7 ms·

When homework is busywork (2009)

19 points by EndXA 7y ago

cripti7 7y ago
More and more people every year turn into freelance mode of work. This is an inevitable trend, and I'm talking not only about Uber drivers. Programmers, writers, journalists, designers, many people who need a computer and a cup of coffee. Read this PDF from Zerocracy, they nailed it there: http://papers.zold.io/freelance-deck.pdf http://papers.zold.io/freelance-deck.pdf
johnzim 7y ago
This is the perfect opportunity to test some anecdata of mine: I’m hard pressed to think of a more anti-homework audience than programmers. An absurd percentage of programmers I met hated homework and did their best to do as little of it as possible. Is my grouping just weird or are most programmers deeply homework averse?
- yen223 7y ago
  It will be hard to find any group of people who enjoyed doing homework.
- Bootwizard 7y ago
  I mean everyone hates homework, but I was a straight A student all throughout gradeschool. I did what I was told, but in college I learned that the professors aren't always doing what is in your best interest. I think it really depends how early children and young adults encounter and take notice of this.
- jbob2000 7y ago
  Can confirm, hated homework. I understood things too quickly so I never had push myself to learn, thus homework felt like a chore or a petty punishment. This burned me later in life because “remembering what the teacher said yesterday” and “using other test questions to answer the current question” only gets you so far.
  - hdctambien 7y ago
    I write my tests specifically so previous test questions do not answer future test questions on the same test. It's interesting how many "A students" get B's and C's on the first few tests I give...
- Baeocystin 7y ago
  We're waste-of-intellectual-time averse. Autodidacts like to learn things for the pleasure of learning, and there were very few homework assignments over the years (at least in the public US schools I attended) that were even worth the ditto paper they were printed on.
- nitwit005 7y ago
  I largely hated the teacher's inability to plan it? In theory, my school limited them to assigning us 30 minutes of homework a night (which was still a 3 hour max with 6 classes). That failed to account for a tendency to all assign things at the same time. Given the normal pacing of things, essays and tests tended to appear at the same time. If we had been employed, there would have been a panic at the spikes of overtime.
- MaulingMonkey 7y ago
  I certainly hated and skipped as much homework I could while maintaining my grades as a kid. My math homework? Unengaging, rote, and on the face of it pointless busywork. No meaningful reward or payoff. And this is coming from someone who ate up the concepts. I have early memories of looking up cos/sin in an encyclopedia of my own violition to figure out how to draw circles in QBASIC before I had ready access to the internet. As an adult, I've rebuilt my knowledge of matrix math, and built new mental models enabling me to spot incorrect values and understand where it's gone wrong in 3d rendering for my gamedev carreer. I'll engage with math curios on youtube. I don't hate homework quite as much as an Adult... then again, I'm not forced to do any ;). Homework is, at least in theory, a means of practicing and solidifying skills you're learning. For some skills, I'd like to motivate myself to do that a lot more! But unlike the satisfying click when a concept falls into place, homework can just grind without payoff other than a slight increase in speed for a skill I don't yet actually use for anything... either because I don't have an immediate use case for the skill, or because I'm completely unsatisfied with the end result at my current skill level. This can be addressed somewhat with extrinisic rewards, gamification...
- tallanvor 7y ago
  Nobody likes homework. Programmers are not any more anti-homework than anyone else. Personally, I don' think homework is a bad thing, although students shouldn't be having to spend 2 or 3 hours a night doing it. Repetition is an important part of learning, and having some of it done as homework isn't a bad thing if it means class time can be spent in different modes of learning.
  - diamondo25 7y ago
    And for a kid growing up, those nights are required for development of the brain by resting. Delaying the night rest with "learning" would be ineffective and might even hurt development. I instead put my time at midnight programming and such, as most people on the IRC channel were online at that time for me...
- bitwize 7y ago
  I find that those who lie at that critical intersection of high intelligence and extreme laziness tend to get into programming. Perhaps it's the appeal of machines that can do your homework for you. Anyway, that's why they end up making webshit for Facebook and not building rockets, curing cancer, or solving tricky economic problems for the President. Those jobs go to people with the sitzfleisch to do their homework.
