10 ms·

The long history of parents complaining about their kids’ homework

62 points by smacktoward 7y ago

vegetablepotpie 7y ago
When I was in college I would zone out in lecture and wait till I got home to do the homework because I was being graded on homework and exams, not how well I paid attention in class. Now I zone out in meetings because I don’t think they’re important and pine for the moment when I can go back to my desk and do my individual work. Homework trained me to behave disconnected, I don’t known if it has stuck with me because I’ve been able to get away with it or because paying attention in meetings is unnecessary.
- shrimp_emoji 7y ago
  I have to give the "flipped classroom" model some credit: doing the "homework" IN "lecture", collaboratively and interactively, and having free time at home sure feels better than the conventional model. The conventional one always seemed absurd to me: I have to go to school and then continue being in school, mentally, AFTER school? Disassociation aside, it seems like that's training you for a 16-hour workday. How oppressive. Maybe the flipped model can only support a lower cognitive ceiling though; I've never seen it applied to, say, calculus courses. Maybe hard enough material does require constant, oppressive grinding. D: (Not that young kids should be doing that though.)
  - Consultant32452 7y ago
    My algebra 2 teacher in high school did this. Class started with an assignment. You had to read the book, collaboratively work on the assignments, and then the last portion of the class he lectured, which was mostly answering questions. It worked really well.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - vector_spaces 7y ago
    I had an incredible calc 1 and 3 teacher who would start the class with a problem that we'd work on for 20ish minutes. usually it was something just out of reach with where we were topically, or something that required us to use like basic geometry (which many of us were rusty on), and then we'd talk about it, ask questions, and he'd segue into a lecture where he'd connect the dots with what we were studying. I vaguely remember one was essentially to prove herons rule which we only had the tools to do from vanilla geometry, then he showed how it could be done with calculus. Lectures were almost Socratic. We were only graded based on exams and participation, which I think he kind of arbitrarily awarded based on how engaged he thought you were. Brilliant guy, loved his classes. He'd studied under a couple members of the Bourbaki group and headed the math department at one of the top math schools in Latin America. Anyway, I had a great experience with this approach and I really think it's the best way to teach math.
    - nsriv 7y ago
      I currently teach high school math and have been trying a similar approach, and received push back from every experienced educator I've encountered, but have been receiving great reviews from students (especially ones that have low math confidence). This post was really encouraging to me, thanks for sharing!
      - grawprog 7y ago
        The best math teacher I ever had throughout all my schooling structured lessons that way. There'd be an introduction to a new topic, with problems we'd get a chance to work through alone then aftwards we'd all go through them together. That was pretty much the extent of the lecture part. Then we'd get an exercise to work on for the last half of the class that covered what we learned. The teacher was always extremely patient and would help everyone who needed it. Sometimes explaining the same thing over and over to different people without ever becoming frustrated. There was optional(but highly encouraged) homework if we wanted more practice. The teacher would be available for an additional tutoring session to work on the optional homework if people wanted it. We weren't graded on it. All our marks came from exams. That class was really the first time a lot of concepts actually started to make sense for me and I went from being a pretty below average math student to having some of the highest marks in the class.
- bsder 7y ago
  > When I was in college I would zone out in lecture and wait till I got home to do the homework because I was being graded on homework and exams 1) College is very different from high school 2) If you don't need the lecturer, then the lecturer sucks. 3) If you really understand that well, why come (I can only assume they took attendance)? I had a digital logical class that was required, but I didn't bother showing up and scored 150%. When I lecture, if you don't need to be there, don't show up. That's perfectly fine by me. However, don't expect me to have a lot of sympathy if you suddenly find that you don't really understand what I lectured on that you skipped.
  - balfirevic 7y ago
    > 2) If you don't need the lecturer, then the lecturer sucks. Meh. Some topics for some people are simply better served by a textbook. > I can only assume they took attendance Not the parent poster, but yes, some professors required us to attend. You don't - great for you and your students.
    - bsder 7y ago
      > Not the parent poster, but yes, some professors required us to attend. You don't - great for you and your students. Well, when I teach, my classes are technical material. One student knowing (or not) the subject has no material impact on any other student. I also have a fixed amount of topics that I need to get across--your grade in my class should reflect your mastery of the material. If you understand the topics properly, I should give you the appropriate grade regardless of how you came about that knowledge. If I taught a class dependent upon discussion (Philosophy or Political Science for example), I might have a different opinion.
  - acollins1331 7y ago
    If you can score 150% in a class it was probably a joke class to begin with, that's some ridiculous opportunity for grade inflation.
- missblit 7y ago
  I just always did homework in class. More productive than zoning out. Though in meetings I always pay attention, this may sound weird, but I like the social aspect of meetings.
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  Strange. The jobs I've been most engaged at, I would usually attentively listen in meetings while others present would spin their wheels discussing technical stuff in the weeds until I'd see a clearly superior alternate solution and put that forward. It would appear as if I were zoning out in meetings, but I was actually just listening and thinking about the problem. I don't think people are particularly good at thinking while also discussing/debating, but I also don't think I would have as quickly arrived at the better solutions without the ability to attentively observe the relevant discussions. If you're not even paying attention / thinking about anything relevant while in a meeting, your presence is a pointless waste of time and space and you should be doing something else.
