7 ms·

More importantly, why are parents doing their kids homework anyway? They're never gonna learn - how - to learn, if the answer is always to ask mum and dad.

by adwf 11y ago

learnstats2 11y ago
Probably the most effective way to learn anything is to ask someone who knows and is willing to teach you.
- adwf 11y ago
  Those people are called teachers. Generally somewhat expert in their topic. Usually more so than the parents. If a kids approach to homework is to try everything and leave the answers he can't do for mum and dad, he'll be crippled in his learning. The point of homework isn't to get 100%, it's to learn.
  - calibraxis 11y ago
    I tutor people -- I use "tutor" to emphasize individual or small group instruction -- and the idea of mainstream teaching is horrific. I fully agree with the poster learnstats2. For one thing (and this is probably most damning), classes are highly regulated by school administrators. Managers who try to hire obedient teachers. The few teachers who try to slip through are nevertheless horrifically constrainted. Children want to learn; it's a deep human motivation that has to be beaten out of people. The adults I teach have to be scrubbed of so many educational scars and bad habits. If only I had time right now to go into depth of all the antipatterns, the symptoms.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - sethammons 11y ago
      I think I hear a blog post coming.... ;)
  - qntty 11y ago
    As mentioned in the article, even teachers can pass on their math anxiety to students (especially female elementary school teachers to their female students). http://hpl.uchicago.edu/sites/hpl.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/PNAS_2010.pdf http://hpl.uchicago.edu/sites/hpl.uchicago.edu/files/uploads...
    - jschwartzi 11y ago
      This reminds me of a story one of the math professors at the university I attended told once. He said he was standing in a class teaching the Math for Elementary Educators class, when someone asked him why they needed to know 8th grade mathematics. Apparently the elementary school teachers in my state are qualified to teach up to 8th grade, and so he needed to make sure they actually knew 8th grade math.
    - sethammons 11y ago
      This rings so true for me. My 4th grade teacher took two weeks of "teaching" fractions. Afterwards, she breathed a sigh of relief and said we can now go back to decimals. I avoided "getting" fractions until I was in 2nd semester calculus in high school. I would change all fractions to decimals, solve the problems, and convert the decimals to fractions (since the teacher wanted answers in fractions). Crazy, right? When the lightbulb finally went on, suddenly everything got a lot easier just working with fractions. I took this so much to heart that my daughter was taught exclusively with fractions at first, and only later moved on to decimals. Believe it or not, she actually had trouble grasping decimals at first due to her fraction exposure.
  - sanderjd 11y ago
    There is a huge difference between parents working on homework with their young children like a tutor would, and a child "trying everything and leaving the answers they can't do for mum and dad". Most parents who are actually interested in the education of their children are likely to do their best to fall into the first camp, though the article discusses that it's harder for parents with less expertise to act as tutors rather than answer-givers.
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    Wouldn't it be great if the selection procedures we have for children teachers didn't make it almost certain that they suck at Math?
stdbrouw 11y ago
The trouble with traditional homework is that you have to wait a long time before you get feedback, at the earliest it'll be the next day. This makes it hard to correct misunderstandings. So parents helping with homework is a great idea, not because pupils shouldn't learn to take charge of their own learning, but because homework kind of sucks as a tool for learning.
- jerf 11y ago
  "at the earliest it'll be the next day." One of the interesting hard mathematical results to come out of generalized learning theory, as used by machine learning, is that there is a fundamental relationship between the speed of feedback and the ability to learn. It is not merely a matter of "willpower" to learn from temporally distant feedback, it is fundamentally, irreducibly harder, and there's no way to "correct" it because it's not even wrong. Homework grading (note the emphasis) as a learning mechanism has such a delay that its learning rate is effectively zero. And what feedback you get is often not even very much beyond WRONG!, which is not exactly rich with information itself. Homework is only useful for the feedback and learning you get while doing it, and for the ability to assess the student because we live & die on assessments, give us a direct choice between assessment and learning and the system will generally prefer the former. So, I won't say "homework is useless" but we could save everybody a lot of time if we only checked that it was done and spot-graded it for assessment, rather than making the teacher laboriously, yet nearly entirely uselessly, grade stacks of homework.

