My last post was about poverty. This one will be very much a UMC concern. Sigh. The different worlds we live in…
In the past six weeks, Jonah has been swamped with homework. He had five huge cumulative midterm exams and one huge project for an elective class that was supposed to be fun, but wasn’t. After he puts in a full day at school, he goes up to his room and works until 11 or so. Is he using his time efficiently? Probably not. He hates memorizing boring biology terms, so it probably takes him longer than it should, but even if he worked like a robot, I doubt that he would be done much earlier. He has a lot to do. His classes are a lot harder than the classes that I took in high school.
At a party last week, one dad told Steve that his son, who goes to a magnet high school for smart kids, does homework until 1 am every evening.
WTF.
Kids aren’t getting the time to flesh out their personalities and discover their interests and daydream, because they are memorizing biology terms. And I don’t even think that the ability to spit back pages of terms will matter much in the future. The key job market skill that kids will need in the future is adaptability. And the key life skill that all kids should acquire is how to have fun.
Sometimes I think that all this homework is a plot to train kids to work some soul-crushing, 80-hour per week UMC job. It’s not teaching them knowledge. It’s training them to sit at a desk for hours and hours.
As a parent, I think it’s time to push back. It’s better to be a B student and have a life, than to be an A student who has never had the time to develop.
Apt. 11d 
Speaking of eduction, I had no idea Robert Dahl was still alive until recently.
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Somebody should write “The Chocolate Factory: Democracy and Power in British Industry.”
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By Monty Hython?
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We’re having the same problem this year–with our sixth graders. (Our tenth grader must be better at organizing her time, because she never had that problem–or, my preferred hypothesis, it’s getting much worse at the younger ages). One assignment in math was to make up an exam–a full exam in their pre-algebra class–then make up a full answer sheet, then administer the exam to a fellow student in class, while taking that student’s exam, then the next night grade the fellow student’s exam, then the next night correct any answers they got wrong on the test administered to them–all told, for sixth graders, eight or more hours over 3 nights for one class.
My husband teaches math for a living and he is not pleased with this teacher to say the least.
It’s actually interfering with my ability to teach them other things, like doing the laundry. I feel so sorry for them I can’t make them do it.
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That was me, Lisa SG, on my phone. No Internet due to winter storm Nika.
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So, the homework was to create an exam and then grade it (while doing an exam themselves and correcting their own mistakes). Isn’t that the teacher’s job? Why is the teacher fobbing off his/her job onto the student? Jonah has to edit a peer’s essay drafts and grade them. Seems like that should be the teacher’s job to me. I can’t imagine that he gets very useful comments back from his peers. I can’t imagine that he offers great feedback to other students. He’s only 14.
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We had a homework like this just a couple of days ago, on algebra questions relating to linear equations. My D created a quiz on the relationship between temperature, cars, and cane toad deaths in Australia. I took the quiz for her. Her first 5 questions were good (and, she even balanced the numbers so that the arithmetic wasn’t too difficult). Her last three needed work. She gave me kudos for knowing how to do the problems (which i did, though I also re-discovered, as she did, the sloppiness that used to trip me up when I was taking math classes).
It was an excellent HW form my point of view, requiring her to integrate the use of the algebra into a real world problem (and she came up with a good realistic one). I thought her questions were excellent and she knew how to do them, and she further recognized the flaws in the way that I was approaching the problem (I wasn’t simplifying terms, making the problem take longer than it should). In discussing the problems I was able to explain to her something about dependent & independent variables that she wasn’t yet quite getting.
Our teachers do not assign this problem so that they can avoid doing the work, mostly, I think, but because they think that designing the problem and thinking about how others solve it is a good way of learning the material more deeply. It works for my daughter. I haven’t seen the problems that others write, though, so I can’t speak more generally. The taking of others exams and grading are done in school (I don’t see others work).
They also use a fair amount of peer editing in writing. In this, I think my D gets a lot out of editing others work, but that she generally doesn’t feel like she gets good editing from her peers.
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I think it’s not at all bad as an occasional exercise, but if the teacher does it too much (or does not grade the work appropriately), it’s going to look like shirking on the teachers’ part.