  - whenchamenia 7y ago
    I just read "I decided my ideas were so good I had no motivation to collaborate on a compromise with coworkers", so OP seems correct.
    - newnewpdro 7y ago
      In reference to my personal experience with meetings?
bsder 7y ago
While parents whining about homework isn't new, what is new is research beginning to pile up that homework doesn't help below a certain age. I am, quite rightly I think, skeptical about most educational "research" (remember "new math"--aka set theory?). However, educational research has gotten much better. And there are starting to be consensus answers that conventional psychological research seems to bear out that educational systems simply ignore. What worked to create human inputs to an assembly line may be quite suboptimal for creating humans capable of functioning in a knowledge-based economy.
- sjg007 7y ago
  I do think homework helps but it should be once a week (maybe it is) and it should be something assigned on say Monday and due the next Monday so you have the weekend if you need it. You should also have opportunities in school to actually do the homework.. maybe homeroom was supposed to be where this was done? I also had kids in homeroom who had no interest in doing homework so it was more of a social hour. Or a zero period which doesn't necessarily have to be in the morning. Or there should be opportunities to do the homework in class. Homework should be more like work.. project based..
- boomboomsubban 7y ago
  >what is new is research beginning to pile up that homework doesn't help below a certain age. This isn't new though. From the article, every fifteenish years there seems to be a shift back and forth between homework being useful and homework being detrimental. And every time this has happened, you could say that better methods were starting to reach consensus answers.
analog31 7y ago
Describing it as parents "complaining" about homework trivializes our role as the ultimate arbiters of our kids' best interests. Evidence is sparse that anything works in education, once you control for social and personal characteristics of the parents.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  Subject matter expertise and teaching experience up to six years make teachers better, as measured by students’ results. That’s better than nothing. There are lots of things we reward teachers for that have no discernible effects, like education degrees but if you go from a system where many of the Math teachers have humanities degrees to one where they all have Physics/Math/Statistics degrees results will improve. Ditto if you go from everyone having a Bachelor’s in Math to everyone having a Master’s. Teachers are far from completely useless, even if selection effects are far stronger than treatment effects.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    > Ditto if you go from everyone having a Bachelor’s in Math to everyone having a Master’s. Is this really going to matter when teaching basic calculus?
    - acollins1331 7y ago
      Yes.
      - whenchamenia 7y ago
        Citation pretty please.
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      It seems the evidence is weaker than I thought and we have no strong evidence that subject matter expertise is any more helpful than an education degree. Likewise experience may not help as we can’t rule out greater texture in a school leading to getting better classes so the teachers look better. Great schools and great teachers exist. We have no idea how to make either. http://hanushek.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Hanushek%201997%20EduEvaPolAna%2019%282%29.pdf http://hanushek.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publication... > Assessing the effects of school resources on student performance: An update > The relationship between school resources and student achievement has been controversial, in large part because it calls into question a variety of traditional policy approaches. This article reviews the available educational production literature, updating previous summaries. The close to 400 studies of student achievement demonstrate that there is not a strong or consistent relationship between student performance and school resources, at least after variations in family inputs are taken into account.
oh_sigh 7y ago
I just didn't do my homework and teachers didn't care because my grades were excellent and I was active in class.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  How did you manage to keep your grades excellent without doing your homework?!
  - diablerouge 7y ago
    I've definitely had classes where the homework was optional. In my case it has been higher-level math courses, where there are regular quizzes to verify that you know the material.
  - jes5199 7y ago
    if you play it right, you can project Smart Kid Who Doesn’t Apply Themselves and get awarded Bs for F-quality work
  - toast0 7y ago
    I had several teachers in high school and college who would do things like homework could give you about a 10% boost in your grade (eg, from a C to a B), or you could just take your test scores. One class I vividly remember after every quiz/test the teacher would say something like "OK people, I'd like to tell you that you need to do your homework, so you can do well on the quizes, but [toast0] got the best score in the class, and didn't turn in any homework, so I can't; the rest of you, should do your homework though." That was high school chem; I did read the assigned texts, but I didn't bother to do most of the homework, because it was very repetitive, and I was doing just fine as-is; I can't remember if I would turn in the couple of problems I did do, or not even bother to write them down.
  - oh_sigh 7y ago
    Sometimes quizzes/exams would have extra credit questions, so you could score something like 120/100 on them. Other classes had a bonus if you got a 5 on associated AP tests.
curiouscats 7y ago
The Truth About Homework Needless Assignments Persist Because of Widespread Misconceptions About Learning By Alfie Kohn https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/truth-homework/ https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/truth-homework/ Research-Based Guidelines for Homework https://effectiveforall.blogspot.com/2019/06/4-research-based-guidelines-for-homework.html https://effectiveforall.blogspot.com/2019/06/4-research-base...