More importantly, why are parents doing their kids homework anyway? They're never gonna learn - how - to learn, if the answer is always to ask mum and dad.

by adwf 11y ago

More importantly, why are parents doing their kids homework anyway? They're never gonna learn - how - to learn, if the answer is always to ask mum and dad.

learnstats2 11y ago

Probably the most effective way to learn anything is to ask someone who knows and is willing to teach you.

adwf 11y ago
Those people are called teachers. Generally somewhat expert in their topic. Usually more so than the parents. If a kids approach to homework is to try everything and leave the answers he can't do for mum and dad, he'll be crippled in his learning. The point of homework isn't to get 100%, it's to learn.
- calibraxis 11y ago
  I tutor people -- I use "tutor" to emphasize individual or small group instruction -- and the idea of mainstream teaching is horrific. I fully agree with the poster learnstats2. For one thing (and this is probably most damning), classes are highly regulated by school administrators. Managers who try to hire obedient teachers. The few teachers who try to slip through are nevertheless horrifically constrainted. Children want to learn; it's a deep human motivation that has to be beaten out of people. The adults I teach have to be scrubbed of so many educational scars and bad habits. If only I had time right now to go into depth of all the antipatterns, the symptoms.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - sethammons 11y ago
    I think I hear a blog post coming.... ;)
- qntty 11y ago
  As mentioned in the article, even teachers can pass on their math anxiety to students (especially female elementary school teachers to their female students). http://hpl.uchicago.edu/sites/hpl.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/PNAS_2010.pdf http://hpl.uchicago.edu/sites/hpl.uchicago.edu/files/uploads...
  - jschwartzi 11y ago
    This reminds me of a story one of the math professors at the university I attended told once. He said he was standing in a class teaching the Math for Elementary Educators class, when someone asked him why they needed to know 8th grade mathematics. Apparently the elementary school teachers in my state are qualified to teach up to 8th grade, and so he needed to make sure they actually knew 8th grade math.
  - sethammons 11y ago
    This rings so true for me. My 4th grade teacher took two weeks of "teaching" fractions. Afterwards, she breathed a sigh of relief and said we can now go back to decimals. I avoided "getting" fractions until I was in 2nd semester calculus in high school. I would change all fractions to decimals, solve the problems, and convert the decimals to fractions (since the teacher wanted answers in fractions). Crazy, right? When the lightbulb finally went on, suddenly everything got a lot easier just working with fractions. I took this so much to heart that my daughter was taught exclusively with fractions at first, and only later moved on to decimals. Believe it or not, she actually had trouble grasping decimals at first due to her fraction exposure.
- sanderjd 11y ago
  There is a huge difference between parents working on homework with their young children like a tutor would, and a child "trying everything and leaving the answers they can't do for mum and dad". Most parents who are actually interested in the education of their children are likely to do their best to fall into the first camp, though the article discusses that it's harder for parents with less expertise to act as tutors rather than answer-givers.
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  Wouldn't it be great if the selection procedures we have for children teachers didn't make it almost certain that they suck at Math?

stdbrouw 11y ago

The trouble with traditional homework is that you have to wait a long time before you get feedback, at the earliest it'll be the next day. This makes it hard to correct misunderstandings. So parents helping with homework is a great idea, not because pupils shouldn't learn to take charge of their own learning, but because homework kind of sucks as a tool for learning.

jerf 11y ago
"at the earliest it'll be the next day." One of the interesting hard mathematical results to come out of generalized learning theory, as used by machine learning, is that there is a fundamental relationship between the speed of feedback and the ability to learn. It is not merely a matter of "willpower" to learn from temporally distant feedback, it is fundamentally, irreducibly harder, and there's no way to "correct" it because it's not even wrong. Homework grading (note the emphasis) as a learning mechanism has such a delay that its learning rate is effectively zero. And what feedback you get is often not even very much beyond WRONG!, which is not exactly rich with information itself. Homework is only useful for the feedback and learning you get while doing it, and for the ability to assess the student because we live & die on assessments, give us a direct choice between assessment and learning and the system will generally prefer the former. So, I won't say "homework is useless" but we could save everybody a lot of time if we only checked that it was done and spot-graded it for assessment, rather than making the teacher laboriously, yet nearly entirely uselessly, grade stacks of homework.