Wait...
what?
Source
Usually it is the children, not the parents, who are loath to spend their evenings practising spelling and learning times tables. But a Canadian couple have just won a legal battle to exempt their offspring from homework after successfully arguing there is no clear evidence it improves academic performance.
Sherri and Tom Milley, two lawyers from Calgary, Alberta, launched their highly unusual case after years of struggling to make their three reluctant children do school work out of the classroom.
After waging a long war with their eldest son, Jay, now 18, over his homework, they decided to do things differently with their youngest two, Spencer, 11, and Brittany, 10. And being lawyers, they decided to make it official.
It took two years to negotiate the Milleys' Differentiated Homework Plan, which ensures their youngest two children will never have to do homework again at their current school. The two-page plan, signed by the children, parents and teachers, stipulates that "homework will not be used as a form of evaluation for the children". In return, the pupils promise to get their work done in class, to come to school prepared, and to revise for tests. They must also read daily and practise their musical instruments at home.
"It was a constant homework battle every night," Sherri told Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper. "It's hard to get a weeping child to take in math problems. They are tired. They shouldn't be working a second shift."
"Why were we putting our family through that stress?" she wondered. "If we don't want it all, we shouldn't have to have it."
Two years ago, Sherri began collecting studies on homework, most of which suggest that, particularly for younger grades, there is no clear link between work at home and school performance. Working with the staff at St Brigid Elementary Junior High School, she formed a homework committee. When no firm changes resulted from the committee, the couple began negotiating the legal document that decided the matter.
"We think it's a parent's right to choose what's in our children's best interests," said Sherri. "But we're thankful the school did the right thing."
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I'm torn. I hated homework and thought the majority of it was useless to me, however I was a KID, and that was what we were supposed to think! Plus I'm still not very mature and have trouble seeing this from a parent or teacher's perspective.
But I know that it helps kids understand the work...at least...that's what they told us...
what?
Source
Usually it is the children, not the parents, who are loath to spend their evenings practising spelling and learning times tables. But a Canadian couple have just won a legal battle to exempt their offspring from homework after successfully arguing there is no clear evidence it improves academic performance.
Sherri and Tom Milley, two lawyers from Calgary, Alberta, launched their highly unusual case after years of struggling to make their three reluctant children do school work out of the classroom.
After waging a long war with their eldest son, Jay, now 18, over his homework, they decided to do things differently with their youngest two, Spencer, 11, and Brittany, 10. And being lawyers, they decided to make it official.
It took two years to negotiate the Milleys' Differentiated Homework Plan, which ensures their youngest two children will never have to do homework again at their current school. The two-page plan, signed by the children, parents and teachers, stipulates that "homework will not be used as a form of evaluation for the children". In return, the pupils promise to get their work done in class, to come to school prepared, and to revise for tests. They must also read daily and practise their musical instruments at home.
"It was a constant homework battle every night," Sherri told Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper. "It's hard to get a weeping child to take in math problems. They are tired. They shouldn't be working a second shift."
"Why were we putting our family through that stress?" she wondered. "If we don't want it all, we shouldn't have to have it."
Two years ago, Sherri began collecting studies on homework, most of which suggest that, particularly for younger grades, there is no clear link between work at home and school performance. Working with the staff at St Brigid Elementary Junior High School, she formed a homework committee. When no firm changes resulted from the committee, the couple began negotiating the legal document that decided the matter.
"We think it's a parent's right to choose what's in our children's best interests," said Sherri. "But we're thankful the school did the right thing."
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I'm torn. I hated homework and thought the majority of it was useless to me, however I was a KID, and that was what we were supposed to think! Plus I'm still not very mature and have trouble seeing this from a parent or teacher's perspective.
But I know that it helps kids understand the work...at least...that's what they told us...
He's not engaged, he's not enjoying it and he doesn't seem to be learning the shit. Teachers should allowed to teach everything in class, not send kids home to tough it out themselves. Teaching them to bubble-in shit for three weeks and not getting to teach doesn't help either.
When I changed from a mainstream school to an alternative school which had no homework but lots and lots of tests and long-term assignments (six-page papers, science fair projects, etc. as opposed to worksheets, problem sets and "read-and-summarize" assignments), my marks improved considerably and I absorbed a lot more information.
I'm not opposed to homework, but in my own case it was an ineffective teaching tool and actually inhibited my progress as a student. Other options should be available at the discretion of teachers and parents.
