I've heard teachers say "Well I suffered through it, so you can too."
I'd like to see empirical studies to see if it actually makes for better performance as students, or if it's useless. I'm guessing the demagogues would never let 'no homework' happen, at least in this country.
It'd probably also be good for the teachers, considering many complain about having to grade outside of the paid teaching day.
>I thought geeks an nerds enjoyed homework for the fact it is mental exercise if nothing else.
Not really. Obviously there are different types of "geeks" and "nerds", but generally those type of people enjoy tinkering and playing around the stuff they care about. They certainly don't like being forced to perform menial and repetitive tasks (as often homework is) because somebody else told them to.
Exactly. I really enjoy math, and how it interacts with other subject. But I didn't figure that out until I was ~20. Until then I hated math, because it was so droll, repetitive, and masturbatory.
Once I started programming, and learning other sciences, I saw how math interacted with them, and it made me realize I actually like math.
When I was failing classes for not doing homework, I was enjoying the company of other nerds from all over the world on IRC and learning to code by writing (awful) mIRC scripts instead. Pretty sure there's room for some middle ground in there. ;)
I don't think you understood my point. I'm saying that it's possible to be far more intellectually stimulated in ways that will help you in life and your career that doesn't require homework. There's a middle ground, and rote homework is far, far from that point.
My physics teacher attempted some reverse psychology on me and banned me from doing homework. After a while, I think when he figured out I was happy with that, he got fed up with that routine and started asking for the homework again but I still didn't bother.
In hindsight my grades probably suffered, but only as far as the fact I didn't have all this still drilled into my memory. I doubt it made me any less smart, and instead of doing said homework, I played with my computer which blossumed into a highly paid career.
As somebody who's never (or almost never) done homework, I have to say that I regret not doing it. I've always understood most of the material being taught and I've always seen homework as a waste of time (this is also a good excuse because I simply was lazy), however I have to admit that the very few times I've managed to sit down and do some homework, it really was useful (but I never admitted it).
Just practicing math problems, or typing out notes and essays, or even practicing a new language... That's all stuff that is useful. Sure you can go without, and probably schools assign way more than they should (I know it was the case for me), but homework itself at least is not a negative thing.
My brother is studying to be a teacher (In the UK) and I asked him what his opinion was on homework.
He told me that it's a good way to get students to do some study/open up the text book when they wouldn't have without a punishment if they didn't.
This, in my opinion leads to more stress and more work on those trying hard to study AND do homework. Each subject wants at least 1 hour of your home time and a student can have anywhere from 2-8 subject to study a night.
I concur with your perspective. If students aren't opening their text-book outside school-hours then that indicates a lack of inspiration being imparted.
I used to sit and read my Ecce Romani! text-books at the weekends because my Latin teacher was such a wonderfully eccentric and inspiring person that I wanted to learn more for myself and to please her. I don't remember her giving us homework other than 'learn the conjugation of this verb'.
I didn't open anything else unless forced to by homework.
Interesting - my Mum was a Latin teacher and in the end moved away from Ecce Romani to the Cambridge Latin Course so the Classical Civilization element got brought out more.
I'm sure the countless hours of homework in every subject that I was never interested in (of which that number was a majority) has helped me in my current career in not-any-of-those-subjects. /sarc
I feel like the most important things in school at that age are:
- Exposing people to a broad range of subjects that they might be interested in (and thus curious enough about such that they end up learning by themselves)
- Having teachers that can teach their subjects with enthusiasm, so that other people can see what the teacher finds exciting so that they too can (potentially) share in that enthusiasm and curiosity.
Homework can be a good bridge to university studies imo. I would certainly have benefited from learning self-disciplined study earlier on rather than coasting through the Swedish equivalent of high school and then swapping straight into university.
For under 12s or so I dont see a reason for homework. For 12-18 year olds I think gradually moving to a more self-driven study environment would be a good thing given that most people will end up going to university by now where that is the norm.
Homework doesn't really teach self-discipline, because it is an external motivation. If anything, I think it can work against that goal, because once people finish their mandatory work, they have no energy or enthusiasm left to learn for their own sake.
Perhaps I'm projecting, but mostly homework taught me how to do the minimum possible so I could get back to playing video games.
All of highschool was just one big exercise in me doing the bare minimum in whatever subject bored me so I could get back to programming. I knew what I wanted to do and I'm sorry Shakespeare, but you and I both know Hamlet is of no relevance. My usual formula for a given class was skim the current chapter, maybe do a practice problem or two, then spend the actual class on my laptop doing something of value to me.
Homework taught me how do that boring thing faster so that I could do interesting thing.
I think I could have learned more if I spent more time talking and seeing my family doing things instead of having my mother in the kitchen, doing dinner, while I was in front of my notebook writing down again the things .
Learning a new trade here in my adult life and finding a tremendous amount of information I learned in school all coming back to me. It's allowing me to speed through learning what i need to know.
I've only ever had two kinds of jobs. In the first I was paid hourly and only ever worked the shift agreed upon. In the second I was paid a salary and there was never any agreement about what my normal working hours would be.
Or you learn to work efficiently and finish your homework in the minutes between classes, the bus rides to and from school, and perhaps 1-2 hours immediately after getting home.
Unless things have changed substantially (and they may have), that was all the time I needed for everything but research papers and projects requiring more thought.
Self-discipline and time management can solve most of these problems. My parents forbade video games and TV until my homework was done, and I was honest as a kid (most of the time). So I got my shit done so I could do what I wanted to do (watch Batman and Animaniacs, run through the woods like a mad man).
Homework doesn't train you to be anything other than what you (really, your parents at that age) allow it to.
I don't think slavery was about making people feel bad if they didn't work outside your "agreed working hours", unless you mean whipping or beating them until they feel really bad.
A more nuanced discussion of what you seem to be trying to get at can be found at http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/. But please don't use the slave analogy unless we're really extracting economic goods out of a working group by force.
My feelings now are that there really shouldn't be any mandatory homework.
- If you do it badly, you may as well not do it. Who else remembers flipping through "The Catcher in the Rye" so fast they don't actually remember any other character than Holden Caulfield?
- It's an easy way for teachers to not teach, yet gives them an alibi. "Look I'm teaching, they have loads of books to read. Can't help it if they don't."
- If you already understand it, you don't benefit from solving more quadratic equations. You benefit from doing whatever the next step is. You just burn time plugging things into (-b +- sqrt (b2-4ac)) / 2a. And you learn the wrong lesson, which is that you have to get it exactly right, rather than why that's the equation in the first place.
- You end up testing which kids have peaceful homes, and parents who care. Some kids just can't do any homework with the home environment they're given. School should be such that it doesn't matter if your parents are drunks or academics.
- Totally fine with doing like in University: here's a mega list of interesting things related to the subject, go and browse around, get a feel for what the landscape is like. Come back more interested.
I think the occaisional project would be fine, that also teaches planning and other skills.
Large amounts of homework exercises probably don't teach much. Actually I'm not even too sure about large amounts of exercises, for reasons similar to the ones you listed.
>burn time plugging things into (-b +- sqrt (b2-4ac)) / 2a
I swear to god, I had so much of that to do, I got tired of it and learned enough python in one night, at 15, to get the computer to do my homework for me.
I wonder how kids who aren't interested in rote math (e.g. 10 quadratic equations 5 nights in a row) bother to learn anything with tools like Wolfram Alpha available for free. I spent so much time on Wolfram Alpha for parts of Calculus II, Chem I and Chem II while in college. Those classes gave mountains of homework, so after I understood how to do them, I just plugged the questions into W|A for a quick answer.
In high school, I would have never had the restraint to learn the material first. All of my homework would have been copy-paste jobs from W|A.
