moominmolly | Homeworkin'

Our house has homework. Rather a lot, at times. It sucks. My attitude is that it is something that needs to be done, because it is expected at the school they go to. They like their school a lot (science/tech magnet school) and so they trade doing homework for the opportunity to go there (which in turn will give them better access into a college they want). If they chose to go to their regular district school, they would almost certainly get less/easier homework (as observed by seeing what other kids nearby have to do).

However, I do not think there is too much here. My 10th grader has the most (and is slowest at working), and if I took out all of his procrastination, I think he'd average 3-4 hours of homework for the week (his teachers say they aim for 5-20 minutes a day, for 4 classes). My 7th grader definitely has less. Our senior goes to the local district school and definitely has less (although I don't watch him much, as he prefers to work late at night). The younger boys' previous school (private) had significantly more and harder work, which was incredibly stressful, but one result is that damn can my kid write a fantastic paper when he needs to.

My rule for homework is that it needs to be attempted and turned in. If that results in a low grade through not understanding the material, then that's a sign that extra attention needs to happen. If it results in a low grade through mistakes/laziness, I honestly don't care because they'll make it up in tests. If it doesn't get done out of laziness, then that's a problem because it means there is poor time management happening (computer games are always the culprit here) and their free time gets restricted.

I actively encourage doing homework during class, on the bus, as fast as possible, whenever and however they can, in order to just get it done. I also try to suggest tips to make it a fun part of life instead of just a chore. Sometimes we all pile around the kitchen table with our tasks and make it a social time. I encourage them to discuss their homework at the dinner table, to teach their foreign language vocab to me, to email their essay to their grandmother, to play with their math problems. I like to read the books they are assigned.

I also prioritize health. If they have actually been working and it is not a hard deadline on the biggest project of the year, I stop them at 10pm (bedtime). Nobody works through dinner. If they are feeling sick, they go to bed, not sit up with math problems.

If they stay on top of things, it is manageable. When they fall behind, then we can have (and have had) a 3-4 hour tear-filled evening or a stress-filled weekend trying to make sure a science project or an essay done. Zeros still happen, and sometimes tempers flare. But I also think they are learning good things, and actually learning them, not just memorizing facts or copying data.

Once I got to the collegiate level, I used to love homework: it was the chance to dig into subjects with my own pace, my own questions, and my own motivation. No matter how complex, long, or hard the subject, homework was self-directed in a way that class time wasn't.
I frequently wonder if I would have done my homework much, if at all, as a younger person if I'd been given that framework: that homework is a chance to be self-directed and to dig into subjects in whatever order or manner pleases you, whether that means working backwards, working in the backyard with your toes in the grass, or taking a break after every 5 minutes of studying.
This is only sort of related to your question, but in answer to WTF homework, I had to chime in with the tiny piece of reframing that changed my life as an academic. =)

I know parents who have decided to homeschool their kids because the homework load on top of a long day at school was just too overwhelming. Their children were not getting a chance to do anything else (much as the article describes).

We aren't there yet. We could get there. It wouldn't surprise me at all if we did. Already we don't do anything after school, because then Benjamin just doesn't have the cope left to fight his way through over an hour of homework. (At age eight...) He asked me a few days ago if he was "allowed to read for fun". It was pathetic. He does read as much as he wants though, because I refuse to stop him from reading to do all the busywork. (It is all busywork too, at least for him. His spelling homework book even *has* a provision for alternative homework for kids who can already spell all the words, which so far he can. When he did the alternative homework *listed in the book as the correct thing to do* he got in trouble for "not doing his homework".) He has done almost no art since school started, and has stopped generating and solving complex math equations for his own entertainment, both of which he did quite a bit all summer. At age eight he is already pretty much too exhausted by it all to do anything else. I just hope he goes back to creative enthusiasm again next summer the way he did by mid-July or so this summer.

Edited 2013-09-19 18:14 (UTC)

This is so incredibly sad.

Not a parent, but I did have 3 - 4 hours of homework a night in junior high and high school, and keep in mind I went to 4 different high schools. The homework/study loads were pretty consistent across all of them.

The amount of homework assigned these days seems excessive. ISTM that the motivation is that more work = more learning, which is only true to up to a certain point (and with the usual stars and daggers of outrageous caveat, especially WRT Bloom's Taxonomy).

My main objection to homework hasn't changed since I used to get homework, back in the pre-pottery neolithic. It seems rather silly -- and rather stressful -- for all of the teachers to assign homework due the next day at once. Because, clearly, exhaustion, anxiety, and boredom are the best teachers. :P

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?

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...

Edited 2013-09-19 19:49 (UTC)

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)

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.)

