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.
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”