Homework is practice, practice works. You can tell me how you've found a thousand published articles that practice doesn't work and all it would do is confirm my prior that the vast majority of research is not well done or fabricated
> not a single study has ever supported the folk wisdom that homework teaches good work habits or develops positive character traits such as self-discipline, responsibility or independence
This I know is wrong because, again in my experience hard work is incredibly rewarding. It doesn't matter what I'm doing, whether I'm painting a house, going for a run, or focusing on programming, I feel much better about myself and act with more dignity. The most miserable people I have met have no purpose or drive.
> You can’t “reinforce” understanding the way you can reinforce a behavior
Hard disagree. First you have to mimic, only later you gain an understanding. I remember copying code over and over again, just following the same patterns and then one day it just clicks. It's happened to me in a lot of different domains.
This is a great high signal article, not because it's true, but its exactly false. Everything about it is exactly opposite of the truth. I wish we should push more homework and more arbitrary rote memorization. A lot of religious groups in the US get great benefits from studying their holy books, only to apply that focus and energy on commercial tasks with great success.
We should bring back memorization of poetry, or calligraphy. Because at least then children had some purpose in their studies. Today we purport to teach logic or reasoning that can't be referenced easily by google, but today's students are worse in these fields than people in the past. And at least long ago, children knew some poetry to boot.
No amount of homework or practice or whatever you want to call it has helped me learn something whose value I could not discern nor find fun. Same goes with lectures.
She had to be fired, that was clearly the only option. It also should have raised the question of how she got the job in the first place.
Yes I am convinced in my views. Am I uninterested in evidence to the contrary? It depends, what's the evidence?
If research comes up with a conclusion that significantly diverges from common sense I don't pay much attention to it unless it's been replicated and the experiments are well designed.
edit: removed my inflammatory comments
Do you just say "well, but practice work!" and ignore your results?
* A is in S
* For many B in S, P(B) is true
* Therefore P(A) is true
Step three in this chain doesn't logically follow from step two, so preemptively rejecting evidence against P(A) is irrational.
My wife is a music teacher and frequently objects to the phrase "practice makes perfect" because the kind of practice that you're doing has an enormous impact on the outcomes. Practice works to solidify behaviors, but ill-conceived practice will actually end up solidifying the wrong behaviors.
I think it's likely that it turns out that homework solidifies behaviors that are objectively a net loss for the individuals and society.
Good teachers are engaging, interesting, passionate, and you listen to them like they're good story tellers. Everything they say seems obvious and clear. Then you try to replicate what they tell you and you fail.
At home or at school, you need to get stuck on your own into the problem and try to solve it yourself, else you won't learn - is my hard-earned experience.
Perhaps you can do homework at school, so to speak. But the other truth about homework is that it takes a lot of attention from an adult. Kids young and older often get stuck, someone needs to help them, and there aren't enough teachers.
Maybe AI can help, but until then, I can't see a viable alternative.