The long history of parents complaining about their kids’ homework
slate.com
slate.com
Evidence is sparse that anything works in education, once you control for social and personal characteristics of the parents.
Is this really going to matter when teaching basic calculus?
http://hanushek.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publication...
> Assessing the effects of school resources on student performance: An update
> The relationship between school resources and student achievement has been controversial, in large part because it calls into question a variety of traditional policy approaches. This article reviews the available educational production literature, updating previous summaries. The close to 400 studies of student achievement demonstrate that there is not a strong or consistent relationship between student performance and school resources, at least after variations in family inputs are taken into account.
Not to mention that the classes are all geared towards elementary school teachers and so are of absolutely no help at all to me. Then couple that with elementary school teachers being generalists and often hating math, yet they're the ones we rely on to give these kids a good grounding in the foundational stuff they'll need later on! No wonder most kids are incompetent at it and can barely add/subtract/multiply/divide without a calculator.
Really, I think education should be an apprenticeship program, rather than an educational one. Make it be like several years of student teaching, which would get more results than anything else from new teachers. They can see how experienced teachers work and really discuss it with them over the course of a few years, not just pay to get told useless stuff and observe a semester.
it's just a few weeks rather than years, but it's the right idea.
just like a pilot has to look so many flight hours before they get their license, a montessori teacher has to log observation and teaching hours before they get to lead a classroom.
For better or worse, the pay scale in most districts in the US guarantee a salary bump for having a higher degree. As a result, there are degree programs tailored to this need, that are practically degree mills. Why didn't you study math, or science?
As for why I didn't study math or science -- I did. My actual undergraduate degree is in physics; just due to various issues I ended up teaching (which I admit I enjoy, even if I'm starting to get burnt out). Dunno if I'll stay another year, at least where I'm currently at.
I'm one of these kids: I was homeschooled for several grades due to my family traveling, completed my lessons in just a couple of hours per day (sometimes doing two lessons in one day so I could take the next day off). I successfully transitioned to a regular high school (with plenty of homework), did great, and went to one of the top and most difficult universities in the country where I also did quite well. Even though I had hours of homework in high school, I didn't seem to suffer from not having spent 10 hours a day in middle school doing school plus homework. I wasn't "unprepared" or otherwise unable to handle the suddenly significantly higher workload.
Of course, this isn't very scientific and this also doesn't prove that homework isn't necessary in a traditional school, but it does suggest that something is very wrong in traditional early education if hours of daily homework are necessary on top of 8 hours of lessons to achieve similar results.
AFAIK most prestigious private schools have much smaller class sizes than public schools, and that's not for no reason. 18-25 kids in a class means you can only give each kid maybe two minutes of individual attention an hour, and maybe less. Practically every single thing is harder for the teacher (except getting kids to participate in discussion, but that's likely a socialization/norms thing—I doubt kids used to small classes clam up the way kids used to 20+ kid classrooms do when they happen to be in a small class for some reason) and worse for the kids.
It seems crazy to me that I was able to complete an entire days worth of lessons this way in the amount of time most 6th and 7th graders spend on homework alone.
Regardless, suppose studies were to show that adding hours of homework was necessary for students to be successful academically (and as far as I know they don't show this). Rather than deciding to destroy our children's free and unstructured time with homework, why don't we figure out how to change school so that this homework isn't necessary? It's clearly possible to generate well-educated and competitive children with significantly fewer hours of education per day. The homework is just a bandaid for something that isn't working (and probably not even as effective as a bandaid).
Probably 10% of the school day's moving around or preparing to move around or settling down from having moved around, or recess or otherwise not-learning (not to shit on recess—I wish they'd give kids more time for it in lower grades). Another 10-15% is stuff you might not consider part of your "school day" if you're homeschooling (PE, music, library visits, "specials") or nonsense you don't have to worry about (assemblies). So there's maybe a quarter of the day accounted for with no allowances for faster and/or better-tuned pacing or more personalized instruction—poof, 90ish minutes of your day back, 180ish days a year, for 13 years, like magic. Self-pacing you fit it all that remains in 2 or 2.5 hrs, don't need more than minimal breaks so there's minimal padding to that time, and the rest of the day's yours.
Public school's alarmingly wasteful of children's time, but saves parents a ton of time, collectively, in exchange.
Anecdata: in my quite successful french public middle and high schools, I've never been in a class with fewer than 27 pupils. I would say success had more to do with geographic selection and other external criteria than from the internal educational benefits.
Honestly, the statistics here are so stark that it shows something is deeply wrong with the US public school system. Personally, it always felt like a busy-work day-care when I went.
The conventional one always seemed absurd to me: I have to go to school and then continue being in school, mentally, AFTER school? Disassociation aside, it seems like that's training you for a 16-hour workday. How oppressive.
Maybe the flipped model can only support a lower cognitive ceiling though; I've never seen it applied to, say, calculus courses. Maybe hard enough material does require constant, oppressive grinding. D: (Not that young kids should be doing that though.)
Lectures were almost Socratic. We were only graded based on exams and participation, which I think he kind of arbitrarily awarded based on how engaged he thought you were.
