7 ms·

The Cult of Homework

61 points by longdefeat 8y ago

mac_was 8y ago
I always had lots of homework and every subject was the most important one, in the opiniin of the teacher. No surprise I was copying homework at school from other children because I forgot or didn’t have energy to do it. Hope my kids will have time to play and discover what is really interesting to them in contrary to me
- 0xdeadb00f 8y ago
  > every subject was the most important one, in the opiniin of the teacher. This is the biggest problem IMO. Teachers give kids an enormous amount of homework not realising (or realising, but not caring) that the kids have the same amount, if not more homework to do in all their other subjects. I recall HS physical education teachers were the worst offenders of thinking their class was the most important. In my HS we had one day a week practical (playing sport) and one day a week theory. In the practical lesson if you forgot your sports uniform (separate to normal, "formal" uniform) they would give you an instant lunchtime detention, making you to write lines, and still make you play sport. In theory class they acted as if your life depended on knowledge of the food groups for example. I'm not saying that what they taught us wasn't important, in fact the classes on STIs were quite important, but their attitude was unwarranted. And this is every single teacher: every single one had this attitude. I realise I'm going on a tangent but to top it all off sex education was an absolute joke. They separated us into gender and had a 30 minute presentation/talk. Completely pointless and it barely consisted of "you have a penis, you get erections" - they told us this at 14 years of age, so of course we knew that much already. No mention of the opposite sex, or actual intercourse. In contrast the girls got to learn about the male and female genitalia, I was told by one of my girl friends (read: friend that is a girl).
e40 8y ago
Uh, I grew up with no homework, or very little of it. Also, why can't we in the US learn from other cultures? One of the Scandinavian countries, with the highest happiness factor, doesn't have homework at all. They have schoolwork, done at school. Home is for fun and socialization and other things. It's too late for my son (a senior in HS), but I longed for that.
- JulianMorrison 8y ago
  Homework and spanking are both things that exist for reasons other than efficacy. They're cultural shibboleths seen as separating out the moral from the immoral.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    That's a bit of a stretch. They assign homework in college for good reason - seriously, you have a zero percent chance of learning anything math related just by listening to the lecture. The alternative would be to turn one-hour lectures in to eight-hour study sessions, and frankly it's nicer to do it at home. The same would apply in highschool if it wasn't so dystopian in its implementation of normal things.
    - curioussavage 8y ago
      Taking this at face value all it means to me is the lecture model for teaching math is crap. I’m glad all those “world class”. It doesn’t seem like there is any push to change the status quo either.
    - ams6110 8y ago
      There's a better balance though. In college you're not sitting in class from 8:00 to 3:00 every day. Half that would be a pretty busy day for actual classes. Or you load up on Mon-Wed-Fri and have no classes Tues-Thu.
      - whatshisface 8y ago
        Right, the real problem with highschool is that it twists every normal thing about college into a dystopian parody of itself. I don't know why.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - jdietrich 8y ago
mrob 8y ago
I absolutely hated homework and did everything possible to avoid it. It felt like a huge injustice that teachers could control what you did even outside school, when you were supposed to be free. My usual strategy was to do the homework in school. I don't recall any teacher noticing that I wasn't really taking notes, and was instead working on something unrelated. I did some homework at home but always spent as little time on it as possible. As well as distracting from lessons, this also meant the homework had to be rushed. This probably did teach me useful skills, e.g. I learned about error modeling from faking believable results in science classes (no time to take all the measurements), and my writing improved by writing final drafts first and then going back and adding errors to fake a first draft. My BASIC programming improved writing tools to automate math homework on a TI-86 calculator or on QBASIC at home. I saw all this as resistance against tyranny, and never considered that there might be some benefit to homework. Most of it was pointless busywork anyway, so the actual benefit if I'd taken it seriously would have been minimal. I support a healthy school/life balance, which means the abolition of homework.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  Couldn’t agree more. Homework was something I dreaded all the time. I skipped most of my homework whenever possible and my grades reflected it. For some odd reason I did well on tests, possibly by cramming the night before - a skill that did well by me through college. Doing well on tests got me by enough to get a 3.4 gpa through high school despite skipping most of my homework. When possible I did copy from other kids and sometimes did some assignments in class before the homework was to be turned in. I’d literally sit there writing things down in the 10 minutes before we were to hand in our assignments. My algebra teacher noticed this and just shook her head but seemed to be totally fine with it - I think deep down inside she knew there was too much homework.
  - huffmsa 8y ago
    If you're doing fine in the tests without homework, then the homework is unnecessary. My biggest issue with it was that you'd be graded on completeness for the 50 assigned examples. If I can learn it in 5-10 examples, why am I going to waste time on another 40 non-interesting problems?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
black-alert 8y ago
The paradox is that the school institution is actually very dumb and stupid where it should be the smartest thing out there.
- mjburgess 8y ago
  Its only a paradox if you think its primary function is education. Its primary function is the warehousing of children while adults work; and secondarily, filtering children according to ability for future work (ie., grading). The content of the "lessons" could be anything, so long as it (1) keeps them occupied; and (2) differentiates according to cognitive ability -- ie., grades. The primary and secondary functions almost totally constrain its auxiliary function of imparting useful skills to children -- which were it sincerely attempted would fundamentally undermine the school's ability to warehouse and grade them effectively.
  - hndamien 8y ago
    This is incredibly sad, but sounds plausible. Where can I read more about this thesis?
    - mrob 8y ago
      See the writings of John Taylor Gatto , e.g.: http://www.swaraj.org/multiversity/gatto_7lesson.htm http://www.swaraj.org/multiversity/gatto_7lesson.htm
    - mjburgess 8y ago