So the marshmallow test, one of my favorite studies of all time, shows that the single best predictor research has found for how kids will perform on their SATs in high school is whether or not they can wait two minutes to eat a marshmallow when left alone in a room with 1 marshmallow and the promise of a second marshmallow if they wait - ETA: this study is done on kids in preschool and kindergarten. In other words, the ability to delay gratification is the biggest predictor of school success. As with many things that are defined as traits by psychologists, I think that people probably have a latent natural range that can be improved or impaired depending on the situation. I bet small amounts of homework are really good practice at delaying gratification that could improve school/work outcomes later in life. I also bet that overwhelming amounts of homework won't deter the people who are naturally on the high end of the range, but that people in the middle could find it defeating or overwhelming and actually push them toward being less successful.

And now that I've thought about this for a bit I really want someone to do this study. If anyone has post doc funding and an advisor lying around I'd do this study. The results would be interesting, and a fairly logical marriage between the marshmallow study and the studies that show increasing homework doesn't improve any other metric people care about.

Edited 2013-09-19 18:55 (UTC)

There has been an update on the marshmallow test, showing that kids did better on the marshmallow test when authority figures had followed through on promises in the past. In other words, when kids had been promised later rewards and not gotten them, they quite rationally disbelieved in future promises of later rewards.

It's always more complicated!

It makes me really happy when someone has already proved my hypothesis - that's exactly the kind of situational or environmental factor I was thinking about when I said that I don't think it's right to think of these as absolute traits, so much as tendencies that can and will vary over time.

I don't have kids, and am thus not your target audience here.

I felt that 95% of the homework I got in grades 1-12 was pointless, and for most of that time I didn't even consider that it might be getting assigned for the purposes of learning. It was just one more weird ritual that adults imposed on the world.

Now that I'm much older, I look back on the homework I did, and . . . my opinions about it haven't actually changed. I don't have many good things to say about my elementary through high school experience.

Looking forward to some day when, hopefully, I will have kids, I'm not sure I'd evaluate homework differently from what they did in school, or what I thought about whatever job I had. To me, the main things that matter are qualitative -- pointless homework isn't different from pointless classes in general. I don't have any idea how I'd evaluate well-designed homework that came in large amounts, but it would be a good problem to have, relatively speaking.

My only comment is that I must be brain-dead right now, because I can't see what the 'sic' is for here:

“three important and powerful quotes from the section with 1–2 sentence analyses of its [sic] significance.”

That one gave me pause for a moment, too, but it's the disagreement between "three quotes" and "its". Shorten it to "three quotes with analyses of its significance" and you see the problem.

OH. Thank you!

I have never been a fan of homework nor of doing it - I had zero work ethic in high school (to the point where one wise algebra teacher had me start to bring my homework to her before homeroom, because she caught me still doing it while she was walking around at the beginning of class to check we had done it.

This lack of work ethic nearly screwed the entire pooch for me in college. Between homesickness, low self-confidence and a lack of ability to cruise through the way I had in high school, I almost failed out my first semester (and got the most miserable report card of my life just as I got snowed in with my mother for a week - but that's a different story).

The point is, that work ethic needs to be developed if your serious about studying something, and I got serious about it by the end of undergrad and was much more so by grad school.

The problem is homework isn't necessarily about learning the thing you're supposed to be learning. I, like many kids, was motivated much more than the grades than the learning. This doesn't mean I didn't want to learn. I used to hang out with teachers on lunch hour and after school and get them to talk to me about what they were enthusiastic about, which was fantastic, and I was always a reader.

The problem is linking up the notion of homework to that deeper learning. I think as long as the homework is interesting and challenging and the student is neither bored nor overwhelmed, that link can stay in place. If it falls away, you are (in my opinion) looking at a student who is not being placed at the proper learning level...or, unfortunately, at a teacher who isn't or isn't able to do right by the whole class.

I think as long as the homework is interesting and challenging and the student is neither bored nor overwhelmed
Well, that's the thing: do kids need n hours a day of homework to be interested and/or challenged, or is the workload bordering on boring over overwhelming? It seems like kids are buried under more homework now than I was, and I can't say they're learning any more.

Perhaps they're learning different things at the expense of others; that's the impression I got from a friendly prof in my local engineering department. He said that over the 25 years he'd been teaching pretty much the same freshman mech-e classes, kids have become more capable but less prepared. That is, they're more willing to try new things have have much more varied experiences than incoming frosh used to have, but their fundamental skills -- apparently even study skills and self-discipline -- are worse (in his opinion).

I think the homework debate is so different depending on where you are, where you went to school, what the background assumptions are. Most of the stories in the media just take for granted that everyone goes to a super-college-oriented school that assigns lots of homework, and the problem with homework is being crushed under it. That's a problem in some places. (I taught at one.)

But when I was a student, I spent a lot of time wishing for more homework. Because I basically wasn't assigned any (or, at any rate, finished it all in class without paying much attention), and I was desperate for something that took me seriously, that made me think. In college I had overwhelming amounts and no study skills, but I was a lot happier that way (and prioritized heavy homework loads when choosing colleges). Of course, as noted above, college is different.