I did that too, though in BASIC on a TI-83+. When I showed it to my math teacher, she said that I could use the program on any future homework and tests as long as I turned in a paragraph explaining step-by-step how the program worked.
Ah looks like you actually had a smart math teacher. Mine retroactively failed all my take-homes and homework after I showed her the program I used and explained why I did it (rote memorization is terrible, I was more interested in the theory and algorithms). I had to appeal to the CS teacher and principal at my school to reverse the grade which would've prevented me from graduating
Same. For me, it was physics and the teacher was interested in how I did it, so I brought in my laptop and showed him the Visual Basic IDE and explained how it worked. He wasn't questioning that I had done it as much as he was intrigued that I had made such a thing. I wasn't allowed to use it on tests (laptops weren't allowed in class back then) but I didn't mind that much since I knew the formulas forward and backward by then.
I also typed all my papers and assignments because my handwriting was atrocious. Only a few teachers took issue with this, and as an adult, I can't say I've had to do any cursive or write out an essay on paper for any reason.
If he's seven, he was probably coloring in ten frames, which are used to build a stronger conceptual understanding of our base-10 number system. The model starts out with physical objects, moves to visual representations of those objects ("coloring in"), then to abstraction.
From there, students use those techniques to move away from the to develop good mental math strategies. If you were doing 17 + 35 on a ten frame, you'd fill in 1 full 10 for the 17 and have 7 left over. You'd then fill in 3 full 10s for the 35, and have 5 left over. You can take 3 of those 5 and fill in the missing spots on the 7 out of 10 ten frame, making a 5th full ten frame, and leaving 2 lonely chips/colored squares in sixth.
The goal is to eventually get students to do all that mentally. 17 + 35 = 10 + 7 + 30 + 5 = 10 + 30 + 7 + 5 = 10 + 30 + 7 + 3 + 2 = 10 + 30 + 10 + 2 = 50 + 2 = 52.
You might have figured out that kind of mental math trick on your own. If so, the lesson's not there for you. It's for all the people out in the real world who didn't develop it on their own and will readily tell you that they're "not math people".
The same technique will be revisited to work with fractions, first with the same denominator and then dissimilar denominators, and similar techniques will be used for multiplication, the distributive property, etc.
The sane way is to try matching against a pattern, then if that fails you fall back to the traditional algorithm with the numbers lined up one over the other and doing the carries. Yes, you can run the traditional algorithm in your head, for this and for much larger things. Fully in memory, 4-digit plus 4-digit is quite doable. (can your method handle that?) While staring at the numbers on paper to avoid forgetting, and writing down the answer as you go, arbitrary sizes are doable.
It so happens that I do see a pattern I can fit, but this shouldn't be expected. I convert to 17+(172+1) and then to 173+1 and I know 17*3 is 51 so the answer is 52. It's forgivable to not spot this shortcut.
What hostility? Come on, you have to admit that a procedure which expands the problem out to the sum of 5 numbers is pretty insane.
BTW, my shortcut got mangled by Hacker News. Multiplication turned into italics. I did 17 times 3, which is great, but I don't think that anybody should be expected to see that path to a solution.
Or you could teach somebody how to 'carry the 1' and get this done in a less mentally taxing way, being faster and still understandable. This looks like a brain dump of how 'somebody somewhere' conceptualizes math and now we're all supposed to put it in play en masse because it 'shows the work'. I look at this math and if I was in 3rd grade, I would know in my gut this is BS. Does anyone actually think that more written steps will remove mistakes, because less moves = less mistakes.
"- You end up testing which kids have peaceful homes, and parents who care. Some kids just can't do any homework with the home environment they're given. School should be such that it doesn't matter if your parents are drunks or academics."
>My feelings now are that there really shouldn't be any mandatory homework.
Been there, tried it. Didn't work. I wish it did, but it didn't.
There's a reason teachers assign homework. We're not a craven group that goes out of our way to say, "Look I'm teaching, they have loads of books to read. Can't help it if they don't." We are, universally, strapped for time. Classroom time is best served teaching new topics, not reinforcing old ones.
When would you prefer students read books for a literature class? During the school day, during lit class, taking time away from discussion/analysis? During the school day, during a study hall, taking time away from electives? In reading sessions before school/after school, taking time away from sports/extracurriculars and requiring additional costs? Or at their leisure, where their free time allows?
>If you already understand it, you don't benefit from solving more quadratic equations.
Yes, you do. Understanding is only the second domain, out of 6, in Bloom's taxonomy of learning. Application—properly using a formula to solve an equation, which you're probably actually referring to—is the third domain. And being able to use the quadratic formula to solve a problem doesn't signify that you know anything more than how to memorize a formula and plug numbers into it.
There are some incredibly bright students out there who can master a concept in a single lesson without reinforcement. You might be one of them. I was. That doesn't mean all students are like you. Most of them require more practice than can be given in a single class period to master a topic. Some "get it" in the class period, and require practice to cement it in their memory. Other think they get it, struggle with the homework, and then get the help they need the next day. Every student is different.
>You end up testing which kids have peaceful homes, and parents who care. Some kids just can't do any homework with the home environment they're given. School should be such that it doesn't matter if your parents are drunks or academics.
That would be nice. Unfortunately, it's impossible. Family life affects far, far more than just whether or not students do their homework. It's hard to get a student from a loving home whose parents don't care about <subject> to care about <subject>. It's hard to convince a student who doesn't have a safe, secure, loving home life that literary analysis is worth studying. It's hard to convince a junior who got a job at Starbucks and is making more money than his parents ever did that finishing school is important.
>Totally fine with doing like in University: here's a mega list of interesting things related to the subject, go and browse around, get a feel for what the landscape is like. Come back more interested.
But K-12 is not University. We educate young folks, the same people we don't trust to vote, drink, smoke, or choose whether or not to attend school in the first place. The same people who pay through the nose for car insurance when they can drive. K-12 students are not good at weighing short-term and long-term decisions. Their brains aren't fully developed.
Given the option to not do homework with no obvious penalty, most of them… won't do homework. I ran a junior/senior Precalculus class once with optional homework. Some students did well on the assessments. Some did not. Many more than usual failed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, test grades correlated strongly to homework completion. Failing a test did not encourage students to study more in the future.
Halfway through the year, I put an end to the experiment and required homework. Test grades and student understanding improved.
It's our responsibility as teachers and as the adults in the room to ensure a student learns. It could be an excellent life lesson for a student to fail a high school class because he or ...
John Gatto used to send his 7th grade students out into the real world, to learn from adults doing real things. He would have them write a report about what they'd learned. [1]
Real learning is achieved with context. Government schools mostly teach theory without context, which is why the students have such a hard time.
The local paper once had a story about the challenges faced by teachers of children who were learning English. The story told of how the class was reading a book abou a dog. Some of the kids didn't get the word 'panting', so the teacher imitated a panting dog. I wrote a letter saying that languages are actually easy to learn, and that a human acting like a dog is no substitute for a trip to the dog park.
At the same time, you can't realistically just take a trip anywhere you want to demonstrate every single individual concept as a teacher of a bunch of students.
You need parental permission, a way to transport kids (probably via bus, which costs money and has to be scheduled), and extra people around to help watch the kids and make sure they don't wander into trouble.
Parents, especially nowadays, are extremely litigious (or call for a teacher's resignation) for such minor things nowadays, that trips in general become risky.
I'm sure most teachers schedule as many of these trips as they can get approved, but they probably only get one or two approved per class.
Sure you might not like all the red tape, but it didn't appear out of nowhere. It's the school protecting itself and covering its ass, just like every other industry out there.