      For my thoughts on grading as merely filtering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics) For the content of the "lessons" being largely irrelevant, ask: what can anyone remember from their lessons at 14? The answer is random with respect to the individual: I cannot predict what you will know. Really only fragments of trivia were acquired. This is the opposite situation of skill acquisition: if you are a practising plumber/doctor/programming, I can predict what you will know. This test, predicting the knowledge/ability of a person who practices a skill, really defines successful education. What can you predict a person knows after high school? You might also look at "Discipline and Punish" or works to that effect to gain a socio-political perspective on the scheduling/routines/rituals of certain institutions. It is no accident that a school closely resembles a prison. That is its primary function: to limit the behaviour of children, to discipline them into conforming with the scheduling of working life, to occupy their time. When you are tutored (to play a piano, in mathematics, etc.) you are really acquiring a skill: to play a piano, etc. Contrast those two environments. Learning a skill requires an environment almost the opposite of a prison, it requires a patient and highly skilled tutor, and some attentive practice and engagement. (Infant/primary education is closer to tutoring than high school). Imagine high school not starting until 14 at which point you spent 4 years with tutors: at most classes of 5 with skilled mentors that guided you through skilled practice. Consider the social environment: how you'd interact with peers, your relationship to your mentor, the hours you'd keep, how much practice you'd get. Contrast this again with prison life within a school: the teacher is not a mentor, they are a master. An enemy largely. You and your peers are at war for attention and time.
aaron695 8y ago
100 years ago and beyond 14 years old married and worked 7 day a weeks. Now we cry because the might have to learn for a few hours, 5 days a week 40 weeks a year? As a adult an incredible important skill to live life is to self manage. How do kids learn this skill? How do they learn to work as a team without being babied? If parents are able to swap in a replacement, sure, if they are rich and have time and the skill set that might be possible, to bad for everyone else. (And for kids already massive responsibilities this is a separate issue that needs solving)
- GordonS 8y ago
  This smacks of "when I were a lad...". Just because people in past times had it worse than now, doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to improve things.
- tzs 8y ago
  > 100 years ago and beyond 14 years old married [...] That's largely a myth. Most women married in their early 20s, and men in their mid 20s. It was legal go get married much younger, but uncommon. https://www.infoplease.com/us/marital-status/median-age-first-marriage-1890-2010 https://www.infoplease.com/us/marital-status/median-age-firs... https://www.theclassroom.com/age-marriage-us-1800s-23174.html https://www.theclassroom.com/age-marriage-us-1800s-23174.htm...
heisenbit 8y ago
When I was going to school most days I was coming home at 1pm. I guess getting homework was fair and later at university I learned a lot by doing my "homework". Still I have to admit I skipped it a lot while in school. Instead I played with friends, build some projects and learned a lot of other things. I really get concerned about the "night" mentioned in the article. If school is the whole day saddling anything on top is wrong.
varjag 8y ago
There's always a fraction of kids for whom homework will never "work"; another group that has no need for it to achieve excellence. But for a huge number of kids the structured individual effort is essential to comprehend and master the subject.
- garmaine 8y ago
  But speaking as a parent, that's not generally what is assigned. It'd be a totally different story if my kids (or me, when I was their age) got assigned a handful of individually selected problems or assignments that helped them with the skills that child was specifically struggling on. But that's not what happens. The whole class as a group are assigned a frightening amount of busywork, the same for everyone, and it is a soul-crushing struggle to finish it.
  - varjag 8y ago
    I meant individual as working on your own, individually, not in a group or under guidance. Personalized homework would be great but is a bit unrealistic to expect on typical school budgets.
crispytx 8y ago
I had the most homework in Middle School and Graduate School. Not sure why exactly, just something strange that I noticed. Ended up dropping out of Grad School over the excessive busy work. Turned out to be an excellent decision!
crispytx 8y ago
I don't think the article mentioned this, but one of the big reasons behind all of this homework is the personality of the people dolling out the homework: Conscientious people can't stand not being busy. So they try to do everyone else a favor by loading them up with lots of busy work. The only problem with that is not everyone is conscientious and in constant need of busy work.
- huffmsa 8y ago
  Good point. The education system is populated by people who love education and probably loved homework when they were young. So they design and build for what they know.
kartan 8y ago
My mother did not work while me and my siblings were growing. The time that we spend doing homework was not the funniest one, but it showed how important is school work to us. She will help us with our school work in the same way that she will help to prepare us for tests. How can parents do that when work just burn them out? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19530479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19530479 And I am not in favor of forcing parents to stay at home. One of my mother more liberating moments was when she went back to work and got a salary for herself. So, I do not know how good or bad is homework for children. But, I think that is an extra-burden for their parents that can have a negative effect in the children family.
- sureaboutthis 8y ago
  > My mother did not work while me and my siblings were growing. ...my siblings and I... There's a homework assignment for you.
  - PakG1 8y ago
    I'd be interested in why this is such a sticking point and the language doesn't just evolve to accept this phrasing. American English seems to have accepted that you can end sentences with a preposition, or is that just my misconception? I believe Canada and the UK still doesn't like it, or is that my misconception too? But my point is why doesn't the language evolve along with informal societal usage?
    - garmaine 8y ago
      It does. Ignore the pandits.
    - geomark 8y ago
      I am no stickler for grammar but when you take out the other people you get "... while me was growing" and to the native Enlish ear that sounds pretty terrible compared to "... while I was growing".
      - 8y ago
dalbasal 8y ago
