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My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

• AmiiJewels 13y ago
  I do not understand the authors conclusion: 'The more immersed I become in Esmee’s homework, the more reassured I am that the teachers, principals, and school-board members who are coming up with this curriculum are earnest about their work.' when his own Daughter's strategy boils down to :" Memorization, not rationalization" - She isn't learning, she isn't becoming "well rounded", she is memorizing information that will be useless past her next year of schooling. Some of the things detailed sound horrible, A C because there was no answer column etc. The school sounds broken.
  • zachlatta 13y ago
    It sounds like most middle/high schools.
  • corin_ 13y ago
    Two counter-points I would make to your comment, without agreeing or disagreeing overall about the effectiveness of the teaching. The first is that it is possible for the educators to be "earnest" and unsuccessful in their attempts. The second is that "memorization not rtionalization" could well be the opinion of his daughter, not her educators. Sure, they should do their best to prevent this, but kids with good memories will often use this to shortcut learning. I received an A* grade for my GCSE French (school exams at age 16 in UK - although I took at 15) not because I was good at French, but because I had a good memory. The written paper for example was 50% essay, and thanks to teachers preparing us on what sort of topics to expect, I was prepared. I picked "write about a recent holiday" and wrote an entire essay from memory. As in, I'd written it weeks previously (in the case of this specific essay, I'd actually written it for the oral exam, for which I had to memorize it and speak it... a nice it of duplication luck for me!), but I could write it down word perfectly without any mistakes. Coincidentally I'm sat in a hotel room in Paris right now, having spent yesterday remembering how poor my French language is.
    • aidos 13y ago
      Ha! I did the same thing for History and English in NZ. We had 2 mock exams during the year leading up to the main one and I used all the same essays in all of them. My teachers weren't too pleased about it after the 2nd mock exam (and my English teacher actually failed me for it - though that didn't count) but I got a good final grade. Ironically my father is was teaching secondary school English and History at the time.
    • saulrh 13y ago
      If you can do well on your science homework following "memorization not rationalization", your science homework is not preparing you to do science. Same with math.
  • joseph_cooney 13y ago
    While I mostly agree with you, she is learning one very valuable thing - how to game the system, which should see her in good stead for the rest of her life.
  • mistercow 13y ago
    It will be useless far earlier than that, because this type of memorization leads to about 0% retention past the point of one or two weeks. And of course the situation completely precludes the possibility of using an effective memorization strategy, like spaced repetition, because there's no time to add that for every class on top of everything else.
• rwallace 13y ago
  There comes a point when an institution becomes so badly broken that the only rational course of action is to get the hell out, and look elsewhere for a solution to your problems. It looks pretty clear from this article that the US school system is well past that point.
  • cookiecaper 13y ago
    Effective schooling could never occur on such a federated level. There's such a broad range of individual personalities and skills along varying axes that the idea of "let's put all the kids born within 10 months of each other in our geographic area in a classroom, and threaten force on people who don't want to cooperate" is never going to function well. I hold the opinion that the proper training and education of one's offspring should be a foremost life goal, and that delegating it to the state because "it's easier", "I don't have the time", etc. is an abhorrent cop-out. The state likes this because it gives them an outlet which can be used to program 99% of the rising generation, but I see it as a serious and negligent discharge of fundamental parental responsibility. Please note that "education" means ensuring children learn correct principles -- it doesn't represent any specific extant construct or abstraction, like "high school" or "university graduation". For far too long these have been mechanisms of control. I say this as a successful high school dropout who has never enrolled in post-secondary courses. The things mentioned in this article are utterly absurd, and as you noted, the fact that people allow their children to go through this for meaningless rewards is really weird. Does an "A" still hold that much sway? I long for the day when it will be recognized at its true worth, which is zero.
    • GabrielF00 13y ago
      As a fellow high school dropout I sympathize with what you're saying, but I don't think it can be the basis for effective public policy. How many Americans have the ability to teach their children math, science, writing, history and civics at a high school level? How many American families have the time to provide children with anything close to the amount of hours of instruction available in schools? And what happens if we build an educational system that doesn't delegate education to the state, as you put it. That system might be fine for parents who have free time and/or can afford tutors, but what about everyone else? Public schools are far from perfect, but they provide vastly more equality of opportunity than existed in our society before their invention.
• imperio59 13y ago
  She is not learning about what she is studying, she is learning to become a well trained parrot. Society has no use for parrots. These kids need to be taught to look up the words they don't know in a dictionary appropriate to their age and gain an understanding of the new words they come across as they are studying. That is the only way to understand any subject one is studying. No amount of "guessing" or "memorizing" will replace an actual understanding of the words one is reading.
  • corin_ 13y ago
    I completely agree that there are much better way to teach people things, but you're exaggerating in saying that memorizing isn't useful. Take language as an example. Sure there are better ways to learn a language than just memorizing words. (That's debatable but I think most people would agree.) However there certainly is some use, still, in just memorizing things. For example, I don't speak French, but thanks to memorizing things I can at least know the basics I might need to get by (allowing me, last night, to buy a packet of cigarettes, ask for a menu, order a meal and the wine I wanted, from a bar owner who didn't speak a word of English, and I never even needed to point at anything!) And in the rest of life, certain things just are useful if you memorize them. I have an events manager at work who doesn't know anything about computer networking, but he's picked up bits and pieces from colleagues to allow him to do things he is likely to need to do. He hasn't gained the experience of tinkering with linux, so give him a new problem and he won't figure it out, but there are certain things he can do on a linux server easily - and that's fine, nobody can be an expert in everything, everyone has areas where you just need to be able to get by.
  • cookiecaper 13y ago
    >Society has no use for parrots. In fact, society has a great use for "parrots" whose sense of rational processing is beat out of them, and are taught to keep their heads down and just swallow whatever their superior is cramming down their throat. It is certainly not a noble use, but without these many years of mandatory obedience training, the wage slavery upon which our lifestyle depends would suffer a severe lack of willing participants.
    • 13y ago
• pnathan 13y ago
  This is the official guideline from my local school district on average homework times: K Occasional 1-2 15 minutes (M-Th) 3-5 30-60 minutes (M-Th) 6-8 30-90 minutes (M-Th) 9-12 60-120 minutes (M-S)
  • nja 13y ago
    Per class?
    • mistercow 13y ago
      Surely it can't be per class. Depending on the class schedule of the school, that would be suggesting that 8 hours of homework for a high school student was "within acceptable parameters".
      • dthunt 13y ago
        I think the better lesson is not, 'how many hours of homework is fair' but, 'teachers, please assign the minimum effective dose of homework'. This is one of the reasons I think labs are effective in high school science classes, provided they don't spell everything out for you and require you to understand what is going on, why you are doing it, and what's the important points are of what is going on. Applying knowledge is far more effective at making knowledge stick than balancing chemical equations.
    • pnathan 13y ago
      It doesn't say. But if you have 5 classes in high school, that would wind up to be a max of 10 hours of homework per night, a conclusion of about 15 hours of schooling per day. I would reckon that is not what is expected, so I read it as 'total'.
• haldujai 13y ago
  The mode of homework time appears to be 3 hours a night during weekdays, this is considered unbearable/a lot? Growing up this was the norm for me. The school in question runs from 8:00 AM to 2:20 PM with a 45 minute lunch break, recesses and homeroom included. With 3 hours of studying that brings you to a total of 9 hours - breaks (I couldn't find a schedule). Assuming 8 hours of sleep, 1 hour for dinner, 2 hours of miscellaneous daily activities and 1 hour to get ready and eat breakfast in the morning you're left with 3 hours of your day left. As a 13 year old with parents that take care of a lot of your responsibilities that's not bad at all. Especially when you consider that this is a school that advertises academic rigor and not intended for your average student. The only thing I agree with is that this school isn't doing a good job of educating if the student says "Memorization, not rationalization". While the homework appears to be monotonous my understanding was that this is because she is 13, it is important to build the foundation (i.e. comfort with numbers and reading dense literature) that will allow her to pursue more intellectually challenging courses in the future. The only criticism I have of this system is that the author suggests none of the courses promote critical thinking and creativity. If this is the case then this is a problem, I would think at least 1/5 courses should do that. One of the biggest criticisms of the education system in China (I don't know if this is true but I hear it a lot) is that it promotes rote memorization (with exceptions), and this school appears to be doing the same. Edit: All of this is predicated on the assumption that this student is academically capable of succeeding at this school. While it takes her 3 hours every night (5 hours max) this may not be the case for the average student, we don't know where she lies on the curve. Anecdotal evidence from some parents is obviously not enough to draw any conclusions.
  • Afforess 13y ago
    Yes. I reached college with 24 AP credits and a 31 ACT (never touched the SAT) 5 years ago and I did barely any homework (~1hr/week total). Instead I played a lot of video games, and when I was 17 taught myself how to program C++ to mod Civ4. I could never have learned programming had I not had tons of free time. Homework is evil because it's a massive opportunity cost in terms of time.
  • Emass12 13y ago
    You're forgetting transportation to and from school in your daily calculation, which could take up to an hour and a half total. And socialization which is non-negotiable. At least an hour for that? Oh and some people might need 9 hours of sleep, and another HN comment actually cited that this is recommended for a 13 year old. You see the problem with cutting it so close that homework just, just barely fits in the remaining hours of the day after all survival necessities have been taken care of? It's either complete the homework assignments or get enough sleep, not both. Is it really supposed to be that childhood is about nothing but school and homework? That seems atrocious to me. Basically you are advocating for a situation in which children trudge through the mechanical needs of the day simply to produce homework output, to be repeated ad nauseum day after day for most of their childhood. This is extremely unhealthy long term. This system eliminates any possibility of these kids exploring their interests and having fun, but that supposedly is not meaningful and too hand-wavy for some people. The author said of parents like that: "I tend not to get along with that type of parent."
• NemesorZandrak 13y ago
  When I was at school and that is not USA but Poland. We used to have 6-8 different subjects per day from biology, chemistry, geography, maths and history as examples. Everyone of this subjects converted to at least an hour of homework. What I learned as a kid is that it is impossible to learn all this things at home and I have to filter what is needed the most. Sometimes approximate and sometimes simply take the risk and just read rapidly the book and count on luck. This what most valuable lesson if learned at school. Some of the kids managed to do this 8 hour drill some like me had to adjust and focus on important stuff learn to filter. This gave me ability to play games and program.
  • VargardObyron 13y ago
    Same here. I think there is a massive overload of homework. School should focus on important bits but also don't leave general knowledge out of scope and going for full specialisation.
  • neltnerb 13y ago
    Thanks for the interesting perspective. I guess I was lucky in having teachers who were more concerned with aptitude than homework (luckily before no child left behind). Almost none of my homework was graded -- this seems to be a european thing? You'd know better than me. So I did the amount of homework needed to learn the material, and no more. Like college. I do wonder if the big issue is that this approach can really burn kids out on cool areas. How many kids think math puzzles are fun in elementary school when taught as a game? I think actually a surprisingly high number. But when you turn it into work it's a totally different approach, and it really doesn't seem to work. There seem to be some promising alternative possibilities, like Khan Academy, but when you're giving kids so much work that they can't read Feynman's lectures out of actual interest you're being counterproductive.
    • VargardObyron 13y ago
      There is no marks for having homework, there are only negative marks for not having it.
