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I am in total agreement that children have better things to do than homework. Such as learning how to play and interact with others. Learn how to deal with ad

I am in total agreement that children have better things to do than homework. Such as learning how to play and interact with others. Learn how to deal with adversity. How to deal with the sadness of a break up or not being included. Learning how to lead a team via Counter Strike or WOW. Learning computers by writing a mod for a favorite computer game. These things taught me far more than a worksheet on a very idealized version of the events that led to the American Revolution. And on a different note the idea of a lecture in class followed by homework at home seems silly to me. Lectures are easy to scale so a child can learn from the best of the best in the world(With explanatory graphics). Tailored tutoring to the issues a child is having while trying to solve problems and understand a concept is very hard to scale. It seems to me it would make more sense to watch lectures outside of the classroom and do homework in the classroom.

CodeCube 11y ago
This is precisely the "flipped classroom" concept that Khan Academy has been championing for a while now: https://youtu.be/vmtgz95ZBbE?t=32s https://youtu.be/vmtgz95ZBbE?t=32s
jbob2000 11y ago
My significant other is a teacher and entered the workforce 2 years ago. I now firmly believe that the education system is the way it is because of the teachers, and not in a good way. The few who got into it because "they love children and teaching" are so massively outweighed by those who took it because there was nothing else. It's created a system that is center around Dear Teacher, a frustrated individual upset that they couldn't get the overseas marketing job or field marine biology study position they spent $40,000 trying to attain. Lecture with assigned homework happens because it's easy. Read a script, send home to mommy and daddy to do the hard stuff. Any attempt to change and you get a strike. There's a fucking strike every year now in Ontario.
- Mz 11y ago
  Bonus: A lot of elementary school teachers are there because they can't cut the math for some program they wanted and their college shunted them off into early education. These are, unfortunately, very often women. As a mathy woman who homeshooled my sons and spent considerable time getting my oldest over the math phobia school instilled in him, I harbor the opinion that sending math flunkies in droves to teach our children is part of why math has such a reputation of fear and loathing. They not only cannot teach it, they pass on their fear and loathing to the students. Extra bonus: Since they are overwhelmingly female, I think this contributes to keeping the stereotype alive and well that girls are bad at math. We give our kids sucky math education and also model that "All the women you know and admire are terrible at it and hate this shit." Go, us.
  - wvenable 11y ago
    Based on my son and daughter's math education I agree with this. It's not all entirely on the individual teachers; the program (created by groups of other teachers) is heavily based around non-algorithmic math. I really liked math in school but I absolutely hate the math my children have to do.
  - mmmBacon 11y ago
    As a person with math degrees, I cannot agree with this more. I'm fighting this battle at home now with my first grader. There is way too much focus on the mechanics of grinding out arithmetic and way too little in teaching kids how to think about numbers and mathematical operations. You can't teach kids how to think about math when the focus is on mechanical mathematical operation. When I work with him on his homework I have to undo a lot of stuff before we can make progress. Then he goes to school and they undo all the stuff we did at home. Rinse, repeat, it can really drive you insane. Furthermore, he's already terrified about getting the wrong answer. He's so worried about doing it wrong that he is afraid to think. When he thinks he does just fine.
    - Jtsummers 11y ago
      > There is way too much focus on the mechanics of grinding out arithmetic and way too little in teaching kids how to think about numbers and mathematical operations. As I posted to a friend on Facebook: arithmetic : Math :: spelling : English It's a critical component, but it's not the entirety of the subject. But we drill, drill, drill it, and when people have trouble with it they say they're "bad at math". I know plenty of mathematicians (also have a math degree) that were horrible at arithmetic, but mathematics (whether for the particular person this meant some field of algebra or geometry or topology or whatever) itself was easy for them. I tried to help my last girlfriend out with this. She is a teacher and a severe mathphobic person. It was incredibly frustrating, because she did get higher concepts when they were separate from numbers, but introduce numbers and her mind would shutdown. This attitude will be passed on to her (future) children and her students if she's not careful.
- netcan 11y ago
  Assigning blame for a system that sucks is tricky. That kind of narrating is often just an outlet for bias, frustrations and such. In reality the way things are has a long history, with interlocking effects and counter effects. Teachers being unhappy with being teacher is a problem. It's partly because teaching is often an available profession, mostly due to how many we need. There are other things to blame too: Education is bureaucratic and regimented, this makes teacher dislike the job. It's the legacy of reactions to failures in the past, an attempt to make sure that schools can't fail kids. Class sizes are way too big, often. A class of 15 9 year olds can learn more in 4 hours than a class 30 9 year olds can learn more in 8. But, we need babysitting. Teachers don't have high pay or a respected place in our society. Etc. Etc. The reality is that it's hard to do this right. It's easy to blame. Even if you're right, it's not useful.
