After Donna Cushlanis’s son kept bursting into tears midway through his second-grade math problems, which one night took over an hour, she told him not to do all of his homework.
“How many times do you have to add seven plus two?” Ms. Cushlanis, 46, said. “I have no problem with doing homework, but that put us both over the edge. I got to the point that this is enough.”
Ms. Cushlanis, a secretary for the Galloway school district, complained to her boss, Annette C. Giaquinto, the superintendent. It turned out that the district, which serves 3,500 kindergarten through eighth-grade students, was already re-evaluating its homework practices. The school board will vote this summer on a proposal to limit weeknight homework to 10 minutes for each year of school — 20 minutes for second graders, and so forth — and ban assignments on weekends, holidays and school vacations.
Galloway, a mostly middle-class community northwest of Atlantic City, is part of a wave of districts across the nation trying to remake homework amid concerns that high-stakes testing and competition for college have fueled a nightly grind that is stressing out children and depriving them of play and rest, yet doing little to raise achievement, particularly in elementary grades.
What a bunch of fucking pussies.
There’s a reason our kids are behind in subjects like math and science when compared to other nations: lame parents.
Parents, push your kids to excel. Don’t be their “buddies.” It is your job to make sure they take full advantage of the tools to succeed, and by taking their side over that of the teachers only serves to weaken the effectiveness of our public school system.
An hour of homework is nowhere near unreasonable. Give me a fucking break.
I agree with #1, but Parents and Teachers are the reasons that kids suck at everything.
I have gone to my kids teachers and asked for MORE homework. They told me it would not be “fair” to give my kid extra assignments, because some of the other kids can’t do homework at home. Stupid teachers. We decided to change school districts.
What is wrong with this sentence?
“And hour of homework.”
I’m not a grammar/spelling Nazi and even I can’t take it…
Lear to edit your copy before putting it out there for all to see.
[Argh! That’s what happens when I post things in the middle of the night. –UD]
I’m at university studying for exams and have just spent over 13 hours studying today. Grow up, when i was in grade school i was doing at least 2-3 hours of homework a night. Get a grip kid.
Just goes to show… I meant to write: Learn not Lear.
I agree with Mac Guy in #1.
Its just that they make homework such a boring drag.
If the questions were more relevant to the students life, more humorous, more real world, more approachable, they wouldn’t be such a deadly boring chore.
A good teacher would tell you that students each have their own style of learning.
Whoever wrote the questions for the test is at a disadvantage because they have no way to get feedback from the students.
Another great McDonalds employee!
Just my views.
I am a retired teacher of some experience (old goat of 76).
Also, a retired Lecturer in Education, much experienced in teaching those wishing to become lecturers in Engineering and with academic qualifications to suit (i.e. Masters degrees etc. from good universities).
The things one has to take into account in homework is firstly the question relating to just how long did it take the learner to do it – solve the problems, I never ever saw any supervised timing record. Did the learner actually ‘understand’ what he or she was doing and, if they had no understanding did they ask? The biggest question is “Did learning take place?” How was this measured, verified? What did the learner gain? Unfortunately homework is not accurately measured, evaluated, criticised – ever.
It is a measure gone through.
Finally. You don’t actually know, do you, whether the student presenting work actually did it do you? The intention of all for the learner to learn and learning doesn’t necessarily follow from teaching. Teaching and learning are two very different processes, you can be good at one, useless at the other.
As Mark Twain once remarked “When I was eighteen I thought my father to be a very stupid man. When I was twenty-one I was amazed how much he had learned in three years.”
Learning is a hugely complicated process and most are experts in it from their experiences at school. Much in the same way as we in the West are all food experts from eating three meals a day.
I spent years in the business and didn’t even begin to understand just why learning took place some times and not others. Send me an expert and I’ll show you a fake.
msbpodcast said, on June 17th, 2011 at 5:51 am
What is wrong with this sentence?
“And hour of homework.”
I’m not a grammar/spelling Nazi and even I can’t take it…
Lear to edit your copy before putting it out there for all to see.
—————
I’m sure you wanted to type “Learn” …
Too funny, that.
You have no right to comment on this unless you have been a parent of seen first hand how this affects children. We moved form one school district to a better one last year and my daughter, a 3rd grader, went from about 15-20 minutes of homework to over an hour and a half and sometimes 2 hours. That is INSANE for an 8 year old child. They can not focus on things for that long especially after just spending a whole day in school. Children need to be able to be children and have time to wind down too, just like we as adults need. But there is NO time to do this after school and forget about trying to have any kind of after-school activity like sports, scouts or anything else. It’s school, homework, dinner, bed…
Ok, yes it is important and yes I understand the importance of getting a good education. And sure, 8-9 hours at work and then on occasion having to take work home is something we as adults deal with all the time. However, we have discipline, patients and a strong work ethic…but an 8 year old does not. It is not yet psychologically possible for them to handle that kind of workload on a daily basis. All you are accomplishing is burning them out before the REAL work begins in high school.