• aidos 13y ago
  OT but early on there's a quote from the homework: "its [sic] significance" Why is the sic in there? Is that not the correct use of 'its' in this context?
  • nja 13y ago
    I spent a minute looking at that too. I think the author inserted the [sic] because: "quotes [...] with 1–2 sentence analyses of its [sic] significance" If the "its" is referring to the quotes, it should be "their significance".
    • aidos 13y ago
      Ah, of course. Thanks both.
  • cperciva 13y ago
    The start of that sentence mentions finding three quotes, so it should be their significance.
    • Zecc 13y ago
      Your interpretation explain the use of "[sic]". But personally I think the "its" refers to the section and not the quotes, making the "[sic]" unnecessary. But I don't have access to the original text.
      • aidos 13y ago
        Actually, reading it again you could well be right. It would make sense for it to be referring to the section.
• acabal 13y ago
  What stood out for me from this article wasn't the homework load, which only seems slightly more than what I remember from my own youth, but rather that: 1) a teacher can accuse a parent of "cyberbullying" for an email sent in purported confidentiality to others, and that the claim can be taken seriously. Obviously I didn't read the email, but the author seems well-read and reasonable, so I'm inclined to conjecture that whatever he sent wasn't outrageous. If I as a parent were "called in to the vice principal's office" and accused of cyberbullying a teacher, I'd laugh in their face. Is this teacher teaching middle school, or in middle school? 2) that the parent is having constant meetings with school officials, and seemingly-frequent interaction with other parents via email. Granted in my days (mid-90's or so) email wasn't a big thing, but my parents typically took the hands-off stand of "did the teacher say so? then do it", plus the occasional PTA meeting. (They did help when asked, but I can probably count all the face-to-face meetings they had with school faculty on one hand). And that's a stance I can very much appreciate. I don't know what parent-teacher relationships are like today, but it sure sounds like the teachers are hearing almost as much from the parents as they are from the students. Which isn't to say the system can't be improved. But honestly I remember nearly as much homework from my days, and those points stuck out more to me as a sign of the times.
  • dylangs1030 13y ago
    Totally agree, especially with your second point. Both my parents are career educators (teachers, counselors and now professors). They personally tell me about how "helicopter parenting" has increased in the time since they've gotten their degrees up to now. Parents are getting more and more involved (read: obsessive) about their childrens' education, sometimes to the detriment of the school process. Very often they'll blame teachers when their kids don't do well in class (not necessarily incorrect). My mother works in the inner city - parents there tend to be ambivalent about their childrens' progress unless they are relatively affluent, from what I've seen. On the other hand, my father works in a suburban private school, and the parents there push back much more often, especially when they aren't right. I can't say whether or not it's good or bad, but the climate of education in America has shifted from one of parents surrendering their kids and trusting the teachers to one of parents questioning the teachers when kids don't do well. Very curious.
• egwor 13y ago
  Welcome to the educated new world; where education matters. One thing to consider; perhaps the child shouldn't be in that class/level or school? Perhaps their previous school didn't cover the material so this is all base stuff for everyone else? If it takes you 3-5hrs to do something and you want to sleep before midnight, start earlier. Perhaps when less tired it would be quicker. I used to have homework that could take me between 30 mins and 2.5 hrs each day (7 days a week). I started when I came in from school and had a break for some tv and then finished to have time to do other things. You learn how to be faster at the homework. When I was 16-18 I most probably spent longer still I used to have enough time to walk home from school, watch tv, play sport, play trumpet and do that work. Also, at lunch time there is usually time to do some work. We used to collaborate on some stuff too.
  • voyou 13y ago
    "Welcome to the educated new world; where education matters." Right. So why is this school wasting children's time and energy with busywork, rather than teaching them effectively during the allotted time at school?
    • smsm42 13y ago
      Because what matters is not effectiveness, what matters is "being educated". I.e. passing through the process of education and having a paper to prove it. That's what HR depts are checking.
• vacri 13y ago
  There are some concepts at odds here. "The measurements included numbers like 78 13/64, and all this multiplying and dividing was to be done without a calculator." is not 'rote learning'/'memorisation without rationalisation'. It's directly exercising an ability. I've had a university-level experience reach for her calculator to multiply 0.2 by 3, and when I forbade her from using it, she just stared dumbly at me. That someone of that age can't do that multiplication 'automatically' was quite a surprise, especially given that it was a science course. Similarly, finding the distances between state capitals exercises research and application skills, and gives a feeling for geographical distances. Doing it in miles and kilometers is helping to get people accustomed to using the Standard International set of units alongside the archaic Imperial units. Likewise, a journalist finding scientific mathematical notation 'unintuitive' doesn't mean it has no merit. The workload is ridiculous, absolutely, but the content of the homework doesn't sound as useless as the article makes it out to be.
  • rtpg 13y ago
    I spent a lot of time up until high school forcing myself not to use a calculator, because I wanted to work on my mental skills in arithmetic, but I always make a lot of small mistakes, even now. I have a hard enough time concentrating on 'easy' things , please don't ask me to hold numbers in my brain. I am a pretty "mathy" person but mental multiplication is not meant for the human thought process, too much is going on. I say this half in jest, but I've met people with very good mathematical sense (especially in domains such as topology) who are incapable of multiplying 3 numbers without making a mistake. Some people have very few registers, and RAM is really slow.
    • anigbrowl 13y ago
      I have a hard enough time concentrating on 'easy' things , please don't ask me to hold numbers in my brain. I am a pretty "mathy" person but mental multiplication is not meant for the human thought process, too much is going on. That's like saying humans were never meant to run up stairs so you're taking the elevator. In any case, nobody's asking yo to hold numbers in your brain; it's OK to use paper and pencil for your calculations, as generation after generation of mathematicians did.
