In the past few years, we’ve seen quite a few reports suggesting that homework doesn’t help kids learn along with some other reports questioning traditional learning techniques. However, it’s still a bit surprising for it reach the level where a teachers’ union in the UK is already considering a proposal to ditch homework for most younger students and drastically scale back how much there is for older students (found via Digg). The reasoning is a bit different. The older reports we saw pointed out that homework wasn’t particularly effective at helping kids learn. The reasoning for this new proposal is that homework makes kids “unhappy and anxious” and that leads to stressed out kids and potential disciplinary problems
Hey, maybe I won’t have to go to work anymore because it makes me “unhappy and anxious”!
WoW! If I had learned early in life from these wise people that working hard to achieve is a waste of time, then I could be living under a bridge too!
Yes, just another impending portent of the collapse of society.
Must be some sort of miracle that the human race managed to survive for all those millions of years without homework.
I just finished watching “The Human Ape” on tv. with less than 2% difference in genes, the show tries to identify what the main difference is between humans and the great apes.
Its debateable, but I think they come up with kindness and empathy. So–what do our kiddies need to experience to give them the type of life we want for them? Meaningless homework?==no. Homwork that impairs their spirit?==no. Homework that broadens and individualizes their experience?==I think so. Kiddies are all different. Hard for an institution to serve individual needs.
Seems like schools should provide a base, and the parents the individualization? I laugh when I recall my dear old dad giving me homework on top of what the school gave me. And yet his lessons were the most meaningful to me==the bastard. “You go to school to learn in spite of the teachers, not because of them.” BS like that.
When I was a kid, homework was not a problem…that is, until near the end of each and every six-week grading period when ALL the teachers suddenly discovered that they didn’t have enough grades. Their remedy? PILE IT ON, ALL AT ONCE. No fun that…it became expected.
And, whilst I’m at it, here’s a well-deserved and long overdue UP YOURS! for all those college professors I had who decided to be pricks and assigned large projects right before spring break and then had the ballz to have them due right after. I was stupid and did the work whereas MANY of my friends blew it off and always had a good time at the beach…they were the smart ones.
In all, its not the homework, its the “Pile On Effect” that sucks up all available time…and THAT just plain sucks.
And then there is always the crowd whose egregious dementia has them convinced they’re smarter than all who preceded them on this small ball of mud – therefore, why study and learn?
As adults we do everything we can to avoid bringing work home with us. We need a clear separation between our work and our private lives. Yet we expect children to be students every waking moment of their lives. I don’t see why we think children should be better capable of defining the line between work and play than we are.
In the US the homework load for kids has been steadily increasing over the years. We have these kids working 9 and 10 hour days and then we’re surprised when they graduate without any social skills.
I don’t think it would be harmful at all to reduce or eliminate homework as long as the kids are still learning what’s required. I’d even extend the school day and reduce the summer vacation.
Get the kids the attention they need and let them off the hook when they are not at school.
As a retired teacher, I totally agree that homework is totally useless and counterproductive for the mental development of children. Parents used to ASK me to give their 9 year old children homework, but I rarely did. If a teacher can’t teach what is needed to be taught during the 6 hour or so long school day, she or he is not very organized or intelligent.
Children should be READING books for recreation and knowledge at home NOT doing “make work” project homework from school. Homework just makes them HATE acquiring knowledge and makes them think learning is not fun… a very deadly attitude. The idea is to make them LOVE LEARNING and develop their curiosity about the world not to make them working “drones” for society.
The only exception I would ever make would be for mathematics practice homework if there was not enough time during the school day to allow children to complete it.
Sigh…am I the first to notice the nice breasts?
#7–Hope==that cracks me up. So it should be hoped that the kiddies will love to learn regarding reading, but MATH has to be shoved down their throats?
So, how come the two subjects shouldn’t be thought of as exactly the same?
And if a competent teacher can instruct adequately on reading in the school day, what do we call a teacher that cannot instruct adequately in the same time about math?
Perhaps we should ban education professionals from coming up with new theories. Perhaps we should throw out phonics too. And who cares if kids are spelling correctlee? It’s more important to have them writing, and you shouldn’t hurt their self-esteem by telling them their wrong. Also history doesn’t need to be accurate, just teach them things that make them feel good.
#3 – Hard for an institution to serve individual needs.
Now you are saying things that make sense.
School, as we know it, is an answer to the needs of an emerging industrialized society. That society needs working bodies conditioned to walk in straight lines and repeat monotonous tasks without question.
Sadly, that worked. Almost as sadly, we don’t need that anymore. We killed our future as an industrial society because rich guys didn’t feel rich enough and decided to offshore everything America built.
School needs to evolve to meet the needs of technology/information society.
#3, I’m trying to be that Bastard Dad.