Good to get the input of a teacher on this, I appreciate it.
Have you checked with kids who are several years out of education? My sense from talking to people is if they didn't give a shit in school, they will not know it once they're out. And they could have done perfectly fine in tests, because of course they were forced to study.
In general, I get the feeling the kids who retain things after school are ONLY the ones towards the top of the class. Anyone who did middling or worse definitely won't remember the quadratic formula let alone calculus. The top section will have some kids who really cared and learned it properly, and some who were good at doing as they were told but never really cared much, and won't have retained anything either.
What I'm getting at is whether you can really learn anything without having some sort of intrinsic interest, and whether it's worthwhile to force people to learn stuff that they will forget even existed in a few years. I don't mean that people inevitably forget a few things (can I solve competition questions I used to do? Probably not), I mean that it is as if they never even knew that certain fields of knowledge existed and that they actually possessed some of that.
You end up with a you-know-how-to-learn-for-life idea, but that's always been unsatisfying for me.
>You end up with a you-know-how-to-learn-for-life idea, but that's always been unsatisfying for me.
Public schooling (in the US) will always feel like it's torn between the two extremes of giving a strong liberal arts, "learn for life" education and giving a strong vocational, "useful in the real world" education. In my experience, it's actually neither. Education is an equalizer.
>What I'm getting at is whether you can really learn anything without having some sort of intrinsic interest, and whether it's worthwhile to force people to learn stuff that they will forget even existed in a few years.
Yes, 100 times over, to both of them. The former is not like riding a bike, but maybe like cooking a favorite meal you haven't made in years. An adult might have forgotten the quadratic equation, how to apply it, and how to use it, but give them 5 minutes of instruction and most will be right back in the swing of things.
The second half, though, is so important, that I think it's worth quoting again.
>[Is it] worthwhile to force people to learn stuff that they will forget even existed in a few years
It is incredibly important to force people to learn stuff that they might forget even existed in a few years. A free and appropriate public education is one of the greatest things we as a civilization can provide to our citizens. Education is possibly the greatest civil right we possess.
If we, as a collective people, do not mandate schools offer classes on how to analyze text and history, write a persuasive essay, solve advanced algebra and geometry problems, and the natural sciences, then some schools simply will not offer those courses. If we do not mandate that every student take these courses, then some students will not take those courses. And if they don't have access to these courses, then they don't have equal access to higher education. (Not to mention how important some topics in Algebra I and II are to managing your finances and understanding compounding interest.)
These will generally be the schools and students that are already the most disadvantaged. The inner-city schools that are counting every dollar. The children of the drunks that you mentioned, the children of loving and well-meaning parents that work three part-time jobs that simply don't have the time to follow up on the minutia, and the special education students that are just as smart as their peers but require support to show that. These students all deserve the opportunity to take those classes. If the classes aren't required, they might not even get that chance.
To put it another way: I'm guessing you and your peers were likely exposed to computers by the time you were, I dunno, 16? Not all of you went on to work in tech and post on Hacker News. But all of you had the opportunity to work in tech and post on Hacker News. If you didn't ever get to interact with a computer until you were an adult, and even then you had to seek it out yourself, how would that change things in your life?
Education has to do that for every student, in every subject.
>It is incredibly important to force people to learn stuff that they might forget even existed in a few years. A free and appropriate public education is one of the greatest things we as a civilization can provide to our citizens. Education is possibly the greatest civil right we possess.
I believe in this ideal as well.
But I do wonder how it can be that there are TV shows filled with people who appear to have learned absolutely nothing in school. How can it be that even though schooling is free in most of the west, I've personally interviewed fewer people who knew the expectation of a dice roll than people who didn't (by a gigantic margin)? And that's selected from people with degrees in STEM. I wonder whether the problem is how schools are organized, what values they instil in the kids, which people teach the kids.
Especially as these days it's highly likely to be a simply photocopy of a page from some study guide. Quite often with printed mistakes and bad grammar in them. Much less need to put in teaching time.
I've nothing against homework in the run up to exams, say 15 years on, but going on my youngest's experience, homework has become common down to as young as 9 or 10. I don't see that as a benefit for anyone except politicians wanting to be seen to do something about ejucashun. :)
Sadly governments are putting too many other tasks on teachers that leave them with little choice. Form filling, over frequent testing, sus checks to make sure the student isn't a potential terrorist or illegal immigrant and so forth. Little wonder it was recently reported in the UK that >50% of teachers now want to leave the professions.
Pay teachers a commercially competitive rate and free them enough to teach. Of course that would free them to teach outside whatever dogma is de rigeur. Homework will remain a growing part of education until we back away from the production line and over-reliance on national standards for everything.
>>If you already understand it, you don't benefit from solving more quadratic equations. You benefit from doing whatever the next step is. You just burn time plugging things into (-b +- sqrt (b2-4ac)) / 2a. And you learn the wrong lesson, which is that you have to get it exactly right, rather than why that's the equation in the first place.
As some one who works in Data Analytics, I can tell you many people lack the ability to plug things into a formula properly, many have issues with even simple approximation and back of the envelope calculations. I wouldn't say, practicing this is a bad thing.
By the way if you think this is wrong. A little scaled up version of this is what is tested in current day interviews. Asking people algorithms is basically testing their ability to remember a heuristic and their ability to plug in numbers and demonstrate mental acrobatics.
> You just burn time plugging things into (-b +- sqrt (b2-4ac)) / 2a. And you learn the wrong lesson, which is that you have to get it exactly right, rather than why that's the equation in the first place.
Once I learned how to complete the square, I decided I'd rather do that than try to remember that formula. I'm actually exaggerating when I say I "decided" - I forgot the formula so much that I was completing the square for a general quadratic equation just to remember it.
Plug-and-chug is pointless. People shouldn't be taking physics before they take calculus.
>People shouldn't be taking physics before they take calculus.
In an ideal world, you're absolutely right. In practice, it's hard to arrange. Assuming a US high school student even takes calculus, it's going to be senior year. So, if physics is taught senior year (don't know what the norm is), at best you're teaching in parallel. To be sure, derivatives are taught fairly early-on in calculus and they're probably most relevant to physics at the high school level.
But, you're right, there's a lot of plug and chug in physics without calculus. On the other hand, physics also helps get students into other things like dimensional analysis etc.
Also, to be fair, the issue of prerequisites comes up a lot of places. There are often facts in intro classes that have to be taken on faith until the topic can be dealt with more deeply later on.
Homework is essential when it is well thought out and helps you understand the material better, like problems that require you to apply multiple concepts in math or science to arrive at a solution. Or language essays that require new constructs or vocabulary, essentially anything that requires you to apply your mind in new ways.
Sometimes rote memory is also required (spellings, formulae, handwriting anyone?)
If anything, the education system in general and homework in particular makes learning very systematic and structured, glossing over broader issues of exploring topics on one's own, seeking out new resources and creating one's own structure and areas of interest. It conceals the deeper questions of education, handing the students only the low-hanging fruits of tests and homeworks.
The education system is so effective, once the pupil is out, learning anything significant becomes a daunting process. The inability to plan and structure one's own learning can lead many to give up early in the process.
Sounds like you perfectly summed why our education system isn't effective. It fails to teach students how to learn on their own!
And there's nothing to say that _homework_ is essential. It's perfectly plausible to have students get everything done during the regular school day.
Well thought out assignments are obviously good. Why do they need to be done at home? It's not as if third graders are listening to lectures from 8 until 3.
I still can't help but hate the teacher who gave the honor's class an enormous mythology book over the summer and gave it less worth to our grade than a ten minute grammar assignment.
