Requiring homework on a consistent basis is not an evidence-based practice and actually introduces worse outcomes for kids whose parents/guardians are less present, which disproportionately affects poor kids and kids of color.
Why do we do it? Because there are some parents (you know the ones) who will pester the school and lobby for dropping their funding if they don’t see consistent tangible output from their students. If the kids aren’t coming home with half a dozen papers each day and a bag of books, how can we verify that the teachers aren’t just sitting around on their phones all day not doing shit and collecting a paycheck WITH OUR TAX DOLLARSSSSS?!!!?!?!
So, homework largely serves as busy work to signal to parents that teachers are doing things. And the system is designed for parents to actively encourage and participate in the development of the skills required to regularly complete homework independently by high school. Kids whose parents have less free time are inherently disadvantaged, often labeled as bad kids or lazy early on, and can have a seat on the prison train before they’ve entered middle school. It also harms kids’ self esteem and sets an unhealthy precedent for expectations around work-life balance.
There isn’t a single thing that homework accomplishes by accident which couldn’t be accomplished better on purpose via other methods. Fuck homework.
“homework is fascist”-posting except it’s real instead of a joke
Why homework? Because the children must learn to struggle for the sake of struggle, weeding out the undisciplined and allowing the strongest wills to rise to power.
Because kids need to be able to read and do basic math and yes they should have the discipline to do something they don’t necessarily like to improve themselves.
The literature does not support that homework is an effective way to accomplish those goals.
But for the most part, the studies haven’t looked at whether it matters what kind of homework is assigned or whether there are different effects for different demographic student groups. Focusing on those distinctions could be illuminating.
Quote from one of the articles, which ignores Germand and French studies and literature on the topic of the last 30 years.
which article are you quoting there. Because I read those articles and what kind of homework is assigned was highlighted often
for example in the first linked article
Homework that is linked to classroom work tends to be more effective. In particular, studies that included feedback on homework had higher impacts on learning
and
Pupils eligible for free school meals typically receive additional benefits from homework. However, surveys in England suggest that pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to have a quiet working space, are less likely to have access to a device suitable for learning or a stable internet connection and may receive less parental support to complete homework and develop effective learning habits. These difficulties may increase the gap in attainment for disadvantaged pupils.
Homework clubs can help to overcome these barriers by offering pupils the resources and support needed to undertake homework or revision.
Your links are literally top search results for “does homework help students learn?”. These aren’t peer reviews research and digging through their cited links for about half an hour I could only find one peer reviewed source.
The first page from a UK nonprofit says right at the top that the evidence for efficacy is low and if you go to the section that supposedly links supporting evidence, it links to another page on flipped classrooms, which is a different strategy that is research-based and literally supports my claim. Not engaging with that one further.
The Duke article doesn’t list the actual name of the study, but I managed to find it with some digging. Here’s a Scihub link:
The Forbes article is pretty nuanced and while I agree that there’s potential for slightly more nuance than “all homework is always bad for every student forever”, I don’t think she’s making the case you think she is and even if she was, her citations are mostly blogs or random pages which themselves do not cite sources. That’s a recursive link hell I’m not diving into any more than I have.
I’m planning on posting some peer reviewed articles later tonight and I’ll be sure to add them here.
(1) Because kids need to be able to read and do basic math
(2) and yes they should have the discipline to do something they don’t necessarily like to improve themselves.
What you say the goal is is not reached by homework. If you are a scientific socialist and materialist I urge you to follow the current discourse on the abolishment of homework. The second part is just grinding for capitalist overlords and isn’t achieved with homework either.
I think a little bit of self motivation is important outside of providing value for others.
Especially as somebody who recommends people read long, old political books.
Also my mom was an elementary teacher for 40 years and I’ve got a kid that just started second grade, they deffinitly need some homework to do without being coached through it to learn to do it themselves they should just have enough time to do that during school hours.
they should just have enough time to do that during school hours.
So supervised exercises.
fuck homework. my spouse is a math teacher and she doesn’t give homework for this reason.
