Homeworkin'

[moominmolly]

this article from mzrowan got me thinking about homework -- one of my favorite things to hate. The article details one father's attempts to do his 8th-grade daughter's homework every night for a week, and it gave me chills. 3 hours! a day!

Natalie has nightly homework, and she's in a phase of being interested in completing it, but when she stops being interested? I don't know what will happen.

Parents of older kids - how do you deal with homework? Is it too much? Everyone: WTF HOMEWORK?

Comments

[kcatalyst.livejournal.com]

Seth does much of his homework at school, in downtime when he's finished whatever the in-school task was. As a result, he has from 0-10 minutes any given day. I wish he had a little bit more, since 1) it would mean he was being challenged enough at school that "school" took up the actual school day! And 2) because he would be pushed to learn some time management.

I read parts of the article and it's fun, but not that compelling. 3-5 hours a day does seem like too much, but it only adds up to being past midnight if you start after dinner every night. What else is the kid doing that 8 or 9pm is when she first sits down to homework?

[amadea.livejournal.com]

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...

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

What else is the kid doing that 8 or 9pm is when she first sits down to homework?

Oh, well, you know, the 857923 activities you have to be enrolled in to have any chance of getting into college.

This is a phenomenon I find baffling, but it's widespread -- lots of kids have afterschool activities many days of the week, and you add up the activities and the transit time and so forth and, yeah, they might not be home before dinner. This is particularly true if they go to private schools, which often require sports of everyone. But, of course, public or private, they might have sports, or drama, or band, or all the lessons and tutoring that their parents are POSITIVELY CERTAIN they must have. (Did I say "or"? I might have meant "and".)

I take my kid to a dance class once a week, because it is on the weekend and around the corner. I sign her up for some clubs that are at her school as part of the afterschool program, because hey, they're there! And mostly she gets to pick. Aside from that, if she wants to be overscheduled, she has to wait until she can transport herself. But obviously I didn't grow up in the Boston/NYC universe. (shhh, someday they will discover I don't care if my kid goes to the "right" college, and kick us out of private school)

[vizsludraugas.livejournal.com]

I used to get home around dinner time, because it took about that long to get home from school: I was in a magnet program. I can't tell where the author of the article lives, but if they have a haul to get to school, that might be the first chance the kid gets to really work on homework. (I could do readings and stuff on the bus, and did, but not everyone can..a lot of folks would get carsick if they tried that.)