Camel's back, etc, I failed the class, got kicked out of the mostly white honor's program to being the only white kid in most classes. I got picked on less there and enjoyed life significantly more after that. Probably the best thing to happen in my life, actually.
It doesn't need to be class time. The issue is that "home work" invades our private lives (evenings, weekends and holidays) due to its very definition.
If I work from home for a company, it's not called homework because it is under the same conditions as normal work: there are set hours, I receive compensation, the only difference is that it's not on-site.
So should Spanish class time be spent memorizing vocabulary? No, at least not in large parts, but neither should it take more than the time allocated for the subject[1]. It's nice that we can choose to do it either in school or at home, but the way it presently works, homework takes up more time than it should.
[1] Again, I don't mean allocated class hours, I mean the total number of hours students are expected to work on something. In Dutch terms, SBUs, or "hours the course takes from your life, class and homework and everything together". All courses should have SBUs that add up to 40 hours per week, give or take 5.
Then - perhaps - this is an argument about whether homework should be compulsory or not. We are constantly hearing about company cultures that require more than 40 hrs/wk due to competition. We seem to (at least tacitly) accept this as a price to pay for success. Should it then be that you can receive the basic skills by merely showing up and working hard in class (which is often true + the primary problem with low performing students) and reserve homework for those who have higher level personal/professional goals (and structure the work accordingly)?
Fwiw, high school language classes are very easy and slowly paced, to the point where I aced the standard curriculum purely by showing up to class and doing no out-of-class work, nor any memorization at all.
So either the curriculum should be made more challenging, or homework should be optional for everyone, like it was for me.
And something I regret more, but still wouldn't have done differently if given the opportunity to do it again, is I never read any of the books for my English classes. I would come to class and integrate what the teachers and other students said and come up with answers to questions that sounded insightful (and probably were, I guess) and learn enough just from class discussions to do well on tests.
Both my English and German classes were considered "honors" level classes in a highly ranked school district. I avoided AP-prep classes outside of math and science because the English and language AP classes involved significicantly more homework, to the point where I couldn't get away with not doing it and pass the class, even if I could pass the test anyway.
If the school can't offer classes that actually require students to do regular homework, then they shouldn't demand that students do regular homework.
I think your problem is avoiding AP classes. They claim to be college prep, but from my experience (no citation, sorry) they're more the level that the entire education system should be working on. I do not remember learning a single thing from my honors/traditional classes (other than ohm's law in Electronic Tech, which is no longer available), however I can confidently say I did learn and still remember what I've learned in my AP and IB classes.
Unfortunately that is due more to excessive memorization and general work required than anything else, but I still find it better than the alternative, which is learn nothing at all.
As an unschooler who went to school and did "homework" or any kind of "schoolwork" for the first time when I was 12, it took me about a month to catch up to my peers in terms of abilities to do the coursework, and about a year to catch up to my peers in resentment and disengagement.
Except I got to spend seven years hanging out with my brothers doing fun stuff and my friends had to spend it training to be slaves. There is no reason for the strange masochism that is mass schooling. It is not productive, does not produce smarter or more learned people.
"It is not productive, does not produce smarter or more learned people."
I would like to disagree, but I don't have anything to back up my claim that mass schooling makes people smarter or more learned.
Like you, I just have anecdotes.
But one thing is for sure. I would never have gotten to where I am today. If I hadn't learned english at school. Having lived in two countries, neither of which had english as a native language, I would unlikely have learned english unless it had been taught at school
Also, from one time when I was a temp at a primary school for 2 weeks. I saw a kid who had come to Norway at the age of 10 or so, and now one year later he could still not add double digit numbers. Worse yet, he didn't see how a problem could be solved by adding two numbers. So problems along the lines of "I have two apples, you give me three, how many do I have now?" where beyond his ability to solve without assistance.
He did however manage to learn quite good Norwegian in that year.
I don't know why this is being downvoted. Teaching a language to students with mixed levels of previous knowledge and motivation is extremely hard. The schools I went to could never manage it.
I learned English from Japanese videogames that had been translated to English by Ted Woolsey.
I remember having an interesting discussion with my Spanglish-speaking friends about whether "All your base" was supposed to mean "your entire base" or "each and every one of your bases". My Engrish-speaking friend could immediately tell that the second interpretation was the correct one.
Out of curiosity, does this mean that you didn't have any English lessons in school?
I ask because in the field of Second Language Acquisition there's a pretty strong consensus that the optimal path to language learning involves a combination of classroom instruction augmented by interaction with (reading, listening) & use of (speaking, writing) the language.
I've spent most of my career as a language teacher, and the typical successful learner is one who isn't necessarily a language nerd, but almost always is someone who does some heavy lifting in the target language outside of class. I love students that have a goal for language use because they help me to target my instruction to bits of language that will be immediately useful to them. (One of the best jobs I had was teaching English to software developenow here I am.rs; as I researched the language they needed, I started to learn programming and )
I did have some, they began slightly later than I've got hold of a PC.
I do think that some school lessons contributed their share. I just don't think that sitting behind a desk for two hours per week, for ten years, is necessary or desired. After a few years I did not need much "training wheels" and could continue to increase proficiency regardless.
That is an interesting point. I only learned to read when I was 11 (never had any need to, before that) which is strangely late. When I went to school at 12, I found I was the fastest reader, and tested as "University +" reading level, which is the highest there was.
By learning independently of school, I learned way later in life, and learned in a way that was right for my stage of development.
My anecdote about it not being productive is purely subjective, but the science on development theory is clear. If left to their own devices, almost all people learn native language, writing and math on their own timeline in about 100 hours. School makes this process far less effcient, and teaches things like grammer that program the brain to read slowly and without depth.
Obviously my anecdote is hyperbolic, I speak primarily as someone who had a great unschooling experience and then went to school and saw the difference, and a little bit as someone who has read extensive child development theory.
Not learning to read until I was 11 would have been strange. I had no specific need to read, but being literate at 4 allowed me to program at 7. It allowed me to explore mathematics beyond what most of my peers did because I read every bit of the book. And then there were the scores of books I read and the interaction with friends using encoding schemes lifted from my Boys' Life subscription.
This is very much a to each their own thing. It worked well for you but it also sounds like you had a uniquely active family and community to support this. The primary problem with homeschooling and unschooling is the lack of family support. Either by apathy or by lack of economic opportunity. Or simply their own lack of education preventing them from even being aware of these options (such as finding a community to coordinate with to make up for their on educational deficiencies).
I can't speak for all public schools, my parents deliberately chose better than average schools for my sister and I to attend. But good public schools exist. Good teachers exist. But just like good home schooling and unschooling experiences, this requires either luck of birth (well-to-do parents) or deliberate effort by parents to improve their children's position.
I agree. I went to private school for a year and did well. I went to public school after that because private was too expensive to maintain, and it was not so good. A few non-burned out teachers who made a difference, mostly just soul-crushing apathy and stockhold syndrome all around. And I would love to have learned to program and read earlier, I am not sure how I managed to go that long without reading, I guess I was just different developmentally.
Thanks to the economic state of the US, most families can't afford the time to dedicate to their children to properly educate them in the breadth of subjects that schools (attempt to) cover. And this assumes that the parents are either educated or capable/willing to source proper materials to provide information (or the tools to access information) for their children.
Agreed. Which makes me sad. The funds do exist, but it all goes to public education. One cannot opt-out of school taxes, even when one opts out of school. It is not just an issue that is purely economic, the money exists, it just does not exist in the hands of the parents.
Possibly, but if the per pupil cost is between $6500-19800 (Utah and New York, respectively) would this amount of money free at least one parent to fully educate their children? If that were true, wouldn't it seem to follow that more people would do it?
Public education must be - or at least have the appearance of being - a good deal economically.