mncharity 7y ago
Feelings about homework might have non-obvious broader impacts. Science education content is wretched. Current reform efforts like Common Core and NGSS barely scratch the surface. But still there's a lot of community opposition. Years ago, I had a long conversation with an anti-Core activist, exploring their perspective. It seemed their root cause was their child had found some Core-ish class too hard, and notably here, its homework. And thus a movement gained an activist, trying to prevent other children from suffering similarly. With science education reform as collateral damage. Which isn't to say that current homework isn't as wretched as the underlying content and pedagogy.
daxfohl 7y ago
I don't know, I'm in a very international neighborhood and kids of immigrants are all spending extra time doing extra homework, and they have a near monopoly on the top scorers. So it obviously pays off. I don't know whether the argument against homework then is that it doesn't pay off in the long run (losing interest -- which my workplace is also very international and I see no indication of lost interest in learning), or that assigned homework doesn't help but maybe private after-school classes do, or what, but I don't see any way you can make an argument that "just school" is enough if you want your kids to keep up.
- patrickthebold 7y ago
  > top scorers...it pays off. As the article says the debate is about 'what childhood is for'. Some would say it's not for getting high scores.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- throwahomework 7y ago
  Part of my job is hiring out for high performing teams. What I've noticed from 100s of candidates is that the high achieving kids of immigrants do well in university as well as school. However when faced with real world challenges, the more well rounded candidates (of which a large portion are the immigrants kids for sure) definitely produce the highest value in their work (orthogonal problem solving and communication). Hard to be well rounded when you're just doing a narrow set of training exercises after school. After school is for life
  - rb808 7y ago
    One problem with that is a well rounded candidates who dont get the best scores wont get entry into the best universities so will always be disadvantaged.
    - ims 7y ago
jp57 7y ago
As a parent from an educated family, whose own parents surely never complained about my or my siblings' homework, I was surprised to see how much other parents complain about homework. It is a hard subject even to discuss because it is always approached as if homework requirements are, and should be, the same for students of all ages, even though nobody really expects it to be so. Nobody (in the USA anyway) expects children attending pre-school programs to get homework. At the same time, it's preposterous to think that university students would learn everything inside the classroom. So, sometime between pre-school and university, students should probably start getting homework. One possibility would be to start with a little and gradually increase the amount of outside work required. Then, however, you open the door to questions of how much and how soon, and everyone will have a different opinion. One of the problems is that many people seem to conceive of education of children like filling a vessel: the students sit passively while the teacher fills their minds with knowledge through their eyes and ears. In fact, the most important things kids learn in school are skills, and the process is not unlike learning to play a sport or a musical instrument. As with all skill learning, practice is required. The important basic skills (e.g. "reading, writing, and arithmetic") especially need practice, and so do meta-skills like "how do I track and prioritize tasks that may not be due for days or weeks?" Also, work like reading, writing papers, and solving math problems can be done without the teacher present, so it's not a particularly good use of limited resources to ask the students to do that work when the teacher is present. I find it ironic that many of the parents I know who complain about their students' homework load would blink not an eye at sending their kids to football, soccer, swimming, gymnastics, cheerleading, or whatever sports practice for hours every week, knowing that the kids have to practice "if they're gonna be any good."
duxup 7y ago
I complained. My kids would come home with multiple worksheets to do every night starting in 1st grade. Potentially a good hour or more of work depending on the child. My understanding is the type of work they send home has not shown to be beneficial based on my wife's graduate work in early childhood education. Fortunately the school district saw it that way too and such homework was no longer counted as far as grading goes in the early grades.
travisp 7y ago
The biggest piece of data that speaks to me against hours of homework being generally necessary for learning and academic success is homeschooling (at least secular homeschooling). Many homeschooled children, especially pre-middle school, have academic periods that last for a maximum of a couple of hours. Yet, these children are able to integrate academically back into traditional schools and excel. I'm one of these kids: I was homeschooled for several grades due to my family traveling, completed my lessons in just a couple of hours per day (sometimes doing two lessons in one day so I could take the next day off). I successfully transitioned to a regular high school (with plenty of homework), did great, and went to one of the top and most difficult universities in the country where I also did quite well. Even though I had hours of homework in high school, I didn't seem to suffer from not having spent 10 hours a day in middle school doing school plus homework. I wasn't "unprepared" or otherwise unable to handle the suddenly significantly higher workload. Of course, this isn't very scientific and this also doesn't prove that homework isn't necessary in a traditional school, but it does suggest that something is very wrong in traditional early education if hours of daily homework are necessary on top of 8 hours of lessons to achieve similar results.
- shantly 7y ago