V's school doesn't do homework yet in her grade, so I can't say.

nonnihil had the same experience I did, even though he did go to one of those East Coast prep schools, so it's hard for me to grok that people (even smart ones!) might actually have too much homework, even though intellectually I recognize it to be the case. So I can't picture how I'd react if V seemed to have too much, because on some level I don't believe this will ever be the case, although actually it's fairly likely to be by high school.

Looking back, I'd assign homework differently were I still teaching now. The culture of the school is homework-y and there was an expectation that you assign it, and I think I'd push back more thoughtfully on that (and maybe do the flipped-classroom thing). But I'd still assign it, because I taught Latin, and memorization actually really matters, and I think that's better done with on-your-own time than with class time (though I'd use class time for some of the things I formerly assigned as homework).

Stephen has homework in kindergarten, plus a longer school day at his charter school. I am not a fan of either, frankly. And it's already a battle. Weirdly, if I let him play, he's usually doing the same kind of thing with his tanagrams on the fridge or with an activity workbook, or just by fooling around with paper and pen and scissors. I hate making him do homework. It's a reasonable amount -- one or two sides of paper -- but the principle of it stinks. Yet the other school option sucks, so this is what we have, and since we have it, we're striving to play by the rules.

It falls under the general category of "things my kid doesn't want to do," as does brushing his teeth. So there's that angle, too: it's less a battle about homework and more a battle of wills/not wanting to be responsible. I'm not sure what to make of that, except that it at least makes homework seem less evil, since it's in the same category as tooth-brushing.

Right now, the only hard and fast rule we have is no TV until the homework is done. I haven't yet been faced with him saying that's okay, and just doing things other than homework. I'm not sure I'd have the heart to make him stop doing good, productive play activities just to do specific homework. I definitely will not let him sacrifice sleep for school, like I did and was encouraged to do in HS. That's too damaging, psychologically more than physically.

In 4th grade, homework was one sheet of (3-8) math problems, each of four nights Mon-Thu. Plus "do X amount of reading a week", which... yeah.

In 5th grade, it's just that so far, but I hear that there's more.

So far, it's not been a pain to get the student in question to do this stuff.

There have also been bigger projects that need to be done at home: historical personality poster, choose a planet and model it, etc. But that feels different from "homework."

We've been lucky so far in that whether it's the teachers or the school policy (unclear?), there's a sense from them that homework is not CRITICAL, and if it's spoiling family life on some night due to yelling, coercion, crying, etc., it's not worth it. The load is also light, so that tends to make it NOT be a big confrontation. Maybe it is just the school.

Me, I didn't do a lick of homework when I was a kid. And while there's no correlation between homework and achievement, I can tell you with dead certainty that there is sometimes a perfect, exact, linear correlation between lack-of-homework and lack-of-passing-grades. Or, I suppose sometimes, lack-of-good-grades. And it is those very grades that then can affect your future choices and options.

Also let me say that there's something truly miserable and humiliating about failing freshman english, repeatedly, while obviously being far above the level of the class material.

#UndiagnosedLearningDisabilityFTL

Edited 2013-09-20 12:29 (UTC)

So I am a statistical outlier on this on SO MANY levels, but I think my experience may be worth adding to the debate nonetheless.
I was an auto didactic homeschooler for most of elementary school and rule was that I had to do some school reading (i.e., not fantasy novels), some writing, and some math everyday. I wasn't allowed to hang out with friends or do things that were clearly play activities until I had done those things, but other than that it was a fairly un-schooling kind of environment. I started taking college classes part-time at the local community college when very young, which was my first experience with homework, but as other people have previously noted, college homework is very different and way more clearly helpful than most of what I saw my friends doing in high school. When I shadowed a friend at a local high school for a day I was amazed and appalled at the amount busywork they were given to do in a day, things that clearly did not feel like learning to me.
this was coupled with an environment where I was dancing intensively all through high school, up to 30 hours a week. Between my college classes and my dancing I was pretty much never bored. Another factor here, and I think this was pretty crucial, was that my mother insisted I not get a job during high school. She said to me, on many occasions "you are a kid and your job right now is to learn and grow. I will take care of the making of money. If you want to earn a little extra doing babysitting on occasion that's fine, but you are not going to waste your time flipping burgers or working retail because making money is not the most important thing for you to do right now."
so I was busy, but I was constantly stimulated and my homework never put me in the place that the article describes, where the kids mantra was "memorization, not rationalization." And in the end this led to both a really clear and well developed work ethic, an ability to do lots of executive functioning stuff without almost any parental oversight, and a love of learning that was maintained throughout my entire educational experience. When I become a parent, this is what I want for my kid(s): a sense that there are things in life that are important outside of school, a genuine engagement with their schoolwork, an ability to do their own time management, and the knowledge that I will prioritize their well-being and help them manage various competing demands. I want my kid to get through high school not already feeling burned out and like they don't have the energy for college, which is something I see a lot of my college kids struggling with.
How I will do this I have absolutely NO idea, but I'm pretty confident I will be able to figure it out when the time comes.
/rant

Homeworkin'

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