It's always difficult to remember one's mindset as a child. Likely as not, I'm projecting my adult ideas on memories. That said.. I hated homework. I also rarely did it. I scribbled something between classes, copied and came empty handed. The whole thing put a strain on my relationship with teachers and school and general. I always identified with being a bad student, and I suspect homework may have been the root cause. I really don't think homework worked for me. What I don't understand today, is why a 9 or 14-year old who spends 35 hours per week in a school needs homework? Is there really a need for an extra 3 or 10 hours per week? Surely, the quality of a kid's attention in the 7th or 9th-hour in a day isn't as good as their first. Is it that "everyone work on these math problems for 30m" isn't something that works in a classroom? Adults have been complaining about after-hours work, in the age of laptops and smartphones. Why is it good for kids? OTOH, exams and project work did work for me. With a Douglas Adams Crisis Inducer (a device that creates an artificial crisis situation of selectable severity, in order to sharpen the wits of the user), I could get 20 days of work into 1. I could sprint like a champ (and was proud of it) but I couldn't march. I'm still this way. I reckon schooling would have been a lot more effective for me personally if it was built around monthly exam or project watersheds, but I don't really know. At the risk of cliche, we probably need more tailored/flexible education systems. Dunno though... "Create a system that educates every person" is a hard task. IDK how you'd do that. Relative to a lot of things at this kind of scale, education is very effective.
- huffmsa 8y ago
  I think we'll see ML coming in as the tailoring solution in the near future.its relatively cheap to model and track and tweak on a per student basis with a software solution.
huffmsa 8y ago
"Sedentary, overworked office are jobs making us fat, stressing us out and killing us" But hey, we'd better have our children sitting for 8 hours a day at school and 1-3 hours at home, and 30-60 minutes on the bus and 2-3 hours at extracurriculars, and hey, 1-2 hours of physical activity a day, and they also need 8-10 hours of sleep, so use that NeuMath™ to figure out where that fits in. /Rant There's a reckoning coming for the US education system.
alexgmcm 8y ago
Homework is bad because for some kids it can be impossible - like what if you have to care for your younger siblings, or your home has no desk space or quiet place to work? To be honest extending the school day would probably make the most sense as it would help working parents as well if children left school at 5pm or 6pm.
- _AzMoo 8y ago
  My step-daughter's school library is open until 5pm and she goes there every day after school to do her homework. Do other schools not offer this?
  - huffmsa 8y ago
    How does she get home at 5pm? Does the school offer a bus service at that hour?
    - garmaine 8y ago
      Most neighborhood schools in non-rural districts don't offer school bus transport outside of special circumstances in the first place...
      - huffmsa 8y ago
        Well that's the point. The library being open until 5pm is great and dandy if the kids have a way to get home, but for a lot of families, it's school bus or bust.
    - williamdclt 8y ago
      Lessons finished at ~4:30pm when I was in school, it's the same pretty much everywhere in France and I would assume this isn't the only country like that. I'm not shocked at the idea of getting home at 5pm (we had no school bus service, just the regular public transportation which works well here)
      - 8y ago
maxaf 8y ago
My daughter is finishing 5th grade in a NYC public school. Homework is the bane of her existence: it’s given for weekdays and weekends alike, as well as for holidays. We can’t ditch it entirely because it affects grades, and perfect grades are a requirement to advance within the school system to middle and high schools that provide something approaching an education. So we’ve developed coping strategies. Most subjects are taught using “workbooks” composed according to the state’s “common core” standards. These workbooks have class- and homework sections. There’s also an answer key, which my daughter discovered using a google search. She prints it out at home, takes it to school, and uses it to fill in homework while no one’s looking. For subjects that impose homework for which no quick fix exists, I’ve taught her to do the bare minimum needed to get by, or have simply done the work myself. I’d rather see my child read a book or go outside than sit around doing busywork. All this has led to an interesting relationship between me and my daughter: she has grown to appreciate my cheeky, playful “fuck the system”, “stick it to the man” attitude. She’s the most cynical 11 year old you’ll meet, but she also operates under the assumption that her da is always on her side. It’s important to know throughout life who your true allies are. Ask my kid, and she’ll gladly explain to you that the US public school is a preparatory form of the prison system. School practices and policies are largely punitive towards students. Admissions criteria in nicer school take attendance into account: students who are prevented by societal or physical reasons from making it to school are penalized and barred from future achievement by a heartless computer system. Likewise, any action that isn’t directly in response to a teacher’s instruction is met with disciplinary letters in the file, which further erode a student’s chances at gaining entry into schools that are more about education than compulsory warehousing of kids away from streets, where they would certainly be using/selling drugs, snatching purses, urinating all over subway stops, and painting graffiti. Fuck the government, man. It’ll never do anything right. Best we can do is cope and thumb our noses at it.
- otoburb 8y ago
  >>My daughter is finishing 5th grade in a NYC public school. Homework is the bane of her existence: it’s given for weekdays and weekends alike, as well as for holidays. We can’t ditch it entirely because it affects grades, and perfect grades are a requirement to advance within the school system to middle and high schools that provide something approaching an education. This doesn't detract from the rest of your post, but if your daughter is in 5th grade then I presume she already took the 4th grade ELA & Math tests which (I thought?) were the [main|only] academic factor used in NYC (good) public middle school rubrics. If the above is true, then could she slack off a bit in grade 5 especially if it means skipping some homework? Caveat: I know grade 5 is still critical she's trying to get into Hunter Middle/High School, but I'm really curious to know if good NYC middle schools use grade 5 ELA/Math scores and subject grades.
naveen99 8y ago
Some of my teachers had a policy that homework grades could only help you. If you got a higher grade on the final exam, homework couldn’t bring it down. Of course some people like doing homework: like Donald Knuth. Or I guess people who like writing unit tests.
dukoid 8y ago
Everybody seems to hate homework here, but for me it seemed like a reasonable way to repeat and "deepen" the things I had learned at school -- and to verify that we had properly understood them. Homework also seemed useful as a preparation for tests, getting some routine in solving equations, writing -- whatever. Total homework typically wouldn't exceed 30mins - 1h for me IIRC. Of course when a significant part of the afternoon is spent at school (this was uncommon at my school time in Germany), "homework" should be done there.
