Homework is wrecking our kids: The research is clear, let’s ban elementary homework

[IGIT]

IDK don't Asian countries have like twice the homework and they whoop our ass in school?

hello there Liquid Smoke,

lol.

i was thinking the same thing as i read the OP.

Asian kids who come to the United States don't seem too traumatized about homework.

i think the problem isn't homework, its parenting. lots of mediocre parenting by American moms and dads. Asian parents have a deep respect for teachers and the teaching profession. typically, they spend a bit of time helping their kids with homework...and the kids?

Asian kids are taught to respect teachers. they don't interrupt or fuck around in class, because the teachers are seen as the font of knowledge - so they listen and try to absorb the information that's being passed on.

here's a thought; if one wants to eliminate the angst both parents and kids feel over homework, just do this; eliminate all mathematics past learning addition and subtraction.
for advanced students, we can teach division and multiplication.

American kids hate.....really hate math, lol. i mean, when they're bitching, its not about having to do a history assignment. its the math.

so, just remove things like algebra, probability & statistics, geometry....all that stuff. gone.

now we've cured a number of things that afflict US kids. there's less homework....and more importantly, there's almost no math homework. GPAs will rise from sea to shining sea, and graduation rates will soar.

problem solved.

- IGIT

 

[Grrrr]

Lol. Got to show your work. But for the little ones it's too complicated of a method.
It seems they are making things more difficult then they need to be.

I agree. Homework was absolutely horrible and overly complicated when mine were in elementary school. A simple subtraction problem seemed to take half a sheet of notebook paper due to the method they were forced to use. Mine are in 7th and 9th grade and I no longer have to deal with those things.

 

[Bloodworth]

I agree. Homework was absolutely horrible and overly complicated when mine were in elementary school. A simple subtraction problem seemed to take half a sheet of notebook paper due to the method they were forced to use. Mine are in 7th and 9th grade and I no longer have to deal with those things.

Thats my new conspiracy. I think there is a sinister agenda behind it.

Because as a whole it really frustrates parents and teachers.

I think it's a ploy to keep the American student down, more stressed

 

[Grrrr]

Thats my new conspiracy. I think there is a sinister agenda behind it.

Because as a whole it really frustrates parents and teachers.

I think it's a ploy to keep the American student down, more stressed

It was definitely frustrating. I feel for those that are going through it now.

 

[RockstarChris]

i always paid off the nerds to do my homework. homework taught me how to be a criminal.

 

[IGIT]

hi all,

and a bit on Common Core;

In 2008, National Governors' Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve, Inc. convened an advisory group consisting of governors, state commissioners of education, business leaders, researchers, former federal officials, and state and local officials. Their task was to investigate what states would need to do to have standards that rival those of top-performing countries.

Their report, Benchmarking for Success: Ensuring U.S. Students Receive a World-Class Education, called on states to upgrade their standards by “adopting a common core of internationally benchmarked standards in math and language arts for grades K-12.” William Schmidt, University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University, laid out in the report the key elements of standards in high-performing countries: focus, rigor, and coherence.


Meanwhile in the United States, it is commonly said that standards are “a mile wide and an inch deep.” In other words, the old standards strived to cover too many topics, which are repeated across various grades, leaving American students lagging years behind their counterparts in other parts of the world. https://asiasociety.org/education/global-roots-common-core-state-standards

Common Core is the result of research conducted by both private and public sector experts in education, seeking to evaluate what is it that Asian countries are doing that causes their kids to excel. its not some devious plan hatched by "big government" to make the lives of US children unbearable.

its an effort to prepare these kids for the reality that they're going to live in a world where they'll have to compete globally for their jobs.

- IGIT

 

[Bloodworth]

It was definitely frustrating. I feel for those that are going through it now.

Teachers hate it as well, there is zero motivation to teach kids this longer ass backwards method

 

[Grrrr]

Teachers hate it as well, there is zero motivation to teach kids this longer ass backwards method

True.... they have to spend extra time teaching parents also.

 

[Long Dark Blues]

"Can it be true that the hours of lost playtime, power struggles and tears are all for naught?"

Damn, that sucks for those kids and their, most likely, dunce parents.

My third grader gets home at 3:45, eats a snack, and bangs out his homework and is playing video games by the time I get home at 4:30. Then I check his homework and go over it with him, which takes all of 10 minutes.

The same was true for my older son.

Sounds to me like a bunch of parents across the nation didn't prioritize creating a foundation and fostering an aptitude for learning in their young children.

 

[Long Dark Blues]

It's not just home work, the entire model of teaching especially math is weird . Almost conspiracy level.

