After reading this article in The New York Times, I am left wondering what educators are supposed to do. Altough this story is about homework in elementary school, I believe it could (in some ways) apply to college students as well.
For the 4-5 years I've been teaching, I'm been bombarded with the idea that lectures don't work; active learning is the gold standard. But this article has experts saying that homework has limited value. Isn't homework (working problems, writing essays, etc.) a type of active learning that occurs outside of the classroom?
Another part of the article I don't get is who the homework stresses and who would benefit from having no weekend and no holiday homework assignments. I don't have children, so I don't know if homework has gotten out of hand. (I was one of those dorks who wanted more homework than I was ever assigned.) And, if it's out of hand, for whom? Kids? Parents? Both? Who do you think these policies are designed to help? Are they a good idea? I'm truly perplexed.
It's not out of hand. If the child is spending too much time on a subject then clearly there is a problem in comprehension or something else that needs to be addressed. The article argues that homework takes away time from play and family. I suppose teaching kids time-management instead of banning homework is out of the question...
ReplyDeleteA lot of this homework isn't active learning. It's pushing a pencil around on a piece of paper. Busywork. Replicating the example ad nauseum.
ReplyDeleteYou know, admin-flakes will support something today and tear it apart tomorrow. Offer them a grant and they change their tune.
ReplyDeleteAgreed with Frankity - homework is an altogether different beast in elementary school. Working through 300 multiplication problems is not the same as having a take-home essay.
ReplyDeleteI'm torn on this one. I have a kid in elementary school, and sometimes the homework is a clearly designed set of tasks designed to consolidate learning, and other times, with other teachers, it is just as clearly bullshit.
ReplyDeleteI know that I am unusual as a parent in being able to spot the difference.
What WhatLadder said. Sometimes the homework is useful practice or consolidation. Sometimes it's time-wasting nonsense. Makes me wish they graded only on results, not on handing in assignments, frankly; then only the assignments that were useful would need to be done.
ReplyDeleteI have a kid. And I'm sending her to a school with no homework till 2nd grade, then only 10 minutes per grade. Here's why: we have a ton of things we can do with her that are more educationally valuable than worksheets. We have a vegetable garden; beehives; a desert tortoise; a church community; neighbors with kids; a keen interest in books, music, and board games; wacky lesbo friends who teach her cool things; and great local libraries, playgrounds, museums, and parks. We are a stable two-parent family with good values and flexible-hours jobs who enjoy our kid's company. What she'll get out of that, and out of our home life, is more important than test scores and worksheets. We'll support whatever take-home projects come our way, and help her study for tests (though I don't think her school uses them for assessment), but the less busywork she brings home, the better.
ReplyDeleteFrog & Toad, I wanna come over to your house and play.
ReplyDeleteI live in a town where people complain about summer reading lists, etc. We get a summer work packet that takes my kids maybe 10 hours total to complete. It is kind of crazy when you look at it all at once, and many of these parents don't have it in them to parcel it out to their kids. The weird thing, though, is those summer homework packets stop after middle school.
ReplyDeleteNeither of my kids had a lot of homework during the year until maybe 7th grade. Some of it is bullshit, yes, and some isn't, but isn't that always the way it goes? I like the fact that they have to buckle down and work out a schedule and have some discipline. IMO, that's good training for life.
@Merely Academic: What you wrote makes me think of my own students, who only want to take a test and not come to class or do any kind of prep work. What about the learning process? In a perfect world we could trust students to be in charge of their own learning process, but as professors, how many of us see students who are capable of that?
About 10 or so years ago when Kal Jr was in Elementary School, he had a TON of homework. Thank goodness for a "traditional" family (a mom and dad both in the home) with fairly educated parents who had interest in helping their sole offspring. I don't know what they were thinking sometimes in his (public) school. I thought it was out of hand, but dear Lois (a public school teacher) thought the more the better.
ReplyDeleteAt the time, I thought: "if this is hell now, what will it be like in Middle School or High School"? Well... not much! He had less homework in MS and HS than in K-5.
In any event, there has got to be a balance. Kids need to do work at home, but more than trivial fill-up-some-time cr*p.