If a student responds well to the learning experience homework provides (a quick repetition of material covered in class, short bursts of learning as opposed to long slogs, lots of little assignments instead of big, long-term deadlines, etc.) then there's no reason they shouldn't have access to it. If they don't, they shouldn't be compelled to keep up with it.
Edited at 2009-11-20 07:50 am (UTC)
I would also point out, that for kids with bad home lives, it's a huge, huge struggle, because it's hard enough to keep bad home lives from affecting grades on tests and in class work, let alone to try to actually DO work in that environment.
Too many teachers use homework as an excuse not to teach properly during school. For example, I've been in classes where the teachers would tell you what chapters to read, and then have you do the work-- and they wouldn't teach on it, you'd just be expected to learn the material from the books.
ALSO, kids have to have a book for almost each class, and taking it home for homework each night results in a backpack of 30-40 lbs per night on average which they have to lug home on their back. (IDK about averages nationally or worldwide, but I know that throughout my school career and my siblings, we weighed our backpacks a few times a year, and it was never lighter than 25 lbs.) This is obviously a problem physically for kids and teens, and I think we're going to see a lot of negative physical repercussions from it down the road as this generation of students ages.
Well, on the for-homework side.. it's repetition. Doing homework makes you think about the material and (hopefully) retain it.
On the against-homework side.. a lot of teachers give homework for the sake of giving homework, so screw that. I know middle-schoolers who have more homework a night than I do. Seriously, guys? A ten-year-old doesn't need 1.5+ hours. Add in extra-curriculars and dinner, and when does the kid get to be a kid?
When that kid stays up to 3 AM to make up for missed downtime. Then we wonder why kids don't get enough sleep.
High School homework is fine, but not as a substitute for teaching. It's really not fair to kids in middle school and elementary school to have homework. My cousin is in the first grade and he gets homework. That's way too young. He should be outside playing, not spending an hour a night filling out worksheets.
lol tl;dr: FUCK HOMEWORK!
In younger grades though, an hour of homework a night is a little ridiculous. Young children literally don't have the capacity to do craploads of homework every night. Not to even begin to mention that most kids learn and retain knowledge using different methods and in varying capacities.
Edited at 2009-11-20 08:03 am (UTC)
My teachers were always like, "this is not my problem".
And even if I did do a good job on the homework, I never learned anything. Especially for things like "read and summarize" assignments, where I'd be rushing during morning announcements to write a summary and, through the combination of rushing and being exhausted, by lunch I wouldn't even remember the topic of the assignment.
Wasn't much.
There were quite a few scary arguments collected in favor of homework. The one that was most WTF was that parents and teachers wanted homework because they thought if teenagers didn't have something to keep them locked down, they'd go get into trouble.
...yeah, what.
Long-term projects and the like I can get behind, but throwing piles of fluff busywork in the guise of "reinforcing what was learned in class" is rubbish. (Math teachers are ESPECIALLY notorious for doing this.) In the case of the latter, all it really does is turn the students off, or worse... Not to mention that this fails to take into account other learning styles and what-have-you.
Mostly so they can know how to fill in bubbles correctly. Awesome.
There is no way that 100 algebra problems is going to magically make someone learn geometry if they have no idea how to do those 100 problems. And if they do know geometry, giving them 100 problems is going to make most kids hate geometry.
I failed 6th grade not because I didn't know the material, but because I didn't any homework for the entire semester. It was boring and tedious and made me depressed. And no one said anything until I failed!
Skipped 8th grade, though, lol.
Now, on topic somewhat. When I was in HS, my algebra teacher used to assign us students all the odd numbered problems. And we never had to show the work. Best part of that is...the answers to all the odd numbered were in the back of our algebra book. Our teacher could never figure out why her students were doing good on their homework, but not passing the tests she gave us.
But that's just it. You can't teach with homework. Many teachers forget that HW is just practice and overload the quantity.
Cool story, bro.
But I do recall at least 90% of my homework assignments in elementary and middle school just being busywork. Here, do this vocab list, write a sentence. Here's 30 math problems that are royally easy, show your work even if you can do this shit in your head. I think I only really learned stuff when doing a research paper or a science project. Hell, I loved doing research papers-even now with Google, those were still some handy skills. I remember in elementary school we'd get vocabulary lists and we'd have to write sentences and definitions out for each word, and I got PISSED when it was more than 10 words, because that was at least an hour with the damn dictionary at age seven, and I already knew most of the words anyways!