Brilliant guy, loved his classes. He'd studied under a couple members of the Bourbaki group and headed the math department at one of the top math schools in Latin America.
Anyway, I had a great experience with this approach and I really think it's the best way to teach math.
That class was really the first time a lot of concepts actually started to make sense for me and I went from being a pretty below average math student to having some of the highest marks in the class.
The shtick about being bad at calculus, whether true or not, translated into a highly Socratic and collaborative learning environment, where all the students were legitimately teaching each other. This was modeled by us “teaching” our teacher.
Thinking back, it really is incredibly remarkable what she accomplished. Not that standardized tests are the greatest measure, but in less than a year of calc instruction, a full classroom of smart but fairly unremarkable students all scored top scored on the AP Calc BC test (in other words, every single one of us tested out of 100-level college calculus).
This was a scenario where having a “large” (ie more than 1-5 students) class (I think there may have been about 20 of us) with a gifted teacher brought out a positive side to non-small classes that you don’t usually see. We all learned the material well enough to teach it, and we all had many teachers we could go to for help understanding a concept.
1) College is very different from high school
2) If you don't need the lecturer, then the lecturer sucks.
3) If you really understand that well, why come (I can only assume they took attendance)? I had a digital logical class that was required, but I didn't bother showing up and scored 150%. When I lecture, if you don't need to be there, don't show up. That's perfectly fine by me. However, don't expect me to have a lot of sympathy if you suddenly find that you don't really understand what I lectured on that you skipped.
Meh. Some topics for some people are simply better served by a textbook.
> I can only assume they took attendance
Not the parent poster, but yes, some professors required us to attend. You don't - great for you and your students.
Well, when I teach, my classes are technical material. One student knowing (or not) the subject has no material impact on any other student. I also have a fixed amount of topics that I need to get across--your grade in my class should reflect your mastery of the material. If you understand the topics properly, I should give you the appropriate grade regardless of how you came about that knowledge.
If I taught a class dependent upon discussion (Philosophy or Political Science for example), I might have a different opinion.
Though in meetings I always pay attention, this may sound weird, but I like the social aspect of meetings.
The jobs I've been most engaged at, I would usually attentively listen in meetings while others present would spin their wheels discussing technical stuff in the weeds until I'd see a clearly superior alternate solution and put that forward.
It would appear as if I were zoning out in meetings, but I was actually just listening and thinking about the problem. I don't think people are particularly good at thinking while also discussing/debating, but I also don't think I would have as quickly arrived at the better solutions without the ability to attentively observe the relevant discussions.
If you're not even paying attention / thinking about anything relevant while in a meeting, your presence is a pointless waste of time and space and you should be doing something else.
I also know a kid who does practically no homework, but is still in that top-scoring cohort. His dad was the same way. ;-)
Just school is not enough. You also need great parents.
I've noticed that in at least one subject -- math -- very few students from any background retain an interest as adults. There has to be a transition from a subject being presented as a series of hoops to jump through, to it becoming an actual passion. Whether that transition occurs is a coin toss. It's easy for people to get busy enough at something productive that doesn't involve math, and so they don't miss it. At my workplace, the small handful of people who are considered to be "math people" come from an apparently random assortment of backgrounds.
Indeed. I think the hierarchy of what factors make the biggest difference goes like this:
1. the kid
2. the parents
3. the teachers
4. the school
The kid has to have at least the basic physical and mental faculties or they are seriously impacted no matter how good the rest of the things are.
Then the parents make the next biggest difference. Even if the teachers and school aren't very good the parents can make up for it and can even excel.
It can be a close call between teachers and parents, because if the parents are doing just the minimum a great teacher can still make a big difference.
Last but still important is the school, meaning the facilities and educational systems in use, separate from the teachers who teach there.
Where I live I see most parents focus on two things: extra tutoring, and schools with fancy facilities. Most don't think they should do anything themselves, that they already paid the school/tutor to teach. An example is that despite the teachers constantly encouraging kids to read with their parents every night, it seems like most kids do their nightly reading on their own if at all.
As the article says the debate is about 'what childhood is for'. Some would say it's not for getting high scores.
Humans are not meant to be happy, but to survive. Only the paranoid do. We have to fight back when others are prepared to destroy their lives to compete. There will be no respite until the demographics change, and there is an educational economy of abundant opportunity, not scarcity and existential threat. Ironically, the emancipation and education of women is the only way to achieve this outcome.
When I was young (11-18) I did an insane amount of studying and other activities: private school, 6-day school week, Sat am lessons, 1hr each-way commute, 2-3hr homework per night, Tue pm military cadets, Mon&Thur sports training, Wed&Sat pm school sports matches, Sun county/region sport; school holidays included homework assignments, exam revision, military camps, expeditions, then pre-season sports camps; summer holidays would include part-time jobs, some retail and delivery gigs, but mostly farming and harvesting.
If you live in some parts of Asia, there are no school-age children to be seen on the streets, or in the shopping malls - they are all busy doing something all the time. There are education-malls filled with small outlets providing tutoring and lessons for every subject, from English, to math and piano.