The way kids are taught to add and subtract was not the way they were doing it twenty years ago
More steps, more confusing. Just weird , especially for elementary school kids .

I assume you are talking about common core?

If so, I initially had an aversion to it as well. Until my friend, who has a degree in mathematics, explained to me that common core is closer to how one does math in their head. It is teaching all kids, not just the numbers-oriented ones, how to be quick and successful at doing math in their heads and on the fly and not just on paper.

 

[panamaican]

hi all,

and a bit on Common Core;

In 2008, National Governors' Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and Achieve, Inc. convened an advisory group consisting of governors, state commissioners of education, business leaders, researchers, former federal officials, and state and local officials. Their task was to investigate what states would need to do to have standards that rival those of top-performing countries.

Their report, Benchmarking for Success: Ensuring U.S. Students Receive a World-Class Education, called on states to upgrade their standards by “adopting a common core of internationally benchmarked standards in math and language arts for grades K-12.” William Schmidt, University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University, laid out in the report the key elements of standards in high-performing countries: focus, rigor, and coherence.


Meanwhile in the United States, it is commonly said that standards are “a mile wide and an inch deep.” In other words, the old standards strived to cover too many topics, which are repeated across various grades, leaving American students lagging years behind their counterparts in other parts of the world. https://asiasociety.org/education/global-roots-common-core-state-standards

Common Core is the result research conducted by both private and public sector experts in education, seeking to evaluate what is it that Asian countries are doing that causes their kids to excel. its not some devious plan hatched by "big government" to make the lives of US children unbearable.

its an effort to prepare these kids for the reality that they're going to live in a world where they'll have to compete globally for their jobs.

- IGIT

I always remember what Arne Duncan said about the backlash to Common Core. He said that it was primarily from middle and upper middle class parents who didn't like that it lowered their kids test scores. Those parents did not care that the lower scores showed that the kids weren't as well educated as expected, they cared that they couldn't claim that their kid scored a 90% on the exam.

So to preserve the appearance of being well educated they fought against actually being well educated.

Arne went on to avow that part of their argument was that since their kids outperformed the kids in rural America or inner city America, those parents didn't see any reason to improve the overall quality of education. They didn't care that they were behind the international standard so long as they were beating the poor kids.

 

[ithinktheymad]

My mom taught me until the 1st grade. She didn't give me much busy work, but she encouraged me to read a lot and provided ample educational activities to keep me stimulated. Adjacent to the USC campus there is a large public campus that houses the Natural History Museum, Science Center, and so forth. My mother would take me there and to the art museums in the city, at least one trip a week.

When I went to normal school I skipped twice. Maybe if I hadn't gotten so much homework I could've hit the 3 peat.

 

[brothir]

The problem is at a young age they need to brute force memorize the basics (addition and multiplication tables) before attempted anything else. That's the foundation of math and often than not I am seeing kids who do not have that shit on lock down.

They're counting with their fuckin' fingers at times! There's no way to build good math knowledge if they don't know what 7x6 is off the top of their head...

More importantly imo is fractions. If a kid doesn't know fractions well by the time elementary school is done, that's usually a pretty clear indicator for how good they'll ever be.

For instance, I didn't like mathematics until high school, when I due to a variety of reasons chose the hardest math classes and continued studying math at university. I struggled a bit with fractions in 5th grade, but learned them eventually. My prediction is that if I had never learned them properly, I would not have been able to eventually choose a higher level of mathematics further down the road because my fundamental capacity would have been stunted at too early a stage.

All the adults that I know that are bad at maths don't understand fractions well, and all that are good do.

Just my hypothesis.

 

[JonesBones]

In the last couple of decades we have had a lot of people coding software who shouldn't be let anywhere near a command prompt. The more schools push it, and make it available early on, the more varied the results. We have genius coders who started before their 10th birthday, and we have people who write the least logical, most inefficient garbage. There's enough demand I guess that the poor coders still get work, but I honestly wish that weren't the case. I am an engineer and a code developer, and I hate a lot of tech. I find a lot of it to be implemented so poorly that I'd rather use low tech solutions when available.

Still, I can't agree that philosophers and linguists are equally important. When engineers get things right, they change the world for the better in a quantitative way that can't be denied. If all the philosophers disappeared from the earth tomorrow most people would go about their lives completely unaffected.

Not surprised to meet a close minded engineer, must be why so many are terrorists. No imagination. How about all the chemicals/pollution and weapons that engineers make?

