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.
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.
I’m not sure you responded to the right person - I don’t think students shouldn’t do homework I think they should when necessary.
The story of the student who refuses to do homework because they ace their tests isn’t an ADHD thing, it’s a story as old as time. If they continue rising in that discipline every student eventually reaches a point where they can’t ace their tests without studying. It’s usually a harsh awakening for them.
My two cents here is that this a failure of the education system to properly stimulate them. (Not calling you out here)
Taking writing for example:
In order to get a hundred a student merely needs to write at a sufficient level that puts them above the grade accepted standard rather than what is pushing them to improve and learn.
As a side note, what do you think about labor based grading practices? Is it impractical to actually implement? Looking at the theory behind it it seems like a good practice for evaluating actual student growth instead of engaging in grading policies that high level kids easily handle and promptly do nothing.
Yeah I think different assessment benchmarks are more or less appropriate depending on the subject. In art class I think an improvement lens is fine, in a physics class it’s not sufficient because passing doesn’t just mean you put in X amount of effort but that you have displayed enough understanding to participate in the next level of the subject. It’s not a one-size-fits-all thing.
But yeah there’s too many factors to have a deep discussion about this stuff here without doxxing, like grade level, subject matter, support for students at risk and students who are low, etc. All these play such a huge role in this conversation that I’m not convinced it can be really had here in a coherent manner.
sorry, meant that as presently constituted, homework is coercive and that there’s no clear relationship between grades and understanding because of that fact.
didn’t mean to suggest that it was an exclusive relationship, I was just sharing my personal circumstances. is infuriating to realize how much more I would have gotten out of school with medication and training on the aspects of learning that have very little to do with the specific material and more to do with “how to study”.
do most subjects continue with testing past the first year or two of undergrad? the math-oriented curricula drop exams at some point, presumably because you can’t really test understanding via exams once the subject matter gets abstract. what got me to start doing the homework was 1. it was actually interesting/enjoyable, 2. I couldn’t follow the lectures while skipping the assignments and 3. I couldn’t make heads or tails of other classes I’d ostensibly completed the prereqs for. the switch from “do the same thing over and over” to “prove X” and eventually to “either prove X or surface a counterexample” helped immeasurably.
more than a decade later, I can’t remember how to compute anything but I’ve never forgotten how to prove the unsolvability of fifth-degree polynomials, despite the fact that I’ve done way more of the former than the latter. the school system does such a shit job at separating things that require drilling from things that require a toolbox of skills - the way homework is constructed until late in undergrad doesn’t differentiate these two very different classes of learning.
Yeah, that’s what I meant. It doesn’t matter whether you understand the material or not; the conventional structure of the class doesn’t care. If you don’t do the homework then it brings down your grades which might cause you to fail the class. Unless the homework isn’t graded and doesn’t affect your passing or failing of the class. Which isn’t coercive of course.
Same. Sometimes I could force myself to do homework, a lot of times not so much. My grades suffered accordingly.