Based
Interesting. Math Homework was probably the most beneficial to me.
Practice can be good, math homework as a laborious practice is not. Math homework also suffers from the classic unknown unknown of “I don’t know if my reasoning is even remotely correct.”
fuck yes, truly based
I think you’re right in that it’s motivated by the anti-labor attitudes that teachers are inherently lazy and need constant monitoring, plus busywork metrics for students, but I don’t think it’s Karen parents behind it. It’s neoliberal shitstain administrators and local/state politicians who see teachers as antagonistic and thus want to subject them to harmful oversight and control. It’s not just homework, there’s been a distinct push to standardize every aspect of the classroom so that teachers aren’t working with students to improve their skills anymore, they’re dull bureaucrats there to administer cookie cutter programs (which, no doubt, the education department paid a pretty penny for to private contractors/publishers). It’s all about churning out metrics to justify systems, with actual education a distant second on the priority list.
Can’t sell online homework infrastructure, copies of text books to take home, and Ti calculators without homework.
being forced to eat my veggies (fed to me lovingly by mother, making airplane noises and gesticulations with her arm and spoon) is settler-colonialism.
Except this isn’t a “stopping a toddler from running into traffic is authoritarianism” take. It has actual scientific backing and has emerged both from educational research and from classroom experimentation. Not from the pressure cooker of bad takes that is Twitter leftism.
i’m here for any literature if you’ve got some hot links.
I’ll pull up some actual studies later tonight.
well i’d hate for you to hafta do any homework on it :p
okay this is kind of funny but the OP is right, homework sucks. Im in my 30s but I knew it sucked when I was in school and Im sure it still does now.
Idk, when I was in middle and highschool I didn’t do homework because noone made me and I found it boring, and I was able to coast with C’s and occasional B’s if I forced myself to do a little of it. I built basically no work ethic/culture of after class work and ended up getting kicked out of college as a freshman because not doing homework/after school study there resulted in me failing a ton of classes.
It’s only one data point but I think being forced to do the homework in secondary school would have helped me a lot.
Developing the ability to sit down and apply oneself to something not intrinsically interesting is a real positive, and I can definitely see homework being part of that.
A lot of homework is busy work and there’s too much even of the helpful stuff, but I don’t think the best amount of homework is zero. And it makes sense to think in terms of the type of homework and the assessment of it as much as it does to look at the amount.
This is why I said, “There isn’t a single thing that homework accomplishes by accident which couldn’t be accomplished better on purpose via other methods.” Developing grit is very important for everyone. There are whole curriculums and research sub fields about it.
I’ve always held this pet theory that if you need to enjoy the field of study before you’re ever going to successfully grind it out. My prime example is in our bjj academy we encourage fundamentals students to only practice a move on one side. If they’re doing a choke with their right arm, they’ll only do it with their right arm. The main line of reasoning is that it’s better to be okay on one side than mediocre on both. My theory is that if you can get a glimpse of what it’s like to be good, to feel competency, and see what bjj is about, then you’ll start to like it. You’ll have a massive gap in your technique and when it gets exposed by a better grappler, you’ll have the investment and desire to put the reps in and practice a left handed choke. If we made students grind from the get go they’d get bored and leave.
In that same vein, if you could show a previously uninterested child how to build a computer generated image of a higher dimension(al shadow) then you’d then have their patience and desire to learn Python and mathematics. If I got to see the experiments that culminated in the discovery of DNA being a double helix first, I’d be much more open to learning my AT-GCs. Give them a piano and show them how to improv with the black keys and then teach them about sub tonics.
The flip side of this is that people really need to be able to push through at least some stuff they aren’t interested in. Some things just kind of suck but need doing.
CW millennial linguistic depravity
spoiler
Think of what people mean when they use the term “adulting”
I think certain classes homework makes some sense. Math? The repetition is helpful for understanding. Social studies? those fill-in-the-blanks worksheets aren’t doing jack. So many classes, so many worksheets. Language classes are better when you’re speaking and listening. English classes don’t really have time to read the whole book in class, but reading on your own is a good skill to have.
