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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,

by 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?
  - mjevans 8y ago
    The teacher doesn't have or doesn't know about pass/fail module scoring. A given sub-topic should be setup like this: * 90% of the points for the module possible if you get 100% on the test. * 60% of the points for the module possible as correctly doing the homework. * Allow for re-submission of the homework (with work shown) for up to a week AFTER the test //results//. The idea is to actually teach the subject, not to pass an arbitrary test on that subject. If you bomb the test, do all of the possible problem questions and recover most or all of the grade.
- quadrangle 8y ago
  I actually had an 8th grade teacher do a special conference with my parents after I complained strongly enough about the nonsense of homework, and she was gracious enough to give me an exception that I could be graded on tests alone. Other kids liked that homework points boosted their grades from mediocre test scores. But I aced all the tests and thus didn't have to do any homework. That was a strange one-time case though.
huffmsa 8y ago
Did the same thing is science. Would stub out the full report, look busy / work on something else, wait for a rule-follower to actually do the experiment, then apply so some stats modeling to their numbers and go about my business (usually working on sketches and improved designs for my CAD modeling class, which surprise, didn't have homework). I gave up on homework once I felt like I'd learned the topic. Killed me in the grades department, but I didn't care.
mjevans 8y ago
I usually carried around ALL my schoolbooks every day and did whatever homework assignments I could during the large sections of time that I didn't actually have to pay attention in any given class.
- jacobush 8y ago
  I carried them all because I could not remember which ones to bring for homework.
tomjakubowski 8y ago
> and my writing improved by writing final drafts first and then going back and adding errors to fake a first draft how did that improve your writing?
- mrob 8y ago
  It forced me to pay attention and get it right the first time, rather than waiting for the errors to be marked by the teacher.

by mrob 8y ago

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?
- mjevans 8y ago
  The teacher doesn't have or doesn't know about pass/fail module scoring. A given sub-topic should be setup like this: * 90% of the points for the module possible if you get 100% on the test. * 60% of the points for the module possible as correctly doing the homework. * Allow for re-submission of the homework (with work shown) for up to a week AFTER the test //results//. The idea is to actually teach the subject, not to pass an arbitrary test on that subject. If you bomb the test, do all of the possible problem questions and recover most or all of the grade.
quadrangle 8y ago
I actually had an 8th grade teacher do a special conference with my parents after I complained strongly enough about the nonsense of homework, and she was gracious enough to give me an exception that I could be graded on tests alone. Other kids liked that homework points boosted their grades from mediocre test scores. But I aced all the tests and thus didn't have to do any homework. That was a strange one-time case though.

huffmsa 8y ago

Did the same thing is science. Would stub out the full report, look busy / work on something else, wait for a rule-follower to actually do the experiment, then apply so some stats modeling to their numbers and go about my business (usually working on sketches and improved designs for my CAD modeling class, which surprise, didn't have homework). I gave up on homework once I felt like I'd learned the topic. Killed me in the grades department, but I didn't care.

mjevans 8y ago

I usually carried around ALL my schoolbooks every day and did whatever homework assignments I could during the large sections of time that I didn't actually have to pay attention in any given class.

jacobush 8y ago
I carried them all because I could not remember which ones to bring for homework.

tomjakubowski 8y ago

> and my writing improved by writing final drafts first and then going back and adding errors to fake a first draft how did that improve your writing?

mrob 8y ago
It forced me to pay attention and get it right the first time, rather than waiting for the errors to be marked by the teacher.