Homework

[sabotabby]

BoingBoing discussion on a new documentary called Race to Nowhere. The movie looks interesting—certainly something that I'd like to see. The discussion on BB is interesting. As always, the libertarians, homeschoolers*, and union-bashers are out in full-force, but so are a number of high school teachers and geeky types. (Oddly, the two posts from high school students seem to roughly concur with what the teachers are saying.)

My favourite comment so far is bigmike7 at #15, who says some sensible things, including:

[...] not everybody should be expected to conform to one way of learning. The older system most of us grew up with assumes a student is highly motivated and wants to learn. Students that either don't try or aren't bright were expected to fall by the wayside. The current system is basically the same, but overlaid with the idea that every student is intelligent and if the student is failing then it's the teacher's fault. I say it's the same in that it's still a program everyone is expected to go through.
[...]
The people in my school that are fanatical over "Schools of the Future" are the same ones that two years ago told me my students were too loud as they were working on their math problems together. Now they're preaching to me about collaboration. Schools of the Future people are extremely rigid and do not want to hear anything besides testimonials about the miracles of students' making powerpoint presentations. They are the teachers that were failing at teaching their students. Assigning no homework and no tests lets them off the hook.

I did far too much homework in elementary school, where the focus was rote memorization, and I recall being stressed out from an early age. I did a substantial amount of homework in high school as well, both because I had to but also because I was genuinely interested in what I was learning. I bitched and moaned about it, because I was a teenager, but I won't say that staying up until 2 am hand-painting Victorian floral wallpaper with watercolours taught me nothing, despite being repetitive, torturous, and technologically pointless**. Self-discipline is an undervalued skill in modern education.

My subject area is not conducive to homework, much to the joy of my students. I tell them at the beginning of class that if they are reasonably disciplined, they can get away with little to none. There is no legal way for the vast majority of them to afford the software we use in class, so the amount of homework I can assign is limited. It's essentially studying for tests (which few of them do; it's standard practice in many classrooms to allow five minutes of study time before a test) and planning work (which few of them do). A student who is focused can obtain a reasonably high mark in my class without doing homework. A student who is not focused will need to do homework–amazingly, they tend to not figure out that they can't slack off for all 75 minutes of the class, hand something crappy in at the last minute, and then expect a decent grade. A student who is actually serious will choose to do homework.

In other subject areas, I think homework is necessary. Math is a no-brainer, but there's also English. I compare the number of books we read in my high school English classes to the number of books my kids read, and the difference is staggering. Short of the university-level English classes, kids read maybe one novel a semester. We read at home and discussed in class. In a semester system (and even in a non-semester system), there's not enough time to read multiple books and analyze them.

It may very well be that today's students have too much unnecessary homework, and they definitely have too much make-work (which is different than drilling and rote-learning, by the way). But I've seen the result of the other extreme too, and it's no less useless.

Boyhowdy at #33 says the same thing:

I teach in an inner city school where there is a comprehensive culture of "nobody does homework here" that I have concluded, after three years of pushing every which way, is a truly immovable force. The result: students read less, because they do not read at home, and have to spend classtime READING BOOKS OUT LOUD; students often arrive in ninth grade functionally illiterate as a result, and the average four-year graduation rate is far under 30%. Even in my media and communications class - where homework can be "watch the evening news, and watch for x, so we can discuss it in class", or "have someone tell you a good joke, and then come tell us about it and the experience of hearing/telling it", only gets done by about a quarter of the kids.

* I am not 100% against homeschooling, but damned if homeschooling parents don't make incredibly difficult not to be.

** Even in the 90s, you could have just scanned it and used Photoshop. But that wasn't the point.

Comments

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

I've said this to you, but I'll post it here too. I know this makes me an old skool reactionary, but with the current focus in the elementary school curriculum on higher-order thinking, and critical thinking this (as long as your version of critical thinking is like the teacher's manual's version), and anti-bullying that, and whatnot, I don't see how kids can possibly acquire mastery of their basic skills without some home-work.

Writing, for example, requires practice at the very early stages. It's very difficult to acquire the motor skills to write fluently and easily without sitting down and practising penstrokes. It's tedious and lacking in immediate rewards, but it's necessary. If you can't write easily and fluently, then you can't take notes, unless you give every child a computer, and teach them to type. Oh, and by the way, fluent typing also takes drill and practice. Reading fluently and capably gets easier the more you read. Some kids will indeed read everything they can, including the nutritional information on the cereal box; others need designated practice time and programs. But you can't skimp on the reading in the early learning years, or you're going to have a student who struggles with basic comprehension and is working on decoding when you want to be discussing symbolism and plot structure. They're not going to learn to spell or write capably unless they can read.

And while it's very trendy to teach applied problem solving and logical thinking in maths, it's difficult to, for example, make change quickly unless you can do basic sums in your head. Guess what? Some kids need to drill in order to acquire basic mastery of sums. And you can do certain things in order to make drill less tedious and demoralizing, and that's great; I certainly support that, but you still need to put the time in.