I want to say I did about 70-80% of homeworks in high school. In college I’d be busy from 8am to 10pm between classes and homework but those assignments were actually crucial in understanding what tf was going on in the lecture.
Yeah, Math is definitely the one I get the most having to do homework for. That helped me understand the material better.
Conversely, I wasn’t forced at home to do homework in middle/highschool, and I’m forever grateful I wasn’t. It bred in me a better ability to refuse unreasonable asks and set reasonable boundaries on work/leisure. If I did all the homework I was set, I would’ve been even more miserable than I already was, to an excessively problematic degree.
It’s possible I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying, but if nobody was attempting to make you do homework, how did you learn to refuse homework like tasks from that uh, like absence of an event?
Like learning to say no requires something to say no to right?
EDIT: saw your other comment, I did misunderstand, please ignore this comment.
No worries <3 Yep, I refused at school, basically thanks to my parents enabling my attitude.
I always got As in middle and high school with bare minimum effort. Never learned to study or do work I didn’t want to do. Now I’ve failed a few classes in college which costed several thousand dollars while people who weren’t in the top 2 every year like me have already graduated and started their careers.
Similarly, I used to love reading. Long books were fine too. But then around 8th grade, my English classes stopped mandatory reading time at the beginning of each class. Things became more difficult in college because I didn’t have to read shit for like 5 years lol
For every comment in this thread I’m assigning my students another homework problem buckaroos.
hahaha get owned tweens! I commented!
I repeatedly refused to do homework as a kid. I did well in class but wanted my time to be my time. I got in trouble all over, teachers told me I have no work ethic and I’ll never succeed at life.
Since leaving school, I have maintained my attitude to staunchly refuse to take work into my own time. To be honest, it’s done me well - The healthy boundaries have spared me a lot of traumatizing lifestyle. Even helped in my career, and I think one of the biggest reasons why is that my bosses start assuming I’m not a prole and wasn’t educated in a state school, though I’m very damnedly both of those things.
I do also recognise I’m lucky to have had the circumstances to enable me to refuse that shit. Not everybody gets those opportunities.
When I was in my first year as a nurse we were expected to complete a research project as part of our year long “nurse-residency” program. They gave us maybe 2-3 hours at most per month to complete it. They more or less made it impossible to do without working on your own time, something I didn’t do, but my coworkers did. You could come in on your day off and have them pay you for the time you spent in the library, but most of my coworkers had a 30+ minute drive. In the end the person in charge of the program denied our research project stating that the highest levels of the CDC stated that their existing policies were good and correct and that our idea was wrong and impossible to test. In the 4 years since, I’ve only seen more academic papers come out and prove us correct, that IVs can be changed as needed rather than scheduled every 3 days. We didn’t have to do the full project since our proposal was denied which actually let us all kinda coast through the rest of it and just state we were denied testing, but I can’t imagine how much more time it would’ve demanded from us to come in on our days off to do extra work because of this. Most of the other groups went with dumb bullshit like placing more recycling cans around to encourage recycling. I wanted to do staffing ratios but my group was afraid of it being too antagonistic to administration.
If I had my way I would assign next to zero homework.
But I don’t have my way. I have to do the standardized testing shit and the endless “packets” that go along with it.
Worse, the vampires that write such “packets” and the tests want kids to fail, because the last few decades of so called “reforms” are designed to make such vampires richer and expand their reach when the standards they set for kids are not met.
That means I must try to help kids pass the fucking things or else things get worse, year after year.
While sorta off topic it’s still sorta related. My mother’s school district has transitioned away from traditional grading methods which is in line more with the research that states letter grades are not nuanced enough and end up discouraging students. I don’t believe anything outside of quizzes actually holds any solid weight towards pass/fail now, but there are other factors that go into the pass/fail determination. They’ve changed the curriculum for a third time in three years requiring teachers to make all new plans and basically have to play learn the curriculum a week ahead of the students.