- Traubenfuchs 7y ago
  _Everyone_ hates homework. Would a lot of people/children do homework if not coerced into it by teachers, parents and the threat of "losing at life"? No.
choeger 7y ago
The thing is: homework can be a rather powerful tool for learning. Students works on their own. In their own environment and at their own pace. They are usually done hours to days after the lesson was teached, so it gets better remembered. They provide an easy interface for parents to help their kids. They are not bound on the time limits of school lessons. And finally they take some churn (and boredom for faster students) out of the classroom. All in all, it would be criminally stupid to outright ban homework. If the problem is workload, which is just too understandable, then an agreed upon effort limit seems reasonable. But that would require teachers to coordinate.
- aeternum 7y ago
  Why not simply set aside some school time for students to work on their own? In highschool, I was lucky enough to have a study hall in the library. It was great because students had freedom to sit where they wanted, browse the books, use computers, do homework, spread materials out on a table when needed. Some students have too many distractions at home and it may be difficult to travel to a conducive environment. Time to socialize and take part in extracurriculars is also important. The time-management and self-learning skills can be strengthened without the home part.
  - dagw 7y ago
    I think we need to separate which age groups we're talking about. What works best for a 16 year old might not be the best solution for an 8 year old. As a parent of a younger child I think homework is a good thing because it makes it easy for me to track my daughters progress in the different subjects and gives a natural venue for me to sit with her and help her with whatever she might need help with.
- mlyle 7y ago
  The thing is, studies have failed to show a benefit for homework as we presently do it for elementary school students; and some even have shown harm. If it was useful, it would show a benefit. (Of course, there reaches a point where independent practice and work is clearly useful, but perhaps it isn't in young children. My theory is, the 1/10 times where the kid is set back, frustrated, or practicing something completely wrong, which is almost inevitable at one point or another, outweighs the 9/10 times where some slightly useful practice is obtained). I do think that things like Khan Academy may turn this around and be able to show efficacy. A kid can do work on something that gives him the basic instructions and immediate feedback, and the teacher can concentrate energy on coaching and individualized instruction. But still, until it's shown: one should be skeptical, IMO.
Rainymood 7y ago
>Vatterott questioned the quantity and the quality of assignments. If 10 math problems could demonstrate a child’s grasp of a concept, why assign 50, she asked? The solution, she said, was not to do away with homework but to clarify the reasons for assigning it. Because repetition is important, especially in math. You don't learn something by doing it once, you must do it over and over again.
- username90 7y ago
  Is it really? I think repetition is dangerous, it might give you the impression that you understand something when in fact you only learned how to follow a specific formula. What you need in math is lots of unique problems to solve, not repetition of the same equation with different constants.
  - dagw 7y ago
    it might give you the impression that you understand something when in fact you only learned how to follow a specific formula. Learning to follow the specific formula by rote is a good thing. For example you really should know your multiplication table up to 10 basically by heart. And the algorithms for doing basic arithmetic on large numbers needs to be practiced until you don't have to think about them. As should the algorithms for simple algebraic manipulation. If you try to move on without having those and similar skills under control you will never get to the understanding part of mathematics since you'll spend all your time dealing with the mechanics of arithmetic. What you need in math is lots of unique problems to solve, not repetition of the same equation with different constants. Repetition of the same problem with different constants is how you learn to spot patterns and develop techniques you can build upon. Like if you find that f(x)=7, f(3x)=21, f(5x)=35, f(9x)=63 then you might spot a pattern that you can explore and that will make it really easy to solve the rest of the problems.
    - XorNot 7y ago
      Rote learning of multiplication tables was the most useless waste of my entire education. Whereas once I was older (as in like 20) I actually got the hang of them from real application, and then realised my struggles with memorisation were easily solved by finding simpler combinations to do so.

