Nobody knows what the point of homework is | Hacker News Reader

Nobody knows what the point of homework is

vox.com

25 pointschampagnepapi24 comments

I like the idea of the inverted classroom (lectures are watched at home, and "homework" is done in class where you can get help from the teacher). It can fail in practice though because 1/3 (or more) of the class doesn't watch the lectures (or has it running while doing something else).

Of course when I was a kid, 1/3 (or more) of the class would copy homework off of other kids, so plus ça change.

This doesn’t seem very complicated

Assume that you have n number of hours per day in the classroom scheduled for instruction

Assume also that you have a curriculum, which requires H number of hours to successfully complete (at the mean time to complete)

Depending on the ratio of n::H will determine the number of students who need to have homework and how much

You then adjust either n or H based on desired measurable outcomes and then iterate

> Experts who are more sympathetic to take-home assignments generally support the “10-minute rule,” a framework that estimates the ideal amount of homework on any given night by multiplying the student’s grade by 10 minutes. (A ninth grader, for example, would have about 90 minutes of work a night.)

I had never heard this but this is absurd. You're already forcing kids to go to school as early as 6-7am, a full 8 hour day, and then you expect them to spend an ADDITIONAL 1+ hours on take-home tasks? Plus studying? if they have extra-curriculars and aren't a genius, forget it. Not to mention kids with special learning needs and the lack of resources there. No wonder kids are stressed.

Honestly I think homework is _less_ important once kids get past 4th or 5th grade. If they're reading and can do basic arithmetic there's no point in really doing daily drills on vocabulary and math exercises.

That's not to say there's no point to homework at all for a ninth grader, but 90 minutes or two hours of busy work _every night_ is silly.

In highschool I would spend 3-5 hours a night on homework. But I was later diagnosed with ADD, so I guess most people would spend far less.

> ... a full 8 hour day,

My daughter's HS is 7 hours including lunch.

More like 1+ hours per class once they hit middle school.

I'm no fan of homework, but under the status quo there's no other time for reinforcement learning besides after school.

Using myself as an example-- being terminally-obstinate I simply didn't do the homework and accepted the grade hits. The real damage came from how quickly I got left behind in classes, since the only things covered in class were new topics that built on the old ones...from elementary school all the way through college.

This ties into:

> No wonder kids are stressed.

I think the curriculum is the problem. The above was my own experience decades ago, but I see what my own kids are learning now, and in which grades, and cannot fathom functioning at that level at that age. It's too much, too fast, with no room for failure and for no discernible purpose.

The rule of thumb in university is 1 hr of home study for every hour of class. So 2 hrs of homework for a 12th grader in seven classes doesn't seem unreasonable. The following year as a college freshman, they are going to have ~3 hrs a day of homework.

The rule for college/uni I've always heard (and repeated to my students) is 2 hrs outside of class for every hour in class. So a 4 unit (= 4 in-class hours/week) class should have 8 hrs of outside time dedicated to studying and homework.

if this was the case for everyone I never would have had a chance at graduating while working multiple jobs

I was blessed with the ability to remember most of what I heard and read, and to be able to test really well. In school I never understood why I needed to do homework if I had already grasped the concept being taught and could prove the knowledge via testing. Usually got a zero on the homework portion of my grades and aced the tests which generally made my class grade pretty average.

To me that was always idiotic—know the subject inside and out, yet you get a C for the class because you didn’t hand in a series of busy work.

For more children than you would expect this is on top of going to work every evening.

I've thought of homework as having two disparate values:

1. Practice (again) what you've recently covered in class. More reps, greater ease and speed and fewer errors. I suppose the article's point about some students needing more support and feedback means this isn't really a good position, unless we (re-)introduce something like tracking, or we abandon the coarse divisions of grade levels.

2. Cram in more learning - I'm thinking back to college to the profs who started each day asking for questions about the previous nights' readings, and then launched directly into new material assuming you had full understanding of the prior stuff.

I would add developing “self discipline” as a third. It easy to do work when you’re at work. It’s not as easy to set aside fun stuff during personal time to do what needs to be done.