  - jbob2000 11y ago
    No, it's important to assign blame here. Teachers welcome praise with open arms, but the minute we criticize them, "oh you know, the issues are complex, it's not my fault". They are the sum of the education system, it is wholly represented by the person leading the classroom. Just like we blame a president for a shitty economy, so too must the teachers carry the blame for a shitty classroom.
    - phil21 11y ago
      I'm not so certain. I've been in many educational environments ranging from home school to private college prep high school, to suburban high school, to inner city high school, to the ghetto school in the area. There were good and bad teachers in all of those. However, the good teachers may as well have not had existed in the inner city/ghetto schools. Their talents were 100% wasted, and those classrooms would have been far better served with a police officer in front of the classroom who was enabled to boot the dysfunctional future criminals from the classroom. With those students in class, there was no point in even calling it school. Call it daycare, or juvie, or whatever you like - learning wasn't much of the process though. I find it hard to blame teachers when their job is primarily daycare, and they have zero tools available to them to deal with poorly performing and disruptive students who have no business being in the classroom. tldr; Almost all the US education problems can directly be tied back to the parents. Full stop. This goes for my private schooling as well. The college prep school I went to was probably more diverse than the inner city school - the only difference was the self-selection of the students and parents who attended. They also taught with about half the funds. That said, there are tons of horrible teachers too. The problems go far deeper though, and until you solve the parenting problem you may as well shut the public school system down in many areas. No amount of epic-level teachers will be able to get anything done in those environments.
- shardinator 11y ago
  I think the real problem is that "marketing job" and "field marine biology study" are preferred to teaching. Finding a way to make teaching a job people want, and keep wanting after doing it for a while, is the key.
aerovistae 11y ago
I think that's a really brilliant idea.
s_dev 11y ago
Repetition is an important part of learning. Expecting all children to understand what was taught in class is unrealistic. This is why homework is assigned - so the student may take their time to review the parts they themselves didn't fully grasp in class. The time spent doing homework varies from child to child and this is important - kids who need longer to accomplish the same task will have that time because they are at home. Arguably you could cover everything again the next day but thats hardly a graceful solution and doesn't cater to that variance of time needed for homework across different children as contact hours are very limited as it is. Homework also offers the opportunity for parents to engage with kids in their formal education - this helps the parents as well as kids.
- InclinedPlane 11y ago
  Repetition, when overdone, leads to an absence of learning. And repetition in the context of rote memorization is often actively harmful to learning. The biggest thing missing in modern public education is synthesis, because there's no time for it, but that's how learning truly sinks in and becomes valuable. Otherwise it's all just disconnected trivia.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Yup. Repetition and rote memorization are useful tools, but should be viewed as putting data in L1 cache, and just that. Memorizing the multiplication table or solving equations ad nauseam gives huge speedups which can not only improve learning harder subjects but even enable the whole new sets of knowledge and skills that are unfeasible to learn otherwise. But turning entire learning experience into cramming stuff into cache memory? That's a recipe for disaster, it leads only for data to be quickly purged, and the time being wasted on re-entering it instead of letting the brain to generate connections and new insights in the main memory. The result is basically what you described.
- dingaling 11y ago
  > kids who need longer to accomplish the same task will have that time because they are at home. But they only have that time if they sacrifice other activities such as clubs, sports and hobbies... or sleep. School already absorbs seven hours of a child's day. In my opinion that is already excessive without the additional burden of homework.
lordCarbonFiber 11y ago
The issue with the idea of the flipped classroom is I feel the proponents only examine the "happy path" as you might call it in QA. Assuming parents are invested in their child's education and enforce the consumption of the lecture materials and preparation for class the next day the system sounds great. The current model of education in this country is designed (for better or worse) around the opposite paradigm. Mandatory schooling dominated by lecture allows the establishing of a minimum level of exposure. And then homework with penalty provides the negative feedback to ensure (as best possible) the minimum of parental involvement. You still need a home life that treats education as a priority to get excellent results but the floor is capped as best we can. You see this thinking in almost every metric by which we grade schools. % failing to pass test, % drop out, etc are all built on the foundation of measuring the efficacy of the achievement floor.
tonydiv 11y ago
I completely agree! Please look for my other comment above (control-F "tonydiv"). You will be pleasantly surprised about what we're working on here at Lingoland!
compStudent 11y ago
As far as dealing with adversity, I would argue that the impossible amounts of homework give that element of hard ship to students.

