Ask HN: What was homework like for you?

I should preface this by saying that there's a huge amount of education research published every year, and it generally falls on deaf ears. (Some of my friends do this research, and it's obviously very dispiriting for them.) I hope that the anecdotes you collect here will simply be a supplement to a review of that research. There are many professors and non-profits that would love to help you.

I also want to say that I'm strongly against traditional homework structure. I'm a huge proponent of a flipped classroom[1]. It decreases the opportunity/incentive to cheat, makes learning more social, and uses the teacher's time in a much more effective way.

Some background:

I come from a family of math geniuses (literally). I'm not one myself, but I was still very above-average at my highly-ranked high school.

Because I "just got" math and science without any trouble, I almost never did my homework. I loathed (and still loathe) tedious, repetitive work.

The result is that I'm much worse at math and science as an adult. I've forgotten most of calculus and physics. Like all learning, it sticks better with repetition.

My brother also skipped his homework. He's so good at math that he can figure pretty much anything out -- there's no element of memorization, like there is for some people. But it does take him longer because his experience at any given math problem is limited or, in some cases, zero.

If he were a computer, you could say that his CPU is so powerful, he doesn't have to rely much on RAM. Most humans (like myself), however, have lots of available memory but much less CPU. Keeping some things in memory makes us a lot faster.

All this is to say that your students, especially your smart ones, will rebel against doing their homework. For that reason, I'd strongly recommend a reliance on word problems.

First of all, word problems are much more like real-life problems. Second, they keep things at least somewhat interesting. Even if the resulting calculations are the same every time, there's some element of puzzle/mystery (as well as variety) with a word problem.

I actually studied physics and calculus at the same time, and it made calculus much more interesting when I was always able to connect it to real-world physical problems. I imagined my own context around the dry numbers on the worksheets.

So if you do have traditional, take-home homework, try to minimize the monotony, even if the repetitiveness is there by necessity.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom

Not answering the question but I think homework should be, at least in part about creating good study habits so that you prepare high-schoolers for university.

They shouldn't last too long as to not overwhelm them as also avoid involving parents.

I told my children to do exactly enough homework to understand the subject, then stop. No busy work; no endless worksheets. If they weren't sure they understood, just ask.

You see, we had a busy family, with sports and Scouts and hobbies and trips. We didn't abdicate our life planning to their school teacher(s). We planned, and learned and performed and worked. If homework fit into that, fine. If not, fine.

Teacher, take your 8 hours and use them efficiently. Lecture less and do problems more. Have study time at school. Because you get those 8 hours and no more.

How did it turn out? One former soldier, back at University studying Mechanical Engineering. One MSCS grad at a startup in Silicon Valley. One musician (played cello for city orchestra in High School; soloed on NPR, you may have heard him) turned CS in college.

My parents were surprised to learn that I imagined homework to be optional. This would have been third grade or so, and the teacher did not at all consider it optional. I was pretty slack about homework even after that, not at all to my benefit, until I was in my 30s, back in school part time to learn computer stuff. A crappy grade on a test changed my attitude, and I became a homework fanatic, to my benefit. So my own best homework experiences came when I was grown, and motivated to make very sure that I understood the material.

The most interesting contrast that I have seen was between a couple of Latin teachers who taught my son in middle school and high school. One believed in piling it on, and gave long sheets of words to look up and define. The other gave a fair bit of homework, too, but I could look at her assignments and see what she was trying to convey to the students that week or month or term.

If I were writing a new homework policy, I would ask that the teachers justify every assignment by specifying what it is intended to convey or reinforce. I would be open to allowing students to test out of homework by scoring high on weekly quizzes.

I almost never did homework. Well, do homework, since I'm still in school. I'd do some science stuff, and some writing stuff, but other than that I didn't really do it. Especially in high school, my ability to bullshit and get by through listening to the teacher's lectures was enough to have me pass all my classes and end up in the top 15% of my graduating class.