The end result is my mother working basically every day 730a-5p along with work she brings home and continues to work on up until like 7-8pm with a little time for commute and dinner. She’s doing close to 12 hour days and grading has become significantly more difficult because these better methods also require more actual labor from a teacher to work properly, but in a country where people don’t want to become educators because of the terrible conditions, the conditions continue to get worse.
Between standardized testing and standardized online classwork, there’s less of an actual education role they’re filling while having to monitor all the students. They also have ended up with more behavioral problems in the past few years likely as a combination of COVID fucking shit up and mainstreaming students that would otherwise be in a specialized classroom for the serious behavioral issues since the theory is that placing students that are lagging behind in with the rest will help pull them forward but the general gist has seen them being more of a disturbance and pulling other students down with them.
Homework is mostly a waste of time and my mother has long since stopped assigning it instead opting that if “you don’t finish it in class, finish it at home” with exceptions carved out for students that are just generally slower at the work for whatever reason.
I feel like we just need an top to bottom redo of the American education system. Students aren’t benefiting from half these attempts at reform in a positive direction because the teachers are overworked to hell, teachers are less open to change because they’re already being asked to do too much with less and less. Students are basically just sat in front of a computer most of the day anymore to do everything. Just like what I see in my line of work in healthcare, the entire thing is standing on the most termite damaged, rotted beams imaginable and it’s only through the sheer grace of God that it hasn’t all fallen down yet.
The thing you’re missing here is that this is a deliberate strategy to privatize and deprofessionalize teaching. The dream is that teachers will be poorly-paid gig workers who oversee the implementation of a digital curriculum created by a private company. This, of course, will not be the case for the wealthy, who will privately educate their children in the traditional style.
I see that very clearly, it’s a slow process that continues to eat away at teaching. It’s a similar thing we’re seeing in nursing with actual gig apps for nursing existing already trying to sell it as a way to control your schedule. COVID did a number on traditional nursing jobs with a lot more going through travel or agency gigs, shit we’re seeing with charter schools, something my mother hates but can’t fully articulate the reason as to why it’s bad beyond seeing them siphoning off a bunch of funding that would’ve otherwise gone to the district.
Yep. I suspect there’s a lot more of this going on than we even hear about. I suspect that if you talk to anyone that works in a field that is still professionalized, there is a version of this going on.
dont people who study education and teaching agree that homework is counterproductive for optimal learning too? Its better to leave all the learning in class so the subconscious has time to process it and form deeper connections or sthing idk
I think it’s highly dependent on one’s learning style
I didn’t like homework, but even I will admit the reinforcement was crucial to my learning. I’m more a fan of the college style of homework which could usually be completed in 10-20 minutes, but in middle school and high school, I consistently had hours of work from 5-6 classes. That bullshit needs to end
god my college assignments were anything but that. I routinely had 6+ hours of work to do on any given night, assuming you actually understood the lectures, had the textbooks (which were expensive af and mostly not available online at the time), and were able to churn through the calculations quickly in your head. my school sucked ass - they prided themselves on failing nearly half of all students. god forbid you had anything else going on in your life or if you were anything but perfectly neurotypical.
A lot of my college courses had minimal work outside of class but put the onus on you to study
For real. Kids that take multiple advanced courses in high school are effectively double full-time college students.
My university considered 12 credit hours to be full-time and straight up did not allow you to take more than 18 without explicit permission from your guidance counselor. But high schoolers are all forced to take 30 credit hours no matter what (35 if you count PE I guess). And idk if it’s like this across the country, but my teachers gave out homework like it’s nothing. On most days I’d have assignments from Math, English, Social Studies, and Science all due tomorrow. It’s legitimately the most demanding job I’ve ever had, I got fucking burn out and suicidal ideation at age 16.
I’m more a fan of the college style of homework which could usually be completed in 10-20 minutes
what are those assignments like?