Nobody does that. The busy stuff we do at home that's "job-like" is ALWAYS for our benefit or the benefit of the family.

Homeworks are way too often to please the teacher ego, especially after proving knowledge by acing some test.

When learning a language for example, I think it was definitely useful to study the new words outside of lessons. The kind of repetition needed does not fit well in the regular lessons schedule.

Basic arithmetic and algebra also can gain from repetition, since they are very mechanical. I wouldn't have hated math homework so much if it didn't work.

> According to a 2021 Pew survey, 25 percent of lower-income parents said their children, at some point, were unable to complete their schoolwork because they couldn’t access a computer at home; that number for upper-income parents was 2 percent

This could be addressed by making homework assignments that can be done without a computer. In academic subjects (math, science, English, history) it should be possible to assign homework that doesn't require anything other than the textbook or class handouts.

As far as whether homework is useful or not I have no opinion when it comes to elementary school, middle school, or high school because I have almost no recollection of doing any homework. I'm sure I was assigned plenty of it, but all I remember was in advanced biology in high school we had a semester long homework assignment to collect and identify either 50 different local insect species and 10 different local plant species or 10 insects and 50 plants.

In college though I'm pretty sure homework is useful. At my college (Caltech) you could pass most classes without doing homework if you did well enough on the final and midterm. First year was all pass/fail so if you went that route it wouldn't even effect your GPA.

But I can't recall anyone who skipped homework and actually learned the material well. To really get it you needed to get the theory from class and/or the textbook and you needed to do problems that applied that.

But homework at Caltech was quite a bit different than homework in high school which may have aided in its effectiveness. In high school when I worked on homework there were usually no other kids nearby working on the same homework. At Caltech there would be other people living in the same house I was in who had the same homework. And at Caltech most professors allowed or even encouraged students helping each other on homework, as long as you aren't just giving someone else the answers.

For example when I took the intro to abstract algebra class the guy in the next room was also in it, and so was another guy just around the corner of our hall, and two more farther down that hall. Me and the guy from the next room and one of the others would typically work on it on his room, mostly working alone at first but coordinating so that we start on different problems. That way when we finished our problem we could move on to a problem someone else had already done so if we got stuck we could ask them for help. If none of us could see an approach someone would go ask the two guys around the corner. They would come ask us if they got stuck. All in all it worked out great and I learned a lot from these homework group sessions.

I wonder if a similar experience could work before college at boarding schools? There you would have easy access to others who are working on the same homework.

Cynical take: to get our workers ready to pull long hours.

Over the last five years of my stint as a teacher (I might go back to it) I didn't assign homework unless it was mandated by the principal, and even then I pushed back. I carved out reading time during class, kept shelves of books of various genres in my classrooms, and encouraged my students to dig into whatever they were interested in outside of (and including) whatever we were doing in class. This approach worked best at an alternative high school where the students were generally disaffected with their educational experiences so far and needed teachers to meet them where they were and build from there.

Over the years, I've become convinced that the real point of homework is to learn how to finish tasks assigned to you by somebody else even if the tasks themselves seem to you to be pointless and unnecessary.

Except you don't get paid, so no incentive. The only decent analogy is prison. Or military

There's homework and then there is HOMEWORK.

In Finland we do the previous, US is strongly in the latter camp.

A 5th grader (11-12yo) has maybe 10-25 minutes of homework, on some days there just isn't any.

Math homework is just a rehash of what they went through in class, Languages are "read the chapter and answer these questions", other subjects tend to be just "read the chapter".

And a "chapter" is like 1-3 pages of sparse text with pictures and diagrams.

I know what that is... it's the point of busy work everywhere. To sap someone's (in this case, a child's) will, make them compliant, and exhaust them.

You know how when the police stop someone, haven't arrested them yet... they're taught to "control" the situation. To be able to, at a moment's notice, tackle anyone who is there, force them to do as they are told?

Same thing with teachers, only they're mostly not allowed to twist arms behind backs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com