Probably not, unless you have 3+ kids. My Mom always worked park time, and we had a community that would get together and hang out and share in the child care. And you definitely have to make sacrifices, we grew up in the country in a pretty small house, etc. but we lived fairly well on 1.5 incomes.
Part of this is that parents alone don't shoulder the burden of paying for their children's education. All taxpayers share in this. Exemptions or credits along these lines are short-sighted.
You expose another issue that comes up frequently which is the idea that the cost per pupil is somewhat fixed in a region (for administrative purposes anyway) and so regardless of the school a parent choose for their child, the state should pay that school. As an extension, if the parent would choose to home school, that parent might be paid the prevailing rate for a child.
I don't think that works on a number of levels (again, poor parents probably can't afford to not work for $6k for 9 months of the year). Perhaps combined with other social programs (such as a UBI), this would be more reasonable. I think there would be a huge media backlash over kids who end up with effectively no education due to parents just taking their kids UBI+their UBU+school fees and then letting the kids play video games all day (regardless of whether this actually happens or not). Standardized testing would probably become even more important as a means for the state to make sure that your children are actually being educated.
Perhaps if the average American cut down their TV watching time in half, they'd suddenly have time to spend more on their children and help them through the subjects studied at school.
Going by the provided statistics, is it any wonder Asian Americans (least amount of TV time) do better in school than other demographics? I have no doubt that parents in those households spend an above average amount of time helping their kids with schoolwork and make absolutely sure they don't fall behind.
... where I am from, elementary school is basically obedience training for high testosterone boys. It is a battle of wills that the boy almost always loses. Eventually, they rebel hard. I upvoted you though because it was hyperbolic, this subject is just very passion-inducing for me.
Slaves were, and are, born into poverty, often forcibly removed from their parents, treated and sold like cattle, worked hard at all times for no benefit to themselves, had no rights and no legal protections, and had no prospect of removing themselves from slavery. In no way is this comparable to receiving a relatively high quality education during the formative years of your life.
Teachers work hard for little reward to provide the education they give and it is a slap in their face, the faces of the descendants of real slaves, and the real slaves that continue to exist today, to imply that the good work they do is equivalent to what slave owners and masters did to their victims. The analogy to slavery is disgusting and juvenile and it's ludicrous that I had to explain this to you.
Yes, you are right, school do not train for slavery literally. But that wasn't the point. As you've recognized yourself, it was an analogy.
As an analogy, you can't say it is invalid by stating differences between the analogues, all analogies are pretty much aware of these differences. If not, they would be identities, not analogies.
"Juvenile", "disgusting" and "ludicrous" are not arguments sufficient to invalidate the analogy either.
What you have to do to invalidate the analogy is to refute the similarities between schooling and slavery, some of them:
- kids are forced to go to school;
- kids are brainwashed to think that school is the only alternative they have besides starving and ultimately dying after an horrible life;
- kids are trained to be submissive to teachers and other in liderance positions.
I think the primary function of mass schooling is to warehouse kids somewhere off the streets and out of the workplace, avoiding having to adapt adult spaces to kids being around. There's a secondary function as a meaningless token mill, for use in pseudo meritocracy. And a tertiary function, much underfunded, of education.
This. It's about economics. It's about extracting value from the parents. It's about making the children, who are the workers of the future, more compliant.
You may consider it conspiracy theory, to me it's just obvious.
To the person who deleted their comment that it's about compliance. That's an often heard conspiracy theory, but IMO, the main strike against it is that it doesn't work. The USA, compared to eg: Singapore, does not turn out particularly compliant graduates.
No, but I have considered it. All four of my grandparents are gradulate-educated educators and they learned and researched education and the various issues surrounding it. So based on their anecdotes and research, my parents kind of were convinced that school was not good and would make our lives worse, and just let us do whatever. I would recommend reading John Holt if you are interested. I'll email you. It is one of those things that is dangerously simple - no structured learning, but there is tons of nuance, I guess.
I would check out the book "Free to Learn" by Peter Gray - he goes into why "unschooling" or democratic schooling can be effective. It really changed my outlook on education. I had previously read "A Mathemetician's Lament"[0], an essay by Paul Lockhart that made me start to question the value of regular schooling.
If I work somewhere and it's 5pm, I'm off unless there is some important deadline the next day that can't be moved. And if I work extra hours, I'll get something extra (usually money but it might also be holidays or something).
In school, teachers have the power to invade our private lives, even our set holidays(!) with pointless tasks. Apparently 40 hours a week is not enough to spend on school, we also need to give up part of every evening, part of most holidays and part of many weekends.
I really hate that system. It's completely unfair, especially if you're in school just to get that shitty piece of paper in the end. I can code already, I taught myself perfectly well, but the prerequisites for HR usually include a diploma, and your salary and career opportunities is often dependent on which diploma you have. I'm just sitting it out and hate almost every assignment we get. It's outdated and moreover, boring stuff that nobody would ever want to use in practice.
Relevant clip from Michael Moore's "Where to Invade Next" (2005): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRJ1hgN7uAU
It's about the Finnish education system based on having no homework.
A few years ago, I found The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing an interesting read. It shaped my views on homework [context: US public schools].
Massive amounts of homework is the perfect training for future work in North America. When kids get used to doing 60-80 hours worth of schoolwork for the same education that can be done in 40 hours they won't complain when their future boss demands 60-80 hours of work for the pay of 40 hours.
The article sources an another article that states that Finland doesn't have any homework, which is a statement I have no idea where it comes from. As a finnish guy, I can ensure you that there's homework being assigned on every grade from first grade to the last course you take at a university. Unless I have participated in some sort of twisted experiment where I have been given homework to do while others just pretend there are doing them.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadI'd like to see empirical studies to see if it actually makes for better performance as students, or if it's useless. I'm guessing the demagogues would never let 'no homework' happen, at least in this country.
It'd probably also be good for the teachers, considering many complain about having to grade outside of the paid teaching day.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2012/11/...
Bazinga generation nerds and geeks get out of my cyber-lawn!
If I was doing mental exercise then there was always more interesting things to do it with than the homework my teachers set.
Not really. Obviously there are different types of "geeks" and "nerds", but generally those type of people enjoy tinkering and playing around the stuff they care about. They certainly don't like being forced to perform menial and repetitive tasks (as often homework is) because somebody else told them to.
Once I started programming, and learning other sciences, I saw how math interacted with them, and it made me realize I actually like math.
I love to learn, which is why I hate school.
>Is There a Bright Future if You Don’t Do Any Homework?
Heh. Nah, not really.
In hindsight my grades probably suffered, but only as far as the fact I didn't have all this still drilled into my memory. I doubt it made me any less smart, and instead of doing said homework, I played with my computer which blossumed into a highly paid career.
Just practicing math problems, or typing out notes and essays, or even practicing a new language... That's all stuff that is useful. Sure you can go without, and probably schools assign way more than they should (I know it was the case for me), but homework itself at least is not a negative thing.
He told me that it's a good way to get students to do some study/open up the text book when they wouldn't have without a punishment if they didn't.
This, in my opinion leads to more stress and more work on those trying hard to study AND do homework. Each subject wants at least 1 hour of your home time and a student can have anywhere from 2-8 subject to study a night.
I used to sit and read my Ecce Romani! text-books at the weekends because my Latin teacher was such a wonderfully eccentric and inspiring person that I wanted to learn more for myself and to please her. I don't remember her giving us homework other than 'learn the conjugation of this verb'.
I didn't open anything else unless forced to by homework.
You weren't in the Berkshire area for school?
