The Cult of Homework
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
As well as distracting from lessons, this also meant the homework had to be rushed. This probably did teach me useful skills, e.g. I learned about error modeling from faking believable results in science classes (no time to take all the measurements), and my writing improved by writing final drafts first and then going back and adding errors to fake a first draft. My BASIC programming improved writing tools to automate math homework on a TI-86 calculator or on QBASIC at home.
I saw all this as resistance against tyranny, and never considered that there might be some benefit to homework. Most of it was pointless busywork anyway, so the actual benefit if I'd taken it seriously would have been minimal. I support a healthy school/life balance, which means the abolition of homework.
My biggest issue with it was that you'd be graded on completeness for the 50 assigned examples. If I can learn it in 5-10 examples, why am I going to waste time on another 40 non-interesting problems?
A given sub-topic should be setup like this:
* 90% of the points for the module possible if you get 100% on the test.
* 60% of the points for the module possible as correctly doing the homework.
* Allow for re-submission of the homework (with work shown) for up to a week AFTER the test //results//.
Other kids liked that homework points boosted their grades from mediocre test scores. But I aced all the tests and thus didn't have to do any homework.
That was a strange one-time case though.
I gave up on homework once I felt like I'd learned the topic. Killed me in the grades department, but I didn't care.
how did that improve your writing?
So we’ve developed coping strategies. Most subjects are taught using “workbooks” composed according to the state’s “common core” standards. These workbooks have class- and homework sections. There’s also an answer key, which my daughter discovered using a google search. She prints it out at home, takes it to school, and uses it to fill in homework while no one’s looking.
For subjects that impose homework for which no quick fix exists, I’ve taught her to do the bare minimum needed to get by, or have simply done the work myself. I’d rather see my child read a book or go outside than sit around doing busywork.
All this has led to an interesting relationship between me and my daughter: she has grown to appreciate my cheeky, playful “fuck the system”, “stick it to the man” attitude. She’s the most cynical 11 year old you’ll meet, but she also operates under the assumption that her da is always on her side. It’s important to know throughout life who your true allies are.
Ask my kid, and she’ll gladly explain to you that the US public school is a preparatory form of the prison system. School practices and policies are largely punitive towards students. Admissions criteria in nicer school take attendance into account: students who are prevented by societal or physical reasons from making it to school are penalized and barred from future achievement by a heartless computer system. Likewise, any action that isn’t directly in response to a teacher’s instruction is met with disciplinary letters in the file, which further erode a student’s chances at gaining entry into schools that are more about education than compulsory warehousing of kids away from streets, where they would certainly be using/selling drugs, snatching purses, urinating all over subway stops, and painting graffiti.
Fuck the government, man. It’ll never do anything right. Best we can do is cope and thumb our noses at it.
This doesn't detract from the rest of your post, but if your daughter is in 5th grade then I presume she already took the 4th grade ELA & Math tests which (I thought?) were the [main|only] academic factor used in NYC (good) public middle school rubrics.
If the above is true, then could she slack off a bit in grade 5 especially if it means skipping some homework?
Caveat: I know grade 5 is still critical she's trying to get into Hunter Middle/High School, but I'm really curious to know if good NYC middle schools use grade 5 ELA/Math scores and subject grades.
Personally, I think homework is fine but should take 1 hour a day at most in high school, and half an hour before that.
It's important to consider that 30min to 1hr is a typical homework load for a single subject in many places in America, that American students get out of school at around 3pm, and that American students have extracurricular activities (sports, theater, etc) which run another 1-2hrs after that. Those rather insane circumstances create the hatred of homework.
It's also important to ask, "verify for whom?"
If the answer is verify for yourself, I don't think even the homework I did in Germany was much other than busywork. Trying to apply your own knowledge to some real world situation or problem is a much better self-verification. If the answer is verify for the central administration, that's just a strong statement about your culture/society's values with respect to the individual and the administrators/managers of large groups. Note that I'll freely admit: American homework mostly serves the central administration, and that's a statement about our societal and cultural values at present. (It did seem to be even more oriented toward administrative convenience in Germany, albeit with a lower volume of homework overall, even in a Gymnasium.)