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As an FYI, on the college level, I hate doing peer reading groups. I actually forbid my students to edit each other’s papers for grammar (in class–I can’t control what they do outside of class) and I have specific things I ask them to do. I have them identify the 3 weakest sentences in the essay. Why? Because everyone has 3 weakest sentences in an essay.
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Creating practice tests and exams is actually one of the most recommended ways for students to learn/absorb/retain material, not only because they have to review the material while doing so, but as bj mentions, it helps think more metacognitively about exam/test structure and how to address the given concepts in challenging but appropriate ways. There’s a lot of research on this as an effective study method for kids.
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If it’s not replacing the teacher’s grading, I think it’s a good tool. In my hippy elementary school we had “portfolios” where we always had to display all stages of the writing process. Peer commenting was big at all parts, and I remember hating it, but it actually provides a good way to both make someone think about writing (what makes my classmate’s paper bad? why is it unclear) and also teaches communication skills. To constructively criticize someone else in a diplomatic way is actually quite difficult but is also really useful in life. Obviously this should if anything be more work for the teacher, and if they use group work as a way to slack off then that is bad.
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I agree that it’s a good teaching technique in appropriate doses, but a whole test of 20 questions plus answer sheet written and graded in several nights? In sixth grade? For someone who has never written a test before and is just learning the subject? How about a three question quiz, or several weeks to prepare? More is not always better.
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Yes, that sounds like overload. It also seems like there’s a rapid rate of diminishing returns, and beyond that it would be counterproductive. Better have a student spend a long time thinking about 5 questions than panicking that they have to come up with 20 and trying to rush through.
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I vote for the old ten minute rule. Sixth graders should be able to do all their homework in not much more than an hour. That already makes for a 7 hour work day without activities.
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This is a good rule, in theory. But it’s not realistic to imagine that every kid will take the same amount of time to do their homework. So, is it a 60 minute average? Then what about the kid that whips off the HW in 10 m? (I have a suspicion that this is what is happening with my 4th grader — that he’s taking about 1/2 the time). Or the kid who spends 2 hours (because they are struggling, or because they want to get everything super-perfect)? What if there just is no average, because for different HW sets, different kids fall into the different categories?
Generally at our school, they tell the kids to stop after they’ve spent the time (20 minutes, for M, and 20 minutes for LA), but is supposed to be a “good” 20 minutes. And, some kids won’t stop, until they’ve finished.
(our HW was not write 20 quiz questions — My D seemed to have something like 10, and she definitely had a fair number of days to finish the HW quiz).
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I haven’t seen anything like that yet (but we’ve only reached 6th grade).
Wednesday nights are often kind of hairy, what with the combination of CCD and a big Latin homework day, but it’s not absolutely terrible. The 6th grader’s grades are good (100% in Latin!), but she’s pretty high maintenance with her teachers. (I’m REALLY happy we don’t homeschool.) I suspect that memorization and non-standard math solutions are really her strong suit, but anything to do with writing is HARD–she writes the shortest possible responses to questions when handwriting. (Her teachers are once again discovering that life is much better if she is allowed to type assignments.)
I have to confess, though, that we (i.e. my 3rd grader) got a 35% on a book report last fall, as we had a little bit too much confidence in his ability to do it by himself. It turned out that the assignment sheet was double-sided, so he missed the whole other side, as well as losing a lot of points on formatting. Awful. And this was our more dutiful, conscientious, perfectionistic child. It won’t happen again.
History fair approaches–yuck! Fortunately, I think we’ve got the costumes taken care of, which is my major responsibility. We have one Amelia Earhart and one Fibonacci.
So far, so good.
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You say that “As a parent, I think it’s time to push back.” We have. We homeschool, and have from the beginning. Not just homeschool, unschool. My daughters are the same age as your sons. One reason I have been supportive of this endeavor is that I thought there was just too much homework when I was in school, and that things have only gotten worse. Based on who I’ve met around here, I can’t say that the kids who have been in schools for up to nine years are better educated than my daughters.
