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

[ratatosk.livejournal.com]

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.