Hello everybody!!! That was over an hour for one class!!! so you multiply that by 4 or 5 depending on the situation… This is why I almost never did homework, I had better things to do after school than 5-6 more hours of school. (still got a’s and b’s, shows how useful the homework was)
New style is kids do the “lecture” part at home (free videos on youtube) and do the work part at school where they can get help from the teachers. Teachers don’t have to do the repetitive part over and over and when the kids are actually doing the work for themselves their teacher is there to help.
In the words of Weezy, memorization is the farther of learning. There are no shortcuts to become an expert unless you truly are a genius. I do think there are plenty of instances where homework is not serving a purpose, but to fix the problem by cutting back on homework is about as ignorant as it comes.
This is a symptom of the larger problem that Americans want gov’t to take care of them. Oh your kids aren’t learning with the homework they have? Well fucking talk to them and figure out something that stimulates their minds and still puts them to work. I realize some parents in a financial pickle don’t have all the time in the world, but we make time for what’s important. Kids should be at the top of that list.
Kids/people want to learn and are helpful by nature. This article shouldn’t be about homework, but what outside factors have pushed both the kids and parents to be such candyasses, and I think most know the reasons behind it.
@#7 “The biggest question is “Did learning take place?” ” Theoretical questions like that are at the core of American elementary education style teaching failure. Proper view of homework where I came from is quite different, best described in terms of sports Americans love so much.
It is one thing to teach kid to dribble soccer ball and participate in organized actions. That requires learning as in your question.
It is another thing to make sure kid can actually do it for any length of time. That part is not trained by teaching/learning but practicing what you know. So, for homework the proper question is “Have the student been required enough of repetitive homework to get ability of doing what he/she have learned how to do in the class?”
Lack in abilities to properly do things they theoretically know how to do is what I encounter in my first year engineering students. They know the path. They lack muscles to go along.
@#9 Please, give me a break… Have had two nephews in US elementary education. They do nothing in school or after worth mentioning a word “strain”. Where I came from, level of typical 6th grader can compete at the level with US 12th grader, not because of some uber-human abilities but DEMANDS placed on children early and often. No child there have yet died of 8 45 minute classes per day for 10 months per year… and 2-3 hours of homework from 1st grade on.
“It shouldn’t take an hour for the kid to figure out how to add 7 and 2.?”
Correct.
7
+2
—
9
…every time.
It took about a second. It was just an exercise in writing the numbers, over and over, which was boring, and I wasn’t learning anything new…
I hated writing the stuff that I already knew over and over on a sheet of paper.
That’s why kids hate arithmetic.
Straight A’s in grade school with no effort and no homework, but teacher still wrote that I wasn’t making enough effort. Even my dad got a laugh out of that.
Today I would probably fail for lack of homework I had no need for.
I’m a secondary math and physics teacher and I’m required to guide students through an extraordinarily dull curriculum. I believe the compliant that math for many students is unnecessarily tedious and repetitive.
In #9 Drdiesel said: All you are accomplishing is burning them out before the REAL work begins in high school.
Frankly, its all choke and puke until you’ve got a Bachelor’s Degree.
You’re not expected to do anything more until then. (In fact, they schools rather you didn’t. [It makes more work for the institution so it had better well be worth it.])
Your Master’s thesis is the first time when you’re asked to contribute anything new.
Your PHD thesis is when you’re expected to contribute some new knowledge to the field you have chosen to master.
The problem starts with aligning the student’s wish to contribute to the reality that the learning institutions don’t want them to do so.
That’s why they have Liberal Arts degrees where you’re supposed to at least be original. 🙂
Homework is a crap idea. It saps the motivation of children to get things done more efficiently. Just assign “Work” that needs to be done by certain points, and then allow them to complete the work.
Almost all my pre-college schooling was spent listening to some dull child ask obvious or inane questions. Who cares if each person in the room understands before the action proceeds?
It doesn’t work like that in life. Figure it out or go home. If the real goal is to move at the speed of the slowest mind in the group then our education system is horribly messed up.
#17–mpod==right on. You stole my thunder.
All you “High Homework” shills are just lying.
All you need to learn, REALLY LEARN, until 10th grade or so is how to read, thereafter you can read what you need to know, how to count to 10, after that its repetitious, and how to write, which shouldn’t be that hard if you can read.
