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First i should probably say that my school experience is limited to schools with very low student to teacher ration. That made my experience not only very different, but certainly much better than it would be otherwise. Now to be fair i have natural desire to know things, but attention and somewhat closer relatinship with teachers helps. Now to actually adress your post. I can agree that things you mention need to be adressed, but do not think homework should be entirely abolished. There are advantages of looking at the classwork several hours after you did it in class. From my again somewhat biased experience it may seem like you understand when you do it class, but having to do it alone several hours after that tends to reveal how much you actually understand. Another possiblity is you will actually understand it because of the timegap and looking at the matter on your own.
Edited by Risa123 on Aug 29th 2022 at 2:11:18 PM
Homework doesn't actually appear to have an impact on how much is learned or retained, especially in younger grades.
Asking a 10th grader to write a short essay? That's justifiable, because it helps show how much material is being understood. Why does a first grader need to do ten pages of math worksheets? Repetition won't help with long-term retainment of the material if the kid doesn't really understand why things work the way they do, and worksheets are completely useless at that.
...that being said, I think there's a real fixation on essays in a lot of circles, when a lot of people aren't really taught how to write them properly and the standard teaching methods for them are...needlessly confusing.
Edited by Risa123 on Aug 29th 2022 at 2:31:44 PM
Here's a Time article talking about it.
It brings up one of the big questions. Children who do a lot of homework tend to do well in school...but is that because of the homework, or because they're high achievers to begin with and the homework is actually irrelevant?
I don't know about the US, but in our country homework was meant to make students practice what they have learned in class. At first basic stuff such as writing letters or doing basic math, then later writing words or doing more complex math, and so on - the homework got more complex as the subjects taught in school got more complex. There is only so much time for lessons at school. Homework not only helps students practice but also teaches them to be quick about such tasks and to use their time effectively - if they are too slow the homework takes a long time and they have less free time at home.
Homework can also be entirely detrimental to kids with certain disabilities.
I had frequent meltdowns in elementary school because I couldn't understand math and I couldn't do the homework. I know now that I have dyscalculia and, because of that, trying to do math by hand or in my head is just never going to happen. But the school refused to budge or acknowledge anything because "it wouldn't be fair".
As per one article i read, a study found math homework boosted achievement more in elementary level than in high school
The article also argued that poor quality of homework assignments could be a factor for whether it does or doesn't help boosting achievement.
Edited by xyzt on Aug 29th 2022 at 6:38:02 PM
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The version I'm fond of calls it the difference between fair treatment and equal treatment.
Well on of the defintion of word fair is equal treatment so to be pedatic i would call it "equal treatment vs just treatment". Still good point.
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Yeah whatever the homework is an actually homework instead "busywork" as mentioned is kind of imporant. Now to be fair being teacher is hard and for that matter (in my country at least) not well paid. So i dont blame teachers for doing that to much to be honest.
Edited by Risa123 on Aug 29th 2022 at 3:23:52 PM
As a parent with two children in the school system, homework seems completely misconfigured. I always saw it as an opportunity to participate in my children's education, to the point where if they didn't have any, or they finished it at school (which seems to happen surprisingly often), I would create some myself, and we would work on it together.
I've more or less kept it to 10 or 20 minutes per day, and that seems to have been appropriate.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.Theoretically, yes. In practice, it's a lot rarer than you might think, especially if the teaching techniques don't match up to what the parents know. Remember the whole Common Core thing? If you haven't been taught how it works (which most parents weren't), it looks like bizarre gibberish.
A lot of parents just don't have the patience, or the energy or the right mindset to help their kid with their homework, and that's before you get into the households where there's just not enough time. Also the families where the parents just straight up do the homework themselves, or dictate it to the kid.
It's great that you can do it with your kid/s but it's not really possible to scale it up properly.
Edited by Zendervai on Aug 29th 2022 at 11:44:02 AM
Eh, i would rather not be outright forced to do homework with parents. Its not even about having bad parents or something. I and my mother always had a different idea how to do it. Not just as people, but she was probably taught different ways of solving math problems for example. As result we ended up arguing, partially because we are both rather temperamental,about how to proceed instead of doing homework. As result for me homework is something you do yourself.
Edited by Risa123 on Aug 29th 2022 at 5:47:48 PM
Well, the teacher assigns the homework, and you have to figure out how they want it completed. Mostly, I just sat there and prompted them, because after all you don't want to give the answers away. But sometimes I did lose patience with what seemed to me the overly complicated way they wanted to teach math, which just seemed to confuse my kids sometimes. If there was an easier way I would show it to them. And sometimes I came up with my own questions.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.At risk of divulging more information about my offline persona than I really care to, I'm going to rant about this now.
The more I teach maths, the more I hate math teachers.
- I have a student who I had to teach that she can write out the things the variables stand for in every formula if she wants to because her notes shouldn't just be filling in the blanks based on the slides, they're for her benefit and she's the only person who has to be able to understand them.
- I have a student who's told me she understands geometry really well until her teacher starts talking and then she comes and asks me to re-explain it again because she has a whole page of notes about something that made sense when it was only a couple of lines.
- I have a student who's low-verbal and low-key hostile and takes half an hour to multiply fractions badly, and is also absolutely obsessed with a puzzle game involving graph theory that no one has ever told him is a branch of mathematics.
- I have a student who learns quickly and understands advanced topics and is diligent and methodical about finding the right answers and I've had to teach him to be less meticulous in order to raise his test scores.
- I have a student who the first time we met I had to pause mid-sentence to re-sync my brain and my mouth, and she immediately assumed I was figuring out how to tell her how stupid she was.
- I have many students who stop themselves and say "never mind" when they're on the right track because they've learned the risk-reward balance for critical thinking is worse than just shutting up and imitating.
Like, holy fuck, I've been cynical about the institution since I was eight and I'm still getting my mind blown over how bad it is. And one or two hours with each student is not nearly enough time to unfuck everything they've learned that week, let alone everything they've learned in their entire education.
ERROR: The current state of the world is unacceptable. Save anyway? YES/NO
I suppose i should consider myself very lucky that i (usually) did not have to deal with teachers like that. Should be noted that i tend to be biased in favor of teachers because of having (relative) close realitionship with them thanks to low student:teacher ration.
Edited by Risa123 on Sep 3rd 2022 at 10:55:39 AM

Well, I do think that asking kids to work on their own is justifiable. The problem with the US homework load is that it takes too much time.
Unrelated to this, but I am not sure that the way Ticino's buses set up first-time middle school transportation this day (schools begin today in Ticino) was a good idea. We don't have dedicated school buses in Switzerland. Using a regular bus which reuses the regular bus number and doesn't appear in the timetable is bound to confuse folks. And judging by the number of children on the regular bus, lots were confused. That bus then made a stop at a school, which didn't appear in the timetable.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman