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Comment by JohnMakin | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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

> ... a full 8 hour day,

My daughter's HS is 7 hours including lunch.

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

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

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.

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.

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