I feel like the most important things in school at that age are:
- Exposing people to a broad range of subjects that they might be interested in (and thus curious enough about such that they end up learning by themselves)
- Having teachers that can teach their subjects with enthusiasm, so that other people can see what the teacher finds exciting so that they too can (potentially) share in that enthusiasm and curiosity.
For under 12s or so I dont see a reason for homework. For 12-18 year olds I think gradually moving to a more self-driven study environment would be a good thing given that most people will end up going to university by now where that is the norm.
Perhaps I'm projecting, but mostly homework taught me how to do the minimum possible so I could get back to playing video games.
I think I could have learned more if I spent more time talking and seeing my family doing things instead of having my mother in the kitchen, doing dinner, while I was in front of my notebook writing down again the things .
Unless things have changed substantially (and they may have), that was all the time I needed for everything but research papers and projects requiring more thought.
Self-discipline and time management can solve most of these problems. My parents forbade video games and TV until my homework was done, and I was honest as a kid (most of the time). So I got my shit done so I could do what I wanted to do (watch Batman and Animaniacs, run through the woods like a mad man).
Homework doesn't train you to be anything other than what you (really, your parents at that age) allow it to.
A more nuanced discussion of what you seem to be trying to get at can be found at http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/. But please don't use the slave analogy unless we're really extracting economic goods out of a working group by force.
- If you do it badly, you may as well not do it. Who else remembers flipping through "The Catcher in the Rye" so fast they don't actually remember any other character than Holden Caulfield?
- It's an easy way for teachers to not teach, yet gives them an alibi. "Look I'm teaching, they have loads of books to read. Can't help it if they don't."
- If you already understand it, you don't benefit from solving more quadratic equations. You benefit from doing whatever the next step is. You just burn time plugging things into (-b +- sqrt (b2-4ac)) / 2a. And you learn the wrong lesson, which is that you have to get it exactly right, rather than why that's the equation in the first place.
- You end up testing which kids have peaceful homes, and parents who care. Some kids just can't do any homework with the home environment they're given. School should be such that it doesn't matter if your parents are drunks or academics.
- Totally fine with doing like in University: here's a mega list of interesting things related to the subject, go and browse around, get a feel for what the landscape is like. Come back more interested.
Large amounts of homework exercises probably don't teach much. Actually I'm not even too sure about large amounts of exercises, for reasons similar to the ones you listed.
I swear to god, I had so much of that to do, I got tired of it and learned enough python in one night, at 15, to get the computer to do my homework for me.
In high school, I would have never had the restraint to learn the material first. All of my homework would have been copy-paste jobs from W|A.
I also typed all my papers and assignments because my handwriting was atrocious. Only a few teachers took issue with this, and as an adult, I can't say I've had to do any cursive or write out an essay on paper for any reason.
They are leaving the hard stuff for homework.
From there, students use those techniques to move away from the to develop good mental math strategies. If you were doing 17 + 35 on a ten frame, you'd fill in 1 full 10 for the 17 and have 7 left over. You'd then fill in 3 full 10s for the 35, and have 5 left over. You can take 3 of those 5 and fill in the missing spots on the 7 out of 10 ten frame, making a 5th full ten frame, and leaving 2 lonely chips/colored squares in sixth.
The goal is to eventually get students to do all that mentally. 17 + 35 = 10 + 7 + 30 + 5 = 10 + 30 + 7 + 5 = 10 + 30 + 7 + 3 + 2 = 10 + 30 + 10 + 2 = 50 + 2 = 52.
You might have figured out that kind of mental math trick on your own. If so, the lesson's not there for you. It's for all the people out in the real world who didn't develop it on their own and will readily tell you that they're "not math people".
The same technique will be revisited to work with fractions, first with the same denominator and then dissimilar denominators, and similar techniques will be used for multiplication, the distributive property, etc.
The sane way is to try matching against a pattern, then if that fails you fall back to the traditional algorithm with the numbers lined up one over the other and doing the carries. Yes, you can run the traditional algorithm in your head, for this and for much larger things. Fully in memory, 4-digit plus 4-digit is quite doable. (can your method handle that?) While staring at the numbers on paper to avoid forgetting, and writing down the answer as you go, arbitrary sizes are doable.
It so happens that I do see a pattern I can fit, but this shouldn't be expected. I convert to 17+(172+1) and then to 173+1 and I know 17*3 is 51 so the answer is 52. It's forgivable to not spot this shortcut.
It's not "my" method. I'm not quite sure what I did to merit attitude and hostility, but to answer your question:
Yes. Third-graders are expected to do it with 3-digit numbers. You'll have to take my word for it that I'm capable of adding 4-digit numbers.
http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/3/NBT/#CCSS.Math.C...
BTW, my shortcut got mangled by Hacker News. Multiplication turned into italics. I did 17 times 3, which is great, but I don't think that anybody should be expected to see that path to a solution.
You like "the old way" because that is how you learned it. But when push comes to shove, I bet you actually use pflats method to do math in your head.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2014/03/07/abou...
(in this case the pattern involves knowing that 17 times 2 is 34 and that 17 times 3 is 51)
My speed and reliability allowed me to focus on understanding higher-level math. With little effort, I easily blew past my peers for years afterward.
Using pflat's method, my reliability would drop. There are too many extra numbers to account for.
And then I found out that my father used to think the same way, but not my mother, who was a teacher a long time ago and just for few years.
And my breakthrough for that didn't happen when using all those squares (for 1s and 100s) or rows (for 10s).
Profound.
Been there, tried it. Didn't work. I wish it did, but it didn't.
There's a reason teachers assign homework. We're not a craven group that goes out of our way to say, "Look I'm teaching, they have loads of books to read. Can't help it if they don't." We are, universally, strapped for time. Classroom time is best served teaching new topics, not reinforcing old ones.
When would you prefer students read books for a literature class? During the school day, during lit class, taking time away from discussion/analysis? During the school day, during a study hall, taking time away from electives? In reading sessions before school/after school, taking time away from sports/extracurriculars and requiring additional costs? Or at their leisure, where their free time allows?
>If you already understand it, you don't benefit from solving more quadratic equations.
Yes, you do. Understanding is only the second domain, out of 6, in Bloom's taxonomy of learning. Application—properly using a formula to solve an equation, which you're probably actually referring to—is the third domain. And being able to use the quadratic formula to solve a problem doesn't signify that you know anything more than how to memorize a formula and plug numbers into it.
There are some incredibly bright students out there who can master a concept in a single lesson without reinforcement. You might be one of them. I was. That doesn't mean all students are like you. Most of them require more practice than can be given in a single class period to master a topic. Some "get it" in the class period, and require practice to cement it in their memory. Other think they get it, struggle with the homework, and then get the help they need the next day. Every student is different.
>You end up testing which kids have peaceful homes, and parents who care. Some kids just can't do any homework with the home environment they're given. School should be such that it doesn't matter if your parents are drunks or academics.
That would be nice. Unfortunately, it's impossible. Family life affects far, far more than just whether or not students do their homework. It's hard to get a student from a loving home whose parents don't care about <subject> to care about <subject>. It's hard to convince a student who doesn't have a safe, secure, loving home life that literary analysis is worth studying. It's hard to convince a junior who got a job at Starbucks and is making more money than his parents ever did that finishing school is important.
>Totally fine with doing like in University: here's a mega list of interesting things related to the subject, go and browse around, get a feel for what the landscape is like. Come back more interested.
But K-12 is not University. We educate young folks, the same people we don't trust to vote, drink, smoke, or choose whether or not to attend school in the first place. The same people who pay through the nose for car insurance when they can drive. K-12 students are not good at weighing short-term and long-term decisions. Their brains aren't fully developed.