I'd recommend using homework as a supplement, don't rely on it for teaching the kids how to do stuff. Present it as something that will help them, but isn't required. Maybe a bonus grade on top of your regular grades if you want. I know if more of my teachers made homework optional and only beneficial, I would have done all my homework.

If you want to make the work less boring and help it stick a lot better, then you could use spaced repetition. For example, instead of testing just the previous week's work, you might pick 1 third of the questions from the previous week, 1 third from the week before, and 1 third randomly.

Here's what the Center for Public Education has to say about homework:

http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/Main-Menu/Instructio...

What basis in the literature is there for the claims about homework policies?

I detested homework at school, mostly because it involved writing selective passages from textbooks as answers. I was among the smartest kids in school, and yet almost never did my homework in time.

Best experiences were those I had in college when I was tasked to be creative and present on topics. This involved a lot of research, something which I enjoy.

My worst experience was when my school teacher shamed me, and made me do my homework in school while sitting on the floor. I was crying the whole time.

As a side note, one very cool lifehack from one of my friends (while in school): He used to skip saturdays (which were half-days anyway). He'd instead stay at home and do stuff he loved to do (mostly circuits and reading). I really found that an excellent way to inculcate self-learning. He wasn't skipping essential stuff at school, and I found this really neat.

We consider homework as adults in the workplace to be a particularly strong type of stress and a sign of failed work/life balance. Why do we assume homework is then acceptable for children who've just spent 8 hours sitting down learning?

Never done any homework but I'd say keep it focused and usable. Rather than "homework" make it a project that is expected to use the knowledge garnered since the previous project. Then use the "best" project as a recap during lesson.

Most of my lesson time were spent sleeping as I live in the "slowest student sets the pace" country of Sweden.

homework in junior high and high school was agonizing for me. So much busywork, so little attention to actual students needs. I clearly loved to learn and was extremely engaged in learning, yet so many teachers wrote my curiosity off as a distraction. Only one teacher ever paid me any attention, and through his support I was able to graduate with a year of college credits under my belt, and ultimately got an Economics degree because of him.

He encouraged me to learn what I wanted to learn and the rest would fall in line - after all the core subjects are needed for everything, so if you are passionate about something the core understandings will follow your passion.

I have an article you may want to read,

http://austingwalters.com/please-excuse-my-grammar/

I almost never did "homework" prior to college, the one exception being that I read everything that was assigned in my school (in every class). I barely graduated and almost dropped out in the junior year of high school. I only passed with the help of several teachers and my knowledge that, "well, the public education system is awful."

That being said, I have a slightly different perspective than many.

I don't think homework is a good idea, daily quizzes (during every class), is the best way to learn. 5 minutes at the start of every class to show people what to focus on (make this worth an extra credit point or something). Then the last 5 - 10 minutes make give quiz that covers the material.

This ensures that the 8 hours a day people are in school, are the only time they are working on "studying." Let's be honest, no kid really wants to do homework or bashing their head into their homework after football/band/dance/etc practice.

I should note, that I had worked my way through several programming books, a calculus/physics books, and had read a hundred or so books in my junior year (50 or so were technical/business). This is the same year I nearly dropped out, because I never did anything in school.

In class reviews on homework assignments immediately after it's due.

Questions that are difficult to google and difficult to copy from another classmate yet prove understanding of the subject.

Consider assigning shorter homework assignments more often, rather than time consuming homework assignments less often.

My primary school education was at a small rural church school. We had 3 classrooms for grades 1-8. I believe it was mostly broken into 1-2, 3-5, 6-8.

The teacher for one of the rooms would have to break up the day to teach separate sub-sets of the room their own lessons. This wound up leaving ample time to work solo and in small groups on assignments. I rarely had to make schoolwork into homework.

While it was certainly a lot of work for the teacher to juggle, it also prevented them from trying to consume too much of the students time with active instruction. This is contrasted to the typical high school scenario where students are bounced between multiple rooms throughout the day where each teacher sees that they only have 40-60 minutes to cram their lesson through.

