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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

by 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.
bpizzi 11y ago
Understanding is a far more important part of learning in my opinion. You know where repetition is really important? In sport. Muscle memory really work that way, with a "conscious enabled" repetition. But for learning? Frankly you don't learn multiplication by repeating the tables, you really learn it by visualizing the repeated additions, thus by understanding it. That being said, homework can be smart if it promotes self-discovery of a specific domain.
- bobthechef 11y ago
  Of course understanding is the most important, but what you're presenting is a bit of a false dichotomy and a bit of a caricature of the understanding process. The way you get good at playing the piano is repetition. I'm not talking about brainless repetition. I'm talking about reinforcing, improving, and strengthening certain mental pathways which happen during repetition. Understanding on its own doesn't create good habits of mind. They're established through repetition, whether that means playing the same song on the piano 50 times or solving the same kind of problems 20 times. Each repetition can also reveal a bit more insight. Also, understanding is not the same as doing, which is a distinction you fail to make. Understanding arithmetic multiplication is one thing. Performing it is something else, hence the distinction between mathematics and calculation. Calculation is very useful in mathematics, it's what K-12 and most college math is, but it's only one part of what mathematics concerns itself with. A physicist may be good at doing physics, but he doesn't necessarily possess an understanding of physics per se until he begins reflecting on it. Furthermore, there are many things you must learn before you can understand them because they require that you known things in aggregate and from a certain mature perspective. You must know the "what" before you can explain the "why" or the "how". Furthermore, there is difference between comprehension and understanding. Most of what you know in the empirical order is comprehension of someone else's claims. You verify very little of those claims yourself because it is impossible for anyone to verify everything they learn. You take it on a practical kind of faith and trust that those who make these claims have done their jobs. If you end up working in the field, you may verify some of those claims, but in practice, science is a body of culture that is transmitted and only when anomalies begin to crop up do certain theories begin to undergo examination, verification, and reformulation by some scientists. There is something to be said about teaching subjects with more context and coherence and being guided along a logical progression. Frankly, most teachers are awful, and compared to the classically trained, are a miserably uneducated bunch with little pedagogical skill. That and the idea of universal education is very problematic because it doesn't take seriously differences in students and the families they come from.
RogerL 11y ago
I spent weeks and weeks doing the same thing over and over - multiply these 2 digit numbers together. Multiply these three digit numbers together. next week? 4 digit numbers!!! Some people needed to do that, some didn't. What is wrong with work until you get it, instead of having to do page after page of rote work when you have clearly demonstrated that you understand the material?
rayiner 11y ago
> 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. Repetition is important. But kids are already at school for 7-8 hours a day. If that is not enough time to engage in adequate repetition, the solution is not to shift work to home hours. It is: 1) Do less, by cutting less important subjects; 2) Do more with the time given, by cutting students who disrupt class.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Exactly. School is a much better environment for repetition anyway - you can oversee students doing the chores and explain things to them individually if they get stuck. It also seems better to use the "high-grade" time (home) for learning new things and "low-grade" time (school) for repetitive chores. If you have to assign something to them to do at home, stick to just making them read a book instead. Right now they have to do both, and there isn't enough time for that.
- pen2l 11y ago
  > 2) Do more with the time given, by cutting students who disrupt class. If you keep doing that for a long enough time, no more students will be left in the class. So I don't think this a practical solution that will yield better results than whatever we have going on today.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    Why do you think that? I'd wager impulsiveness and attention span are normally distributed, and there are gains to be had tracking those say more than 1 SD below the mean into classes specially equipped to handle them.
- cossatot 11y ago
  What do you view as non-essential? STEM? Arts? Social studies? Recess/PE? And how much time do you actually think is wasted on dealing with disruptive students? 10% of the day? 35%? To me, this sounds like a recipe for creating an upper class of uncreative, poorly-rounded conformists and a lower class of people who are undereducated and permanently pissed off at the society that fails to serve their needs. I think it's pretty unlikely that this would be a substantial improvement in modern American society or many others. Kids misbehave at school for a huge number of reasons (many of them socioeconomic but definitely not all), and it's not really the public school system's responsibility to fix that, but it is the school system's responsibility to give them an education so that they can properly integrate into society as an adult. Shoving the problematic students to the side exacerbates this. Bonus points if the education system can encourage more independence of thought and action, creative and analytical problem skills, and the tenacity and wisdom that come from actually having gotten some hard things done. A better system would be one that is more capable of demonstrating the value of education to the students (incentivizing them to learn, and making learning at any level more rewarding), as well as one that can accommodate a larger degree of student interests and learning styles. I don't really know how to do this without having more internships and so forth, which aren't necessarily feasible for younger children but may be for teens. Maybe somewhere in the world or at some point in history this has been practiced more?