Given the option to not do homework with no obvious penalty, most of them… won't do homework. I ran a junior/senior Precalculus class once with optional homework. Some students did well on the assessments. Some did not. Many more than usual failed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, test grades correlated strongly to homework completion. Failing a test did not encourage students to study more in the future.
Halfway through the year, I put an end to the experiment and required homework. Test grades and student understanding improved.
It's our responsibility as teachers and as the adults in the room to ensure a student learns. It could be an excellent life lesson for a student to fail a high school class because he or ...
[1] http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/
Real learning is achieved with context. Government schools mostly teach theory without context, which is why the students have such a hard time.
The local paper once had a story about the challenges faced by teachers of children who were learning English. The story told of how the class was reading a book abou a dog. Some of the kids didn't get the word 'panting', so the teacher imitated a panting dog. I wrote a letter saying that languages are actually easy to learn, and that a human acting like a dog is no substitute for a trip to the dog park.
You need parental permission, a way to transport kids (probably via bus, which costs money and has to be scheduled), and extra people around to help watch the kids and make sure they don't wander into trouble.
Parents, especially nowadays, are extremely litigious (or call for a teacher's resignation) for such minor things nowadays, that trips in general become risky.
I'm sure most teachers schedule as many of these trips as they can get approved, but they probably only get one or two approved per class.
Sure you might not like all the red tape, but it didn't appear out of nowhere. It's the school protecting itself and covering its ass, just like every other industry out there.
Have you checked with kids who are several years out of education? My sense from talking to people is if they didn't give a shit in school, they will not know it once they're out. And they could have done perfectly fine in tests, because of course they were forced to study.
In general, I get the feeling the kids who retain things after school are ONLY the ones towards the top of the class. Anyone who did middling or worse definitely won't remember the quadratic formula let alone calculus. The top section will have some kids who really cared and learned it properly, and some who were good at doing as they were told but never really cared much, and won't have retained anything either.
What I'm getting at is whether you can really learn anything without having some sort of intrinsic interest, and whether it's worthwhile to force people to learn stuff that they will forget even existed in a few years. I don't mean that people inevitably forget a few things (can I solve competition questions I used to do? Probably not), I mean that it is as if they never even knew that certain fields of knowledge existed and that they actually possessed some of that.
You end up with a you-know-how-to-learn-for-life idea, but that's always been unsatisfying for me.
Public schooling (in the US) will always feel like it's torn between the two extremes of giving a strong liberal arts, "learn for life" education and giving a strong vocational, "useful in the real world" education. In my experience, it's actually neither. Education is an equalizer.
>What I'm getting at is whether you can really learn anything without having some sort of intrinsic interest, and whether it's worthwhile to force people to learn stuff that they will forget even existed in a few years.
Yes, 100 times over, to both of them. The former is not like riding a bike, but maybe like cooking a favorite meal you haven't made in years. An adult might have forgotten the quadratic equation, how to apply it, and how to use it, but give them 5 minutes of instruction and most will be right back in the swing of things.
The second half, though, is so important, that I think it's worth quoting again.
>[Is it] worthwhile to force people to learn stuff that they will forget even existed in a few years
It is incredibly important to force people to learn stuff that they might forget even existed in a few years. A free and appropriate public education is one of the greatest things we as a civilization can provide to our citizens. Education is possibly the greatest civil right we possess.
If we, as a collective people, do not mandate schools offer classes on how to analyze text and history, write a persuasive essay, solve advanced algebra and geometry problems, and the natural sciences, then some schools simply will not offer those courses. If we do not mandate that every student take these courses, then some students will not take those courses. And if they don't have access to these courses, then they don't have equal access to higher education. (Not to mention how important some topics in Algebra I and II are to managing your finances and understanding compounding interest.)
These will generally be the schools and students that are already the most disadvantaged. The inner-city schools that are counting every dollar. The children of the drunks that you mentioned, the children of loving and well-meaning parents that work three part-time jobs that simply don't have the time to follow up on the minutia, and the special education students that are just as smart as their peers but require support to show that. These students all deserve the opportunity to take those classes. If the classes aren't required, they might not even get that chance.
To put it another way: I'm guessing you and your peers were likely exposed to computers by the time you were, I dunno, 16? Not all of you went on to work in tech and post on Hacker News. But all of you had the opportunity to work in tech and post on Hacker News. If you didn't ever get to interact with a computer until you were an adult, and even then you had to seek it out yourself, how would that change things in your life?
Education has to do that for every student, in every subject.
I believe in this ideal as well.
But I do wonder how it can be that there are TV shows filled with people who appear to have learned absolutely nothing in school. How can it be that even though schooling is free in most of the west, I've personally interviewed fewer people who knew the expectation of a dice roll than people who didn't (by a gigantic margin)? And that's selected from people with degrees in STEM. I wonder whether the problem is how schools are organized, what values they instil in the kids, which people teach the kids.
There may well be more of a correlation with drunk and academic than not
Caring/not caring would be a better comparison.
Not being pedantic, its a great point I hadn't thought about, that shouldn't be held down by the drunk reference.
Especially as these days it's highly likely to be a simply photocopy of a page from some study guide. Quite often with printed mistakes and bad grammar in them. Much less need to put in teaching time.
I've nothing against homework in the run up to exams, say 15 years on, but going on my youngest's experience, homework has become common down to as young as 9 or 10. I don't see that as a benefit for anyone except politicians wanting to be seen to do something about ejucashun. :)
Sadly governments are putting too many other tasks on teachers that leave them with little choice. Form filling, over frequent testing, sus checks to make sure the student isn't a potential terrorist or illegal immigrant and so forth. Little wonder it was recently reported in the UK that >50% of teachers now want to leave the professions.
Pay teachers a commercially competitive rate and free them enough to teach. Of course that would free them to teach outside whatever dogma is de rigeur. Homework will remain a growing part of education until we back away from the production line and over-reliance on national standards for everything.
As some one who works in Data Analytics, I can tell you many people lack the ability to plug things into a formula properly, many have issues with even simple approximation and back of the envelope calculations. I wouldn't say, practicing this is a bad thing.
By the way if you think this is wrong. A little scaled up version of this is what is tested in current day interviews. Asking people algorithms is basically testing their ability to remember a heuristic and their ability to plug in numbers and demonstrate mental acrobatics.
Once I learned how to complete the square, I decided I'd rather do that than try to remember that formula. I'm actually exaggerating when I say I "decided" - I forgot the formula so much that I was completing the square for a general quadratic equation just to remember it.
Plug-and-chug is pointless. People shouldn't be taking physics before they take calculus.
In an ideal world, you're absolutely right. In practice, it's hard to arrange. Assuming a US high school student even takes calculus, it's going to be senior year. So, if physics is taught senior year (don't know what the norm is), at best you're teaching in parallel. To be sure, derivatives are taught fairly early-on in calculus and they're probably most relevant to physics at the high school level.
But, you're right, there's a lot of plug and chug in physics without calculus. On the other hand, physics also helps get students into other things like dimensional analysis etc.
Also, to be fair, the issue of prerequisites comes up a lot of places. There are often facts in intro classes that have to be taken on faith until the topic can be dealt with more deeply later on.
Sometimes rote memory is also required (spellings, formulae, handwriting anyone?)
If anything, the education system in general and homework in particular makes learning very systematic and structured, glossing over broader issues of exploring topics on one's own, seeking out new resources and creating one's own structure and areas of interest. It conceals the deeper questions of education, handing the students only the low-hanging fruits of tests and homeworks.
The education system is so effective, once the pupil is out, learning anything significant becomes a daunting process. The inability to plan and structure one's own learning can lead many to give up early in the process.
