Homework

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.

Uncomfortable theories of education

Related to this.

There are some truisms repeated during the education of educators (and in discussions of education, particularly at the policy level), that I think are incorrect. Granted, my experiences in education may be atypical, but the following points, I believe, at least need to be considered:

1. Not every child wants to learn.

We are told repeatedly in teachers' college that every child wants to learn. Everyone agrees that the system is flawed and/or broken, and these flaws are responsible for why, by the time they reach high school, many children do not seem to want to learn. It is assumed that children are, by nature, intellectually curious, and it is the system that beats this out of them.

I believe that the system is broken rather than flawed, and that it does quite a bit to stifle intellectual curiosity. However, I also believe that the truism that every child wants to be a lifelong learner requires further examination, and may indeed be a useful lie. (In that it is useful for teachers to believe this and perform their jobs as though it were a law of nature, but it may very well be pure fiction.)

I am a reasonably intellectually curious and well-educated person, and yet I frequently default to laziness. Whether this is a function of brain chemistry, fatigue, or innate tendency, I'm not sure, but if I'm smart and I would often rather just watch TV, what does that mean for people who struggle with learning? Remember that people who utter the mantra, "every child wants to learn" are reasonably educated people who like learning. It's stupid to generalize the experience of the minority who complete post-secondary education and then choose education as a profession to the entirety of the population that moves through K-12.

2. Everyone has different learning styles. This may be irrelevant.

The Ontario educational system currently recognizes around nine types of intelligences, and operates on the basis of there being four major learning styles. While this may have some basis in reality, it does not logically follow that if a student is stronger in one particular type of intelligence, the other ones should be ignored. You should still know how to write an essay even if you are a musical genius, and even if you will never write a particularly good essay.

3. There is no such thing as an educational model that has not been tried before. Currently trendy models of education are nothing new.

If you think Differentiated Learning is substantially different from the theory of Seven Intelligences, you are not very intelligent.

They need to learn more/they need to learn less/they need to learn specific facts/they need to develop critical thinking skills/they need to learn learning skills/they need more arts/they need more maths/teacher-centric education/child-centric education/phonics/whole language/just shut up already.

Which leads me to...

4. We actually know some of the things that work. They just happen to be expensive things.

Small class sizes, well-educated and passionate teachers, access to resources, variety of instructional styles, activities, and assessments, parental support, groupings according to ability and interest rather than age. There, I just solved the education crisis for you. Now give me money.

Moment of Heartwarming

Various discussions today, on my blog and other people's, reminded me of why I still like LJ and stick around here. Thanks, guys.