I don't think I can emphasize enough how important it was to be to be able to work on my 8th grade algebra homework on a couch cushion in the back of the room while other kids were doing their science lesson.

Obviously the shared room model is directly akin to modern open office layouts which are chaotic and can be confusing even for well leveled people.

I think my point is that kids should have plenty of unstructured time to do the vast majority (if not all) of their work at school.

It's a much different world than it was even 10 years ago, when I was in school.

I help raise my 14 year old nice and most of her non-math homework tends to be typing questions directly into Google, and writing the first thing that makes sense.

Sometimes we check her work, find that obvious, and discuss the answer. Sometimes we don't.

The Googling of answers has caused many problems with vocabulary words, where the words have slightly (or even vastly) different applications to different domains.

If she gets something wrong, she quickly moves onto the next subject without much reflection, because homework is usually graded on completeness (rather than accuracy). From what she says, they rarely review homework in class, so they never revisit subject areas that are problematic.

My #1 criticism with homework is that it's a tool that is used for reenforcement, but that sometimes the wrong methods/ideas/facts are reenforced.

Most of my classes were something like this:

- No mandatory homework (not graded) - Quizzes at the end of each week - Optional homework is designed to reinforce the concepts that were going to be on the quiz at the end of the week.

If you understand the material, don't bother with the homework. If you don't, do the homework and feel free to ask questions about it in class.

I did homework on the bus in the morning before class, or in other classes, but never at home. I hated spending 8-9 hours at school, plus bus time, and then 1-2 hours at home doing even more work, it seemed ridiculous.

I sometimes enjoyed the material, in particular reading, almost regardless of subject. I hated busywork, like "answer these questions about the reading"--which is the equivalent of a test. Just ask me on the test! Not to mention people can copy that, and those who don't read WILL copy it. Those who do read have no need to (assuming reading comprehension). It's not a measure of anything.

The memorization of facts came easily to me and I didn't mind them because it often turned my expected-1-hour assignment into a ten minute assignment. For instance, in a vocabulary book I could read each word, and between being well-read and having a good memory, it was very easy to fill in all the blanks.

My worst experiences were on some larger projects. One required that I typed & printed a report, before computers were ubiquitous. I had no access, was afraid to ask my dad to take me to a library, and had no friends with computers. I got docked a letter grade for my lack of access, which my teacher attributed more to laziness. I don't entirely blame him--most kids aren't scared to ask their parents for things. Similarly, science projects were no fun because they generally require either some investment or some creative thinking, often on the part of parents. My dad was pissed to buy the folding cardboard display, I could not ask for say, lumber and tools. One time I was supposed to build a "one-string canned bean guitar"---lumber, can, fishing line, etc. Mine was absolutely awful and I was mortified to bring it into class--and as expected I caught a lot of teasing for it. Anyway, not really the fault of the school, but bad experiences nonetheless.

If I were implementing a homework policy I think I would make it optional. It can be part of your grade or not--you can choose to have only tests / projects / labs / etc in your grade. If not optional, then not part of the grade.

In a typical college model there is no homework, and in my high school days, homework was just equivalent to padding grades...weighted the tests less, but everyone expected to get 100% or thereabouts on their homework, if they put in the effort to actually do it.

I think your responses here will be skewed towards those who enjoy learning for learning's sake, and that's something to account for. Everyone hates homework & busywork, but for this crowd it probably wasn't necessary. I'd argue that for some students it is, but I'd also personally argue that we should refocus those students into something more practical, like vocational programs.

Homework single-handedly contributed to turning me off to any pursuit of college, because I grew to greatly resent any kind of busy work. It wasn't for lack of knowledge or understanding, as this was evidenced by my flawless test scores (and I eventually tested out of a college degree). But, I see homework as helping to contribute towards socializing children into getting used to doing repetitive tasks that don't really have a greater point (much like a lot of people's jobs).

I've thought a lot on this over the years, and the ways I'd personally fix this are:

1. If you're going to have homework in your class, have a policy such that if a student gets 85% or higher on a test, they don't need to do any homework until the next test.