• tudorw 13y ago
  Six and a half hours sleep, this is way too low, Millpond Children’s Sleep Clinic recommends over nine for a 13yr old. http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Childrenssleep/Pages/howmuchsleep.aspx http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Childrenssleep/Pages/howmuchsleep...
  • EvanAnderson 13y ago
    This is what jumped out at me, too. There are studies linking obesity, poor school performance, and problems with emotional control (just to name a few) to lack of sleep in children. Having to stay up late to do homework seems counterproductive.
  • Afforess 13y ago
    I once asked a vice principal (way back, 10 yrs ago) why schools started so early when lack of sleep was known to be bad. He said it was so there was time for sports in the evening. If you started at 10 or 11 school would run until 6 and it would start getting dark. Sports are why kids sleep is ruined.
    • comex 13y ago
      Maybe, but when I was a teenager, at least, starting at 8 or 10 would make no difference to me - I would just tend to fall asleep 2 hours later. At least in some cases, the real issue is the number of waking hours in a day demanded of a student.
      • mistercow 13y ago
        The teens are actually a particularly problematic period for humans in this respect, because it's a time when you have the sleep requirements of a child, but the natural bedtime of an adult. Most 8-year-olds can't easily stay up past 11. Most 13-year-olds can't easily fall asleep before 10. Both need at least 9 hours of sleep.
    • Glyptodon 13y ago
      It's sports and so parents can drop them off before work. Both play a role.
• code_duck 13y ago
  My high school in Connecticut declared that you should spend 1 hour doing homework for each academic class every day, which adds up to 12 hours each day focused on attending school, or more. I have no idea why this sounds reasonable to administrators and teachers. The idea of 'memorization' as learning has always bothered me... The most reliable long-term way to recall things is to learn and comprehend them.
  • mgkimsal 13y ago
    Couple of thoughts: There's some things that need to be memorized - basic multiplication tables - I memorized those (9*8, etc). Basic articles/phrases in Spanish. Some basic world/state capitals, etc. But at some point memorization doesn't get you anything any more (except passing a test, maybe) - memorizing a few basic building blocks helps for the larger problems, and eventually the truisms of the building blocks become apparent (if there are any - capitals doesn't matter). On 12 hours per day - some of the teachers I know definitely put in that amount of time, on average (grading homework, meeting with parents, planning, etc). They may be thinking "If I'm doing it, so can they", but... The teachers already KNOW their stuff - they're not LEARNING for the most part - they're doing the job of a professional. The student, by definition, is not a master at any of this stuff. A 12 hour effort, day in day out, by students, is simply going to wear most of them down. This seems like a simple scheduling thing - teachers could coordinate between themselves better, individually or by subject - to stagger workloads effectively. Foreign language may get to pile on big assignments on Mondays, Sciences on Tuesdays, etc., with an understanding of minimal homework requirements the rest of the time. But if "read 79 pages and do a one page summary of 3 topics from it" is considered "minimal", there are bigger judgement issues going on.
    • code_duck 13y ago
      I think the results of multiplication of small integers should be remembered from frequent use, rather than explicitly committed to memory. Acting as if these values are a member of a group that must be memorized like state names, as if they are arbitrary, distances students from understanding that they can easily determine a multiplication result by calculation if they don't know it (or 'remember' it). I think we might be working from a different idea of what memorization means. I associate it with a truly rote impression of abstract strings with no attempt at comprehension of their meanings individually (as alluded to in the article). I'd think something like Spanish phrases require comprehension to be used. Definitely one problem was lack of coordination between teachers in the area of homework load; sometimes teachers would arbitrarily declare that we needed to be spending twice as much time on their class for a period of time. I suppose teachers may think the student workload is reasonable because they have their own. Overall I think that would reflect a lack of understanding that it's improper to expect another person's child's world to be almost entirely composed of your governments school plan. Academically, I learned far more outside of school reading and programming on my own, and in music lessons outside of school. The teacher is being compensated monetarily for their time and that is his or her choice.
• anigbrowl 13y ago
  So much whining. These tasks represent actual problems you might be tasked with finding out in the real world; not all of them are directly relevant to students or their utility immediately apparent, but the mothodologies are solid. Growing up in Ireland and going to high school int he 80s, I was doing 3-4 hours/night of homework from the equivalent of your grade 7, and I still found time to watch TV and read for pleasure each evening. I laughed out loud at the author's complaint that math homework involved doing a lot of calculation without the aid of a calculator. Well yes, that is how you develop math feel. Using a calculator is great, and appropriate in later math classes, but training in mechanistic tasks is important too, for the same reason that athletic exercise involves a good deal of repetition and practice. It's the same reason musicians play scales every day - it's not because they don't care about the theoretical underpinnings, it's because performance depends on practice. Likewise, understanding the mechanics of a tennis ball hitting a racket won't make you into a good tennis player, and understanding how to punch something into a calculator won't help you develop your mental math skills. What I am interested in is what my daughter is doing during those nightly hours between 8 o’clock and midnight Why are you letting her wait until 8pm to start homework? Start at 6, done by 9. I don’t remember how much homework was assigned to me in eighth grade. I do know that I didn’t do very much of it and that what little I did, I did badly. My study habits were atrocious. After school I often went to friends’ houses, where I sometimes smoked marijuana, and then I returned home for dinner; after lying to my parents about not having homework that night, I might have caught an hour or two of television. And look at the results: simple problems like calculating the area and perimeter of complex shapes just seem too, too hard for your poor brain. Instead you have the mental equivalent of a beer gut.
  • Afforess 13y ago
    You clearly are very isolated from the world. Even if the author had a good math experience, polynomials do not appear in everyday problems. As for the start time, likely she is involved in extra-curricular activities, like cheerleading or sports. I wouldn't judge so harshly.