  Very small class sizes make a huge difference. Homeschooling (usually) involves a very small effective class size. Lessons can be very carefully tailored, the teacher can change the course of a lesson entirely on a dime if the kid or small set of kids need them to, the pace is better tuned for each student, and so on. AFAIK most prestigious private schools have much smaller class sizes than public schools, and that's not for no reason. 18-25 kids in a class means you can only give each kid maybe two minutes of individual attention an hour, and maybe less. Practically every single thing is harder for the teacher (except getting kids to participate in discussion, but that's likely a socialization/norms thing—I doubt kids used to small classes clam up the way kids used to 20+ kid classrooms do when they happen to be in a small class for some reason) and worse for the kids.
  - travisp 7y ago
    Homeschooling is a small effective class size, but my parents were by no means wonderful teachers (even though they are wonderful people). For homeschooling during 6th and 7th grades, I mostly used the purchased curriculum books myself without significant involvement from them. On a typical day, I probably received less instruction from my parents than a student in a regular classroom (sometimes no instruction). It seems crazy to me that I was able to complete an entire days worth of lessons this way in the amount of time most 6th and 7th graders spend on homework alone. Regardless, suppose studies were to show that adding hours of homework was necessary for students to be successful academically (and as far as I know they don't show this). Rather than deciding to destroy our children's free and unstructured time with homework, why don't we figure out how to change school so that this homework isn't necessary? It's clearly possible to generate well-educated and competitive children with significantly fewer hours of education per day. The homework is just a bandaid for something that isn't working (and probably not even as effective as a bandaid).
boomboomsubban 7y ago
I wonder if the fifteen year cycle is impacted by students of the past generation rejecting what they faced moving on to positions of influence.
- smacktoward 7y ago
  You've just proposed something very much like the Strauss-Howe generational theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
  - boomboomsubban 7y ago
    The only real similarity is that both involve cycles. I'm guessing that both parents and educators routinely hated school as children, so pushed strongly in the other direction as adults. The timing is similar to the fifteen year period described.
mikhailfranco 7y ago
Homework (and education in general) is a classic arms race, which produces an enormous waste of time and resources. Teachers hate it too. Humans are not meant to be happy, but to survive. Only the paranoid do. We have to fight back when others are prepared to destroy their lives to compete. There will be no respite until the demographics change, and there is an educational economy of abundant opportunity, not scarcity and existential threat. Ironically, the emancipation and education of women is the only way to achieve this outcome. When I was young (11-18) I did an insane amount of studying and other activities: private school, 6-day school week, Sat am lessons, 1hr each-way commute, 2-3hr homework per night, Tue pm military cadets, Mon&Thur sports training, Wed&Sat pm school sports matches, Sun county/region sport; school holidays included homework assignments, exam revision, military camps, expeditions, then pre-season sports camps; summer holidays would include part-time jobs, some retail and delivery gigs, but mostly farming and harvesting. If you live in some parts of Asia, there are no school-age children to be seen on the streets, or in the shopping malls - they are all busy doing something all the time. There are education-malls filled with small outlets providing tutoring and lessons for every subject, from English, to math and piano. I was recently looking at some business analysis for a traffic management project, including patterns of congestion. One comment was "... the school buses start to build-up at 04:30-05:00 ...". Luckily, kids are very resilient.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  > One comment was "... the school buses start to build-up at 04:30-05:00 ...". Luckily, kids are very resilient. Resilient yes, but you'll be harming them for life making them get up so early. Their brains just don't work like that and it's inhumane to force somebody into the school system so early. No wonder people hate it.
  - scottLobster 7y ago
    I sincerely doubt that the buses in question are filled with kids that early. Most likely they're just starting their routes to pick up some high school kids around 6:30. Still way too early IMO, but not quite what you describe.
whenchamenia 7y ago
Homework is crap. Let learning stay at school. Families are busy, have things to do. The complaints are obvious.
yummypaint 7y ago
There needs to be distinction between different types of homework. Most people probably envision worksheets, problem sets, and book summaries. These sorts of "busy work" are rightfully derided by activists and commenters in this thread. However, my experience has been that more open-ended project-based learning is quite different. Things like science fair projects, making videos, and independently implementing math from class on programmable calculators engage students differently. Most students don't connect with every project, but it's a good way to feel out people's passions and harness them. When the student has agency in setting a concrete goal and deciding the specifics of how they spend their time, the material they are learning becomes a valued tool that saves them time and effort, rather than something being shoved down their throat. I used to despise everything related to math because the curriculum kept it segregated from other disciplines, thus hiding it's utility. It wasn't until I was playing around with 3D modeling software for an art project that I really understood how useful trigonometry is. There is something psychological at play that makes it easier to learn something when it isn't the main focus of the activity, but a supporting element needed to achieve a self-defined goal.
- daxfohl 7y ago
  Everybody is different. I never cared for rote but never cared for project oriented learning either. For me the preferable thing would be to skip all the busy work problems and go straight for the challenge problems. But most of my teachers graded such that challenge problems only counted if you did well enough on the busy work as well.