I thought college homework was like writing long research essays and shit.
idk, I feel like homework helps me understand things, get me ready, etc. Practice helps, yk? I feel we’re a bit overcorrecting in terms of opposing everything and absolutely everything that exists in capitalism. Maybe I’m wrong, though. Wouldn’t be the first time.
I feel we’re a bit overcorrecting in terms of opposing everything
Well in regards to homework the science is clear. If you wanna practice you don’t need homework. This is not a solely leftist position.
I have yet to see a study which shows consistent benefits of homework.
Refers a now 15 year old study in which there was no effect on grades shown by homework. Homework is more a disciplinary element to filter and out select pupils of lower classes and without the means for private teaching or tutoring. Of course some practice (remember kids do work 30-45 hour weeks anyhow) can help, but actually only if you understood what is going on. Extra material isn’t homework either and that is something you might’ve liked.
Hexbears please stop linking news articles that “reference” studies for which are not actually linked in the article. Anyways do you know of any studies that have explored the 2nd, 3rd or 4th order effects of removing homework from schools? If that has not yet occurred (and I’m certainly not aware of any) then why would you even remotely want to support this as a policy position without pushing for that study first? Because it is definitely possible that removing homework “erodes” the knowledge base of our teachers over multiple generations and gradually erodes our understanding of the topics we wish to teach. We have seen that very dynamic play out throughout history before. It certainly merits further examination and a deeper study of the topic, however.
Removing homework will result in societal…
degendegradation?
No one is coming for your homework. Why is the default position considered to be “homework good”?
I don’t really know how I feel about this personally. Isn’t it possible homework is primarily a coercive measure to make children learn in a society that doesn’t care about personal improvement and collective self-actualization and only seeks to exploit them?
Well I believe that the default position is considered to be “homework good” for the same reason that the default position of many things is the status quo. It “works well enough right now” for the purpose that it is purported to serve and any improvements should come with studies that support that it is better with good methodology and examining the impact over multiple generations (in my opinion with regards to education).
That being said it certainly is possible that that is the case. Even more so I’d say that history likely supports that idea. But could it not be that and still be beneficial to the education of children in regards to the knowledge that we as a society are determining is important to pass on to our children? Further, if that doesn’t sit well with you, then could homework be reformed to not be primarily a coercive measure to make children learn in a society that doesn’t care about personal improvement and collective self-actualization and only seeks to exploit them? And if so wouldn’t that be a more fruitful pursuit than running to the support of a policy position over articles in the German equivalent of Vox news, that aren’t peer reviewed, and which hasn’t examined the social impact over generations of time to show that it will be a net-neutral in regards to our education?
Well I believe that the default position is considered to be “homework good” for the same reason that the default position of many things is the status quo. It “works well enough right now” for the purpose that it is purported to serve and any improvements should come with studies that support that it is better with good methodology and examining the impact over multiple generations (in my opinion with regards to education).
Is it working well enough? Maybe by the metrics of standardized testing but my understanding is that even those aren’t showing too great. This entire educational system including homework, the “banking model of education”, is founded upon the idea that we can just force people to learn for ~10-20 years and then they’re good for the rest of their life when we should be restructuring society to provide the conditions for enthusiastic, life-long learning.
Capitalism is working well enough by its standards, as in providing shareholder value and innovating or whatever. There’s many studies “proving” capitalism is the best system. Just because it’s in a study doesn’t mean it isn’t effected by the whole socio-political-economic context in which the study takes place. I don’t think there’s been any studies looking at the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th order effects of socialism but that didn’t dissuade you.
But could it not be that and still be beneficial to the education of children in regards to the knowledge that we as a society are determining is important to pass on to our children? Further, if that doesn’t sit well with you, then could homework be reformed to not be primarily a coercive measure to make children learn in a society that doesn’t care about personal improvement and collective self-actualization and only seeks to exploit them? And if so wouldn’t that be a more fruitful pursuit than running to the support of a policy position over articles in the German equivalent of Vox news, that aren’t peer reviewed, and which hasn’t examined the social impact over generations of time to show that it will be a net-neutral in regards to our education?
