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

[metagnat.livejournal.com]

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.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

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).