4 ms·

I'm curious... in elementary/middle school, what would the consequences be to instruct your kid to not do homework? Is homework a big enough part of their grade

• e40 11y ago
  I don't know about elementary school, in middle school it would mean failing and having to redo the grade. EDIT: and I forgot to mention, I'm just one half of his parents. The other half doesn't believe what I believe. I am in the vast minority in my city.
• throwaway280 11y ago
  In high school I did near 0 homework. I ended up with a 69 average which rounded up to a 70 allowing me to graduate. I ranked in the bottom 20 students in a class size of around 450 students. I was a few questions away from a perfect score on my SAT and had an app with over 2 million users so I still got into a good college. So it is doable and I would still encourage others to refuse to do homework.
  • ejk314 11y ago
    This is such a risky game to play. Yes, I took a similar approach to HS with similar results. But I remember competing with another student to see who could do the best in a class without opening their book. I passed. I didn't do as well as I could have, but I passed. He wasn't so fortunate. By the time he accepted that he was behind, it was too late for him to save his grade. What I'm saying is, students should be taught which homework to do, not to just to skip it.
    • xiaoma 11y ago
      Getting a bad grade doesn't sound nearly as big of a risk as wasting one's childhood and adolescence.
      • JackFr 11y ago
        'Wasting' in the eye of the beholder.
      • alistairSH 11y ago
        Except in large American suburbs, college admissions has become so competitive that you need a near-perfect GPA (along with decent extra-curricular activities) to get accepted to the decent state schools. This wasn't the case 15-20 years ago. When I started college (1995), good (but not perfect) grades, with a compelling life-story, were good enough. These days, there are simply too many students applying to college - the bar is much higher, even for schools that were previously considered fall-backs (JMU, GMU, VCU in my state).
        • riskable 11y ago
          This presumes college is the goal or that graduating college is actually important. Also, what does getting into a "good college" actually provide (in terms of education--forget social networking for a moment) above and beyond a "mediocre college"? Everyone would have us believe that "an education is what you make of it" yet the foundation of our society is apparently the opposite: The education is what makes you.
          • alistairSH 11y ago
            I don't disagree, but as long as getting into a good college is deemed important (rightly or wrongly), getting bad grades is risky.
• emidln 11y ago
  It depended on my teachers. I can only think of a couple classes where it was a major part of my grade from third grade on. I distinctly remember not going on field trips because I wouldn't have enough homework stickers on boards when I was in grade school. I only completed homework that I could do before I left school, and I never took anything home. I did this through college, including writing papers, speeches, etc in non-demanding times of each class. I went to a catholic school, so things like theology, art appreciation, and history could be memorized at the beginning of the year, and then you had those lectures to handle various science, math, and english homework. I never really minded doing math problems or completing worksheets (it was always fun to see how fast I could complete them, and I was always proud of being the first to finish on worksheets or tests throughout school), but I loathed the idea of spending any time outside of school working on school stuff. I finished middle school with an 87 average and high school with an 85 weighted average. This really fucked me in college. I never learned how to study, just how to memorize things from a quick read and complete the minimum to pass a class. When I went into an engineering college, this fell apart around the fourth semester, as I was getting slower and slower during tests. Since I didn't study and homework wasn't mandatory to pass (or so I thought), I never really learned material until I saw it on a test. I learned a lot on tests (and I like working under pressure), but as the difficulty of the material increased, I wasn't able to teach myself at test time. This devolved quickly, and I left college. tldr; homework's portion of your grade doesn't matter. Learning the habit to set aside time to work outside of what may appear to be required is the real skill. If you choose to encourage skipping homework, please impart this habit in some other way. It is not obvious to each individual, no matter how quickly they might grasp certain subjects.
  • alistairSH 11y ago
    In high school, this was roughly my experience as well. I did some homework during the school day, generally at the expense of listening to the teacher lecture. Or, I jammed in some last-minute homework over lunch (half-assed effort simply to get credit for having attempted something). It didn't impact my grades much. I was an A/B student, probably could have been straight-A if I wanted to be, but preferred playing sports, or just being a kid/teenager. I had enough honors/AP course-work and extra-curricular activities to make up for slightly less-than-stellar grades. I ended up at the top public university in my state, alongside many of the straight-A students. Could I have gone to Harvard or Stanford with better grades? Maybe. But I probably would have gone to UVA regardless because of cost.
• amyjess 11y ago
  Where I grew up, it was policy to unconditionally promote everyone through the 4th grade, and after that to start holding back failing kids. For late elementary and junior high, I don't remember whether or not homework was a large enough part of the grade to fail you if you took a 0 on all of it. In high school, I think homework was a small portion... something like 10-20% of the grade. So you could blow off homework if you aced everything else. You had to get at least a 70 average to pass (we didn't do D grades), so if homework was 20% then you had to get at least an 88 average on everything else in order to pass the class. And I think I have vague memories of homework being 30% in some of my high school classes, which means you'd have to perfectly ace everything if you wanted to take a 0 on all your homework. And there could be consequences for extracurriculars if you were taking low grades in your classes. I remember that in junior high, you could only go to the school dances if you had at least in 80 in all your classes, and in high school, if you were failing even one class you couldn't participate in any school sports.
  • jonsen 11y ago
    "holding back failing kids" Worth pondering this phrasing, I think.
• brewdad 11y ago
  The "homework" trend in my district that I abhor is the "reading log" requiring a certain number of minutes reading per night. My son loves to read when the mood strikes and might read for two or three hours straight. Other times he wants nothing to do with a book and will focus on some other activity instead. Scheduled reading saps the joy from the experience. Each time it comes up, I start with ignoring the log altogether. If the teacher is paying attention he or she quickly realizes that my son is a strong reader and doesn't need the log. If the teacher insists, then we just make something up, write it down and move on. I'm not sure what lesson my son is learning from this, but I'm sure it's not what the school is hoping for.
  • theandrewbailey 11y ago
    Compulsory reading in school is the top reason I seldom read a book in my spare time, even all these years later.
    • conceit 11y ago
      Could you explain how? What are the other reasons?
  • nkrisc 11y ago
    Your son is learning how to pick battles that are worth fighting and how to deal with irrationally difficult people.