Schools Banning Homework? 534
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]."
higher expectations? (Score:5, Interesting)
Um. 15 what?
Ballpark estimate: 15 minutes (Score:4, Interesting)
Given the order of magnitude of what is expected of my little cousins, the 15 probably refers to 15 minutes.
Why on Earth... (Score:3, Interesting)
Moo (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Is this a new thing? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Expections (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Homework has never been proven to improve grades (Score:3, Interesting)
ttyl
Farrell
Sweden (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Is this a new thing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Of these schools, only Cragmont had heavy homework loads or emphasis at any point. I think that the problem with that, however is that I never formed the habit of doing homework, and still have difficulty just 'sitting down and doing work.' Homework outside of mathematics and reading is, IMHO of doubtful value until HS, and even then has limited utility. However, forming the habit of being able to sit down and do a set of work that needs to be done on your own time at home is highly useful throughout life.
Re:Is this a new thing? (Score:4, Interesting)
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
hippie school (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:5th grade teacher weighing in.... (Score:2, Interesting)
As a teacher... (Score:4, Interesting)
Homework should be used for practice, but not count for the final grade.
-CGP [colingregorypalmer.net]
Homework helps very few... (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Kind of a dumb suggestion, but why not change ... (Score:3, Interesting)
That homework link is ridiculous (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Is this a new thing? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This is pathetic (Score:3, Interesting)
It's so bad that the train companies charge the family for clean-up after somebody jumps in front of a train...
Re:This is pathetic (Score:3, Interesting)
Things are different in highly competitive private schools and top public school districts these days. I see my little cousin in fourth grade doing 2-3 hours of homework, having 2 hours of after-school activities every evening, and a tutor two or three hours a week. And it's been like that for several years now. Admittedly, she lives in one of the hyper-competitive communities of the very wealthy in Connecticut - so I don't know if her experience is typical.
But she never learned how to entertain herself, or use her imagination. She needs constant entertainment from the world around her, and will whine and eventually scream if she doesn't get it. She is very maladjusted, and her parents have had to medicate her as a result (after normal therapy options apparently failed entirely). Her parents now fight a nightly battle with her to do her homework, she seems miserable, the family seems miserable, she's been diagnosed with "early onset bipolar disorder" since she was in second grade, and I fear that when she's old enough to be more independent, her life will spiral out of control. Oh, and she's been tested and is clearly intellectually well above-average, so that has nothing to do with it. The family has been totally enervated by this entire process.
This is not the way childhood is supposed to be. I'm not saying you should insulate children as they get older from the harsh realities of the world, but I do believe there is a balance. I think those in the upper middle and upper ends of the social spectrum have forgotten about this in the face of hyper-competitive college admissions process, which seems to have had an "arms race" effect, moving this competitive spirit farther and farther down the chain to younger children. Planned activities seem to dominate the time of even extremely young children. Homework and school competitiveness starts at a far younger age, when it's not clear that the brain has matured sufficiently to function in that framework without dysfunction.
Clearly most kids don't suffer from the kinds of problems that my cousin does. However, I keep reading article after article about the increasing frequency of childhood psychiatric disorders like "early onset bipolar disorder" that didn't exist 20 years ago. Maybe if we gave young kids a bit more time to be kids, fewer of them would break down and fall apart entirely.
Re:contact information (Score:3, Interesting)
Boy, I do not follow that reason at all. Most people graduate from high school at age 18 or so, so a 40th reunion would make someone 58 years old. I see no reason at all why someone who is only 58 necessarily should be retiring. It's a perfectly reasonable age to retire if you've already saved up enough money not to need to work, but then so is age 35, but there is no reason someone should be required to retire just because they have reached the ripe "old" age of 58.
I think your point might've been that, at 58, one is probably past their prime, but that's far from being a fair assumption as well. I had an excellent calculus teacher in college who must have been in his 70's. His mind was certainly sharp enough to teach calculus at a college level; in fact, he was sharper than most of the other college professors I've ever had. And he certainly had his teaching style perfected by then. If you had the proper background and simply came to class and paid attention, it was almost impossible not to learn the material. As a matter of fact, I myself never did any homework (he assigned it but did not require you to turn it in), but his lectures were so clear that I managed to get near perfect scores on all the tests simply by sitting there in class and listening closely to what he said, and I had failed the same calculus course prior to taking it from him.
Re:No Child Left Behind (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:higher expectations? (Score:2, Interesting)
Personally I'm split on the issue. On the one hand, they're kids. You can't give them too much homework. At least culturally, there's backlash against having a student focus on coursework so much. On the other hand, they're there to learn, and if we can't reach them, we lose out.
Re:higher expectations? (Score:1, Interesting)
Math was especially true in this regard, math homework was nothing more than endless repetition of braindead problems designed to wear down your spirit and break you as a human being. Dispite being easy enough for a retarded monkey to do, math homework took a couple hours to complete each night just from sheer volume. That's why I stopped doing it in 4th grade. Depending on the teacher, this meant I got either an A (due to near perfect test performance) or an F (due to 0 homework turned in) throughout the rest of my primary and secondary schooling.
Homework isn't the problem, US currucula are! (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Moo (Score:1, Interesting)
That sounds nice in theory, but for me and other people who were above average what happened was we got so bored and were so unchallenged from a very early age that we developed terrible attitudes towards academics and learning. Schoolwork was a trivial matter that wasted our time, and so the challenge was to see how very little effort and time it we had to spend in order to get whatever grade our whimsy desired.
I remember one math teacher in particular that I hated; I enjoyed it so much when she gave us work time at the end of class and she called me up because she didn't believe I'd finished the work. Such a scowl from her when I was swaggering back to my seat; I loved it and she never made that same mistake. In contrast, in high school I signed up for a summer school (WCATY) where you could take math classes at your speed for credit with close supervision by teachers. I finished high school geometry in around 2.5 weeks and it was challenging enough that on the second Monday there I was incapacitated from absorbing all that knowledge. It was like my mind had been broken. I *loved* it in a way I'd never loved any class I'd ever known; I wanted all my classes to be like that.
When I went back to high school, though, it was like an addict going back to his old neighborhood. I went back to forgetting many assignments altogether, doing the others while eating lunch or when I arrived at school early. It was all about pushing papers to me, it had nothing to do with learning or goals or possible real life applications - just what I needed to get in to college X and whether college X was worth wasting that much of my time.
I completely regret the academic childhood I had. It was a huge waste of my time and every subsequent stage of my life has been severely hindered by it. Don't get me wrong, I'm doing fine and eventually developed my own desire to learn and be productive but it could have been developed much earlier if I hadn't essentially been ignored. And I still can't stand classes and do more than the minimum unless they're exactly on-topic with what I want to learn or do, or if there's a very specific goal that will be accomplished or enabled by paying attention.
I used to be too shy or too modest to write things like this, except I've met other people who went through very much the same thing. Our schools are wasting a lot of people's potential, and many of them - while not geniuses - are definitely people that could be in the top tiers of whatever field they end up in, if only they had some attention paid to them when they were younger students.
Re:Is this a new thing? (Score:4, Interesting)
school-rewrite (Score:1, Interesting)
I agree with those who say that kids can't concentrate for log times, so maybe 6 50-minutes lessons with 5 minutes-pause between the 2nd-3rd, and between 4th-5th would be better that the 1 hour per lesson and 5 hours a day with 10/15 minutes-brake.
what we need is changing the ways teachers are selected/trained, not only find the right balance with homework.
I speak for Italy, here schools are a complete disaster, from elementary schools to high schools (can't speak for university, i'm not there yet), and the problem is in the way teachers are selected.
from what i have learned, you have to pass some written exams, and nothing else, just wait, you'll be first a teacher which has to move from school to school, and then, when you automatically enter in a list after some years, you can be a teacher which can remain in the same school 'till you ask to change.
the problems are:
1-no one knows if you can teach. they just know that you know what you teach. (actually, exams doesn't seem to be that difficult, if you think i had a teacher who said diamod is ductile and malleable...)
this leads to the point that you have people that know all the story of the world minute-by-minute, and teachers doesn't have a clue of what "teaching" means, instead they just "know" (if they know, actually). in Italy they cover... i'd say 60% (25% who knows how to teach and 10% useless)
2-no one can fire you. Gee, you can't even imagine how many teachers just come in the classroom "to keep the chair warm" here, or how many teachers a class can change because that teacher is always "sick"
would it too difficoult just to ask the teacher to show how he/she would explain this to the classroom when you have to hire a teacher?
i think teachers should be more trained to teach than to know, at least here.
why can't we fire useless teachers???
other problem for the kids is that teachers in a class don't know what other teachers give as homework, so there are days which you have nothing to do, others which you can't do anything else.
writing all homework in those 50cmX30cm books isn't enough, 'cause i dubt a math professor knows how log translating a latin text takes. obiviously writing down also the time that homework should take is too much... or even writing down when tests are, so people can organize...
the problem of the amount of homework is also given from the fact that the lesson-table is not compiled by hand, so you can have human days, but with a simple program, to which you give the professor-name, the hours/week, the class, and it decides the lessons starting with a random one, than doing some math.o, and schools even pay for this... 'cause there's noting given by the state, and doing it by and is difficoult (especially in big schools).
would it be too difficoult for the state to hire somesone/pay someone to write (and release gpl, so no licence-problems) a simple program in which you can also specify how much that lesson is hard for kids? of course it depends from the school, but it's kinda objective, since i dubt latin in a math-oriented school is not one of the hardest leassons...
this way the state can even pay one time for something that is actually paying lots and lots of times...
just like lots of other things they could do...
pay 5-10 people to mantain a gpl-project, so you don't have to pay it every year for every school the state has... that's lots of money saved...
anyway, sorry for my rant
Seven lesson schoolteacher (Gatto) (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.worldtrans.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt [worldtrans.org]
"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!
Re:higher expectations? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure. And shooting hundreds of free throws is nothing more than endless repetition designed to break your spirit, and not at all about making you a better basketball player, or doing scales over and over is designed to make you a better piano player.
