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.
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:
Pratice and excercises are demonstratively good for learning;
Kids these days are expected to learn a lot and class time simply isn’t enough for that;
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”
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.
So I’m not sure what you’re saying. If you don’t do enough practice to pass a class you might not pass it yes that’s true. You can choose to view that as coercive if you want, but if you take that to its logical extension then there are no standards for anything anymore.
except not doing this homework while acing the exams, in practice, will cause you to fail many classes that kids actually get put into? source: unmanaged adhd as a child and I effectively ran an experiment on whether or not a given class was one such example for every single class until college, where I finally got forced to do the homework because there was a substantial amount of material not covered in lectures.
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.