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Too Much Homework Can Be Counterproductive
Spy der Mann writes "An interesting study made by to two Penn State researchers shows that increases in homework may actually hinder educational achievement (Coral Cache) instead of improving it. The researchers analyzed a large amount of data collected by the Third International Study of Mathematics and Sciences (TIMSS) in 1994 from schools in 41 nations across the fourth, eighth and 12th grades. For some analyses, they used data from an identical study carried out in '99." From the article: "An unintended consequence may be that those children who need extra work and drill the most are the ones least likely to get it. Increasing homework loads is likely to aggravate tensions within the family, thereby generating more inequality and eroding the quality of overall education."
While that may be true, if you're going to disagree with an article that mentions not only one, but two studies disagreeing with you, why don't you back that up with a little fact?
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
Too much of anything can be counterproductive
Homework isn't pretty - but it teaches you how to sit down and do stuff. The real problem is that most homework is the hard stuff - makes some children think and most of them give up. I used to postpone it and do an all nighter , my sister used to finish her homework the day she got it... it sort of carries over into how you handle problems in real life too (unfortunately).
My parents just gave up on trying to make me do homework when I was around 11 or 10 years old. I think it helped me think my way around problems - by the time I was 17 I was ranked in the top 50 students in the state. Unorthodox methods (I remember being kicked out of class for asking the proof of Pythagoras Theorem) and a couple of good teachers pushed me through the indifference barrier that these kids are stuck at (translated as "why should I always be studying ?").
I spent most of my life learning stuff - but I studied around 4 or 5 years. Too bad the world doesn't realize they need problem solvers of a practical nature - not guys who know calculus by heart.Let me quote Calvin here - They only teach stuff any fool can look up in a book .
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
The there's also the issue of student motivation to actually study in the first place. Unless you have an active and ongoing interest in a particular topic, you are usually not particularly motivated to study it.
Nobody at home forced me to take an interest in computers and electronics. Nobody gave me homework
You can only thrust so much work at kids, but the REAL learning starts happening when the kids start LEARNING FOR THEMSELVES and feel comfortable coming to the teacher with all sorts of difficult questions. Rather than the current top->down method of throwing facts around, hoping they stick, and asking the students questions they have no motivation to answer for themselves.
The main problem is, at a young age kids aren't motivated to want to slug away at homework... little do they realise that sooner or later their formative years are going to be gone and the workforce will be waiting for them. In a way I guess they have to be forced, but it is not the best way to learn IMHO.
All in all, teaching is not an easy job. Teaching kids to think, rather than giving them all the answers is tricky.
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Some countries banned it, and I entirely agree, there should be no homework, just schoolwork. There's absolutely no rational reason why schoolwork must be done at home; children can learn just as well in school. In such countries the kids would do all their schoolwork before leaving school, or, if you must use the word "homework", they do their "homework" at school(!), and once they're out for the day, that's it, they can be kids, as they should be, free for the day, and free to enjoy their afternoons and evenings.
I still remember from my childhood the frustration of getting "homework" from 5 different teachers, each oblivious to the demands of others, and even when made aware, just simply doesn't care!
Homework belongs back to the days when corporal punishment was okay in school. Corporal punishment, and often collective punishment of an entire class, was easily abused, with no real evidence that it actually was of any benefit or necessity overall, and so is homework, a relic of a bygone era that still persists.
After I graduated from college I decided to take a year off and went to Taiwan to teach young kids. Most of them were about 8 years old and went to school from 7AM until 6 PM and then went home and did 3-4 hours of homework. Weekends were made up of bushibans of math, science and english.
Does repetition work? Yes mostly. Learning to write Chinese is best taught by repetition. Any sport is best learned by repetition.
Being a brilliant scientist is that learned by repetition? No. The important thing seems to me is to leave some time for creativity and that is one thing Asian schools (assuming Korea/Singapore/Japan are similar) don't seem to get.