I encourage my kids to bring home some homework. Not a lot, just 1/2 or so a day. I then do it with them. We have a good time with it because we make it fun. Homework no longer is a chore but a time to learn and share something new with their dad. Just what you said, Schools provide the base and the parents provide the personalization.
I agree that mathematics is probably the only subject I took throughout grammar and high school where the repetition of homework was a necessity.
Steve-O, if you want to see more her name is tiffany teen… or that is what I have been told… yeah that’s the ticket.
#13 – I agree that mathematics is probably the only subject I took throughout grammar and high school where the repetition of homework was a necessity.
then yoos not reading wuts da kids iz sayings on Interwebtubes dees days LOLLOLS
there grammerz iz teh suxors
(Or what their bonehead parents are typing, for that matter)
I spent seven years in college, way back when, after the usual K to 12 craziness, and I’m watching my daughter at about halfway through a degree at a college.
IMHO, homework before they’re about Jr. High age is (and was) nonsense, except for very specific issues. Math drills are a necessity, but were taken to extreme with my daughter. An hour trying to sort out various methods of averaging (fourth grade, maybe), and finally asking the teacher what was going on, because the textbook only had problems, and no explanations, seemed silly. I finally asked and was told that “it’s in our teaching handbook.” When I inquired as to what to do if you missed that class for some reason, she sort of shrugged….
Other subjects are more in need of a simple reinforcement drill, or a bit of reading to get one warmed up for “tomorrow”. Or just some “fun” reading in the subject.
As the kids get older, learning how to write a paper is useful, and they should expect more esoteric homework – read some Plato, for example, and sort out what he was getting at, based on classroom time information. (Yeah – that’s complex stuff, but the idea is to make the mind work, not to just memorize stuff, and often there’s no right answer; sometimes the _approach_ is more important.)
Just piling it on because El Supremo says you should is the problem here…. “No Child Left Behind”, meantime, may not be helping the kids anyway, but it may also be adding to the homework mess. “Teaching to the test” leaves a lot of stuff out that homework may help with….
About the only homework I remember my daughter doing that was really meaningful was back in Kindergarten. She had to cut letters out of a catalog or magazine, along with matching pictures. Sort of “A is for Apple” thing. We had a riot doing that, and it was great practice at cutting and pasting, as well as avoiding boredom while trying to find a dozen letters a night, etc. (KEEP those Sears and Penney’s Catalogs!)
Mostly downhill from there….
Government involvement doesn’t bode well here, of course, but yeah, there’s too much, and too much is busywork.
I almost got tossed out of 8th Grade English for refusing to do homework…. Remember the fill-in-the-blanks stuff, where you’d have to supply a word or two that “fit” (due to some criteria) in a sentence. I refused to copy out the whole sentence…. Why waste the time?
(Good handwriting practice, actually, and a little better “context”, but my handwriting was almost painful, and I didn’t need the rest.)
Which is also why I type now….
Regards,
Stu.
Of course work makes people unhappy.
WELCOME TO REAL LIFE!
#16 – Travel back to 1955 and look at three institutions: A school, a factory, and a prison. They look similar in many significant ways.
Come back to today and look again. One of those three has evolved. Here is a hint. It isn’t the prison or the school.
Schools are designed to produce model citizen/consumer/worker units who are obedient and loyal to the nation/bank/corporation institutions. Now that India and China do all our work though, the scramble is on for workers who a fleet-footed and nimble-minded… Finally, the day is upon us when freethinking is an asset, but sadly, the school isn’t geared up to inspire that.
You can talk about “love of learning” and whatever hippy dippy idealism you like… It was never the goal. It isn’t why we have schools. It might be why people get teaching degrees but it isn’t why schools are chartered and it isn’t a metric you can judge a school on.
I don’t care who loves what… I only care that kids can read, write, calculate, employ logic, and think critically. I figure, if they can do all that, they probably do love learning anyway… But the reason is to compete in a new world economy. We no longer need generations of factory workers and office clerks, yet that is what we train.
WoHoo!!
Sign me up!
My, my, mam o rye. Such a lovely, uh, “shirt”. Price tag: “20 years”.
Most of the school day is screwing around with organizational stuff, similar to “hurry up and wait”. The “value” of the education is linked to the length of the time spent each day in school, in the minds of the teachers and parents. Actual class time could probably be cut to 4 hours for all ages, but the students would have to spend 4 hours doing stuff that allows them to understand and internalize what they learned in school, and they are just not going to do it on their own.
OFTLO – Yup. One of the early leftists: Dewey, of “Dewey Decimal” fame. Part of the collectivisation of production and the masses.
“Liberal Fascism” is a worthwhile read, in spite of the partisan screaming (and conservatives have their own problems with the book). Actual reality is minimally related to Political Reality.
>read, write, calculate, employ logic, and think critically.