    • anigbrowl 13y ago
      I can't believe I'm reading someone on hacker news saying 'polynomials don't appear in everyday problems.' As for the start time, likely she is involved in extra-curricular activities, like cheerleading or sports. 5 nights a week? Not buying it. I don't think I'm isolated from the world at all; I managed to deal with a heavy homework load and still have plenty of fun and get into various sorts of trouble (often at the same time) as a teenager.
• ygra 13y ago
  I don't recall similar homework loads (Germany, school being 10–20 years ago), but that might be due to laziness on my part or simply the fact that it wasn't a good time for me anyway. By the later grades (11th and onwards) it definitely wasn't as much. I liked what our math teacher said regarding his homework: It's for practice and not strictly needed and thus voluntary. If we feel confident doing the homework ad-hoc on the blackboard in class then we don't need to do it at home. While this won't work for every class (e.g. I guess languages don't really work that way), it was definitely nicer than having to unconditionally do the homework (as well as all the rest). > I’ve often suspected that teachers don’t have any idea about the > cumulative amount of homework the kids are assigned when > they are taking five academic classes. There is little to no > coordination among teachers in most schools when it comes > to assignments and test dates. This is something my mother (a teacher) can confirm as well. Many teachers just assume that they're the only ones giving homework and thus don't really see why it can be so much. That was a problem in uni as well sometimes in the earlier years (and anecdotally the norm by now that we have the Bachelor/Master system, depending on your major).
  • mcv 13y ago
    I have no idea how much homework I used to get (Netherland in the '80s), because I never did any. I was lazy and got excellent grades anyway. Well, not for languages, where you did have to memorize lots of stuff (rather than rationalize, which I'm much better at), so I dropped my languages as soon as I could. My not doing any math homework did get me in trouble when I was 17 (5th class (penultimate before graduation) middle school in the Dutch system), because integration meant memorizing all those standard primitives and having used them a lot, and not having practiced them a hundred times meant failing grades for me. A year later math moved on to geometry and I got perfect grades and finished my homework during class for the first time ever. I think it would have been better for me if I'd learned to do my homework; I never really learned to work during school, which might actually be a more important skill than all the stuff it seems to be teaching. But reading 79 pages in a single evening? I hope it's a really easy book, because in anything moderately serious, that would take me a week. Oh yeah, required literature reading put me off of reading for a couple of years. (Until I discovered Terry Pratchett, i fact.)
  • 13y ago
• Al-Khwarizmi 13y ago
  Wow. Everyone in the thread seems to have gotten lots of homework in their youth. In my case, I went to both a private and a public school (in Spain) and the homework load was probably like half an hour a day, in both cases. In high school it was a bit more, maybe 45 minutes, the main difference was that in high school studying the day before the exam was usually not enough. I remember that my mother used to be worried that I would have problems at university, because there I would have to work a lot of hours per day, and I wasn't getting used to that at school. Well, I did have to work a lot of hours per day at university, but I did perfectly fine. And I'm grateful that I had time during my school and high school years to write stories, make drawings, learn C and C++, write games, compose some music, etc... unlike the poor girl in the article!
  • zanny 13y ago
    When I was in High school (especially my senior year) I'd schedule study halls at the end of the day, and spend lunch in the study hall, to do homework on-site so I didn't have any at home. Pretty much straight A's that year, and I took 4 AP courses I got a minimum of a 4 on.
  • jeltz 13y ago
    My experience from Swedish schools is rather similar. While my memory isn't perfect 30 minutes per day is a reasonable guess. It could have been 1 hour max.
• mcphilip 13y ago
  I was homeschooled K-12. My days consisted largely of 1-2 hours of bible study with my 3 brothers followed by a few hours on my own working through a set number of pages in math, science, literature, etc textbooks. I'd usually get done by 2 and then play Nintendo until friends got home from school. I was never tested in homeschool. There were no grades or report cards. The only accountability was mom checking that the assignments were done. My first real test was the PSAT. As part of applying to college, my mom had to make up high school grades for the transcript. I scored decently on the SAT and got accepted into a university. College was relatively a breeze since I had spent all my grade school years teaching things to myself - college was just an extension of this method of learning. While there are plenty of good arguments against homeschooling, I feel lucky to have been brought up in an environment where education did not have a competitive aspect requiring 8-12 hours of work a day.
  • zanny 13y ago
    Also, you can move at your own pace. I'm sure nobody would work at a company where some terrible nephew who didn't know anything about computing was hired, and where everyone is assigned a random bug report to fix each day, but nobody could leave until the nephew pushed to upstream. So you might finish your daily bug in an hour, but now have to sit around waiting (without Internet access or the ability to leave your cubicle or converse with anyone) until hes done.
  • alt_f4 13y ago
    You lost me at the emphasis on 1-2 hours of bible study.
    • jessaustin 13y ago
      What valuable insight does this comment add to the conversation?
    • dcre 13y ago
      Oh, come on.
    • mcphilip 13y ago
• marcuspovey 13y ago
  I find the phrase "Memorisation not rationalisation" deeply sinister.
  • Afforess 13y ago
    Yes, it could have been a line right out of 1984. Highly Orwellian.
• fcatalan 13y ago
  When I was a kid the situation was clear for me: Homework made me struggle for hours while the drill sergeant act next day would last for mere seconds. So I did the bare minimum that would keep me from getting in serious trouble and accepted punishment for the rest as a good deal. My own kids are now growing and should show up with homework quite soon. I dread the day.
  • webjunkie 13y ago
    Haha, yeah, that was the way. “find three important and powerful quotes from the section with 1–2 sentence analyses of its [sic] significance.” What to do: hastily read the pages, write down anything that might qualify as a quote and write "It's important because blah blah". Done.