I have low tolerance for B.S. myself, and I basically did whatever homework was really meaningful and skipped whatever was busy-work. My own school grades reflected primarily the arbitrariness of which teachers put higher weighting on tedious homework.
Homework is the source of my main memory of academic injustice: valedictorian regularly didn't finish homework whenever she knew she would get away with lying about it (holding up some half-done or even different-subject paper and getting an "okay" from teacher just going around checking everyone). Meanwhile, my honesty that I sometimes did it and other times not brought me careful scrutiny so that I was marked down for every little unfinished item in each assignment.
Also, why can't we in the US learn from other cultures? One of the Scandinavian countries, with the highest happiness factor, doesn't have homework at all. They have schoolwork, done at school. Home is for fun and socialization and other things. It's too late for my son (a senior in HS), but I longed for that.
Most students will never really learn anything math related beyond basic arithmetic - they'll just about fake it for the exams, then promptly forget it. The actual numeracy skills of the general population (even college graduates (even STEM graduates)) is so woefully inadequate that it'd be entirely reasonable to argue that we should just stop bothering with mandatory math education after 8th grade.
IMO the fundamental problem with education is the assumption that it works. The handful of RCTs we have suggest that it's mostly placebo.
Small percentage it exists, but I’m jaded into thinking any comment with a specific statement attributed non-specifically, without citation, is safe to ignore.
Also school doesn’t start until age 7, the school day is filled with long breaks to go run around outside, student:teacher ratios are very low and teachers are highly trained and respected in society, and there is no standardized testing.
Especially for little kids, more hours in school does not increase learning. Sleeping later in the morning is better.
Having nutritious school lunches (for free) probably plays a role too. Kids' may hate the food, but it's not junk like pizza, juice and jam.
And school is indeed quite relaxed in Finland. Bullying does exist though, but there is absolutely none of this elite school racing mentality where you have to attend the right kindergarten, do many goal-oriented extracurricular activities and basically prove your exceptionality almost daily.
What works for a relatively mono-ethnic / mono-culture (generalizing a bit here) of < 10 million people usually doesn't scale well to the wild free-for-all of 330m+ people in the United States.
The Federal government meddling in the education system has basically never produced good results.
We have culture-scale NIH syndrome.
We also have schools with no homework in Germany - because kids stay in school the whole day and do the homework at school. Not what I want for my kids.
But hey, we'd better have our children sitting for 8 hours a day at school and 1-3 hours at home, and 30-60 minutes on the bus and 2-3 hours at extracurriculars, and hey, 1-2 hours of physical activity a day, and they also need 8-10 hours of sleep, so use that NeuMath™ to figure out where that fits in.
/Rant
There's a reckoning coming for the US education system.
I really get concerned about the "night" mentioned in the article. If school is the whole day saddling anything on top is wrong.
I hated homework. I also rarely did it. I scribbled something between classes, copied and came empty handed. The whole thing put a strain on my relationship with teachers and school and general. I always identified with being a bad student, and I suspect homework may have been the root cause. I really don't think homework worked for me.
What I don't understand today, is why a 9 or 14-year old who spends 35 hours per week in a school needs homework? Is there really a need for an extra 3 or 10 hours per week? Surely, the quality of a kid's attention in the 7th or 9th-hour in a day isn't as good as their first. Is it that "everyone work on these math problems for 30m" isn't something that works in a classroom?
Adults have been complaining about after-hours work, in the age of laptops and smartphones. Why is it good for kids?
OTOH, exams and project work did work for me. With a Douglas Adams Crisis Inducer (a device that creates an artificial crisis situation of selectable severity, in order to sharpen the wits of the user), I could get 20 days of work into 1. I could sprint like a champ (and was proud of it) but I couldn't march. I'm still this way. I reckon schooling would have been a lot more effective for me personally if it was built around monthly exam or project watersheds, but I don't really know.