Without social sciences we wouldn't know how mindless you are:

The two authors found the same high ratio of engineers in most of the 21 organizations they examined, including Jemaah Islamiya in Southeast Asia and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Middle East. Sorting the militants according to their 30 homelands showed the same pattern: engineers represented a fifth of all militants from every nation except one, and nearly half of those with advanced degrees.

One seemingly obvious explanation for the presence of engineers in violent groups lies in the terrorist’s job description. Who, after all, is least likely to confuse the radio with the landing gear, as Gambetta puts it, or the red wire with the green? But if groups need geeks for political violence, then engineering degrees ought to turn up in the rosters of all terrorist groups that plant bombs, hijack planes and stage kidnappings. And that’s not the case.

Gambetta and Hertog found engineers only in right-wing groups — the ones that claim to fight for the pious past of Islamic fundamentalists or the white-supremacy America of the Aryan Nations (founder: Richard Butler, engineer) or the minimal pre-modern U.S. government that Stack and Bedell extolled.

Among Communists, anarchists and other groups whose shining ideal lies in the future, the researchers found almost no engineers. Yet these organizations mastered the same technical skills as the right-wingers. Between 1970 and 1978, for instance, the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany staged kidnappings, assassinations, bank robberies and bombings. Seventeen of its members had college or graduate degrees, mostly in law or the humanities. Not one studied engineering.

The engineer mind-set, Gambetta and Hertog suggest, might be a mix of emotional conservatism and intellectual habits that prefers clear answers to ambiguous questions — “the combination of a sharp mind with a loyal acceptance of authority.” Do people become engineers because they are this way? Or does engineering work shape them? It’s probably a feedback loop of both, Gambetta says.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.html

 

[SaiWa]

More importantly imo is fractions. If a kid doesn't know fractions well by the time elementary school is done, that's usually a pretty clear indicator for how good they'll ever be.

For instance, I didn't like mathematics until high school, when I due to a variety of reasons chose the hardest math classes and continued studying math at university. I struggled a bit with fractions in 5th grade, but learned them eventually. My prediction is that if I had never learned them properly, I would not have been able to eventually choose a higher level of mathematics further down the road because my fundamental capacity would have been stunted at too early a stage.

All the adults that I know that are bad at maths don't understand fractions well, and all that are good do.

Just my hypothesis.

Agreed...

Kids (and adults who are bad at math) are terrified of fractions.

Every single person I've tutored in math were horrified at having to learn fractions but then again they were bad with their basic math to begin with.

 

[A.S. Deep]

Always hated homework. If you can't teach the kids enough during school time then it's your own fault.

 

[xcvbn]

No shit.

Even high school the only homework required should be for AP students.

 

[Swing]

More importantly imo is fractions. If a kid doesn't know fractions well by the time elementary school is done, that's usually a pretty clear indicator for how good they'll ever be.

For instance, I didn't like mathematics until high school, when I due to a variety of reasons chose the hardest math classes and continued studying math at university. I struggled a bit with fractions in 5th grade, but learned them eventually. My prediction is that if I had never learned them properly, I would not have been able to eventually choose a higher level of mathematics further down the road because my fundamental capacity would have been stunted at too early a stage.

All the adults that I know that are bad at maths don't understand fractions well, and all that are good do.

Just my hypothesis.

I think you're right. I give a little speech at the beginning of each school year claiming that getting good at fractions will make you good at math. I tell this to my PreCalc kids.

 

[SaiWa]

"Can it be true that the hours of lost playtime, power struggles and tears are all for naught?"

Damn, that sucks for those kids and their, most likely, dunce parents.

My third grader gets home at 3:45, eats a snack, and bangs out his homework and is playing video games by the time I get home at 4:30. Then I check his homework and go over it with him, which takes all of 10 minutes.

The same was true for my older son.

Sounds to me like a bunch of parents across the nation didn't prioritize creating a foundation and fostering an aptitude for learning in their young children.

That's the thing though. Some of these parents weren't taught properly and carried on with their ways without it. Back then you could get a decent blue collar job without having to learn math so it wasn't an issue.

so now their kids or grandkids come home with homework but they can't help them because they never learned it.

when I tutored I always wondered why the parents can't do what I am doing. it's so simple and takes 10-30 mins if you are doing it everyday instead of me coming over and cramming their brains 1-2 times a week for an hour or 2 but the cold hard truth is they can't...

 

[SaiWa]

No shit.

Even high school the only homework required should be for AP students.

I am pretty sure if a school instituted this no homework policy grades would fall dramatically. kids not paying attention and not having to do homework as well??.. wooohooo!..