I think you might be right in that homework does serve a purpose under this system in forcing compliance with this model of education, so maybe it is beneficial for learning. I don’t think you can take the coercion out of homework by reform under this system but I think we should try to resolve the contradiction between home and school in some way. Maybe homework has to stick around… for now? Maybe. That being said I think we should definitely be reducing its use where we can.
There’s many studies “proving” capitalism is the best system. Just because it’s in a study doesn’t mean it isn’t effected by the whole socio-political-economic context in which the study takes place. I don’t think there’s been any studies looking at the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th order effects of socialism but that didn’t dissuade you.
Yeah I think that this is a good point and I really needed to think about this when you pointed it out. I think for me at least there doesn’t seem to be a way to even really “study” this though. Plus I agree that anything that we would think would make progress for kids and their education should be investigated, but ultimately even if socialism fails, we will just simply move past that with whatever would come after it. However if we lose tons of knowledge on something that we could actually study before implementing… I guess I just see it as completely avoidable as opposed to knowing that socialism with always be smothered in the crib by capitalists and thus cannot be put under rigorous scrutiny to be judged on its merits until capitalism dies.
This entire educational system including homework, the “banking model of education”, is founded upon the idea that we can just force people to learn for ~10-20 years and then they’re good for the rest of their life when we should be restructuring society to provide the conditions for enthusiastic, life-long learning.
Super agree with this. I think there are lots of things we could be doing better, and all of them deserve to be looked at.
I definitely agree with you that we should carefully consider next steps before we take any action, anti-homework aktion or not. I think education reform/restructuring will end up being a core component of the socialist programs of the next world-historical revolutions.
And I do think we can study it and determine if it’s a good idea. We just have to take a class-based perspective instead of giving into the usual technocratic, “objective” metrics of how well students are doing (standardized testing, job placement, rates of crime or “behavioral issues”, etc). With the bourgeois state in control of education it will always prioritize the interests of the ruling class over the interests of students and teachers. Thanks for the discussion, I’ve been really thinking about this stuff too. I think homework (in the sense of learning being done outside of a classroom) isn’t inherently a bad idea but we do need an alternative to the way it’s currently practiced.
Why not provide evidence that homework is helpful to understand material for kids who already don’t get the material?
Well there are a couple reason why I don’t need to provide that evidence
- I’m not advocating for any position about it. I’m granting that homework may be unhelpful for students who already don’t get the material.
- I’m asking for studies that study the 2nd/3rd/4th order effects on this which is entirely different from trying to attack JuneFalls post.
- JuneFall hasn’t provided any study, just a new article from Der Spiegel which is reporting on a study being conducted, with some preliminary results. But without any peer reviewed study published out of what TU Dresden is doing, Der Spiegel and the people they interviewed can basically say whatever they want and it still wouldn’t have any scholarly weight nor should it. I don’t know why I should be made to put in more effort just because of the content of my post I’ve said.
- " … for kids who already don’t get the material" is doing a lot of lifting, since I’m not sure if there are any studies which concern themselves with that issue in the affirmative or the negative, and definitely not over multiple cohorts spanning multiple generations.
Offering up my thoughts however, I’d also like to just mention that I think that isolating one aspect of the education process and assessing its value solely by that aspect is both lacking in a dialectical analysis and also deeply idealist due to the manner in which the advocates are discussing the issue (as a sole atomic item of consideration, without regard for the manner in which this issue is connected to other issues), so even if I could find such studies which support or deconstruct the position you are asking me to find studies for I would still have my criticisms of the deeply liberal way that these studies are conducted and so I wouldn’t include them in my response because I wouldn’t link to studies for which I disagree with their methodology even if it supports that.
isolating one aspect of the education process and assessing its value solely by that aspect
Shouldn’t we try to isolate variables like this?
I agree that ultimately we need a comprehensive approach, but studying each variable in turn seems like an appropriate start.