62 points by smacktoward 7y ago

When I was in college I would zone out in lecture and wait till I got home to do the homework because I was being graded on homework and exams, not how well I paid attention in class. Now I zone out in meetings because I don’t think they’re important and pine for the moment when I can go back to my desk and do my individual work. Homework trained me to behave disconnected, I don’t known if it has stuck with me because I’ve been able to get away with it or because paying attention in meetings is unnecessary.

shrimp_emoji 7y ago
I have to give the "flipped classroom" model some credit: doing the "homework" IN "lecture", collaboratively and interactively, and having free time at home sure feels better than the conventional model. The conventional one always seemed absurd to me: I have to go to school and then continue being in school, mentally, AFTER school? Disassociation aside, it seems like that's training you for a 16-hour workday. How oppressive. Maybe the flipped model can only support a lower cognitive ceiling though; I've never seen it applied to, say, calculus courses. Maybe hard enough material does require constant, oppressive grinding. D: (Not that young kids should be doing that though.)
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  My algebra 2 teacher in high school did this. Class started with an assignment. You had to read the book, collaboratively work on the assignments, and then the last portion of the class he lectured, which was mostly answering questions. It worked really well.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- vector_spaces 7y ago
  I had an incredible calc 1 and 3 teacher who would start the class with a problem that we'd work on for 20ish minutes. usually it was something just out of reach with where we were topically, or something that required us to use like basic geometry (which many of us were rusty on), and then we'd talk about it, ask questions, and he'd segue into a lecture where he'd connect the dots with what we were studying. I vaguely remember one was essentially to prove herons rule which we only had the tools to do from vanilla geometry, then he showed how it could be done with calculus. Lectures were almost Socratic. We were only graded based on exams and participation, which I think he kind of arbitrarily awarded based on how engaged he thought you were. Brilliant guy, loved his classes. He'd studied under a couple members of the Bourbaki group and headed the math department at one of the top math schools in Latin America. Anyway, I had a great experience with this approach and I really think it's the best way to teach math.
  - nsriv 7y ago
    I currently teach high school math and have been trying a similar approach, and received push back from every experienced educator I've encountered, but have been receiving great reviews from students (especially ones that have low math confidence). This post was really encouraging to me, thanks for sharing!
    - grawprog 7y ago
      The best math teacher I ever had throughout all my schooling structured lessons that way. There'd be an introduction to a new topic, with problems we'd get a chance to work through alone then aftwards we'd all go through them together. That was pretty much the extent of the lecture part. Then we'd get an exercise to work on for the last half of the class that covered what we learned. The teacher was always extremely patient and would help everyone who needed it. Sometimes explaining the same thing over and over to different people without ever becoming frustrated. There was optional(but highly encouraged) homework if we wanted more practice. The teacher would be available for an additional tutoring session to work on the optional homework if people wanted it. We weren't graded on it. All our marks came from exams. That class was really the first time a lot of concepts actually started to make sense for me and I went from being a pretty below average math student to having some of the highest marks in the class.
bsder 7y ago
> When I was in college I would zone out in lecture and wait till I got home to do the homework because I was being graded on homework and exams 1) College is very different from high school 2) If you don't need the lecturer, then the lecturer sucks. 3) If you really understand that well, why come (I can only assume they took attendance)? I had a digital logical class that was required, but I didn't bother showing up and scored 150%. When I lecture, if you don't need to be there, don't show up. That's perfectly fine by me. However, don't expect me to have a lot of sympathy if you suddenly find that you don't really understand what I lectured on that you skipped.
- balfirevic 7y ago
  > 2) If you don't need the lecturer, then the lecturer sucks. Meh. Some topics for some people are simply better served by a textbook. > I can only assume they took attendance Not the parent poster, but yes, some professors required us to attend. You don't - great for you and your students.
  - bsder 7y ago
    > Not the parent poster, but yes, some professors required us to attend. You don't - great for you and your students. Well, when I teach, my classes are technical material. One student knowing (or not) the subject has no material impact on any other student. I also have a fixed amount of topics that I need to get across--your grade in my class should reflect your mastery of the material. If you understand the topics properly, I should give you the appropriate grade regardless of how you came about that knowledge. If I taught a class dependent upon discussion (Philosophy or Political Science for example), I might have a different opinion.
- acollins1331 7y ago
  If you can score 150% in a class it was probably a joke class to begin with, that's some ridiculous opportunity for grade inflation.
missblit 7y ago
I just always did homework in class. More productive than zoning out. Though in meetings I always pay attention, this may sound weird, but I like the social aspect of meetings.
newnewpdro 7y ago
Strange. The jobs I've been most engaged at, I would usually attentively listen in meetings while others present would spin their wheels discussing technical stuff in the weeds until I'd see a clearly superior alternate solution and put that forward. It would appear as if I were zoning out in meetings, but I was actually just listening and thinking about the problem. I don't think people are particularly good at thinking while also discussing/debating, but I also don't think I would have as quickly arrived at the better solutions without the ability to attentively observe the relevant discussions. If you're not even paying attention / thinking about anything relevant while in a meeting, your presence is a pointless waste of time and space and you should be doing something else.
- whenchamenia 7y ago
  I just read "I decided my ideas were so good I had no motivation to collaborate on a compromise with coworkers", so OP seems correct.
  - newnewpdro 7y ago
    In reference to my personal experience with meetings?