• belorn 13y ago
  > But when I ask her what the verb tener means (“to have,” if I recall), she repeats, “Memorization, not rationalization.” I wonder where she got that from, or if it was something she figured out by herself. It just sound so soul crushing that the goal for children is not learning, but to memorize something until the test is done. Memorization should never be used when rationalization could do better. Sure, there exist a few rare cases where memorization is the only option (such as remembering names), but those are exceptions. Languages are almost without exception best learned by actually using the language in communication or by consuming media (books, movies, and so on).
  • ronaldx 13y ago
    I recall that most people can manage 4 hours of intense concentration per day. If you are doing 5 hours of homework per night (after a full day of school), memorization is more effective at completing the workload - since you don't have time/energy to spend on rationalizing. But it does seem likely that she's repeating this phrase from a teacher. Worrying. A positive interpretation is that the language teacher intends this to mean exactly what you say - languages are best learned through use, and can't be learned rationalizing the rulesets of grammar.
  • edtechdev 13y ago
    Virtually every class focuses on memorization and not conceptual understanding, unfortunately. That's what students have to do to survive high school and college courses, because that's how they are taught and assessed. A recent study of calculus courses found for example that almost 80% of the test questions simply involved recalling and applying a procedure (i.e., "plug and chug"). http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/cspcc/TSG13_Bressoud.pdf http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/cspcc/TSG13_Bress... The students don't want it to be this way: "74% preferred to make sense of mathematics rather than simply memorizing it and 72% saw the role of the instructor as helping students to reason through problems on their own rather than showing students how to work the problem". And yet because it is easier to test and grade rote learning and memorization, we end up killing students' interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) and most students who enter college as a STEM major end up changing majors, transferring, or dropping out. "students leave STEM majors primarily because of poor instruction in their mathematics and science courses, with calculus often cited as a primary reason."
• Grue3 13y ago
  So the guy is too stupid to do his child's homework and somehow sees this as a bad thing? Like, he wants his daughter to end up as dumb as him? That's what I get from this article.
• deleted 13y ago
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• forrestthewoods 13y ago
  I am eternally grateful that I went to dumb kid rural high school with a 50% drop out rate. I only did homework or studied for a test a couple of times per semester. I has more than enough time for sports, friends, and video games. Much, much better than laborious studying no matter how useful or not useful it may be.
• mistercow 13y ago
  The answer, of course, is to tell your daughter she just doesn't have to do this shit. It's middle school. It doesn't matter. When she gets to high school, if teachers try to put her in non-honors classes (where she obviously doesn't belong), you sign a waiver and put her in the right classes. Of course, if you by any means have the time or the money, the real answer is not to send your kids to these idiotic institutions at all, and to teach them yourself, or higher tutors. Hire college students; they can use the money.
• Fuxy 13y ago
  Holy st people how can you allow teachers to torture your kids like that. I'm young and I never had this kind of work load hell if i did i would have either gone insane or just said fk it and ignored all that homework. Yes I'm not from America I'm from Easter Europe. I would never allow this to my children. If this is the state of education I can do a better job. "If Esmee masters the material covered in her classes, she will emerge as a well-rounded, socially aware citizen, a serious reader with good reasoning capabilities and a decent knowledge of the universe she lives in. What more can I ask of her school?" No she will emerge as a well informed drone with good reading skill but no desire to do so because she is reminded of the amount of reading forced upon her and very weak reasoning and deductive skills. “Memorization, not rationalization.” What the point of that? If you don't understand what you have memorized it is useless not to mention a lot harder to remember. Cyberbullying really? Is that person a complete idiot? Why would i ever let my child learn from a person who would attempt to threaten me with some ridiculous accusation in order to make me back off from my opinion. It is manipulative and instead of addressing my concerns they are trying to make me go away. From what they are telling the parents the teachers are just a bunch of drones following instructions sent by a higher power. Exactly what they are teaching the students to become. Where's the critical thinking where the opinion and power of the teachers to teach in a manner that they see fit?
• gambiting 13y ago
  But it can be done better. My sister attends a private boarding school in the UK and they only have 2 hours set per day for homework(always between 7pm and 9pm). Teachers coordinate between each other to make sure the work never takes more than these two hours,but also that it doesn't take any less. So my sister spends two solid hours each day working on her homework,and it doesn't cut into her sleep pattern - they need to be in bed by 10.15pm after all. Obviously a non-boarding student doesn't necessarily have the regime at home to solidly sit down for 2 hours and work without access to their phone/ipad/computer/playstation for that period like at a boarding school, but I believe that if the system was better teachers really could coordinate between themselves and arrange homework that was manageable.
• nicholassmith 13y ago
  With the education system pushing for rote memorisation over comprehension it's going to grind the enthusiasm to learn out of kids before they even have chance to start enjoying education. I hated doing homework that was just memorisation and didn't have a component where you had to either comprehend or be able to rationalise as it felt like all I was doing was trying to avoid looking something up in a book. If you're just training memorisation you may as well play a memory game.
• kalleboo 13y ago
  This has turned into a circumcision/spanking debate. "Let me tell you what MY parents/school imposed on me and why that's the best way, and as anecdotal evidence, I present myself, who as you can see turned out to be a perfect individual." I can read those on Reddit, Hacker News readers have no particular insight here. In fact, Reddit readers are probably better suited to this debate as there are more students and teachers posting there. Haven't there been any actual studies on this? The article mentions how on a international scale there's no correlation between homework load and results. Have there been any studies on a smaller scale (such as intra-class, using the same teachers/assignments)?