- Wowfunhappy 8y ago
  I don't think there are all that many people here who'd want homework to be eliminated entirely, just for there to be less of it. Personally, I think homework is fine but should take 1 hour a day at most in high school, and half an hour before that.
- sfRattan 8y ago
  Having lived in Germany as an 11th grade exchange student, the rather minimal homework and the schooldays that ended in the early afternoon (early enough to eat lunch with guest family) were great. It's important to consider that 30min to 1hr is a typical homework load for a single subject in many places in America, that American students get out of school at around 3pm, and that American students have extracurricular activities (sports, theater, etc) which run another 1-2hrs after that. Those rather insane circumstances create the hatred of homework. It's also important to ask, "verify for whom?" If the answer is verify for yourself, I don't think even the homework I did in Germany was much other than busywork. Trying to apply your own knowledge to some real world situation or problem is a much better self-verification. If the answer is verify for the central administration, that's just a strong statement about your culture/society's values with respect to the individual and the administrators/managers of large groups. Note that I'll freely admit: American homework mostly serves the central administration, and that's a statement about our societal and cultural values at present. (It did seem to be even more oriented toward administrative convenience in Germany, albeit with a lower volume of homework overall, even in a Gymnasium.)
throwaway66666 8y ago
I grew up in Greece, where we go to a second school (private classes), after the main (public) school. And they both assign you homework. We are talking, 7 hours of public school + 3 hours of 'private' school (we call it 'the after school'). So 10 hours of being physically present at some kind of school and then homework from both of them. So expect 2-4 hours of homework added on top of that. 10-14 hours school days. Yay! You might be wondering why the "after school" exists. See, you need to attend the public school (or an accredited really expensive private one) in order to advance through the education system. But because public school suck you go to the second school in order to really learn. As to how much the public schools were I grew up suck, we are talking kids having sex and filming it during school time - and the teachers dealt with this by banning cellphones to the school. No cameras, no recordings!! When I think back, I honestly feel rage with how much wrong the system was. Anyway, of course this meant you had to be physically present at some kind of school location for 10 hours per day, and then spend 2-4 hours doing homework in order to keep up. I remember people defending that system to death, making fun of america's homeschooled children and finland's relaxed attitude and how we are the "real heroes" of the education system. Ugh. PS. I just remembered. We even had homework to "religion class". Oh yeah, we learned about the life of jesus mostly, in theory we had to learn about other religions too, but it was mostly all about the J. So, of course we were given homework even to that too. Ugh ugh ugh. Not a religious school btw, a regular public one. Complete with "why didn't you learn the creed of faith, are you not a chistian?" attitude from the teacher towards 8 year olds that didn't study. What a shithole.
- geomark 8y ago
  That terrible routine is repeated many places in the world. Here in Thailand students do a full day at low quality public school and then a few more hours of tutoring. What is particular foul is that many public school teachers are very corrupt. They withold important teaching at school and then tell students they need to go to their paid tutoring center in order to do well on the tests. It is pretty awful.
golemiprague 8y ago
It should be the other way around, work should be done during school hours where the teachers just help the students and learning should be done partially at home from youtube courses and partially in class. There is no advantage to teaching in school when there are so much better teachers and courses on the internet when you can rewind if you don't understand something and control the pace. We don't work at home as adults, why should we work at home as children?
quadrangle 8y ago
I really hate the concept that parents push for their kids to experience whatever they felt was normal in their upbringing. What about taking even the tiniest bit of critical thinking and conclude that you should want for your kids whatever turned out to be valuable in your upbringing and not want whatever you reflect on as negative or wasteful‽ I have low tolerance for B.S. myself, and I basically did whatever homework was really meaningful and skipped whatever was busy-work. My own school grades reflected primarily the arbitrariness of which teachers put higher weighting on tedious homework. Homework is the source of my main memory of academic injustice: valedictorian regularly didn't finish homework whenever she knew she would get away with lying about it (holding up some half-done or even different-subject paper and getting an "okay" from teacher just going around checking everyone). Meanwhile, my honesty that I sometimes did it and other times not brought me careful scrutiny so that I was marked down for every little unfinished item in each assignment.
siedes 8y ago
Considering that most people on HN are self-starters who had to learn things on their own whether by necessity or just because they preferred it that way, it may not be so obvious that a good number of people are not able to have that kind of freedom. Whether for good or bad, these types of people must be coerced toward doing things for their own good, like with punishment for not doing the homework, otherwise they would choose to do nothing and fail. Even with homework and all the punishments, there's kids who still can't be made to work. But if the teachers gave them homework...you can't say they didn't try you know. If there was no homework, I'm sure a number of parents would be complaining how the schools didn't do anything for their children. And parents generally pay taxes, that funds these schools. Perhaps there should be a way for kids to opt-out of homework provided they have the grades and work ethic? And then this would incentivize other kids to try harder as well if they want that privilege.
drewg123 8y ago
I knew something was wrong when my son was assigned homework in KINDERGARTEN. He had to do some totally absurd assignment, designed to be "fun" by the teacher. It was something like describing part of a Curious George story on a home-made kite. I was livid. Our son could not even read at that point, nor did he have the motor skills to assemble a hand made kite at the age of 5. The assignment was clearly aimed at satisfying the parents who thought that homework should start early. We put up with that public school for another year, then we got him into a private school that did not believe in homework in elementary school. Our lives were much less stressful, and he spent more time playing outside when he changed schools in 2nd grade.

