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.
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
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.
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.
you learn it in class then you get sent to practice what you learned otherwise there would be no time for teaching as it would all be filled up with work on solving problems