Understanding patterns, applying information from another part of your brain and another field to the task at hand etc. This is where creativity comes from. I don't think it can 100% be taught - but I think it can be inspired by good teachers.
Where are the Asian Nobel prize winners? How come Taiwan can take 60% of the US Electrical Engineering Phds (90s stat) but not produce top line physics research? That is probabably a question for another day.
You have studies saying "but assigning more homework made no difference", then just looking through this thread you just see two dozen answers saying basically "hah! I didn't do any homework back when it was less of it. They can't make me do it. The teacher was soo funny getting all upset and foaming at the mouth about it."
/. article), having the genes to be a slightly asocial genius instead of an air-head chatterbox, is proposed as a reason for abortion. (Now I have nothing against abortion, but just saying that it's put on the same undesirability level as carrying the genese for some fatal diseases.)
Well, gee, maybe it's not homework that's causing the bad results, but _lack_ of actually _doing_ that homework. Yeah, I can see how the Japanese can do better on less homework... if they actually _do_ that homework and _study_ for it. Yeah, big surprise there, than someone on 1 hour a week of maths homework does better than someone who basically did _zero_ hours a week of maths homework.
Or what's the article's thrust? Basically "but some parents are too busy to help the kid with that homework." Well, gee, maybe it's the _kid_ that should learn how to do some work and study? Yeah, I can see how 2 hours of maths homework done by the _parent_ still leaves the kid behind someone who did only 1 hour of it, but did it personally.
Or in the article itself, "homework may not be cordially received, especially by parents of small children" or "Parents might sometimes see exercises in drill and memorization as intrusions into family time." So basically, forget even peer pressure from other kids. The message that the child gets even from the _parent_ is basically "oh, screw the homework, it's just getting in the way of other stuff you could do in that time."
Well, gee, maybe it's not the homework that's the problem. Maybe what they describe there is a massive cultural failure. It's a culture which basically discourages any attempt at personal responsibility, study, or academic results. A culture where being called "Einstein" in high school is actually an _insult_. A culture where (as reflected in another recent
Maybe _that_ is the real failure.
And blaming homework for the lack of results of people who _didn't_ do that homework... well, seems to me just bloody stupid.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'll probably be modded down because I'm responding angrily to a BS post, but...
As a 16-year-old student at California's top high school (API statistics and quite literally the best AP Physics class in the world), who gets mostly A's and sometimes a B, I can verify that too much homework is really screwing things up. It's no lack of responsibility that I can't do SEVEN concurrent projects equally well. It's no lack of personal responsibility or lack of study that causes my grade to lower. It's the fact that I DON"T HAVE THE TIME TO STUDY EVERYTHING! When was the last time I came home with very litte homework, enjoying extra time to do what I love (programming)? Virtually NEVER! Two hours of math a week (from the article)? Ha! How does an hour a day sound?
Can you really say that just because I spend anywhere from five to seven hours on homework that I'm "just going through the motions" when I really try to think and put effort into my projects so they aren't just another piece of uninspired crap the teachers see all the time? Are you saying that I don't try to learn from my work? That I deserve SEVEN concurrent projects, four of which are blatantly busywork, and two of which are genuinely useful? That I can't be learning more about my subject of interest, programming, by spending more time learning about it? AND that my effort in school is wasted (I "go through the motions" and don't learn), as you so dismissively label so many students?
"Einstein" is no insult -- it's the people who irresponsibly blame their social situation on a characteristic they can't change. Blaming culture is nice, and sometimes useful, but honestly -- if the you think that the Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is exactly the problem, then I think you're misguided or unfamiliar with the amount of work today's best students have to do. The problem with attitude is at most HALF the problem. The problem with culture is usually a non-issue (unless you live in a really, really, really bad area and can't cope).
The problem with having too much to do and too little time to do it is you don't get the chance to find what you love to do and actually do it.
How much of my free time, how much of my waning childhood, how much of the free time I can enjoy are you going to metaphorically take away by justifying all of my homework?