61 points by longdefeat 8y ago

I always had lots of homework and every subject was the most important one, in the opiniin of the teacher. No surprise I was copying homework at school from other children because I forgot or didn’t have energy to do it. Hope my kids will have time to play and discover what is really interesting to them in contrary to me

0xdeadb00f 8y ago
> every subject was the most important one, in the opiniin of the teacher. This is the biggest problem IMO. Teachers give kids an enormous amount of homework not realising (or realising, but not caring) that the kids have the same amount, if not more homework to do in all their other subjects. I recall HS physical education teachers were the worst offenders of thinking their class was the most important. In my HS we had one day a week practical (playing sport) and one day a week theory. In the practical lesson if you forgot your sports uniform (separate to normal, "formal" uniform) they would give you an instant lunchtime detention, making you to write lines, and still make you play sport. In theory class they acted as if your life depended on knowledge of the food groups for example. I'm not saying that what they taught us wasn't important, in fact the classes on STIs were quite important, but their attitude was unwarranted. And this is every single teacher: every single one had this attitude. I realise I'm going on a tangent but to top it all off sex education was an absolute joke. They separated us into gender and had a 30 minute presentation/talk. Completely pointless and it barely consisted of "you have a penis, you get erections" - they told us this at 14 years of age, so of course we knew that much already. No mention of the opposite sex, or actual intercourse. In contrast the girls got to learn about the male and female genitalia, I was told by one of my girl friends (read: friend that is a girl).

e40 8y ago

Uh, I grew up with no homework, or very little of it. Also, why can't we in the US learn from other cultures? One of the Scandinavian countries, with the highest happiness factor, doesn't have homework at all. They have schoolwork, done at school. Home is for fun and socialization and other things. It's too late for my son (a senior in HS), but I longed for that.

JulianMorrison 8y ago
Homework and spanking are both things that exist for reasons other than efficacy. They're cultural shibboleths seen as separating out the moral from the immoral.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  That's a bit of a stretch. They assign homework in college for good reason - seriously, you have a zero percent chance of learning anything math related just by listening to the lecture. The alternative would be to turn one-hour lectures in to eight-hour study sessions, and frankly it's nicer to do it at home. The same would apply in highschool if it wasn't so dystopian in its implementation of normal things.
  - curioussavage 8y ago
    Taking this at face value all it means to me is the lecture model for teaching math is crap. I’m glad all those “world class”. It doesn’t seem like there is any push to change the status quo either.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    There's a better balance though. In college you're not sitting in class from 8:00 to 3:00 every day. Half that would be a pretty busy day for actual classes. Or you load up on Mon-Wed-Fri and have no classes Tues-Thu.
    - whatshisface 8y ago
      Right, the real problem with highschool is that it twists every normal thing about college into a dystopian parody of itself. I don't know why.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jdietrich 8y ago

mrob 8y ago

I absolutely hated homework and did everything possible to avoid it. It felt like a huge injustice that teachers could control what you did even outside school, when you were supposed to be free. My usual strategy was to do the homework in school. I don't recall any teacher noticing that I wasn't really taking notes, and was instead working on something unrelated. I did some homework at home but always spent as little time on it as possible. As well as distracting from lessons, this also meant the homework had to be rushed. This probably did teach me useful skills, e.g. I learned about error modeling from faking believable results in science classes (no time to take all the measurements), and my writing improved by writing final drafts first and then going back and adding errors to fake a first draft. My BASIC programming improved writing tools to automate math homework on a TI-86 calculator or on QBASIC at home. I saw all this as resistance against tyranny, and never considered that there might be some benefit to homework. Most of it was pointless busywork anyway, so the actual benefit if I'd taken it seriously would have been minimal. I support a healthy school/life balance, which means the abolition of homework.

mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
Couldn’t agree more. Homework was something I dreaded all the time. I skipped most of my homework whenever possible and my grades reflected it. For some odd reason I did well on tests, possibly by cramming the night before - a skill that did well by me through college. Doing well on tests got me by enough to get a 3.4 gpa through high school despite skipping most of my homework. When possible I did copy from other kids and sometimes did some assignments in class before the homework was to be turned in. I’d literally sit there writing things down in the 10 minutes before we were to hand in our assignments. My algebra teacher noticed this and just shook her head but seemed to be totally fine with it - I think deep down inside she knew there was too much homework.
- huffmsa 8y ago
  If you're doing fine in the tests without homework, then the homework is unnecessary. My biggest issue with it was that you'd be graded on completeness for the 50 assigned examples. If I can learn it in 5-10 examples, why am I going to waste time on another 40 non-interesting problems?

deleted 8y ago

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black-alert 8y ago

The paradox is that the school institution is actually very dumb and stupid where it should be the smartest thing out there.