19 points by EndXA 7y ago

More and more people every year turn into freelance mode of work. This is an inevitable trend, and I'm talking not only about Uber drivers. Programmers, writers, journalists, designers, many people who need a computer and a cup of coffee. Read this PDF from Zerocracy, they nailed it there: http://papers.zold.io/freelance-deck.pdf http://papers.zold.io/freelance-deck.pdf

johnzim 7y ago

This is the perfect opportunity to test some anecdata of mine: I’m hard pressed to think of a more anti-homework audience than programmers. An absurd percentage of programmers I met hated homework and did their best to do as little of it as possible. Is my grouping just weird or are most programmers deeply homework averse?

yen223 7y ago
It will be hard to find any group of people who enjoyed doing homework.
Bootwizard 7y ago
I mean everyone hates homework, but I was a straight A student all throughout gradeschool. I did what I was told, but in college I learned that the professors aren't always doing what is in your best interest. I think it really depends how early children and young adults encounter and take notice of this.
jbob2000 7y ago
Can confirm, hated homework. I understood things too quickly so I never had push myself to learn, thus homework felt like a chore or a petty punishment. This burned me later in life because “remembering what the teacher said yesterday” and “using other test questions to answer the current question” only gets you so far.
- hdctambien 7y ago
  I write my tests specifically so previous test questions do not answer future test questions on the same test. It's interesting how many "A students" get B's and C's on the first few tests I give...
Baeocystin 7y ago
We're waste-of-intellectual-time averse. Autodidacts like to learn things for the pleasure of learning, and there were very few homework assignments over the years (at least in the public US schools I attended) that were even worth the ditto paper they were printed on.
nitwit005 7y ago
I largely hated the teacher's inability to plan it? In theory, my school limited them to assigning us 30 minutes of homework a night (which was still a 3 hour max with 6 classes). That failed to account for a tendency to all assign things at the same time. Given the normal pacing of things, essays and tests tended to appear at the same time. If we had been employed, there would have been a panic at the spikes of overtime.
MaulingMonkey 7y ago
I certainly hated and skipped as much homework I could while maintaining my grades as a kid. My math homework? Unengaging, rote, and on the face of it pointless busywork. No meaningful reward or payoff. And this is coming from someone who ate up the concepts. I have early memories of looking up cos/sin in an encyclopedia of my own violition to figure out how to draw circles in QBASIC before I had ready access to the internet. As an adult, I've rebuilt my knowledge of matrix math, and built new mental models enabling me to spot incorrect values and understand where it's gone wrong in 3d rendering for my gamedev carreer. I'll engage with math curios on youtube. I don't hate homework quite as much as an Adult... then again, I'm not forced to do any ;). Homework is, at least in theory, a means of practicing and solidifying skills you're learning. For some skills, I'd like to motivate myself to do that a lot more! But unlike the satisfying click when a concept falls into place, homework can just grind without payoff other than a slight increase in speed for a skill I don't yet actually use for anything... either because I don't have an immediate use case for the skill, or because I'm completely unsatisfied with the end result at my current skill level. This can be addressed somewhat with extrinisic rewards, gamification...
tallanvor 7y ago
Nobody likes homework. Programmers are not any more anti-homework than anyone else. Personally, I don' think homework is a bad thing, although students shouldn't be having to spend 2 or 3 hours a night doing it. Repetition is an important part of learning, and having some of it done as homework isn't a bad thing if it means class time can be spent in different modes of learning.
- diamondo25 7y ago
  And for a kid growing up, those nights are required for development of the brain by resting. Delaying the night rest with "learning" would be ineffective and might even hurt development. I instead put my time at midnight programming and such, as most people on the IRC channel were online at that time for me...
bitwize 7y ago
I find that those who lie at that critical intersection of high intelligence and extreme laziness tend to get into programming. Perhaps it's the appeal of machines that can do your homework for you. Anyway, that's why they end up making webshit for Facebook and not building rockets, curing cancer, or solving tricky economic problems for the President. Those jobs go to people with the sitzfleisch to do their homework.
Traubenfuchs 7y ago
_Everyone_ hates homework. Would a lot of people/children do homework if not coerced into it by teachers, parents and the threat of "losing at life"? No.