bsder 7y ago

While parents whining about homework isn't new, what is new is research beginning to pile up that homework doesn't help below a certain age. I am, quite rightly I think, skeptical about most educational "research" (remember "new math"--aka set theory?). However, educational research has gotten much better. And there are starting to be consensus answers that conventional psychological research seems to bear out that educational systems simply ignore. What worked to create human inputs to an assembly line may be quite suboptimal for creating humans capable of functioning in a knowledge-based economy.

sjg007 7y ago
I do think homework helps but it should be once a week (maybe it is) and it should be something assigned on say Monday and due the next Monday so you have the weekend if you need it. You should also have opportunities in school to actually do the homework.. maybe homeroom was supposed to be where this was done? I also had kids in homeroom who had no interest in doing homework so it was more of a social hour. Or a zero period which doesn't necessarily have to be in the morning. Or there should be opportunities to do the homework in class. Homework should be more like work.. project based..
boomboomsubban 7y ago
>what is new is research beginning to pile up that homework doesn't help below a certain age. This isn't new though. From the article, every fifteenish years there seems to be a shift back and forth between homework being useful and homework being detrimental. And every time this has happened, you could say that better methods were starting to reach consensus answers.

analog31 7y ago

Describing it as parents "complaining" about homework trivializes our role as the ultimate arbiters of our kids' best interests. Evidence is sparse that anything works in education, once you control for social and personal characteristics of the parents.

barry-cotter 7y ago
Subject matter expertise and teaching experience up to six years make teachers better, as measured by students’ results. That’s better than nothing. There are lots of things we reward teachers for that have no discernible effects, like education degrees but if you go from a system where many of the Math teachers have humanities degrees to one where they all have Physics/Math/Statistics degrees results will improve. Ditto if you go from everyone having a Bachelor’s in Math to everyone having a Master’s. Teachers are far from completely useless, even if selection effects are far stronger than treatment effects.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  > Ditto if you go from everyone having a Bachelor’s in Math to everyone having a Master’s. Is this really going to matter when teaching basic calculus?
  - acollins1331 7y ago
    Yes.
    - whenchamenia 7y ago
      Citation pretty please.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    It seems the evidence is weaker than I thought and we have no strong evidence that subject matter expertise is any more helpful than an education degree. Likewise experience may not help as we can’t rule out greater texture in a school leading to getting better classes so the teachers look better. Great schools and great teachers exist. We have no idea how to make either. http://hanushek.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Hanushek%201997%20EduEvaPolAna%2019%282%29.pdf http://hanushek.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publication... > Assessing the effects of school resources on student performance: An update > The relationship between school resources and student achievement has been controversial, in large part because it calls into question a variety of traditional policy approaches. This article reviews the available educational production literature, updating previous summaries. The close to 400 studies of student achievement demonstrate that there is not a strong or consistent relationship between student performance and school resources, at least after variations in family inputs are taken into account.

oh_sigh 7y ago

I just didn't do my homework and teachers didn't care because my grades were excellent and I was active in class.

saagarjha 7y ago
How did you manage to keep your grades excellent without doing your homework?!
- diablerouge 7y ago
  I've definitely had classes where the homework was optional. In my case it has been higher-level math courses, where there are regular quizzes to verify that you know the material.
- jes5199 7y ago
  if you play it right, you can project Smart Kid Who Doesn’t Apply Themselves and get awarded Bs for F-quality work
- toast0 7y ago
  I had several teachers in high school and college who would do things like homework could give you about a 10% boost in your grade (eg, from a C to a B), or you could just take your test scores. One class I vividly remember after every quiz/test the teacher would say something like "OK people, I'd like to tell you that you need to do your homework, so you can do well on the quizes, but [toast0] got the best score in the class, and didn't turn in any homework, so I can't; the rest of you, should do your homework though." That was high school chem; I did read the assigned texts, but I didn't bother to do most of the homework, because it was very repetitive, and I was doing just fine as-is; I can't remember if I would turn in the couple of problems I did do, or not even bother to write them down.
- oh_sigh 7y ago
  Sometimes quizzes/exams would have extra credit questions, so you could score something like 120/100 on them. Other classes had a bonus if you got a 5 on associated AP tests.

curiouscats 7y ago

The Truth About Homework Needless Assignments Persist Because of Widespread Misconceptions About Learning By Alfie Kohn https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/truth-homework/ https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/truth-homework/ Research-Based Guidelines for Homework https://effectiveforall.blogspot.com/2019/06/4-research-based-guidelines-for-homework.html https://effectiveforall.blogspot.com/2019/06/4-research-base...