I was recently looking at some business analysis for a traffic management project, including patterns of congestion. One comment was "... the school buses start to build-up at 04:30-05:00 ...".
Luckily, kids are very resilient.
Resilient yes, but you'll be harming them for life making them get up so early. Their brains just don't work like that and it's inhumane to force somebody into the school system so early. No wonder people hate it.
The school schedule is determined by late 19th century factory shifts and has nothing to do with the welfare of children.
"Traffic during the first few years was not too bad, as we only had to leave the house at 6am, but congestion on the Causeway has gotten worse year after year, so we had to leave at 5am to arrive on time for school at 7.15am."
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/malaysian-sisters-...
If anything, the entry of women on the job market decades ago increased the supply side of the equation and competition. And whereas before one working adult could provide for a family, now it takes both of the adults working to provide for the same family.
(Property is often the constrained resource in the system, which means it captures most of the value from any beneficial change in the economy - e.g. SV startups are ways for geeks to work hard transferring money from VCs to landlords).
However, liberation of women from the home is a goal in itself, and part of the long run solution. When women are emancipated, legally and socially, with access to contraception and education, in a society with a base level of utilities and appliances in the home (or village), and just enough of a welfare system to ensure that children are not seen as a pension policy, then progress can be made towards the sunlit uplands.
The West, NE Asia and China are already past their peaks. India, Africa, Middle East and SE Asia are growing very rapidly. Countries like Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Philippines and Vietnam are all bigger than the largest European country (Germany). Turkey will overtake Germany soon. The first 3 in the list are bigger than Russia.
If half of India's population went to Europe, they would become the majority in every country, and India would still be the second largest country in the world. Nigeria is predicted (UN) to pass the US in 2050 and have 733m people in 2100.
Science education content is wretched. Current reform efforts like Common Core and NGSS barely scratch the surface. But still there's a lot of community opposition. Years ago, I had a long conversation with an anti-Core activist, exploring their perspective. It seemed their root cause was their child had found some Core-ish class too hard, and notably here, its homework. And thus a movement gained an activist, trying to prevent other children from suffering similarly. With science education reform as collateral damage.
Which isn't to say that current homework isn't as wretched as the underlying content and pedagogy.
Research-Based Guidelines for Homework https://effectiveforall.blogspot.com/2019/06/4-research-base...
I am, quite rightly I think, skeptical about most educational "research" (remember "new math"--aka set theory?). However, educational research has gotten much better. And there are starting to be consensus answers that conventional psychological research seems to bear out that educational systems simply ignore.
What worked to create human inputs to an assembly line may be quite suboptimal for creating humans capable of functioning in a knowledge-based economy.
This isn't new though. From the article, every fifteenish years there seems to be a shift back and forth between homework being useful and homework being detrimental. And every time this has happened, you could say that better methods were starting to reach consensus answers.
My kids would come home with multiple worksheets to do every night starting in 1st grade. Potentially a good hour or more of work depending on the child.
My understanding is the type of work they send home has not shown to be beneficial based on my wife's graduate work in early childhood education.
Fortunately the school district saw it that way too and such homework was no longer counted as far as grading goes in the early grades.
However, my experience has been that more open-ended project-based learning is quite different. Things like science fair projects, making videos, and independently implementing math from class on programmable calculators engage students differently. Most students don't connect with every project, but it's a good way to feel out people's passions and harness them. When the student has agency in setting a concrete goal and deciding the specifics of how they spend their time, the material they are learning becomes a valued tool that saves them time and effort, rather than something being shoved down their throat.
I used to despise everything related to math because the curriculum kept it segregated from other disciplines, thus hiding it's utility. It wasn't until I was playing around with 3D modeling software for an art project that I really understood how useful trigonometry is. There is something psychological at play that makes it easier to learn something when it isn't the main focus of the activity, but a supporting element needed to achieve a self-defined goal.
It is a hard subject even to discuss because it is always approached as if homework requirements are, and should be, the same for students of all ages, even though nobody really expects it to be so. Nobody (in the USA anyway) expects children attending pre-school programs to get homework. At the same time, it's preposterous to think that university students would learn everything inside the classroom. So, sometime between pre-school and university, students should probably start getting homework. One possibility would be to start with a little and gradually increase the amount of outside work required. Then, however, you open the door to questions of how much and how soon, and everyone will have a different opinion.
One of the problems is that many people seem to conceive of education of children like filling a vessel: the students sit passively while the teacher fills their minds with knowledge through their eyes and ears. In fact, the most important things kids learn in school are skills, and the process is not unlike learning to play a sport or a musical instrument. As with all skill learning, practice is required. The important basic skills (e.g. "reading, writing, and arithmetic") especially need practice, and so do meta-skills like "how do I track and prioritize tasks that may not be due for days or weeks?" Also, work like reading, writing papers, and solving math problems can be done without the teacher present, so it's not a particularly good use of limited resources to ask the students to do that work when the teacher is present.
I find it ironic that many of the parents I know who complain about their students' homework load would blink not an eye at sending their kids to football, soccer, swimming, gymnastics, cheerleading, or whatever sports practice for hours every week, knowing that the kids have to practice "if they're gonna be any good."