Yeah we definitely should isolate variables but you’ve nailed it one the head, once that is done we look at each one in concert with all the other social factors and figure it out comprehensively. Sorry to reply by basically just saying “yeah”
Practice is cool and good. Kids can and should practice skills outside of the paradigm of assigned and graded homework.
But will they? I believe that grading is awful and punishing kids for not doing homework shouldn’t happen (I didn’t do most hw as a teen so I get it); But as someone who is currently studying to be a maths teacher I find it pretty hard to work simultaniously with the beliefs that:
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Pratice and excercises are demonstratively good for learning;
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Kids these days are expected to learn a lot and class time simply isn’t enough for that;
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HW sucks, it demmotivates kids and most of the time parents/ older siblings do most of the work;
but also a lot of kids, both from annecdotal evidence and actual research, wouldn’t take their time to pratice what they have learned out of their own will, especially if it’s an area they have low interest in.
The most obvious answer is that the current school system is awful and designed by capitalism to create workers at a steady rate, but even if we demolish the capitalist mode of production and renew the education system some of this problems seem very intrinsic to me. Do you (or any other comrade for that matter) have a good book/reference to study if my view is wrong?
i’ve learned things in pursuit of a hobby that other people probably learn in school. I don’t think the tired “when will we ever use this” is a reasonable sentiment, but i’d have certainly learned trigonometry better if I was physically building something at the time and could directly apply it to something other than “at least math problems are less boring than this english novel”
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Whoah adding “grading” in there out of no where does a ton of heavy lifting. No one was arguing that homework needs to be graded.
Practice is good. Assigning it is good. Asking students to finish it at home if they don’t have time to finish it in class is also good. That is what homework can be, assessment practice is completely separate from that.
Does “assignment” not imply some kind of coercive measure to make someone carry it out? Like grading?
I can probably be a little more clear. Grading homework is actually bad practice. Finishing your practice isn’t an expression of learning, what you can do after you’ve finished practicing is. Attaching marks to homework just incentivizes cheating, rewards students who have good executive function, amd/or calm households with rich parents, and/or tutors.
Not to mention you shouldn’t be marking practice because that’s where you’re supposed to be making your mistakes.
No. (I’m a teacher, the answer is no.)
It’s optional? I genuinely don’t understand what you mean.
I mean, it’s optional in all cases, whether homework is graded or not. You can opt to do it or not do it.
I can also opt to leave my voluntary contract with my employer (quit my job) but there are very negative consequences to that. Everything is optional unless you consider the coercive forces at play. No one wants to fail classes, so sometimes people with the adequate attentional control can force themselves to do homework.
In college and a lot of grad programs you have “homework” that is assigned, but your grade is based solely on tests/projects/participation.
True. I was more referring to the kind of rote, repetitive assigned tasks (“worksheets”) that is seen most often in primary and secondary schooling.
well yes and no because while it is true that there are class characteristics of which children have help from their parents with their homework it is also true that spending time outside of lesson hours working on the subject is immensely educationally valuable. Homework exists for a reason
the better solution would be some kind of government funded tutoring scheme to help those children with less present parents
Homework exists for a reason
The reason is tradition
Nah, get rid of it.
I know it’s a pain but we do actually need to teach people how to do algebra and write poems and stuff in order to have and maintain a society with bridges that don’t collapse and that produces great works of art.
And to teach those things requires that the children learning them do work outside the set of hours designated for school which are arbitrary and primarily intended to keep children out of the way while their parents are at work.
If we just got rid of homework altogether then the children of the wealthy would be sent to private tutors for extra hours and education would become less accessible not more
I know it’s a pain but we do actually need to teach people how to do algebra and write poems and stuff in order to have and maintain a society with bridges that don’t collapse and that produces great works of art.