choeger 7y ago

The thing is: homework can be a rather powerful tool for learning. Students works on their own. In their own environment and at their own pace. They are usually done hours to days after the lesson was teached, so it gets better remembered. They provide an easy interface for parents to help their kids. They are not bound on the time limits of school lessons. And finally they take some churn (and boredom for faster students) out of the classroom. All in all, it would be criminally stupid to outright ban homework. If the problem is workload, which is just too understandable, then an agreed upon effort limit seems reasonable. But that would require teachers to coordinate.

aeternum 7y ago
Why not simply set aside some school time for students to work on their own? In highschool, I was lucky enough to have a study hall in the library. It was great because students had freedom to sit where they wanted, browse the books, use computers, do homework, spread materials out on a table when needed. Some students have too many distractions at home and it may be difficult to travel to a conducive environment. Time to socialize and take part in extracurriculars is also important. The time-management and self-learning skills can be strengthened without the home part.
- dagw 7y ago
  I think we need to separate which age groups we're talking about. What works best for a 16 year old might not be the best solution for an 8 year old. As a parent of a younger child I think homework is a good thing because it makes it easy for me to track my daughters progress in the different subjects and gives a natural venue for me to sit with her and help her with whatever she might need help with.
mlyle 7y ago
The thing is, studies have failed to show a benefit for homework as we presently do it for elementary school students; and some even have shown harm. If it was useful, it would show a benefit. (Of course, there reaches a point where independent practice and work is clearly useful, but perhaps it isn't in young children. My theory is, the 1/10 times where the kid is set back, frustrated, or practicing something completely wrong, which is almost inevitable at one point or another, outweighs the 9/10 times where some slightly useful practice is obtained). I do think that things like Khan Academy may turn this around and be able to show efficacy. A kid can do work on something that gives him the basic instructions and immediate feedback, and the teacher can concentrate energy on coaching and individualized instruction. But still, until it's shown: one should be skeptical, IMO.

Rainymood 7y ago

>Vatterott questioned the quantity and the quality of assignments. If 10 math problems could demonstrate a child’s grasp of a concept, why assign 50, she asked? The solution, she said, was not to do away with homework but to clarify the reasons for assigning it. Because repetition is important, especially in math. You don't learn something by doing it once, you must do it over and over again.

username90 7y ago
Is it really? I think repetition is dangerous, it might give you the impression that you understand something when in fact you only learned how to follow a specific formula. What you need in math is lots of unique problems to solve, not repetition of the same equation with different constants.
- dagw 7y ago
  it might give you the impression that you understand something when in fact you only learned how to follow a specific formula. Learning to follow the specific formula by rote is a good thing. For example you really should know your multiplication table up to 10 basically by heart. And the algorithms for doing basic arithmetic on large numbers needs to be practiced until you don't have to think about them. As should the algorithms for simple algebraic manipulation. If you try to move on without having those and similar skills under control you will never get to the understanding part of mathematics since you'll spend all your time dealing with the mechanics of arithmetic. What you need in math is lots of unique problems to solve, not repetition of the same equation with different constants. Repetition of the same problem with different constants is how you learn to spot patterns and develop techniques you can build upon. Like if you find that f(x)=7, f(3x)=21, f(5x)=35, f(9x)=63 then you might spot a pattern that you can explore and that will make it really easy to solve the rest of the problems.
  - XorNot 7y ago
    Rote learning of multiplication tables was the most useless waste of my entire education. Whereas once I was older (as in like 20) I actually got the hang of them from real application, and then realised my struggles with memorisation were easily solved by finding simpler combinations to do so.