At the risk of cliche, we probably need more tailored/flexible education systems. Dunno though... "Create a system that educates every person" is a hard task. IDK how you'd do that. Relative to a lot of things at this kind of scale, education is very effective.
This is the biggest problem IMO. Teachers give kids an enormous amount of homework not realising (or realising, but not caring) that the kids have the same amount, if not more homework to do in all their other subjects.
I recall HS physical education teachers were the worst offenders of thinking their class was the most important. In my HS we had one day a week practical (playing sport) and one day a week theory. In the practical lesson if you forgot your sports uniform (separate to normal, "formal" uniform) they would give you an instant lunchtime detention, making you to write lines, and still make you play sport. In theory class they acted as if your life depended on knowledge of the food groups for example. I'm not saying that what they taught us wasn't important, in fact the classes on STIs were quite important, but their attitude was unwarranted. And this is every single teacher: every single one had this attitude.
I realise I'm going on a tangent but to top it all off sex education was an absolute joke. They separated us into gender and had a 30 minute presentation/talk. Completely pointless and it barely consisted of "you have a penis, you get erections" - they told us this at 14 years of age, so of course we knew that much already. No mention of the opposite sex, or actual intercourse. In contrast the girls got to learn about the male and female genitalia, I was told by one of my girl friends (read: friend that is a girl).
Of course some people like doing homework: like Donald Knuth. Or I guess people who like writing unit tests.
So they design and build for what they know.
Perhaps there should be a way for kids to opt-out of homework provided they have the grades and work ethic? And then this would incentivize other kids to try harder as well if they want that privilege.
You might be wondering why the "after school" exists. See, you need to attend the public school (or an accredited really expensive private one) in order to advance through the education system. But because public school suck you go to the second school in order to really learn. As to how much the public schools were I grew up suck, we are talking kids having sex and filming it during school time - and the teachers dealt with this by banning cellphones to the school. No cameras, no recordings!! When I think back, I honestly feel rage with how much wrong the system was.
Anyway, of course this meant you had to be physically present at some kind of school location for 10 hours per day, and then spend 2-4 hours doing homework in order to keep up. I remember people defending that system to death, making fun of america's homeschooled children and finland's relaxed attitude and how we are the "real heroes" of the education system. Ugh.
PS. I just remembered. We even had homework to "religion class". Oh yeah, we learned about the life of jesus mostly, in theory we had to learn about other religions too, but it was mostly all about the J. So, of course we were given homework even to that too. Ugh ugh ugh. Not a religious school btw, a regular public one. Complete with "why didn't you learn the creed of faith, are you not a chistian?" attitude from the teacher towards 8 year olds that didn't study. What a shithole.
To be honest extending the school day would probably make the most sense as it would help working parents as well if children left school at 5pm or 6pm.
And as bizarre as this might sound, outside of New York City, unaccompanied children on public transportation is basically not a thing in America. We assume the children are lost / abandoned and the parents are delinquent / trying to get the kid kidnapped by a pedo.
There was a decently widespread news story a few years ago about someone calling the police on a mother because she let her kids go to the park by themselves.
How can parents do that when work just burn them out? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19530479
And I am not in favor of forcing parents to stay at home. One of my mother more liberating moments was when she went back to work and got a salary for herself.
So, I do not know how good or bad is homework for children. But, I think that is an extra-burden for their parents that can have a negative effect in the children family.
...my siblings and I...
There's a homework assignment for you.
I can't think of anyone in my circle of friends, family and business who don't say it correctly. I know my rather large circle is not everybody but neither are the people who use it incorrectly and I fail to see the point in changing to incorrect usage.
There have never been grammatical rules in those cases, just grammatical demands.
Thank you. English is not my mother tongue and I easily fail that kind of constructs.
In general in English, you have a one-to-one correspondence between a finite verb and a subject noun phrase. When the noun phrase is just a single pronoun, you have formal agreement between the verb and that pronoun ("(I) am here", but not "(Everyone who knows I) am here"). Subject pronouns are not used in other cases.