None of those things are achieved by homework, especially not school homework for people under the age of 18.
homework is how you get kids to do work outside of class hours it is as ridiculous to say that people practicing doing maths problems isn’t how they learn maths as it is to say that practicing on the piano isn’t how you learn to play the piano
you don’t learn math by solving different varieties of the same problems over and over - this is neither how mathematicians learned their field historically or how they learn it today. they learn it by
- studying the techniques and reasoning used in the solution of important problems; and
- by solving various and crucially substantially different hard problems of their own
a sheet of barely differentiable problems is too homogenizing and it teaches you to over generalize techniques that only work in specific circumstances to contexts in which they unambiguously don’t, while simultaneously blinding you to the patterns that are, at their heart, what the study of mathematics is all about.
mathematicians do drill but they do so on problems that cover much more breadth and so that they don’t lose skills they’ve already acquired. if you look at the problems in a math textbook not aimed at children you’ll immediately see this in effect: no 2 problems can be solved by rote application of the same techniques and the problems escalate in difficulty very quickly until you’re studying variations on open (i.e. unsolved) problems. (the study of open problems and the techniques developed to analyze and make progress on them constitute much of a math degree)
the only place where this doesn’t apply is when you’re learning basic arithmetic because that kind of computation is purely about memorization. trying to apply this to algebra prevents you from building the structures in your head that make the later study of calculus actually feasible (because you need patterns to allow you to spot what kinds of algebraic tricks will allow you to compute limits, derivatives, and integrals). and worse, if you actually go on to study mathematics in college, you will very quickly realize that absolutely nothing you were taught prior to college is of any use because it has so little to do with the actual subject.
generalizing this slightly - learning occurs when you have to stretch yourself beyond what you can accomplish in the present. drilling is effective for things that must be memorized but repetitive practice that doesn’t challenge you accomplishes very little.
mathematicians do drill but they do so on problems that cover much more breadth and so that they don’t lose skills they’ve already acquired. if you look at the problems in a math textbook not aimed at children you’ll immediately see this in effect: no 2 problems can be solved by rote application of the same techniques and the problems escalate in difficulty very quickly
yeah that’s what maths homework is
you absolutely can learn about algebra this way and maths is never just about memorisation that’s a complete bastardisation of the subject
teach it in class instead. that’s what those awful 90 minute long classes in high-school should be for.
People who get anywhere in those fields don’t do so by doing the bare minimum assigned by the school. Conversely, people who’ve hated math for the last 10 years are not going to fall in love with a sheet of derivatives and unify gravity and QM.
I did pretty well in maths and there was no way I would have gone home and done work just for fun. I came to like it but I had to be made to
kids if left to their own devices won’t educate themselves they will play video games and watch tv
What happened when nobody made you educate yourself anymore via homework?
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yeah alright mate no need to get personal about it
I’m upset.
No they wouldn’t.
I’m going to have to disagree, the wealthy already go to private tutors
Case in point: United States and SAT test prep places
Literally none of those proves effectiveness, real class dynamics, or future-proof predictions of homework or homework abolition. Stop being little buzzing bugs in my even littler worm ears.
The comment I replied to was claiming wealthy people wouldn’t go to private tutors if homework were abolished.
I don’t care.
oh yes they would
I just crunched the number and they actually wouldn’t.
Edit: Yung Chomsky, pull up that video of the DPRK school with the wooden train for the little babies in kindergarten. Pull it up. 'Cause that’s what we’re building here. Did you know not only has the DPRK abolished income taxes but also homework? Can you believe this, folks?? Crazy.
sure they would I worked as a tutor that is exactly the kind of thing middle class parents do if they feel their children are academically falling behind
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I will protect all the little babies from homework torture. Unlike this freak here.
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I think this is something that isn’t an on/off issue. Homework is important. There simply isn’t enough time in class (at least in US public schooingl) to do retention work and give a lecture. Reading assignments all but have to be given in order to efficiently give instruction and for things like maths, repetition of problem solving is super valuable. Even the practice of working through material on their own is in itself important for people learning.
At the same time, I’ve definitely had to do bullshit busywork worksheets or had classes that assigned too much homework to comfortably finish in combination with other courses.