CodeCube 11y ago

This is precisely the "flipped classroom" concept that Khan Academy has been championing for a while now: https://youtu.be/vmtgz95ZBbE?t=32s https://youtu.be/vmtgz95ZBbE?t=32s

jbob2000 11y ago

My significant other is a teacher and entered the workforce 2 years ago. I now firmly believe that the education system is the way it is because of the teachers, and not in a good way. The few who got into it because "they love children and teaching" are so massively outweighed by those who took it because there was nothing else. It's created a system that is center around Dear Teacher, a frustrated individual upset that they couldn't get the overseas marketing job or field marine biology study position they spent $40,000 trying to attain. Lecture with assigned homework happens because it's easy. Read a script, send home to mommy and daddy to do the hard stuff. Any attempt to change and you get a strike. There's a fucking strike every year now in Ontario.

Mz 11y ago
Bonus: A lot of elementary school teachers are there because they can't cut the math for some program they wanted and their college shunted them off into early education. These are, unfortunately, very often women. As a mathy woman who homeshooled my sons and spent considerable time getting my oldest over the math phobia school instilled in him, I harbor the opinion that sending math flunkies in droves to teach our children is part of why math has such a reputation of fear and loathing. They not only cannot teach it, they pass on their fear and loathing to the students. Extra bonus: Since they are overwhelmingly female, I think this contributes to keeping the stereotype alive and well that girls are bad at math. We give our kids sucky math education and also model that "All the women you know and admire are terrible at it and hate this shit." Go, us.
- wvenable 11y ago
  Based on my son and daughter's math education I agree with this. It's not all entirely on the individual teachers; the program (created by groups of other teachers) is heavily based around non-algorithmic math. I really liked math in school but I absolutely hate the math my children have to do.
- mmmBacon 11y ago
  As a person with math degrees, I cannot agree with this more. I'm fighting this battle at home now with my first grader. There is way too much focus on the mechanics of grinding out arithmetic and way too little in teaching kids how to think about numbers and mathematical operations. You can't teach kids how to think about math when the focus is on mechanical mathematical operation. When I work with him on his homework I have to undo a lot of stuff before we can make progress. Then he goes to school and they undo all the stuff we did at home. Rinse, repeat, it can really drive you insane. Furthermore, he's already terrified about getting the wrong answer. He's so worried about doing it wrong that he is afraid to think. When he thinks he does just fine.
  - Jtsummers 11y ago
    > There is way too much focus on the mechanics of grinding out arithmetic and way too little in teaching kids how to think about numbers and mathematical operations. As I posted to a friend on Facebook: arithmetic : Math :: spelling : English It's a critical component, but it's not the entirety of the subject. But we drill, drill, drill it, and when people have trouble with it they say they're "bad at math". I know plenty of mathematicians (also have a math degree) that were horrible at arithmetic, but mathematics (whether for the particular person this meant some field of algebra or geometry or topology or whatever) itself was easy for them. I tried to help my last girlfriend out with this. She is a teacher and a severe mathphobic person. It was incredibly frustrating, because she did get higher concepts when they were separate from numbers, but introduce numbers and her mind would shutdown. This attitude will be passed on to her (future) children and her students if she's not careful.
netcan 11y ago
Assigning blame for a system that sucks is tricky. That kind of narrating is often just an outlet for bias, frustrations and such. In reality the way things are has a long history, with interlocking effects and counter effects. Teachers being unhappy with being teacher is a problem. It's partly because teaching is often an available profession, mostly due to how many we need. There are other things to blame too: Education is bureaucratic and regimented, this makes teacher dislike the job. It's the legacy of reactions to failures in the past, an attempt to make sure that schools can't fail kids. Class sizes are way too big, often. A class of 15 9 year olds can learn more in 4 hours than a class 30 9 year olds can learn more in 8. But, we need babysitting. Teachers don't have high pay or a respected place in our society. Etc. Etc. The reality is that it's hard to do this right. It's easy to blame. Even if you're right, it's not useful.
- jbob2000 11y ago
  No, it's important to assign blame here. Teachers welcome praise with open arms, but the minute we criticize them, "oh you know, the issues are complex, it's not my fault". They are the sum of the education system, it is wholly represented by the person leading the classroom. Just like we blame a president for a shitty economy, so too must the teachers carry the blame for a shitty classroom.
  - phil21 11y ago
    I'm not so certain. I've been in many educational environments ranging from home school to private college prep high school, to suburban high school, to inner city high school, to the ghetto school in the area. There were good and bad teachers in all of those. However, the good teachers may as well have not had existed in the inner city/ghetto schools. Their talents were 100% wasted, and those classrooms would have been far better served with a police officer in front of the classroom who was enabled to boot the dysfunctional future criminals from the classroom. With those students in class, there was no point in even calling it school. Call it daycare, or juvie, or whatever you like - learning wasn't much of the process though. I find it hard to blame teachers when their job is primarily daycare, and they have zero tools available to them to deal with poorly performing and disruptive students who have no business being in the classroom. tldr; Almost all the US education problems can directly be tied back to the parents. Full stop. This goes for my private schooling as well. The college prep school I went to was probably more diverse than the inner city school - the only difference was the self-selection of the students and parents who attended. They also taught with about half the funds. That said, there are tons of horrible teachers too. The problems go far deeper though, and until you solve the parenting problem you may as well shut the public school system down in many areas. No amount of epic-level teachers will be able to get anything done in those environments.
shardinator 11y ago
I think the real problem is that "marketing job" and "field marine biology study" are preferred to teaching. Finding a way to make teaching a job people want, and keep wanting after doing it for a while, is the key.