Regardless of some technical explanation of why the "and I" construction is unnatural, some pretty good evidence would include the fact that people have to keep teaching it to successive generations, and the fact that "I and he" sounds undesirable even to people who have learnt the rule, whereas "him and me" and "me and him" both sound natural to someone who has learnt English naturally.
Perhaps we should also be telling people that prepositions are not things you can end sentences with.
I was livid. Our son could not even read at that point, nor did he have the motor skills to assemble a hand made kite at the age of 5. The assignment was clearly aimed at satisfying the parents who thought that homework should start early.
We put up with that public school for another year, then we got him into a private school that did not believe in homework in elementary school. Our lives were much less stressful, and he spent more time playing outside when he changed schools in 2nd grade.
Now we cry because the might have to learn for a few hours, 5 days a week 40 weeks a year?
As a adult an incredible important skill to live life is to self manage. How do kids learn this skill? How do they learn to work as a team without being babied?
If parents are able to swap in a replacement, sure, if they are rich and have time and the skill set that might be possible, to bad for everyone else. (And for kids already massive responsibilities this is a separate issue that needs solving)
Just because people in past times had it worse than now, doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to improve things.
That's largely a myth. Most women married in their early 20s, and men in their mid 20s. It was legal go get married much younger, but uncommon.
https://www.infoplease.com/us/marital-status/median-age-firs...
https://www.theclassroom.com/age-marriage-us-1800s-23174.htm...
Its primary function is the warehousing of children while adults work; and secondarily, filtering children according to ability for future work (ie., grading).
The content of the "lessons" could be anything, so long as it (1) keeps them occupied; and (2) differentiates according to cognitive ability -- ie., grades.
The primary and secondary functions almost totally constrain its auxiliary function of imparting useful skills to children -- which were it sincerely attempted would fundamentally undermine the school's ability to warehouse and grade them effectively.
For the content of the "lessons" being largely irrelevant, ask: what can anyone remember from their lessons at 14?
The answer is random with respect to the individual: I cannot predict what you will know. Really only fragments of trivia were acquired. This is the opposite situation of skill acquisition: if you are a practising plumber/doctor/programming, I can predict what you will know.
This test, predicting the knowledge/ability of a person who practices a skill, really defines successful education.
What can you predict a person knows after high school?
You might also look at "Discipline and Punish" or works to that effect to gain a socio-political perspective on the scheduling/routines/rituals of certain institutions.
It is no accident that a school closely resembles a prison. That is its primary function: to limit the behaviour of children, to discipline them into conforming with the scheduling of working life, to occupy their time.
When you are tutored (to play a piano, in mathematics, etc.) you are really acquiring a skill: to play a piano, etc.
Contrast those two environments.
Learning a skill requires an environment almost the opposite of a prison, it requires a patient and highly skilled tutor, and some attentive practice and engagement. (Infant/primary education is closer to tutoring than high school).
Imagine high school not starting until 14 at which point you spent 4 years with tutors: at most classes of 5 with skilled mentors that guided you through skilled practice. Consider the social environment: how you'd interact with peers, your relationship to your mentor, the hours you'd keep, how much practice you'd get.
Contrast this again with prison life within a school: the teacher is not a mentor, they are a master. An enemy largely. You and your peers are at war for attention and time.
Let me preface this comment by saying: this isn't my view of primary education, but of secondary mostly. Primary education has undergone a lot of changes and it is increasingly effective at education.
However, yes, the motivations of the people involved in a system is often at-odds with the system they've got themselves involved in.
The teacher's motivation may be school's auxiliary function but their mental and physical energy is spent on its primary and secondary functions.
"For the sake of educating these children, I will sacrifice my effort/energy/time in disciplining them, in grading them, in differentiating them, and so on".
People need their motivations.
My aim is to describe the system not to describe the motivations of the people involved: the former is social anthropology; the latter is religion.
But despite them being personally good people, by accepting the job they bought into an oppressive system. If they tried to improve things too much they'd be fired. Existence of good teachers doesn't make the system as a whole good.