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

[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).