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Schools Banning Homework?
theodp writes "Alarmed by indicators of student stress like cheating and substance abuse, some SF Bay Area schools are reducing an education staple: homework. Homework is mostly banned at Menlo Park's Oak Knoll School, but some teachers apparently have higher 'expections' [sic]."
like good grammar? FTA: . Reading Log - children should be reading a minimum of 15 every night.
Um. 15 what?
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
Given the order of magnitude of what is expected of my little cousins, the 15 probably refers to 15 minutes.
Homework, sheesh, its amazing what happens when people try to be nice but stop thinking..
It used to be that there were three groups of kids in a clasroom. One was average, one was above average, and one was below average. The teacher taught to the average group. The above average kids got bored, but hopefully were given more work if they enjoyed it. The lower than average kids did work at home in order to keep up with the average. All was good.
Then we decided to be nice. So, instead of letting the lower-than-average kids deal with being such, we'll teach to their level so everything can be done in school. Well, that left most of the kids bored, and the nostalgic feeling of homework was going away. So, they started giving homework to everyone.
Parents liked homework too, because it occuppied their kids time for them. So teachers gave more, and than the kids complained or rebelled. It's just plain sad.
One of my teachers did it best. He wrote an assignment on the board every day at the beginning of class that was due the next day, and then proceeded to teach it. As soon as you understood it, you stopped listening and started on the work. The lower-than-average kids needed help, so the higher-than-average helped them when they were finished with it themselves. There was rarely homwork for anyone, unless they needed it to keep up with the class (and that was known by whether they could do the work in class.) I consider that teacher the best one. He gave work for learning it, not just to give it.
Have you read my journal today?
From my experience, homework is used as a tool by bad teachers to teach their lessons. We had the a pretty bad Math's teacher, his idea of teaching was to provide a brief summary and then tell people to just do an entire chapter of problems as homework. Easily 2 hours work, especially as the problems got longer and longer. in my experience the class time broke down to this, 40 mins overall. 5 mins getting the class together, into the class room sorting things out etc 10-15 mins correcting and looking at homework etc. Then say 5 mins explaining something and the last part of the class finally the remainder of the time is spent assigning more homework and people maybe getting one or two of the problems done. The real problem with excessive homework is that people tend not to finish it, and far to much useful class time is eaten up either assigning more or correcting what was assigned the previous few days. Of course if you take my experience and spread it over the other 8 or so subjects we had it ended up being highly stressful and more then anything left a number of people uninterested in the subjects as they became more and more burned out on the subject.
Lucky you. You obviously have the luxury where you live of being able to choose which school your kid goes to, and have a wealth of choices available so you can move him/her from school to school at a whim.
I'm not sure either that your kid would thank you for flipping his/her learning and social life on it's head so quickly.
Well, normally homework is supposed to work like this:
...at least the professor has tutors to back him up.
1. The teacher spends N lessons teaching the kids something new (N usually is between 1 and 5)
2. The students get homework repeating what was done in class (It is known that repetition is an important part of learning)
3. The teacher spends N lessons exploring the deeper areas of the current topic (N between 1 and 3)
4. The students get homework that either repeats the new stuff and/or requires them to apply their knowledge to problems that don't follow the scheme seen so far
5. UNTIL test GOTO 3
Some teachers, however, do it like bad university professors:
1. The teacher spends one lesson talking about the subject, boring the students to death
2. The students get a ton of homework where they do the actual learning
3. UNTIL test GOTO 1
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Speaking as a teacher, I agree with this move. The problem with homework (at least in the schools where I have worked) is that it is expected to be graded and counted toward the overall academic progress of the child. This is an issue because as a teacher I cannot trust that the work done at home is the child's own. Aside from the easy things to catch like copying there are a myriad of parents and tutors who will use homework to artificially boost a child's grades.
Homework should be used for practice, but not count for the final grade.
-CGP
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
We've come to expect that our kids do tons of homework each and every night, and I have many colleagues who parrot that idea. When I press them as to why, they basically tell me that they need to practice doing homework. Rarely is the question answered that the lesson needs to be reinforced or whatnot.
We're in the day and age of "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB), the current incarnation of educational reform that has been around since the sixties. I live in an average-to-slightly-upper middle class neighborhood, and the vast difference among my students academically is astounding. 1/3 of my kids in the classroom have IEPs (Individual Educational Plans, which have goals tailored to the individual, and you must follow them, even if it was written in another district before the student moved to yours), and gathering homework on a regular basis from everybody is time consuming due to the amount of kids not doing it to the different expectations NCLB has forced.
The reality is that very few parents are willing or able to help at home. Kids are overextended with activities (kids are doing extra-curriculars at an all-time high), or they're latchkey, or they're in daycare for extended time. I usually get done in FIVE minutes one-on-one what could be done in half an hour at home, and of course I take that route when I can. I've moved on to pushing some work back to the next day instead of giving it for homework (yes, I still give homework, just not nearly as much as when I started, and now it's mostly reading), due to the fact that while they are learning skills they should have an opportunity to learn it from a person that is getting paid for teaching it, and it highly qualified to do it (yes, there are teachers who are not highly qualified, or highly motivated, but that's for another thread I think).