It's funny that Bella mentioned summer reading lists... One summer, Kal Jr had a selection of books from American authors (something like read 4(?) books out of the list of 25) and, ummmmm... I pointed out to the school system that one of the authors was NOT American... he was an Australian. "Oh."
What, trivial "fill up some time" crap like, say, practicing scales on a musical instrument?
ReplyDeleteThat's what a good deal of math homework, in particular, is; science homework, too. Plain ol' boring "make 50 free throws before you leave practice" shit. No value to that at all. </sarcasm>
The reason they are asked to do multiple arithmetic problems, or multiple "solve the integral" problems, or multiple "give the product of this reaction" problems, is to cement the relationships in their little heads.
introvert.prof, fine -- 20 minutes of that per day for a second grader, 30 for a 3rd grader, 40 for a 4th grader and so on is just plenty. Say the kid plays an instrument: add 10-15 minutes of playing scales and you've got quite a bit of do-at-home-work. By high school, that's 2 hours of homework a day, plus a half-hour of music practice, which on top of sports/school plays/recitals/etc. is enough. Adolescents need SLEEP to do well in school, more than they need extra homework.
ReplyDeleteWhat I object to is what Dr D describes, big loads of take-home work, especially the rote kind, on small shoulders. It takes away from valuable time for play and family life. Childhood is for exploration and socialization, not just memorization.
I am all for summer reading lists. Summer, with more at-home time, *should* be for reading. I used to read 7 or 8 books a day on weekends when I didn't have camp, and I remember those days of drunken immersion in fiction very fondly.
Frankity, come on over. It's fun here. The bees don't hurt you if you don't bother them, and the tortoise looks hilarious when she eats.
Um...Frog and Toad, I always got the impression the rule was supposed to be 10 minutes of homework (total) per grade per week, not night or per class.
ReplyDeleteThink about it...a 12th grader would have 2 hours of homework per night per class? There aren't enough hours in the day! Either you're misinterpreting this "common sense" rule or your school is.
a 12th grader would have 2 hours of homework per night per class? There aren't enough hours in the day!
ReplyDeleteTM, I'm gonna call bullshit on you. Two hours of homework per week, for someone whose next step is college?
In college we tell 'em to expect that working two hours outside of class for every hour in class, should earn an average student a C (with grade inflation it's more like a B). For a full time student, that's 24 hours of homework per week, minimum.
That's a damned big jump, from 2 hours per week to 24 hours per week.
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ReplyDeleteSorry, TM, I missed the "per class" bit. But you missed the mark: F&T was saying 2 hours total per night.
ReplyDeleteI apologize, but the fact remains that two hours homework per week, per class, is a bit light when compared to what will be expected of them in college. High schoolers spend more time in class than college students, but still... I'd say three hours per class, per week, would not be out of line for high school.
TM, there's nothing saying "per class" in my comment. I meant per night, as does the school my kid will go to. 10 minutes per night per grade -- in elementary school where all classes are taught by one teacher, that might be math homework one night, social studies the next, and so on.
ReplyDeleteBy 12th grade, that works out to about 20-30 minutes a night per class if a kid has 5 academic classes in a given semester: 2 hours of homework per night (Mon-Sat) for 12 hours per week. I think that's entirely reasonable when you factor in after-school activities like sports, theater, school paper, etc.
College is different because they don't have every class every day, so there's daytime study time. There I think a minimum of 20-25 hours a week is appropriate -- though god knows my students do not study these hours.
My prep (high) school assigned c. 4 hours of homework a night, after a school day that ran from 8:30 to 4:30. That was definitely way too much, especially since I hadn't yet learned not to feel guilty about being selective in what work I completed. I only survived because Wednesday was devoted to a "co-curriculum" in which we did internship-type work, rather than going to class, which allowed me to catch up on my sleep mid-week. But it did leave me well-prepared for college; in fact, it was a tremendous relief to actually have time to complete the homework *and* sleep. And yes, college students today don't include the necessary outside-of-class study time in their schedules (in part, at least at my university, because they spend so much time trying to earn money to pay tuition/minimize loans).
ReplyDeleteAnd I, too, want to come over and play at F&T's house. At this time of year, having to drive for 20 minutes to get to my community garden plot just doesn't cut it.