2. Possibly have a system where homework doesn't actually count towards your grade, but only can help your grade. This would help those who don't handle the pressure of test taking well, and allow them to boost their grades up through the homework.

3. Have assignments that are longer form and more constructive, such as writing papers over a period of a couple weeks, where the student can turn it in at intervals to get feedback until they feel comfortable that the assignment is in its final form. For a class like math, have the student write a lesson teaching the actual thing that they're supposed to learn, and see if another student in the class is able to read it and understand the subject better.

4. The hardest one -- applying new concepts to real world applications that are in peoples' interest areas. I would have definitely perked up if someone had drawn comparisons of concepts to how they would apply to game programming, for instance (pretty much all basic math used in things like matrix transformations/linear interpolations, raycasting, inertia) which took me a whole lot of Khan Academy to start to understand much much after the fact. What makes this the most difficult is that the teacher has to be incredibly creative to pull this off, regardless of subject they're teaching. Can you imagine an english assignment being writing dialogue branches for an RPG?

My final GPA in high school was 1.85, which basically forced me into the military, forever changing my future. My end goal has now become to start a program in high schools where students are funded to start their own business, say for 10,000, and their absences of lack of completion of assignments are deducted from their funding. At the end, they'd basically get to keep whatever was left including what profit their business made. Still fleshing this one out, but I think giving students basic knowledge of how businesses operate through practical knowledge could drastically change their trajectories.

In early primary school (5-7 years old in France), we'd have around 30 hours of classes a week. We'd start homework in class, with the teacher there to help us understand the subjects at hand. We'd then go back home and finish that, which would take between 30 minutes and an hour every day of the week.

The number of hours of work at school and at home then gradually increased over the years, giving rise to more and more standardized, less personalized and "busy" teaching methods and assignments.

By the end of high-school (15-18 years old), I had an average of 42 hours of classes a week, plus about half of that in homework (so 60+ hours a week). It was brutal, which wasn't helped by the fact that I had chosen one of the hardest specializations (scientific), that my dad was a teacher, that my parents were generally pretty strict when it came to school stuff, that I had music classes, that I had insomnia, or that I was working in kitchens every so often. Expectations of academic success were very high, personal or social success, on the other hand, were out of the equation.

It was stressful and in my opinion, largely unnecessary. By the time I graduated high school (Baccalaureate, 9 subjects), I nearly instantly forgot pretty much everything I had learnt. Not that it wasn't useful, just that I was profoundly sick of it. I'm also much better at "learning in the trenches", but I suppose that's a personal preference.

If anything, this "training" made University (in Scotland) a breathe, while I saw other British students struggle with the amount of work in first year, I felt like I had joined a year-round summer camp (it got harder the following years but nothing at the high-school level).

This makes it somewhat hard for me to define what a good homework policy actually is. I liked my primary school of way doing things, it felt personal and somewhat enjoyable, but this simply doesn't work for some people. My high-school way of doing things was anything but enjoyable, but it had this military feel to it that does work for some (and has long lasting consequences, both good and bad).

My ideal homework policies would involve at least:

- cross-disciplinary projects

- non-standardized homework (all of my best teachers, without exception, wrote their own exercises and did not rely on books)

- some level of freedom/creativity, i.e. give the students a subject but give some leeway as to how students can approach the subject

- no forced group projects (not once have I seen this work properly), however encourage students to talk to each other (and not systematically assume it is the same as cheating)

- very generally speaking, make the students feel like they're doing this for themselves, not for the teacher, not for their parents, and especially not to meet a quota or check boxes in a bullet point list handed out to thousands of teachers by an unrelated bureaucrat

Everything taught in high school, except writing, is trivial, so the homework doesn't really matter.

For non-trivial material, I found homework - ie. doing brutally painful difficult work by myself - was the only way I learned anything. Structuring that material in better ways is what separates great teachers from the rest.

As a math and science teacher, your focus should be on teaching non-trivial material, not the social ramifications.