I wondered the same thing! I enjoyed the article and the author for being kind of a bad-ass rabble-rouser, but the fact that he struggled to do things his kid had recently and intensively been taught to do doesn't really tell me much about the impact of homework on kids. (It's kind of like that ethnographic study a while back where a woman who doesn't have a psychotic disorder took an antipsychotic and reported on what it was like. Interesting, but doesn't tell a lot about what it feels like to be a person with psychosis taking the medication). I thought it was a great article about the effect of homework on parents. Which is a worthy topic!
I don't have any kids. What I remember about the homework at my series of really academic private schools was that I was ok with doing the work, when I understood it (I got really frustrated with sixth-grade math, but that's because I'd gotten moved up into an honors class and didn't really belong there). What made me very upset was everything surrounding the doing of the work: carrying a heavy backpack full full full of books, forgetting my book at school so I couldn't do the homework, not being able to finish an assignment because we were traveling. Not sure what that goes to show other than that kids have a unique view on their struggles that might not be the same as their parents' concerns on their behalf...
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Date: 2013-09-19 07:47 pm (UTC)I don't have any kids. What I remember about the homework at my series of really academic private schools was that I was ok with doing the work, when I understood it (I got really frustrated with sixth-grade math, but that's because I'd gotten moved up into an honors class and didn't really belong there). What made me very upset was everything surrounding the doing of the work: carrying a heavy backpack full full full of books, forgetting my book at school so I couldn't do the homework, not being able to finish an assignment because we were traveling. Not sure what that goes to show other than that kids have a unique view on their struggles that might not be the same as their parents' concerns on their behalf...