a major gap in public education.

> and understand that computers

this is hit-and-miss and mostly ignored by standards, but the standard does get into some pencil-and-paper type algorithmics

http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/4/OA/#CCSS.Math.Co...

http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/5/OA/

Of course, quality of instruction varies school by school.

I wouldn't trust every teacher to teach well. The simple fact is, there are good teachers and there are bad teachers. Ultimately, it's the parents job to make sure kids are brought up well. That means helping teach during some years and stepping back more in some years. Parent involvement is a must.

Sometimes parents are unable or unwilling to bring up their kids well. What should happen to those kids?

I don't see how parents failing to do their job changes what I said.

But to answer your unrelated question: Of course, responsible adults, which includes teachers, should help them as well as they can.

Unfortunately, try as they might, only parents can do a parents job. Really, it comes down to providing a good family to as many kids as possible.

Divorce, broken families, single parent homes, foster care, etc... They all fall short of what a good solid Mom/Dad home (with a good relationship between Mom and Dad) can provide a kid. That's where we should be focusing.

Oh, and while I'm at it: World Peace.

*edit - Unfortunately, we can't do anything about people dying or getting sick. But short of that, people really need to be responsible about the situation they are in when they bring kids into the world. And then they need to take care of those kids.

It’s because behavior is an emergent property of a dynamical system, and that means that if you want a particular behavior, you have to know when to provide input and when to let the system process.

If you want a plant to bear fruit, you have to nurture it for a while, and you will never be able to browbeat it into producing fruit before it has developed the facilities for doing so.

Part of effective parenting is resolving the dependency tree for healthy attitude/behavior in your child.

Although I agree, it's not the neglectful parents who are reading books like this...

> Parent involvement leads to more academic confidence and success[1],[...] > [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3020099/

Half-OT, but you're making a textbook logical error in interpreting the science you're citing. This is an observational study, making claims about associations, yet you clearly indicate a causal effect in your words.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com