• GotAnyMegadeth 13y ago
  The Author and his daughter haven't learnt the tricks of the trade. I was set 3+hrs of HW a day, but I certainly didn't do that much. First, they need to assess which teachers "Don't mind" if you don't do the homework. This could mean they stand you up in front of the whole class and shout at you, but if they don't give you an after school detention, don't do it. Getting in the teachers good books previously helps with this. Second, if you've got a joke subject before one with homework due, do the homework then. Geography before Maths for example. Third, have a homework team where you take it in turns to do the easily copied homework (Maths, DT, Science) and then copy each other in the mornings before school. Of course you need to cover your tracks. Fourth, always cut corners. No calculator? Lol, use a calculator, but purposely get a few wrong. Use Google for everything (I didn't have a computer until yr8). Never read a book when you can read a synopsis/ watch the film whilst playing Pokémon. Fifth, work as a team at home. The parent will have to remember things from their childhood, where as older siblings only need to remember from the year before. I used to do my middle brother's compulsory homework, whilst he did my littlest brother's, and my mum did mine. Other tricks: Try leaving all of you books related to that subject at home one day and claim you thought it was Thursday. Miss out a question at the bottom of a page, they might not even notice. Pretend you are/were ill. Cry Hand in last weeks homework again. This one only buys you time, but works well on a Friday. Tell your teacher you'll hand it in tomorrow, then the next day tell them you handed it in yesterday and they've lost it. Band together with the other kids in your class and tell the teacher they said the homework was due for next week, or that they didn't even set it. If you are asked to hand something in on lined paper, just don't do a whole sheets worth. More convincing if both sheets start/end in the middle of a sentence. I've done this before and they didn't even comment, I suspect they felt guilty they'd lost it. Note: I successfully used all these tricks on several occasions. I would say that it definitely had no impact on my education (Got a AAAB at A level, 1st Class degree in Electronic Engineering w/ Hons), and a very significant positive impact on my life as a whole.
  • tptacek 13y ago
    How caustic a lesson to teach your kid, that they should organize to cheat on homework, so they can artificially inflate their grade. I suppose it does set them up for a productive life of investment banking.
• retrogradeorbit 13y ago
  Some of John Taylor Gatto's writings on the education system shed some light on all of this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto
• tptacek 13y ago
  Some quick thoughts, as the parent of a high school freshman: * If you anticipate your child being assigned 3 hours of homework in a typical evening, it is negligent to allow them to start that work at 8:00PM. Instead of allowing his daughter to watch episodes of Portlandia on her computer all afternoon, he could consider a rule suggesting homework gets completed before electronic entertainment; that's our rule this year (for the first time) and it's working better than I thought it would. Another rule we have: complete or not, homework is done at 9:30PM. * Japan (a) does not outperform the US (at least on PISA) when normalized for income, which normalization also normalizes for homework load, and (b) has the some of the longest school days in the world, with an abbreviated, homework-encumbered summer break to boot. Japanese students probably do not work less hard than US students, or to greater effect. * If your daughter answers "Texas City" as the state capital of Texas, the discussion of how she's struggling academically might range farther than homework load, eh? Neither my son in high school nor my daughter in middle school has ever to my knowledge had state capitals homework, and neither would give that answer. * If your daughter has spent middle school staying up until 1:00AM completing homework†, so much so that you are in open conflict with the school over that load, why oh why would you go out of your way to enroll the kid in a highly selective public school that is virtually assured to maintain or increase that load? We had homework-intensive school options for the boy, too, and (sanely) decided not to avail ourselves of them. Is this a status obsession thing? Because if the end goal is a push to get your kid into an Ivy, stop bitching about workload. You're choosing to make your kid compete. Minus the cannabis (I substituted Unix exploit development), I had a similar high school experience to this author. I'm not generally in favor of homework and would if asked by any of my kid's teachers --- who do actually coordinate to even out the workload --- vote for less of it. But I think the parent in this article is suffering from a couple problems of his own creation, and has probably not come up with an indictment of the US school system. † Never once has either of my kids had a middle school workload that kept them up late at night.
  • aestra 13y ago
    My younger brother who is now in his mid-twenties had to memorize state capitals, in elementary school. I had to memorize a map of Europe in 6th grade. It's somewhat meaningless.
• wintersFright 13y ago
  I'm surprised he is so open about the weed. Especially since his daughter will read that. I thought the USA was all gung ho on the war on drugs?
  • smsm42 13y ago
    USA is absolutely insane on war on drugs. Same person can openly admit in his youth he was using marijuana and cocaine and advocate decades-long mandatory sentences on people who are found in possession of the same now. I tried to understand what's going on in the heads of those people but I've given up. It looks like when it comes to certain subjects, people are just switching off their brains and think with some other organs, I dare not guess which ones.
• auggierose 13y ago
  "for example, converting 0.00009621 to scientific notation is tricky (it’s 9.621 x 10¯5, which makes no intuitive sense to me)" Are math skills out there really THAT bad?
• anaphor 13y ago
  I'm in an honours program at university and I get orders of magnitude less homework. Of course the work requires much more thought and maybe more reading, but the people designing public school curriculums really need to learn how people actually learn.
• Zigurd 13y ago
  His daughter is in a high-pressure selective school that appears to market this workload as a feature. It might be the right thing for kids who breeze through their school material and then get bored for lack of any challenge. It probably isn't the right thing for everyone. His daughter seems like the victim of needing to get into some college prep program where choices are limited, waiting lists are common, and many private school prices are out of reach. I did not see where she was asked about a choice of schools. Middle school seems way too early for a program this intensive. What is the retention for all this material when the students are high school juniors? The only purpose for the homework grind appears to be to get students that they don't want in this school to self-select out of it. It seems like what the author is wishing for is a good free normal public school in New York City. Ha! The bottom line is that he can't actually afford to live where he lives unless he sacrifices his daughter's childhood this way.