mjburgess 8y ago
Its only a paradox if you think its primary function is education. Its primary function is the warehousing of children while adults work; and secondarily, filtering children according to ability for future work (ie., grading). The content of the "lessons" could be anything, so long as it (1) keeps them occupied; and (2) differentiates according to cognitive ability -- ie., grades. The primary and secondary functions almost totally constrain its auxiliary function of imparting useful skills to children -- which were it sincerely attempted would fundamentally undermine the school's ability to warehouse and grade them effectively.
- hndamien 8y ago
  This is incredibly sad, but sounds plausible. Where can I read more about this thesis?
  - mrob 8y ago
    See the writings of John Taylor Gatto , e.g.: http://www.swaraj.org/multiversity/gatto_7lesson.htm http://www.swaraj.org/multiversity/gatto_7lesson.htm
  - mjburgess 8y ago
    For my thoughts on grading as merely filtering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics) For the content of the "lessons" being largely irrelevant, ask: what can anyone remember from their lessons at 14? The answer is random with respect to the individual: I cannot predict what you will know. Really only fragments of trivia were acquired. This is the opposite situation of skill acquisition: if you are a practising plumber/doctor/programming, I can predict what you will know. This test, predicting the knowledge/ability of a person who practices a skill, really defines successful education. What can you predict a person knows after high school? You might also look at "Discipline and Punish" or works to that effect to gain a socio-political perspective on the scheduling/routines/rituals of certain institutions. It is no accident that a school closely resembles a prison. That is its primary function: to limit the behaviour of children, to discipline them into conforming with the scheduling of working life, to occupy their time. When you are tutored (to play a piano, in mathematics, etc.) you are really acquiring a skill: to play a piano, etc. Contrast those two environments. Learning a skill requires an environment almost the opposite of a prison, it requires a patient and highly skilled tutor, and some attentive practice and engagement. (Infant/primary education is closer to tutoring than high school). Imagine high school not starting until 14 at which point you spent 4 years with tutors: at most classes of 5 with skilled mentors that guided you through skilled practice. Consider the social environment: how you'd interact with peers, your relationship to your mentor, the hours you'd keep, how much practice you'd get. Contrast this again with prison life within a school: the teacher is not a mentor, they are a master. An enemy largely. You and your peers are at war for attention and time.

aaron695 8y ago

100 years ago and beyond 14 years old married and worked 7 day a weeks. Now we cry because the might have to learn for a few hours, 5 days a week 40 weeks a year? As a adult an incredible important skill to live life is to self manage. How do kids learn this skill? How do they learn to work as a team without being babied? If parents are able to swap in a replacement, sure, if they are rich and have time and the skill set that might be possible, to bad for everyone else. (And for kids already massive responsibilities this is a separate issue that needs solving)

GordonS 8y ago
This smacks of "when I were a lad...". Just because people in past times had it worse than now, doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to improve things.
tzs 8y ago
> 100 years ago and beyond 14 years old married [...] That's largely a myth. Most women married in their early 20s, and men in their mid 20s. It was legal go get married much younger, but uncommon. https://www.infoplease.com/us/marital-status/median-age-first-marriage-1890-2010 https://www.infoplease.com/us/marital-status/median-age-firs... https://www.theclassroom.com/age-marriage-us-1800s-23174.html https://www.theclassroom.com/age-marriage-us-1800s-23174.htm...

heisenbit 8y ago

When I was going to school most days I was coming home at 1pm. I guess getting homework was fair and later at university I learned a lot by doing my "homework". Still I have to admit I skipped it a lot while in school. Instead I played with friends, build some projects and learned a lot of other things. I really get concerned about the "night" mentioned in the article. If school is the whole day saddling anything on top is wrong.

varjag 8y ago

There's always a fraction of kids for whom homework will never "work"; another group that has no need for it to achieve excellence. But for a huge number of kids the structured individual effort is essential to comprehend and master the subject.

garmaine 8y ago
But speaking as a parent, that's not generally what is assigned. It'd be a totally different story if my kids (or me, when I was their age) got assigned a handful of individually selected problems or assignments that helped them with the skills that child was specifically struggling on. But that's not what happens. The whole class as a group are assigned a frightening amount of busywork, the same for everyone, and it is a soul-crushing struggle to finish it.
- varjag 8y ago
  I meant individual as working on your own, individually, not in a group or under guidance. Personalized homework would be great but is a bit unrealistic to expect on typical school budgets.

crispytx 8y ago

I had the most homework in Middle School and Graduate School. Not sure why exactly, just something strange that I noticed. Ended up dropping out of Grad School over the excessive busy work. Turned out to be an excellent decision!

crispytx 8y ago

I don't think the article mentioned this, but one of the big reasons behind all of this homework is the personality of the people dolling out the homework: Conscientious people can't stand not being busy. So they try to do everyone else a favor by loading them up with lots of busy work. The only problem with that is not everyone is conscientious and in constant need of busy work.

huffmsa 8y ago
Good point. The education system is populated by people who love education and probably loved homework when they were young. So they design and build for what they know.

kartan 8y ago

My mother did not work while me and my siblings were growing. The time that we spend doing homework was not the funniest one, but it showed how important is school work to us. She will help us with our school work in the same way that she will help to prepare us for tests. How can parents do that when work just burn them out? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19530479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19530479 And I am not in favor of forcing parents to stay at home. One of my mother more liberating moments was when she went back to work and got a salary for herself. So, I do not know how good or bad is homework for children. But, I think that is an extra-burden for their parents that can have a negative effect in the children family.

sureaboutthis 8y ago
> My mother did not work while me and my siblings were growing. ...my siblings and I... There's a homework assignment for you.
- PakG1 8y ago
  I'd be interested in why this is such a sticking point and the language doesn't just evolve to accept this phrasing. American English seems to have accepted that you can end sentences with a preposition, or is that just my misconception? I believe Canada and the UK still doesn't like it, or is that my misconception too? But my point is why doesn't the language evolve along with informal societal usage?
  - garmaine 8y ago
    It does. Ignore the pandits.
  - geomark 8y ago
    I am no stickler for grammar but when you take out the other people you get "... while me was growing" and to the native Enlish ear that sounds pretty terrible compared to "... while I was growing".
    - 8y ago