aerovistae 11y ago

I think that's a really brilliant idea.

s_dev 11y ago

Repetition is an important part of learning. Expecting all children to understand what was taught in class is unrealistic. This is why homework is assigned - so the student may take their time to review the parts they themselves didn't fully grasp in class. The time spent doing homework varies from child to child and this is important - kids who need longer to accomplish the same task will have that time because they are at home. Arguably you could cover everything again the next day but thats hardly a graceful solution and doesn't cater to that variance of time needed for homework across different children as contact hours are very limited as it is. Homework also offers the opportunity for parents to engage with kids in their formal education - this helps the parents as well as kids.

InclinedPlane 11y ago
Repetition, when overdone, leads to an absence of learning. And repetition in the context of rote memorization is often actively harmful to learning. The biggest thing missing in modern public education is synthesis, because there's no time for it, but that's how learning truly sinks in and becomes valuable. Otherwise it's all just disconnected trivia.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Yup. Repetition and rote memorization are useful tools, but should be viewed as putting data in L1 cache, and just that. Memorizing the multiplication table or solving equations ad nauseam gives huge speedups which can not only improve learning harder subjects but even enable the whole new sets of knowledge and skills that are unfeasible to learn otherwise. But turning entire learning experience into cramming stuff into cache memory? That's a recipe for disaster, it leads only for data to be quickly purged, and the time being wasted on re-entering it instead of letting the brain to generate connections and new insights in the main memory. The result is basically what you described.
dingaling 11y ago
> kids who need longer to accomplish the same task will have that time because they are at home. But they only have that time if they sacrifice other activities such as clubs, sports and hobbies... or sleep. School already absorbs seven hours of a child's day. In my opinion that is already excessive without the additional burden of homework.

lordCarbonFiber 11y ago

The issue with the idea of the flipped classroom is I feel the proponents only examine the "happy path" as you might call it in QA. Assuming parents are invested in their child's education and enforce the consumption of the lecture materials and preparation for class the next day the system sounds great. The current model of education in this country is designed (for better or worse) around the opposite paradigm. Mandatory schooling dominated by lecture allows the establishing of a minimum level of exposure. And then homework with penalty provides the negative feedback to ensure (as best possible) the minimum of parental involvement. You still need a home life that treats education as a priority to get excellent results but the floor is capped as best we can. You see this thinking in almost every metric by which we grade schools. % failing to pass test, % drop out, etc are all built on the foundation of measuring the efficacy of the achievement floor.

tonydiv 11y ago

I completely agree! Please look for my other comment above (control-F "tonydiv"). You will be pleasantly surprised about what we're working on here at Lingoland!

compStudent 11y ago

As far as dealing with adversity, I would argue that the impossible amounts of homework give that element of hard ship to students.