by s_dev 11y ago

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.

bpizzi 11y ago

Understanding is a far more important part of learning in my opinion. You know where repetition is really important? In sport. Muscle memory really work that way, with a "conscious enabled" repetition. But for learning? Frankly you don't learn multiplication by repeating the tables, you really learn it by visualizing the repeated additions, thus by understanding it. That being said, homework can be smart if it promotes self-discovery of a specific domain.

bobthechef 11y ago
Of course understanding is the most important, but what you're presenting is a bit of a false dichotomy and a bit of a caricature of the understanding process. The way you get good at playing the piano is repetition. I'm not talking about brainless repetition. I'm talking about reinforcing, improving, and strengthening certain mental pathways which happen during repetition. Understanding on its own doesn't create good habits of mind. They're established through repetition, whether that means playing the same song on the piano 50 times or solving the same kind of problems 20 times. Each repetition can also reveal a bit more insight. Also, understanding is not the same as doing, which is a distinction you fail to make. Understanding arithmetic multiplication is one thing. Performing it is something else, hence the distinction between mathematics and calculation. Calculation is very useful in mathematics, it's what K-12 and most college math is, but it's only one part of what mathematics concerns itself with. A physicist may be good at doing physics, but he doesn't necessarily possess an understanding of physics per se until he begins reflecting on it. Furthermore, there are many things you must learn before you can understand them because they require that you known things in aggregate and from a certain mature perspective. You must know the "what" before you can explain the "why" or the "how". Furthermore, there is difference between comprehension and understanding. Most of what you know in the empirical order is comprehension of someone else's claims. You verify very little of those claims yourself because it is impossible for anyone to verify everything they learn. You take it on a practical kind of faith and trust that those who make these claims have done their jobs. If you end up working in the field, you may verify some of those claims, but in practice, science is a body of culture that is transmitted and only when anomalies begin to crop up do certain theories begin to undergo examination, verification, and reformulation by some scientists. There is something to be said about teaching subjects with more context and coherence and being guided along a logical progression. Frankly, most teachers are awful, and compared to the classically trained, are a miserably uneducated bunch with little pedagogical skill. That and the idea of universal education is very problematic because it doesn't take seriously differences in students and the families they come from.

RogerL 11y ago

I spent weeks and weeks doing the same thing over and over - multiply these 2 digit numbers together. Multiply these three digit numbers together. next week? 4 digit numbers!!! Some people needed to do that, some didn't. What is wrong with work until you get it, instead of having to do page after page of rote work when you have clearly demonstrated that you understand the material?

rayiner 11y ago

> 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. Repetition is important. But kids are already at school for 7-8 hours a day. If that is not enough time to engage in adequate repetition, the solution is not to shift work to home hours. It is: 1) Do less, by cutting less important subjects; 2) Do more with the time given, by cutting students who disrupt class.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Exactly. School is a much better environment for repetition anyway - you can oversee students doing the chores and explain things to them individually if they get stuck. It also seems better to use the "high-grade" time (home) for learning new things and "low-grade" time (school) for repetitive chores. If you have to assign something to them to do at home, stick to just making them read a book instead. Right now they have to do both, and there isn't enough time for that.
pen2l 11y ago
> 2) Do more with the time given, by cutting students who disrupt class. If you keep doing that for a long enough time, no more students will be left in the class. So I don't think this a practical solution that will yield better results than whatever we have going on today.
- rayiner 11y ago
  Why do you think that? I'd wager impulsiveness and attention span are normally distributed, and there are gains to be had tracking those say more than 1 SD below the mean into classes specially equipped to handle them.
cossatot 11y ago
What do you view as non-essential? STEM? Arts? Social studies? Recess/PE? And how much time do you actually think is wasted on dealing with disruptive students? 10% of the day? 35%? To me, this sounds like a recipe for creating an upper class of uncreative, poorly-rounded conformists and a lower class of people who are undereducated and permanently pissed off at the society that fails to serve their needs. I think it's pretty unlikely that this would be a substantial improvement in modern American society or many others. Kids misbehave at school for a huge number of reasons (many of them socioeconomic but definitely not all), and it's not really the public school system's responsibility to fix that, but it is the school system's responsibility to give them an education so that they can properly integrate into society as an adult. Shoving the problematic students to the side exacerbates this. Bonus points if the education system can encourage more independence of thought and action, creative and analytical problem skills, and the tenacity and wisdom that come from actually having gotten some hard things done. A better system would be one that is more capable of demonstrating the value of education to the students (incentivizing them to learn, and making learning at any level more rewarding), as well as one that can accommodate a larger degree of student interests and learning styles. I don't really know how to do this without having more internships and so forth, which aren't necessarily feasible for younger children but may be for teens. Maybe somewhere in the world or at some point in history this has been practiced more?