Here's a quarter; buy a clue. Practice helps. I have two daughters, 13 and 10, who have been in the Kumon program for the last five years. Kumon is just organized drill, but it has helped my girls get straight A's in math and reading since Grade 2, and both are now in the gifted program. Just like weight training reps help build strength, math reps help build brains. I've stopped being surprised by the number of university graduates I meet who can't figure out a 15% tip without a calculator. My girls are numerate as well as literate, and I ascribe that to Kumon, as well as our family support. My older daughter is in Grade 7, and in Kumon, she is working on quadratic equations, while in school, they are doing elementary algebra. She is so far ahead of her peers, her biggest problem is dealing with boredom at school. Your whining post suggests you were pissed off that you couldn't play video games due to homework. Tough.
Re:Expections (Score:3, Interesting)
The reason a lot of elementary and middle school students are bad at math and writing is that their teachers absolutely hate those subjects. If you interview most of the students getting degrees in Elementary Education you'd notice that they're almost all doing it because they can't do math worth crap. The math requirement for elementary ed. in Washington is appalingly low, and the people taking the requirement find it to be difficult. They then take this hatred and fear of math into the classrooms where it's taught to our children. These children graduate years later still thinking they can't do math and furthermore thinking that it's okay because nobody else can either.
Talk to some of the parents of kids who say they can't do math. The parents reinforce this attitude that math is scary and difficult. By the time these children go to high school they're ready to do the absolute minimum required to pass standardized tests.
Re:Student stress is GOOD (Score:2, Interesting)
What works in India/China/Russia does NOT work in America, we'd be a whole lot better off not taking cues from governments that are the INVERSE of everything we stand for, but this isnt a political discussion... US Public schools don't suck because they don't have enough homework, they suck because of budget cuts and poor teachers, less and less people even WANT to teach. Busy work at home is the time when kids shut off their minds and drone out to the task at hand, that's exactly what India, China, and Russia need. We need something better, the answer hasn't a thing to do with homework, but more funding, more teachers, better teachers, better spending. I certainly don't have the answers, but I know copying the Chinese schools isn't going to work here, and it should not, that method is for creating soulless commie robots. Shouldn't send your kids to public school anyway, that should be a last resort these days.
Re:Explaintions. (Yes, I spelled it wrong on purpo (Score:3, Interesting)
Since you're the only one that disagreed with me that showed any ability to debate at all, I'll respond to you.
There's 2 types of homework: Busywork, and learning reinforcement. (Despite the other response that says learning can't be reinforced, this not true. If you do something over and over, you remember it easier.)
For young students, how much is there really to reinforce? It's pretty much all just memorization, and you either memorize it or you don't. I suspect the 'homework' for these students was busywork, and not good for them, hence the negative relationship.
For older students, there's more thought and less memorization involved. Essays, word-problems, calculations, etc. This is a behavior that is being learned, and not just memorization.
The final thing to realize is that not all homework is equal. Even if the teacher means well and wants to reinforce the day's lesson, they might assign the 'odd problems' (you know, the ones that have the answers in the back) so that the student can 'check their own work.' I think I was the only kid in the school that didn't cheat on that. (Mainly because it was even more boring than doing the problems.)
Bay Area education (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, I dropped-out in my final semester because my english teacher failed me and I didn't want to do summer-school....
twenty years later I decided to go to college and hit the 98th percentile on my english scores for the entrance exam.... Not that I'm holding a grudge or anything, but I think the evidence shows that Mrs. McLellan (I think that was her name) was a pompous horses-ass for failing me. (okay, so I'm not the best speller, but my comprehension, vocabulary, and grammer skills are well above average).
(I also got failed by my algebra teacher -- I just finished an "upgrading course" to refresh my high-school math, and got an A+ doing 2 years of high-school math in 6 weeks.)
The teachers were (in general) actually too stuck on homework -- I was able to absorb the material without doing the homework, but for some teachers... well, they didn't like me skipping the homework, so they failed me. C'est la vie -- I hated high school, but now I'm enjoying going back to "finish" my education.
Back then, the graduation requirements included eight semesters of physical education. I looked at their current requirements and the curriculum has only gotten worse since I attended.
Re:Homework isn't the problem, US curricula are! (Score:2, Interesting)
In America, most kids don't get to geometry until TENTH GRADE! It is absolutely learnable six years earlier. Most kids should be at calculus by 10th grade. The American math curriculum is a punch line, treading water from 3rd grade until high school when, for some, a modicum of teaching resumes. A lot of essential math is NEVER taught: logic? non-Euclidean geometry? probability and statistics? linear algebra? These are basic building blocks of rational thought.
But if you're qualified in math, why on Earth would you pursue a career as a math teacher? Making a quarter what you would in the private sector? Enduring unrelenting intellectual abuse from a school administration? And teaching a curriculum six years too late to students who have had every iota of motivation and curiosity programmed out of them?
No Child Left Behind = No Child Learns Anything
North American vs. Korean Education (Score:2, Interesting)