Not every kid needs to put the same amount of time into the same things. Some kids learn to read relatively easily, others struggle. Some kids learn math pretty quickly, others spend a lot of time drawing 5 baskets with 5 apples in each basket to get 25; do this enough times and eventually the kid remembers that 5 fives are 25.

A lot of us don't remember doing all this foundational work, because we did it when we were really, really little. I remember doing it for math, at which I sucked, but not for reading, to which I took like a duck to water.

I remember doing in-class handwriting drill: endless pages of penstroke practice (in pencil), and letter shape practice; I had to do it at home if I didn't finish in class. I am assured that there's no time in most classrooms today for this kind of drill. And you know what? Kids are not teaching themselves handwriting. Reluctant readers do not teach themselves to read. Budding mathphobes do not teach themselves to make change or halve the quantities in a recipe. I am closely associated with a seven year old who would spend all day every day playing Lego and looking at pictures in books if he were permitted to do so, and would never learn to read.

I don't think it's his teachers' faults, entirely. I do think the school system isn't quite giving him, or other kids, what they need. I definitely think a more flexible curriculum, a more kid-focused curriculum, and smaller classes would do him a lot of good.

[sabotabby]

This. Sure you don't want to be a teacher?

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

Yes.

Because then I would have to deal with this nonsense head-on, rather than just pontificating about it ;-P.

Also? Nobody would give me the 8-kid class that would let me be an awesome teacher. Unless I went into Spec. Ed., I guess, and that would be waaay too much like being my mom.

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

I could run for school board trustee in the next municipal election.

But only if our current trustee isn't running, because she's pretty great.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

I'm shocked by how few parents teach their children to read or do basic sums before school age. I know that now over here children are given reading books to take home to read with their parents as homework, and the parents have to write what they have done each day, which forces parents to get involved more. I learned to read when I was three and I and a few others were allowed to sit in the other room reading Enid Blyton at school while the teacher taught everyone else to read.

[zingerella.livejournal.com]

I actually think that if children are not burning to read and/or figuring it out by themselves, most parents probably should not teach their children to read. Some kids learn to read really easily, but most do not. Teaching many children to read is actually quite difficult, and because most parents do not themselves remember the mechanisms and processes by which they learned to read, they can seriously botch the process. The result may be a kid who just doesn't learn to read until they go to school, but it can also be a kid who learns to associate reading with strife and struggle and parents asking them to do things that don't make any sense, and who has decided that reading is just hard. These kids tend to turn into reluctant readers, and it's a lot more difficult to get them reading comfortably than it is if they come to school simply having been read to, and raised in literacy-friendly environments.

This isn't to say that a parents of kids who are panting to read, are asking about words and sounds, and are figuring out things for themselves should not encourage and foster this. But readiness for reading comes at different ages for different children, and teaching reading is not really an easy or straightforward thing. If you know how to read, however, reading to or with your child can be much simpler, and, in the long run, equally beneficial.

Ditto math. Some kids pick up numeracy pretty easily and intuitively. Some don't. There are tricks to teaching numbers and their relationships, and not every parent has the understanding of numbers or of pedagogy to successfully teach these concepts to every child (not every teacher does, either, but they do teach a few things about how kids learn in teacher training.

So I don't necessarily thing parents should make sure kids know how to read and how to calculate before they send them to school. Given the resources they need, teachers are pretty good at this. I'd be a lot happier if parents would support the teachers and do stuff like the reading at home with their kids that you mentioned (most schools here have a book-a-day programme, too. The books are often pretty dreadful, but they're appropriate to the child's reading level, and therefore probably won't cause horrible frustration.), and playing maths games and modelling literate and numerate behaviour, so that children acquired a context in which to see their emerging skills.

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. The awful thing is that schools have had to demand that parents read with their children. I think most children would be asking to learn to read and picking things up naturally if it were normal in their homes for people to read, and if they were read bedtime stories.

Perhaps it isn't so much that parents should teach their children to read, if parents can't be trusted not to make reading a horrible chore instead of fun. I suppose what I meant is that it is shocking how few parents bother reading with their children and making it enjoyable to learn to read, then! Obviously I wouldn't think it great if parents were putting their children off reading by making it stressful for them. My mother did that for me and science by trying to make me do an Open University technology course when I was eight. Huge mistake!

A book-a-day programme! I don't know if they manage as many books as that here. I imagine one a week is more likely!

I find the phonetic method frustrating. I tried to help a friend's child with his reading homework recently and could see that he was getting very upset because he had been taught that pronouncing the letters in turn would sound out the word, which unless the word is "dog" it often does not. I showed him how to recognise frequently occurring words by their shape and context, and within half an hour he was reading whole sentences by himself and smiling.

Being a primary school teacher would be great in terms of being able to help sweet small children, I think, but I would find it way too hard and stressful! Much admiration for nice teachers who do it, though.