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

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

Pooey - I'd like to read all this but I have only a little time on computer as I left my laptop lead far away so have to go to my dad's to catch up online!

at my primary school (5-10 years old) we had very few lessons - just handwriting and then maths in the last year - and no homework. My friends and I used to get extremely bored and beg for homework. We joined the astronomy and birdwatching clubs so we could learn something. Then at secondary school for the first two years I was so shy and scared that i did my homework studiously, then when I realized I could get high marks without bothering I stopped doing it. I only worked for Russian, because it was hard and I had to and I wanted to learn it, and English because I loved reading and writing anyway.

I suppose it differs from person to person greatly, but I agree about reading. Most people do need to be set reading to do for homework or will not read much at all, and reading the books in class takes up way too much time. Going on theatre trips probably helps a great deal. My little brother's school only got him to read one play by Shakespeare throughout his whole time there, whilst at my school we read two a year and went to see plays regularly.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

We had no homework in primary school (to age 11) and then a ton probably peaking in the Upper 5th (grade 10) because that was the big year for 'O' levels and I, and many others, had as many as ten examinable subjects. It eased up a bit in the Sixth Form because we were taking fewer subjects which meant free periods in regular class time which could be used for independent study as well as just having fewer subjects. Still, it was homework pretty much every night and weekends. It just wasn't quite as brutal as Upper 5th. At all times there was a clear expectation that we were reading in addition to set texts.

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

I know some nice homeschoolers, liberals, not religious fanatics. They're doing a good job with the kid. But their attitude toward the public schools can only be described as a paranoid fantasy. They assiduously collect articles describing every possible abuse that ever happens in the schools, as if that kind of stuff will be routine if their daughter set foot in the local elementary school. She'll be strip searched! Electroshocked! Witnessed-to by her teacher! Shot! Locked in the basement!

Have things changed that much? Worst things that happened to me were boredom and too many standardized tests. I think there are even more tests now.

I got picked on, but my worst pickings-on were not in school, but at extraschoolar activities that this kid does go do, so she's hardly heat-shielded from bullies.

[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.