And there's nothing to say that _homework_ is essential. It's perfectly plausible to have students get everything done during the regular school day.
Well thought out assignments are obviously good. Why do they need to be done at home? It's not as if third graders are listening to lectures from 8 until 3.
Camel's back, etc, I failed the class, got kicked out of the mostly white honor's program to being the only white kid in most classes. I got picked on less there and enjoyed life significantly more after that. Probably the best thing to happen in my life, actually.
Should Spanish class-time be spent memorizing vocabulary and conjugations, or practicing communicating in the language?
Should History class-time be spent reading from the book so you know what happened, or discussing those topics and their implications?
Should English class-time be spent doing silent reading, or talking about the books/authors/time periods that you read about?
If I work from home for a company, it's not called homework because it is under the same conditions as normal work: there are set hours, I receive compensation, the only difference is that it's not on-site.
So should Spanish class time be spent memorizing vocabulary? No, at least not in large parts, but neither should it take more than the time allocated for the subject[1]. It's nice that we can choose to do it either in school or at home, but the way it presently works, homework takes up more time than it should.
[1] Again, I don't mean allocated class hours, I mean the total number of hours students are expected to work on something. In Dutch terms, SBUs, or "hours the course takes from your life, class and homework and everything together". All courses should have SBUs that add up to 40 hours per week, give or take 5.
So either the curriculum should be made more challenging, or homework should be optional for everyone, like it was for me.
And something I regret more, but still wouldn't have done differently if given the opportunity to do it again, is I never read any of the books for my English classes. I would come to class and integrate what the teachers and other students said and come up with answers to questions that sounded insightful (and probably were, I guess) and learn enough just from class discussions to do well on tests.
Both my English and German classes were considered "honors" level classes in a highly ranked school district. I avoided AP-prep classes outside of math and science because the English and language AP classes involved significicantly more homework, to the point where I couldn't get away with not doing it and pass the class, even if I could pass the test anyway.
If the school can't offer classes that actually require students to do regular homework, then they shouldn't demand that students do regular homework.
Unfortunately that is due more to excessive memorization and general work required than anything else, but I still find it better than the alternative, which is learn nothing at all.
Except I got to spend seven years hanging out with my brothers doing fun stuff and my friends had to spend it training to be slaves. There is no reason for the strange masochism that is mass schooling. It is not productive, does not produce smarter or more learned people.
I would like to disagree, but I don't have anything to back up my claim that mass schooling makes people smarter or more learned.
Like you, I just have anecdotes.
But one thing is for sure. I would never have gotten to where I am today. If I hadn't learned english at school. Having lived in two countries, neither of which had english as a native language, I would unlikely have learned english unless it had been taught at school
He did however manage to learn quite good Norwegian in that year.
You could as well play a lot of video games in English and dabbling in programming. That's how I learned.
Everybody who relied on school for learning English - still barely understand it.
I learned English from Japanese videogames that had been translated to English by Ted Woolsey.
Did you set us up the bomb?
I remember having an interesting discussion with my Spanglish-speaking friends about whether "All your base" was supposed to mean "your entire base" or "each and every one of your bases". My Engrish-speaking friend could immediately tell that the second interpretation was the correct one.
I ask because in the field of Second Language Acquisition there's a pretty strong consensus that the optimal path to language learning involves a combination of classroom instruction augmented by interaction with (reading, listening) & use of (speaking, writing) the language.
I've spent most of my career as a language teacher, and the typical successful learner is one who isn't necessarily a language nerd, but almost always is someone who does some heavy lifting in the target language outside of class. I love students that have a goal for language use because they help me to target my instruction to bits of language that will be immediately useful to them. (One of the best jobs I had was teaching English to software developenow here I am.rs; as I researched the language they needed, I started to learn programming and )
I do think that some school lessons contributed their share. I just don't think that sitting behind a desk for two hours per week, for ten years, is necessary or desired. After a few years I did not need much "training wheels" and could continue to increase proficiency regardless.
Every teacher's dream outcome. Congratulations! :)
By learning independently of school, I learned way later in life, and learned in a way that was right for my stage of development.
My anecdote about it not being productive is purely subjective, but the science on development theory is clear. If left to their own devices, almost all people learn native language, writing and math on their own timeline in about 100 hours. School makes this process far less effcient, and teaches things like grammer that program the brain to read slowly and without depth.
Obviously my anecdote is hyperbolic, I speak primarily as someone who had a great unschooling experience and then went to school and saw the difference, and a little bit as someone who has read extensive child development theory.
This is very much a to each their own thing. It worked well for you but it also sounds like you had a uniquely active family and community to support this. The primary problem with homeschooling and unschooling is the lack of family support. Either by apathy or by lack of economic opportunity. Or simply their own lack of education preventing them from even being aware of these options (such as finding a community to coordinate with to make up for their on educational deficiencies).
I can't speak for all public schools, my parents deliberately chose better than average schools for my sister and I to attend. But good public schools exist. Good teachers exist. But just like good home schooling and unschooling experiences, this requires either luck of birth (well-to-do parents) or deliberate effort by parents to improve their children's position.
Public education must be - or at least have the appearance of being - a good deal economically.
You expose another issue that comes up frequently which is the idea that the cost per pupil is somewhat fixed in a region (for administrative purposes anyway) and so regardless of the school a parent choose for their child, the state should pay that school. As an extension, if the parent would choose to home school, that parent might be paid the prevailing rate for a child.
I don't think that works on a number of levels (again, poor parents probably can't afford to not work for $6k for 9 months of the year). Perhaps combined with other social programs (such as a UBI), this would be more reasonable. I think there would be a huge media backlash over kids who end up with effectively no education due to parents just taking their kids UBI+their UBU+school fees and then letting the kids play video games all day (regardless of whether this actually happens or not). Standardized testing would probably become even more important as a means for the state to make sure that your children are actually being educated.
http://www.statisticbrain.com/television-watching-statistics...
Perhaps if the average American cut down their TV watching time in half, they'd suddenly have time to spend more on their children and help them through the subjects studied at school.
Going by the provided statistics, is it any wonder Asian Americans (least amount of TV time) do better in school than other demographics? I have no doubt that parents in those households spend an above average amount of time helping their kids with schoolwork and make absolutely sure they don't fall behind.
Oh, get over yourself.
Maybe "training to be slaves" is hiperbole, but as Seth Godin puts it, training to be "cogs in a machine" is quite right.
Teachers work hard for little reward to provide the education they give and it is a slap in their face, the faces of the descendants of real slaves, and the real slaves that continue to exist today, to imply that the good work they do is equivalent to what slave owners and masters did to their victims. The analogy to slavery is disgusting and juvenile and it's ludicrous that I had to explain this to you.
As an analogy, you can't say it is invalid by stating differences between the analogues, all analogies are pretty much aware of these differences. If not, they would be identities, not analogies.
"Juvenile", "disgusting" and "ludicrous" are not arguments sufficient to invalidate the analogy either.
What you have to do to invalidate the analogy is to refute the similarities between schooling and slavery, some of them:
You may consider it conspiracy theory, to me it's just obvious.
https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....
In school, teachers have the power to invade our private lives, even our set holidays(!) with pointless tasks. Apparently 40 hours a week is not enough to spend on school, we also need to give up part of every evening, part of most holidays and part of many weekends.
I really hate that system. It's completely unfair, especially if you're in school just to get that shitty piece of paper in the end. I can code already, I taught myself perfectly well, but the prerequisites for HR usually include a diploma, and your salary and career opportunities is often dependent on which diploma you have. I'm just sitting it out and hate almost every assignment we get. It's outdated and moreover, boring stuff that nobody would ever want to use in practice.
http://www.alfiekohn.org/homework-myth/