The REAL job of school is to………..socialize. And thats why more music, sports, and other social activities are needed===not more academics.
Kiddies that can read, write, and do math will find things to learn on their own if they have any interest in doing so. If they have no interest to begin with, school just teaches them to become criminals.
Always good to take a “time out” every once in a while, put your head on the table, and think about what life is really all about?
Ha, ha. And right now, life is all about a bunch of under educated, under achievers who can’t read or write who are so unsocialized they vote Republican.
You KNEW I was going there.
Yea, verily.
We’re not suggesting that parents get involved with the kids academics, are we?
I thought that burden was tossed over the wall to those overpaid educators? Evenings are for Angry Birds and and dinner table political brainwashing.
And Repukes want to CUT EDUCATION SPENDING (TO GIVE MORE TAX CUTS TO BILLIONAIRES AND MILLIONAIRES) to keep the “working classes” STUPID !!! They are doing a BANG UP JOB !!!
What can we expect from public education when we spend less on a teacher’s salary than we pay a plumber ???
If you want to know to cost of education, call up any PRIVATE SCHOOL in your city and ask what the tuition is and you will have your answer !!!
As for homework, that’s where the child TEACHES HIMSELF – THROUGH DRILL AND REPETITON what the Teacher has shown in the classroom.
The child needs to see, hear, and do the exercises to fix the procedure in as many places in his mind as possible. This enables easier recall later on ….
So what exactly is the reason the US has dropped down the world scale to 21st in science and 25th in maths. Here in the UK it was normal to have at least two hours of homework a night in the 1950s and that was in the lower school, if you went to grammar school as you headed for the exams it was often four hours a night!
Have a look at what the kids in India, Korea, Japan and China are doing and then figure out who is going to be the powerhouse of the 21st century!
If the US is not careful it will end up a third world country!
#19 The real job of kindergarten is social skills.
Here are the educational rankings by country. I wonder where Canada ranks?
Oh, there it is….
http://geographic.org/country_ranks/educational_score_performance_country_ranks_2009_oecd.html
So, is a lot of homework necessary? Well, I did a little homework just now, and I found this interesting article in Maclean’s Magazine (Canada’s answer to Times).
http://macleans.ca/education/universities/article.jsp?content=20071128_96876_96876
Take not slave drivers…
“However, the case for homework’s necessity is murkier than most educators will admit. The recent Trends in International Math and Science Study(TIMSS)looked at science scores for Grades 4 and 8 students in 50 countries, including Canada. It found that “on average, internationally, spending a lot of time studying was not associated with higher achievement.” It was the poorest performing countries that assigned the most homework. Canada’s scores were above average. Time spent on homework was below average. ”
Who would have thunk that?
Re #26… Er, that should have been “Take note slave drivers.”
However, “Take not slave drivers.” also works in a Shakespearean sort of way.
Sigh. I am depressed by the amount of spelling and grammatical mistakes in the above posts.
#24: That’s certainly an interesting ranking, but I have a problems with any sort of education rating that has a column labeled “Maths”.
Bobbo, I have to disagree about everything after learning to read and write (you left out math) circa 10th grade not mattering. I can name 5 or 6 books (there are more), off the top of my head, that I was required to read in 11th and 12th grade that helped form my view of myself and the world. I never would have read most of them on my own.
An hour of homework for a second grader? Not so bad. Back in the day when they advertized Winstons during the Flintstones, we got off of school at 3 and had a good 2 or 2.5 hours before dinner. Goof off for part of it, do homework for part of it.
Oh, I forgot that the kids these days need 8 hours for Facebook and Youtube and Twitter!
OK… how many hours a day does the kid waste playing video games, or watching TV? If he spends more than 2 hours a day, then cut that back. Then he will he will have time to do his homework.
#30–spsffan==you do need more reading. Its at about 10th grade that the more “formal” education does start to matter—prep for college rather than life. Of course, I’m exaggerating, but its to a valid point. I am reminded of Einstein who was thought retarded in Grade School. Could he have simply been bored?===being turned into a criminal as I metaphored?
My own experience: as a world traveler==got taught from the same books in 4th, 5th, and 6th grade. My test scores declined each year. Bored out of my f*cking skull. Had my parents not shown the “new” school my 4th grade scores, I would not have been promoted to 7th grade and finally some new material.
BTW–what books did you find so valuable?
Re #30, spsffan: Okay, I’ll bite. Why do you have “a problems with any sort of education rating that has a column labeled “Maths.””
“Noun 1. maths- a science (or group of related sciences) dealing with the logic of quantity and shape and arrangement.”