mncharity 7y ago

Feelings about homework might have non-obvious broader impacts. Science education content is wretched. Current reform efforts like Common Core and NGSS barely scratch the surface. But still there's a lot of community opposition. Years ago, I had a long conversation with an anti-Core activist, exploring their perspective. It seemed their root cause was their child had found some Core-ish class too hard, and notably here, its homework. And thus a movement gained an activist, trying to prevent other children from suffering similarly. With science education reform as collateral damage. Which isn't to say that current homework isn't as wretched as the underlying content and pedagogy.

daxfohl 7y ago

I don't know, I'm in a very international neighborhood and kids of immigrants are all spending extra time doing extra homework, and they have a near monopoly on the top scorers. So it obviously pays off. I don't know whether the argument against homework then is that it doesn't pay off in the long run (losing interest -- which my workplace is also very international and I see no indication of lost interest in learning), or that assigned homework doesn't help but maybe private after-school classes do, or what, but I don't see any way you can make an argument that "just school" is enough if you want your kids to keep up.

patrickthebold 7y ago
> top scorers...it pays off. As the article says the debate is about 'what childhood is for'. Some would say it's not for getting high scores.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
throwahomework 7y ago
Part of my job is hiring out for high performing teams. What I've noticed from 100s of candidates is that the high achieving kids of immigrants do well in university as well as school. However when faced with real world challenges, the more well rounded candidates (of which a large portion are the immigrants kids for sure) definitely produce the highest value in their work (orthogonal problem solving and communication). Hard to be well rounded when you're just doing a narrow set of training exercises after school. After school is for life
- rb808 7y ago
  One problem with that is a well rounded candidates who dont get the best scores wont get entry into the best universities so will always be disadvantaged.
  - ims 7y ago

jp57 7y ago

As a parent from an educated family, whose own parents surely never complained about my or my siblings' homework, I was surprised to see how much other parents complain about homework. It is a hard subject even to discuss because it is always approached as if homework requirements are, and should be, the same for students of all ages, even though nobody really expects it to be so. Nobody (in the USA anyway) expects children attending pre-school programs to get homework. At the same time, it's preposterous to think that university students would learn everything inside the classroom. So, sometime between pre-school and university, students should probably start getting homework. One possibility would be to start with a little and gradually increase the amount of outside work required. Then, however, you open the door to questions of how much and how soon, and everyone will have a different opinion. One of the problems is that many people seem to conceive of education of children like filling a vessel: the students sit passively while the teacher fills their minds with knowledge through their eyes and ears. In fact, the most important things kids learn in school are skills, and the process is not unlike learning to play a sport or a musical instrument. As with all skill learning, practice is required. The important basic skills (e.g. "reading, writing, and arithmetic") especially need practice, and so do meta-skills like "how do I track and prioritize tasks that may not be due for days or weeks?" Also, work like reading, writing papers, and solving math problems can be done without the teacher present, so it's not a particularly good use of limited resources to ask the students to do that work when the teacher is present. I find it ironic that many of the parents I know who complain about their students' homework load would blink not an eye at sending their kids to football, soccer, swimming, gymnastics, cheerleading, or whatever sports practice for hours every week, knowing that the kids have to practice "if they're gonna be any good."

duxup 7y ago

I complained. My kids would come home with multiple worksheets to do every night starting in 1st grade. Potentially a good hour or more of work depending on the child. My understanding is the type of work they send home has not shown to be beneficial based on my wife's graduate work in early childhood education. Fortunately the school district saw it that way too and such homework was no longer counted as far as grading goes in the early grades.

travisp 7y ago

The biggest piece of data that speaks to me against hours of homework being generally necessary for learning and academic success is homeschooling (at least secular homeschooling). Many homeschooled children, especially pre-middle school, have academic periods that last for a maximum of a couple of hours. Yet, these children are able to integrate academically back into traditional schools and excel. I'm one of these kids: I was homeschooled for several grades due to my family traveling, completed my lessons in just a couple of hours per day (sometimes doing two lessons in one day so I could take the next day off). I successfully transitioned to a regular high school (with plenty of homework), did great, and went to one of the top and most difficult universities in the country where I also did quite well. Even though I had hours of homework in high school, I didn't seem to suffer from not having spent 10 hours a day in middle school doing school plus homework. I wasn't "unprepared" or otherwise unable to handle the suddenly significantly higher workload. Of course, this isn't very scientific and this also doesn't prove that homework isn't necessary in a traditional school, but it does suggest that something is very wrong in traditional early education if hours of daily homework are necessary on top of 8 hours of lessons to achieve similar results.

shantly 7y ago
Very small class sizes make a huge difference. Homeschooling (usually) involves a very small effective class size. Lessons can be very carefully tailored, the teacher can change the course of a lesson entirely on a dime if the kid or small set of kids need them to, the pace is better tuned for each student, and so on. AFAIK most prestigious private schools have much smaller class sizes than public schools, and that's not for no reason. 18-25 kids in a class means you can only give each kid maybe two minutes of individual attention an hour, and maybe less. Practically every single thing is harder for the teacher (except getting kids to participate in discussion, but that's likely a socialization/norms thing—I doubt kids used to small classes clam up the way kids used to 20+ kid classrooms do when they happen to be in a small class for some reason) and worse for the kids.
- travisp 7y ago
  Homeschooling is a small effective class size, but my parents were by no means wonderful teachers (even though they are wonderful people). For homeschooling during 6th and 7th grades, I mostly used the purchased curriculum books myself without significant involvement from them. On a typical day, I probably received less instruction from my parents than a student in a regular classroom (sometimes no instruction). It seems crazy to me that I was able to complete an entire days worth of lessons this way in the amount of time most 6th and 7th graders spend on homework alone. Regardless, suppose studies were to show that adding hours of homework was necessary for students to be successful academically (and as far as I know they don't show this). Rather than deciding to destroy our children's free and unstructured time with homework, why don't we figure out how to change school so that this homework isn't necessary? It's clearly possible to generate well-educated and competitive children with significantly fewer hours of education per day. The homework is just a bandaid for something that isn't working (and probably not even as effective as a bandaid).

boomboomsubban 7y ago

I wonder if the fifteen year cycle is impacted by students of the past generation rejecting what they faced moving on to positions of influence.

smacktoward 7y ago
You've just proposed something very much like the Strauss-Howe generational theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
- boomboomsubban 7y ago
  The only real similarity is that both involve cycles. I'm guessing that both parents and educators routinely hated school as children, so pushed strongly in the other direction as adults. The timing is similar to the fifteen year period described.

mikhailfranco 7y ago

Homework (and education in general) is a classic arms race, which produces an enormous waste of time and resources. Teachers hate it too. Humans are not meant to be happy, but to survive. Only the paranoid do. We have to fight back when others are prepared to destroy their lives to compete. There will be no respite until the demographics change, and there is an educational economy of abundant opportunity, not scarcity and existential threat. Ironically, the emancipation and education of women is the only way to achieve this outcome. When I was young (11-18) I did an insane amount of studying and other activities: private school, 6-day school week, Sat am lessons, 1hr each-way commute, 2-3hr homework per night, Tue pm military cadets, Mon&Thur sports training, Wed&Sat pm school sports matches, Sun county/region sport; school holidays included homework assignments, exam revision, military camps, expeditions, then pre-season sports camps; summer holidays would include part-time jobs, some retail and delivery gigs, but mostly farming and harvesting. If you live in some parts of Asia, there are no school-age children to be seen on the streets, or in the shopping malls - they are all busy doing something all the time. There are education-malls filled with small outlets providing tutoring and lessons for every subject, from English, to math and piano. I was recently looking at some business analysis for a traffic management project, including patterns of congestion. One comment was "... the school buses start to build-up at 04:30-05:00 ...". Luckily, kids are very resilient.

cameronbrown 7y ago
> One comment was "... the school buses start to build-up at 04:30-05:00 ...". Luckily, kids are very resilient. Resilient yes, but you'll be harming them for life making them get up so early. Their brains just don't work like that and it's inhumane to force somebody into the school system so early. No wonder people hate it.
- scottLobster 7y ago
  I sincerely doubt that the buses in question are filled with kids that early. Most likely they're just starting their routes to pick up some high school kids around 6:30. Still way too early IMO, but not quite what you describe.

whenchamenia 7y ago

Homework is crap. Let learning stay at school. Families are busy, have things to do. The complaints are obvious.

yummypaint 7y ago

There needs to be distinction between different types of homework. Most people probably envision worksheets, problem sets, and book summaries. These sorts of "busy work" are rightfully derided by activists and commenters in this thread. However, my experience has been that more open-ended project-based learning is quite different. Things like science fair projects, making videos, and independently implementing math from class on programmable calculators engage students differently. Most students don't connect with every project, but it's a good way to feel out people's passions and harness them. When the student has agency in setting a concrete goal and deciding the specifics of how they spend their time, the material they are learning becomes a valued tool that saves them time and effort, rather than something being shoved down their throat. I used to despise everything related to math because the curriculum kept it segregated from other disciplines, thus hiding it's utility. It wasn't until I was playing around with 3D modeling software for an art project that I really understood how useful trigonometry is. There is something psychological at play that makes it easier to learn something when it isn't the main focus of the activity, but a supporting element needed to achieve a self-defined goal.

daxfohl 7y ago
Everybody is different. I never cared for rote but never cared for project oriented learning either. For me the preferable thing would be to skip all the busy work problems and go straight for the challenge problems. But most of my teachers graded such that challenge problems only counted if you did well enough on the busy work as well.