dalbasal 8y ago

It's always difficult to remember one's mindset as a child. Likely as not, I'm projecting my adult ideas on memories. That said.. I hated homework. I also rarely did it. I scribbled something between classes, copied and came empty handed. The whole thing put a strain on my relationship with teachers and school and general. I always identified with being a bad student, and I suspect homework may have been the root cause. I really don't think homework worked for me. What I don't understand today, is why a 9 or 14-year old who spends 35 hours per week in a school needs homework? Is there really a need for an extra 3 or 10 hours per week? Surely, the quality of a kid's attention in the 7th or 9th-hour in a day isn't as good as their first. Is it that "everyone work on these math problems for 30m" isn't something that works in a classroom? Adults have been complaining about after-hours work, in the age of laptops and smartphones. Why is it good for kids? OTOH, exams and project work did work for me. With a Douglas Adams Crisis Inducer (a device that creates an artificial crisis situation of selectable severity, in order to sharpen the wits of the user), I could get 20 days of work into 1. I could sprint like a champ (and was proud of it) but I couldn't march. I'm still this way. I reckon schooling would have been a lot more effective for me personally if it was built around monthly exam or project watersheds, but I don't really know. At the risk of cliche, we probably need more tailored/flexible education systems. Dunno though... "Create a system that educates every person" is a hard task. IDK how you'd do that. Relative to a lot of things at this kind of scale, education is very effective.

huffmsa 8y ago
I think we'll see ML coming in as the tailoring solution in the near future.its relatively cheap to model and track and tweak on a per student basis with a software solution.

huffmsa 8y ago

"Sedentary, overworked office are jobs making us fat, stressing us out and killing us" But hey, we'd better have our children sitting for 8 hours a day at school and 1-3 hours at home, and 30-60 minutes on the bus and 2-3 hours at extracurriculars, and hey, 1-2 hours of physical activity a day, and they also need 8-10 hours of sleep, so use that NeuMath™ to figure out where that fits in. /Rant There's a reckoning coming for the US education system.

alexgmcm 8y ago

Homework is bad because for some kids it can be impossible - like what if you have to care for your younger siblings, or your home has no desk space or quiet place to work? To be honest extending the school day would probably make the most sense as it would help working parents as well if children left school at 5pm or 6pm.

_AzMoo 8y ago
My step-daughter's school library is open until 5pm and she goes there every day after school to do her homework. Do other schools not offer this?
- huffmsa 8y ago
  How does she get home at 5pm? Does the school offer a bus service at that hour?
  - garmaine 8y ago
    Most neighborhood schools in non-rural districts don't offer school bus transport outside of special circumstances in the first place...
    - huffmsa 8y ago
      Well that's the point. The library being open until 5pm is great and dandy if the kids have a way to get home, but for a lot of families, it's school bus or bust.
  - williamdclt 8y ago
    Lessons finished at ~4:30pm when I was in school, it's the same pretty much everywhere in France and I would assume this isn't the only country like that. I'm not shocked at the idea of getting home at 5pm (we had no school bus service, just the regular public transportation which works well here)
    - 8y ago

maxaf 8y ago

My daughter is finishing 5th grade in a NYC public school. Homework is the bane of her existence: it’s given for weekdays and weekends alike, as well as for holidays. We can’t ditch it entirely because it affects grades, and perfect grades are a requirement to advance within the school system to middle and high schools that provide something approaching an education. So we’ve developed coping strategies. Most subjects are taught using “workbooks” composed according to the state’s “common core” standards. These workbooks have class- and homework sections. There’s also an answer key, which my daughter discovered using a google search. She prints it out at home, takes it to school, and uses it to fill in homework while no one’s looking. For subjects that impose homework for which no quick fix exists, I’ve taught her to do the bare minimum needed to get by, or have simply done the work myself. I’d rather see my child read a book or go outside than sit around doing busywork. All this has led to an interesting relationship between me and my daughter: she has grown to appreciate my cheeky, playful “fuck the system”, “stick it to the man” attitude. She’s the most cynical 11 year old you’ll meet, but she also operates under the assumption that her da is always on her side. It’s important to know throughout life who your true allies are. Ask my kid, and she’ll gladly explain to you that the US public school is a preparatory form of the prison system. School practices and policies are largely punitive towards students. Admissions criteria in nicer school take attendance into account: students who are prevented by societal or physical reasons from making it to school are penalized and barred from future achievement by a heartless computer system. Likewise, any action that isn’t directly in response to a teacher’s instruction is met with disciplinary letters in the file, which further erode a student’s chances at gaining entry into schools that are more about education than compulsory warehousing of kids away from streets, where they would certainly be using/selling drugs, snatching purses, urinating all over subway stops, and painting graffiti. Fuck the government, man. It’ll never do anything right. Best we can do is cope and thumb our noses at it.

otoburb 8y ago
>>My daughter is finishing 5th grade in a NYC public school. Homework is the bane of her existence: it’s given for weekdays and weekends alike, as well as for holidays. We can’t ditch it entirely because it affects grades, and perfect grades are a requirement to advance within the school system to middle and high schools that provide something approaching an education. This doesn't detract from the rest of your post, but if your daughter is in 5th grade then I presume she already took the 4th grade ELA & Math tests which (I thought?) were the [main|only] academic factor used in NYC (good) public middle school rubrics. If the above is true, then could she slack off a bit in grade 5 especially if it means skipping some homework? Caveat: I know grade 5 is still critical she's trying to get into Hunter Middle/High School, but I'm really curious to know if good NYC middle schools use grade 5 ELA/Math scores and subject grades.

naveen99 8y ago

Some of my teachers had a policy that homework grades could only help you. If you got a higher grade on the final exam, homework couldn’t bring it down. Of course some people like doing homework: like Donald Knuth. Or I guess people who like writing unit tests.

dukoid 8y ago

Everybody seems to hate homework here, but for me it seemed like a reasonable way to repeat and "deepen" the things I had learned at school -- and to verify that we had properly understood them. Homework also seemed useful as a preparation for tests, getting some routine in solving equations, writing -- whatever. Total homework typically wouldn't exceed 30mins - 1h for me IIRC. Of course when a significant part of the afternoon is spent at school (this was uncommon at my school time in Germany), "homework" should be done there.