Kids who don't finish something in a reasonable timeframe in the classroom will have more homework than those who do. It's easy to tell, once you get to know the kids, whether they don't understand or are malingering. I do, however, like to give reading homework for many reasons. For one, it helps them become better readers, and they actually DO IT, especially if they self-select the reading. Another reason is that, in my grade, I encourage the kids to read with parents or siblings. I get a lot of feedback about how that has been good for the family as a whole over time.
I can't speak to the upper grades, but I know many teachers who see the same thing (the kids who can do it already, the kids who can't at home, and the middle ground) in middle school and high school. There's no easy answer, but looking back at the history of education, there was an extended period (covering DECADES) where there was virtually no homework for the kids. I wouldn't say a blanket "no homework at all" for the upper levels, but I'd certainly be in favor of limiting it to an hour or less. Just food for thought.
Yeah, probably switched topics too much, but I have no time to re-read this because I have essays to grade...
I'm pro-accordion and I vote
One wonders if the 2nd grade teachers at Menlo Park ES have ever actually raised a 7 year old themselves. The average 7 year old has an attention span of about 15 minutes. I've raised 2 myself, and coached hundreds of others in both basketball and baseball. The cognitive skills these teachers seem to expect simply are not there yet. The idea that you can give them a weeks worth of homework on Monday and expect them to remember to bring in Friday without mom helping is ludicrious. The only way it is going to happen is if mom and dad help them schedule out the work all week, and then personally put it in the backpack Thursday night. Even with that, a lot of the kids will walk out of the house Friday morning without it if mom isn't there to hand them the backpack on the way out the door. Punishing the kid for being a normal 7 year old is simply cruel.
It seems as though the school has outsourced reading, handwriting, math, and spelling to mom and dad. What exactly are they doing all day in school?
Sounds like you might want to read this.
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
When I arrived in the US, I realized my fellow 5th graders had no idea about geometry, sets and a whole bunch of other mathermatical concepts that I thought were completely basic. In 9th grade geometry, they basically made me repeat the math I learned in 4th grade. And I'll admit it: I was totally baked in very many of my geometry classes and it was still an easy A.
But what I really wanted to say is this: I don't dispute the results of the study. I can easily imagine that homework doesn't help American students do better at the American grade school curriculum. That's because in America, the slowest kid in the class sets the pace for everyone else, and that kid dosn't do homework anyway. No wonder it takes no work to keep up! But we absolutely can aim higher standards. Kids are capable of learning a lot more than people expect. Many can learn Calculus before they enter high school. Homeschooled kids with competent mentors do this all the time. My dad was teaching calculus when he was 16 (his dad taught math and there was no other qualified sub in their little town).
If doing homework doesn't show any benefit in how kids do in school, that screams to me that whatever they're doing in school is messed up. I suspect they dumbed down everything so that doing homework doesn't teach you anything you didn't already learn in class. Now (surprise, surprise!) they release a study showing that doing homework doesn't help you perform in class, and they react to it by cancelling homework. How stupid! Why don't they instead set higher goals in school, so that you would learn something important when doing homework?
I thought it was all part of the "No child gets ahead" Act. When my son was promoted to the second grade (early on in his first grade year as he was already reading), he started doing homework right away. By the third grade, it was about three hours every night. In the sixth grade it was five hours a night and starting to cause real big problems. Interesting thing was most of the students seemed to be majoring in (and failing) remedial esteem and civility training. In the eighth grade we finally got to select an elective course, though still no foriegn languages offered. We chose Drama. It seemed good to finally get him into something other than drudging along with the slowest non-thinkers at the school. Alas, it turned out to be remedial reading course in disguise, only the students were reading through scenes from plays rather than the modern "Dick and Jane" stuff. I always suspected that high-achieving students were being mainstreamed in a feeble attempt to bring up the standardised test scores that their funding seems to depend upon. (Buy more Lotto tickets, chumps!) My son came to dread the phone calls from his apparently simple-minded "Study Buddy" and would beg me to say he was unavailable so that he could complete his own homework. Now he's a freshman at a private high school. (Long story, BTW, he went from tops in his class to near the bottom- but he's adapting.) Now, I generally have to to tell him to go to bed around midnight, sometimes I catch him still doing homework at 2AM. And weekends too. Needless to say, all the song and dance was beaten out of him by the third grade, the drawings and paintings I found so delightful trickled to a halt by the fifth, and now I'm starting to worry about his health. I personally think that a lad of fifteen should be out after school doing the Tarzan/Huck Finn stuff that looms so large in my memories of youth. I'm not sure what the goal of all this is, but I think we may have found the dark side of "Democracy".
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
From:
http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method
of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't be fooled into
thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the
critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the
pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the
lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments
with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self-
motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and
lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home
life.
Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time
left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a
combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or
single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family
time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-
soil wastelands to do it in. A future is rushing down upon our culture
which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material
experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we
follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These
lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like
starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the
only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it."
Homework only makes the problem worse!
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.