Sounds like a traditional curriculum ‘3Rs’.
Now how do you calculate if they teach using calculators for math?
How do you read without phonics?
How do you write if they won’t correct spelling?
All of these are techniques being pushed by schools of education.
#23 – >read, write, calculate, employ logic, and think critically.
Sounds like a traditional curriculum ‘3Rs’.
Plus extra thinking.
I think statistics and logic should actually start right off the bat, in early grade school. It should not be just embedded in other stuff. The kids should learn to understand and use these things.
Now how do you calculate if they teach using calculators for math?
How do you read without phonics?
How do you write if they won’t correct spelling?
All of these are techniques being pushed by schools of education.
As are opposing techniques. These things are not black and white.
My daughter use to love reading with me. She is 12 now. In the past we would read almost anything. Mysteries were her favorites. We would read every day and talk about the book when we weren’t reading. This year, 6th grade, she has to read certain level books for “AR” (Advanced Reading) points. This has put an end to reading for enjoyment in our house. So sad.
Another point I’d like to make is that homework gives children from stable middle class and upper class homes an unfair advantage and gives children from poor or emotionally stressed family situations a HUGE disadvantage… it looks like some of you on this message board would be all in favor of that. 🙂 But, overall, this is very bad for society in general.
We have a horrid high school drop out rate in this country and giving students homework assignments which some of them cannot possibly turn in and then giving them “F’s” for it might be a contributing factor.
I have an example from my own childhood in this regard: In elementary school the teacher gave my class a homework assignment which involved cutting pictures out of magazines. My parents never subscribed to magazines. My father and mother could barely afford to put food on the table; paying for a magazine subscription was not something they could afford to do. I was extremely embarrassed to tell the teacher that I did not have my homework. Some teachers will give failing grades to students who do not turn in their homework and so a child who could have been VERY successful in school is turned into one who drops out; can’t get a job; winds up in jail, etc., etc.
Some teachers give assignments which require going to the public library to complete the assignment…they forget that poor children come from families who do not have cars and cannot do this so the child winds up with an “F” and probably a harsh lecture on not doing his or her homework.
Just eliminate homework entirely and I bet the drop out rate will vastly improve. Public education is supposed to level the playing field not make it worse.
#26 – Another point I’d like to make is that homework gives children from stable middle class and upper class homes an unfair advantage and gives children from poor or emotionally stressed family situations a HUGE disadvantage… it looks like some of you on this message board would be all in favor of that.
So the solution is rather than to raise the poor kids up, is to drag the rich kids down?
People in this country are mediocre enough as it is, and now you want to drive even more cattle to the middle of the road?
Speaking as the guy who might be the most liberal guy here… Yes… I am all in favor of not limiting homework because someone has a bleeding heart.
The uneducated poor represent a huge economic burden to America. Education doesn’t have to be equal. Equality isn’t the big deal everyone wants it to be. In fact, its about as unnatural a concept as can be. So find a solution that helps the poor, empowers the poor… and if Richie Rich cries that Joe Dirt is getting a break that Richie isn’t… too bad. He’s Rich. He oughta be happy about that and quit crying.
Don’t make the work easier on Joe. Make his opportunity to achieve success easier to access.
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for rich kids because I wasn’t one of them. It was harder for me. I would have prefered a helping hand to the starting line to any idea that would have made the advantaged kids dumber.
As adults, they are already mean. Imagine what they’d be if they were dumb too.
In college, homework is par for the course. Most courses have only three to six hours of instruction during a week. You are not going to learn differential calculus, chemistry or even Chaucer and Plato that way. If you want to prepare students for potentially going to college, they better be experienced with doing homework. Furthermore, one of the most critical skills a person can learn is how to find answers on their own. Beyond expanding and reinforcing a student’s knowledge of a subject, homework is meant to force them to refine their skills at finding answers on their own.
my pet theory is I think teachers just want less work load. So if they stop spending time grading homework, then they will have less of a work load. Genius!
One of my co-worker’s kids asked what I did. I told him I did homework for a living. The look on his face was priceless.
#24, OFTLO, Agreed. Teach them statistics, especially the relationship between individual events and large scale probability, such as: ” ‘Might’ does not mean ‘will’, it means ‘probably NOT, so don’t spend your mortgage money on lottery tickets’.”
And for logic: “The word ‘if’ means something else can happen. Every thing after the word ‘if’ in a line of reasoning depends on that ‘if’, no matter how logical the reasoning might be. If that something else is true then the line of reasoning is a fantasy.”
And diplomacy: “Don’t call your Mom or Dad an idiot for not understanding the above; it gets kids clobbered and teachers fired.” (The last probably has more to do with the kids not being taught this sort of thing.)
Mike: Different children learn different ways. Phonics works for some.
#31 – That depends. When are you moving there 🙂