But, generally, elementary and middle school were much worse when it came to homework.
Because while busy work such as line copying/fill in the blank worksheets will probably not ever have a lasting effect, starting to write papers/essays early will. There are so many students already who come into college having no idea how to structure an argument or even form a basic sentence (I know, I grade their papers). Things like writing and language are only solidly learned through repetition and constant application of skills. If my latin students aren't going to go over vocabulary out of class or prep passages for class (look up vocab, read through for comprehension) so we can discuss grammatical concepts and introduce new concepts, honestly, I may as well not even try to teach it because they'll never improve. Same with any other language.
In terms of teaching, while it certainly is lazy teaching to assign only busy work, if teachers can no longer expect students to say, read a chapter in their history book to prep for a discussion, most teachers will build that reading time into the class time (which it sounds like their contract is encouraging). That's the ultimate in lazy teaching. Same in math--most concepts take an entire class period to introduce. If students aren't applying those concepts outside of class, 80% of that lecture will be gone by the next class period. How much will they remember when it comes time to test? There is also a legitimate argument that 'spoon feeding' information, such as saying you need to learn these twenty facts to pass the exam and not requiring any reading in a course, actually ends up dulling critical thinking skills and resulting in seriously 'dumbed down' course material. That's when you get worksheets--when the teacher has no confidence in student's ability to process information.
Of course a lot of kids are overloaded and most of that is busy work. I personally think we should outlaw all worksheets and anything that requires a glue gun (omg dioramas still give me leftover rage!). Maybe think about building a study hall into the school day (my school used to run every class 4 times a week and whatever class we didn't have was a study hall. It worked so well I rarely ever had more than a half hour of stuff to do at home.) and use it to build time management skills. It would be nice if teachers communicated about timing of larger projects (do away with the four weeks, midterm, final test schedule and stagger them).
TL;DR--There are ways to work around overloading without dumbing down class work and consequently the students. Part of this is the responsibility of the schools/teachers, but it's a lot harder to teach unprepared students and places incredible emphasis on testing to evaluate progress.
And I really have to say that I like the homeworks. They force me stay up and review what I've learned in class. And you know, when you're studying for the tests, you're doing the same thing you would've done with homework. And you can use your hw to fact check when reviewing for tests.
But really, homeworks are effective only if you would do them thoroughly instead of copying answers out from the back of the book or friends. Which is very common. And there's also the good kinds of homeworks and the bad kinds of homeworks. The good kind being challenging and strategically structured, the bad kind being the kind you don't need to know the material to do.
So I'm all for not counting homeworks in for grades, but just making them "suggested assignments". They can be good for us students. (Though this may be the masochistic nerd speaking)
... this comment makes no sense whatsoever, doesn't it? I'm blaming it on the ungodly hour.
Math was by far the worst offender (I really don't need that many problems in order to get this concept! I'm not that dense! ...usually), but it was bad even with subjects I actually liked.
Japanese was by far my best subject, and I was always ahead of the class because I was so eager to absorb the new information... but I wound up almost failing a couple times because I was so burnt out on the homework. It was nothing but busywork, repeating stuff that I already had a firm handle on. I never needed it, and my test scores proved it. But my teacher was oh so very concerned about my homework.
Somewhere along the line, the cart started pulling the horse.
So homework in moderation? Can be helpful, I think. It's practice. But assigning 70-80 math problems is just absurd (YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE YOU FAT BALD BASTARD).
I never had that much home work - except in grade 11 math. I'm not good at math, but my teacher would assign about 15-20 questions almost every night.
We'd then take them up the next day in class. I did well in math that year. It didn't take me that long to do the homework and I learned a lot about accountability because if you didn't have them done and she came around, you felt like you disappointed her.
When I did my teaching placement in a grade 1/2 split, they had something called a 'Reading Folder' they chose a book (usually about 10-20 pages depending on the level) and were to go home and read it - preferably to their parent, guardian or an older sibling... it was absolutely amazing to see how their reading and comprehension improved in a short amount of time.
The parents who were into it, then had some educational time to spend with their child and could even put comments onto a little card that was inside their reading folder.
so- go homework - just not too much.