Wowfunhappy 8y ago
I don't think there are all that many people here who'd want homework to be eliminated entirely, just for there to be less of it. Personally, I think homework is fine but should take 1 hour a day at most in high school, and half an hour before that.
sfRattan 8y ago
Having lived in Germany as an 11th grade exchange student, the rather minimal homework and the schooldays that ended in the early afternoon (early enough to eat lunch with guest family) were great. It's important to consider that 30min to 1hr is a typical homework load for a single subject in many places in America, that American students get out of school at around 3pm, and that American students have extracurricular activities (sports, theater, etc) which run another 1-2hrs after that. Those rather insane circumstances create the hatred of homework. It's also important to ask, "verify for whom?" If the answer is verify for yourself, I don't think even the homework I did in Germany was much other than busywork. Trying to apply your own knowledge to some real world situation or problem is a much better self-verification. If the answer is verify for the central administration, that's just a strong statement about your culture/society's values with respect to the individual and the administrators/managers of large groups. Note that I'll freely admit: American homework mostly serves the central administration, and that's a statement about our societal and cultural values at present. (It did seem to be even more oriented toward administrative convenience in Germany, albeit with a lower volume of homework overall, even in a Gymnasium.)

throwaway66666 8y ago

I grew up in Greece, where we go to a second school (private classes), after the main (public) school. And they both assign you homework. We are talking, 7 hours of public school + 3 hours of 'private' school (we call it 'the after school'). So 10 hours of being physically present at some kind of school and then homework from both of them. So expect 2-4 hours of homework added on top of that. 10-14 hours school days. Yay! You might be wondering why the "after school" exists. See, you need to attend the public school (or an accredited really expensive private one) in order to advance through the education system. But because public school suck you go to the second school in order to really learn. As to how much the public schools were I grew up suck, we are talking kids having sex and filming it during school time - and the teachers dealt with this by banning cellphones to the school. No cameras, no recordings!! When I think back, I honestly feel rage with how much wrong the system was. Anyway, of course this meant you had to be physically present at some kind of school location for 10 hours per day, and then spend 2-4 hours doing homework in order to keep up. I remember people defending that system to death, making fun of america's homeschooled children and finland's relaxed attitude and how we are the "real heroes" of the education system. Ugh. PS. I just remembered. We even had homework to "religion class". Oh yeah, we learned about the life of jesus mostly, in theory we had to learn about other religions too, but it was mostly all about the J. So, of course we were given homework even to that too. Ugh ugh ugh. Not a religious school btw, a regular public one. Complete with "why didn't you learn the creed of faith, are you not a chistian?" attitude from the teacher towards 8 year olds that didn't study. What a shithole.

geomark 8y ago
That terrible routine is repeated many places in the world. Here in Thailand students do a full day at low quality public school and then a few more hours of tutoring. What is particular foul is that many public school teachers are very corrupt. They withold important teaching at school and then tell students they need to go to their paid tutoring center in order to do well on the tests. It is pretty awful.

golemiprague 8y ago

It should be the other way around, work should be done during school hours where the teachers just help the students and learning should be done partially at home from youtube courses and partially in class. There is no advantage to teaching in school when there are so much better teachers and courses on the internet when you can rewind if you don't understand something and control the pace. We don't work at home as adults, why should we work at home as children?

quadrangle 8y ago

I really hate the concept that parents push for their kids to experience whatever they felt was normal in their upbringing. What about taking even the tiniest bit of critical thinking and conclude that you should want for your kids whatever turned out to be valuable in your upbringing and not want whatever you reflect on as negative or wasteful‽ I have low tolerance for B.S. myself, and I basically did whatever homework was really meaningful and skipped whatever was busy-work. My own school grades reflected primarily the arbitrariness of which teachers put higher weighting on tedious homework. Homework is the source of my main memory of academic injustice: valedictorian regularly didn't finish homework whenever she knew she would get away with lying about it (holding up some half-done or even different-subject paper and getting an "okay" from teacher just going around checking everyone). Meanwhile, my honesty that I sometimes did it and other times not brought me careful scrutiny so that I was marked down for every little unfinished item in each assignment.

siedes 8y ago

Considering that most people on HN are self-starters who had to learn things on their own whether by necessity or just because they preferred it that way, it may not be so obvious that a good number of people are not able to have that kind of freedom. Whether for good or bad, these types of people must be coerced toward doing things for their own good, like with punishment for not doing the homework, otherwise they would choose to do nothing and fail. Even with homework and all the punishments, there's kids who still can't be made to work. But if the teachers gave them homework...you can't say they didn't try you know. If there was no homework, I'm sure a number of parents would be complaining how the schools didn't do anything for their children. And parents generally pay taxes, that funds these schools. Perhaps there should be a way for kids to opt-out of homework provided they have the grades and work ethic? And then this would incentivize other kids to try harder as well if they want that privilege.

drewg123 8y ago

I knew something was wrong when my son was assigned homework in KINDERGARTEN. He had to do some totally absurd assignment, designed to be "fun" by the teacher. It was something like describing part of a Curious George story on a home-made kite. I was livid. Our son could not even read at that point, nor did he have the motor skills to assemble a hand made kite at the age of 5. The assignment was clearly aimed at satisfying the parents who thought that homework should start early. We put up with that public school for another year, then we got him into a private school that did not believe in homework in elementary school. Our lives were much less stressful, and he spent more time playing outside when he changed schools in 2nd grade.