  • danielweber 13y ago
    I think schools follow this algorithm: 1. Great students (read: students who get into selective colleges) do a lot of homework. 2. Therefore, give everyone lots of homework, and all students will be great students. I've seen that pattern replicate itself down to kindergarten. Not everyone is going to be a biochemist. Stop punishing the kids who won't be.
• ctdonath 13y ago
  The Montessori method: take each child at his own pace thru sensory-grounded material, giving enough familiarity with material until it is internalized and the child abstracts it himself - THEN move on to the next step, at individual pace. Therein lies understanding. Not doing this leads to contempt for the material and rote memorization (which the article starts out noting is the plain conclusion) devoid of understanding.
  • jbellis 13y ago
    That's the theory, anyway. http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/2013/09/18/montessori-schools-dont-work-for-young-boys/ http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/2013/09/18/montessori...
    • ctdonath 13y ago
      Upshot of the objection is: boys are busy, rough, and loud. The objection then practically concludes that letting them play hard as they desire is the only option, and the acceptable alternative thereto is At least in public school, boys get diagnosed with ADHD and plied with Adderal to enable adjustment to [learning while sitting still for very long periods]. I reject any conclusion that reduces to either letting kids run wild or drugging them into submission. Montessori finds a happier medium: the child is permitted to move and change focus as desired, while gently encouraging them to learn focus and self-control. Maybe it's not optimal for some kids, but it's sure better than the alternatives the link prefers.
• loup-vaillant 13y ago
  > Esmee […] got a C on her math homework from the night before because she hadn’t made an answer column. Her correct answers were there, at the end of each neatly written-out equation, yet they weren’t segregated into a separate column on the right side of each page. I almost snapped my pen in half.
• rayiner 13y ago
  The entirety of K-12 is a basically a crock. Very little of this stuff is important. Who cares how crystal structures are defined? Memorizing that trivia won't improve your thinking skills, and you won't remember it after the exam anyway. Even if you go on to major in chemistry, you'll have to relearn all of that anyway because colleges don't trust the K-12 system to teach any of it correctly. My wife recently told me she wants to send our daughter to an expensive private school for 4th-12th grade. My wife and I both attended public school until graduate school, so I wasn't warm to the idea. But I couldn't argue with her reasoning: many private schools are exempt from NCLB (because they don't take federal money under the Act), and as such can dispense with a lot of that ridiculousness. They teach the important skills (reading, writing, logical reasoning, math), but otherwise go easy on kids, inflate their grades, and have old connections to top colleges so they don't have to define themselves based on the "rigor" of their programs the way public magnet schools do. I went to a highly-competitive public magnet school for high school, and it was a huge waste of time. I sorely regret all those hours I spent learning about earth science or ancient china. My wife went to a very progressive public school in Oregon and loved it. They had mostly electives, and one of her classes in high school was a whole class on James Joyce. They didn't assign a ton of homework, but instead let kids explore their interests them go home at the end of the day.
• vickytnz 13y ago
  An aside: I've been reading Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Book Store. Good, breezy, semi-techy read.
• graeme 13y ago
  I teach the SAT. My impression is that children are too busy to learn. I learned a LOT from reading random things outside of school. Students have no time for that these days. And when they do need to learn something new, such as math on the SAT, they have no time to learn it. The schools also don't seem to be focussed on learning. The emphasis is on covering 'the curriculum'. So I'm dealing students studying trigonometry who can't multiply 7 * 6 without a calculator. Needless to say, they don't actually understand trigonometry either. Memorize, not rationalize is sadly very true.
  • mathattack 13y ago
    Very good point. I really enjoyed being out of school so that I could control my reading list. The one thing I didn't like about going back for grad school was giving up control over my reading list for a few years.
• grandalf 13y ago
  This article reminds me of being in school (some high school and surprisingly many college classes). I simply didn't do the memorization homework. I turned out OK but my GPA was definitely lower than it would have been if I'd spent all those extra hours memorizing.
• grandalf 13y ago
  The trend toward memorization homework is part of the larger view of education as social assimilation training and obedience training. If the homework required "rationalization, not memorization" then the brightest students would easily coast through in minutes the same material that would take the dimmer students hours. With memorization, the curve is flattened significantly and grades are much more closely tied to effort than to innate ability. All this is intentional and has the desired outcome -- colleges offer many classes where the student who is used to drudgery and memorization can simply thrive by putting in the hours with flashcards, and can then go on to a career where obedience and compliance with drudgery are highly valued traits. The problem with this is that it misses the more important point, which is that abstract reasoning skills can be taught too, they are just often taught very poorly and so kids who have a small leg up (largely by accident) get a big unfair advantage and in a non-memorization world reap significant benefits. I'd be extremely concerned if my child were being asked to memorize material that was not strictly necessary for some kind of reasoning exercise.
• modfodder 13y ago
  One subject I don't remember learning; how to learn. Maybe it was just taught so early that I don't remember, but although I was always a good student that breezed through school for the most part, I take horrendous notes and feel really inefficient when it comes to learning.
• joelhooks 13y ago
  We homeschool and our kids do 2-4 hours of academics per day, generally. Frees up a lot of time for things like "being a kid" and "enjoying life". Some days they don't do any and spend the day building things in minecraft or drawing pictures. It's awesome, and I highly recommend it to anybody interested in non-institutionalized kids.
• alexeisadeski3 13y ago
  Why would he read 79 pages in one night if all he had to do was find three quotable sentences? Read three pages picked at random from that 79 page section and move on. This isn't rocket science.
• segmondy 13y ago
  "When I get home, Esmee tells me she got a C on her math homework from the night before because she hadn’t made an answer column. Her correct answers were there, at the end of each neatly written-out equation, yet they weren’t segregated into a separate column on the right side of each page. I’m amazed that the pettiness of this doesn’t seem to bother her. School is training her well for the inanities of adult life." :-(
• deleted 13y ago
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