We’re planning on continuing it for high school. Based on some of the comments we’ve been receiving from people when they hear that we’re planning on homeschooling high school, you’d think we were setting them up for the welfare line. I doubt that is the case. If the blog is still around in another four years, I’ll let you know how it works out.
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OK, this makes me slightly relieved to be living in the upper midwest, despite our current -20 windchill. Just seems to be a lot less external pressure than I hear from friends on the east coast. Maybe the subzero temperatures dull our competitive spirit? Most people don’t work 80 hour/week jobs here, either. (except the lawyers…) Homework until 1 am? Is that even healthy?
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My 4th grader has no homework, to the point where we’re wondering what’s going on. He seems to have less than our daughter did at the same age with the same teachers, so we’re wondering what’s going on. I think part of it is that he’s more efficient (and less concerned with missing a point here and there). But, they also seem to have made the decision not to have too much being done at home.
My 7th grader can become obsessive, to the point where i have to tell her to stop doing homework fairly frequently. I feel like done properly, the HW would be an 1-11/2 hours per night. But, when she’s given the assignment to write a 1000 word essay on a book (done slowly, over the course of 3+ weeks, at 20 minutes a night), she writes 10000 words and has to figure out how to fit her ideas into the shorter piece. So, in thinking about HW load. When she does her monthly math challenge problems (they receive a set of 30 problems, of which they are asked to do 8 or so) she always wants to rack up the problems and tries to do more. On the other hand, she memorizes quickly, like Amy’s kid, so work that involves lots of memorization (not frequent) is tossed of quickly. So, in spite of the past few weeks in which her HW load has seemed crazy (especially on top of basketball, a theater club production of a play she wrote and directs, a playwrighting contest, debate, newspaper, . . . .), I still think the problem for us is an interaction between children and expectations and parents.
We don’t have grades, really, which would make things worse (because our daughter would want to get 100% on everything and would obsess about that last 1% in a way that would not be about learning). On the other hand, grades might make our son fill in the last 5% in a way that might be about learning.
I don’t see us pushing back on the workaholic nature of childhood (not the least because our kiddo is a natural workaholic). I do try to talk about efficiency and learning and how school is “only a day job” (i.e. filling in all the blanks at school only gets you so far, and that you can’t lose sight of the learning and the bigger picture goals.
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“I think part of it is that he’s more efficient (and less concerned with missing a point here and there).”
Yes–efficiency does enter into it.
I had two hours of math homework every night in high school back in the very late 80s/very early 90s, but part of that was that I tended to read my fun books during math class and then I’d bring all the work home. (That wasn’t as suicidal as it might have been for other kids, because my dad has an MA in math, so if I got stuck, help was only a few steps away.)
If a kid has a lot of homework, part of the explanation may be that they are not properly using school time.
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PS: Our kid isn’t allowed to stay up ’til 11, but she’s not in HS yet. I hear that it is impossible to finish the work in HS in our area without long nights.
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Our 6th grader’s official bedtime is 9:40, but unofficially it’s often just a little past 10. I think that under unusual circumstances, I’d let her work until 10:15 (and we have done that on sports nights).
As far as grades 7-12 are concerned, I think I’d want her to be generally finished by 10, but that 11 is not unreasonable for major projects (especially in high school). If there was anything beyond that, I think we would have to talk about time management. I certainly remember my high school (and college and grad school and current) time management issues, and I would not want my kids to fall into the habit of pulling all nighters.
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We’ve been passing around this article at our school: http://paulgraham.com/hs.html
It’s by Paul Graham, the Y-Combinator guy, and I feel it does a nice balance of speaking to both the obsessive student and the casual student. This paragraph is my take home:
“If I had to go through high school again, I’d treat it like a day job. I don’t mean that I’d slack in school. Working at something as a day job doesn’t mean doing it badly. It means not being defined by it. I mean I wouldn’t think of myself as a high school student, just as a musician with a day job as a waiter doesn’t think of himself as a waiter. [3] And when I wasn’t working at my day job I’d start trying to do real work”
It tells the student who might be a slacker that they have to do what’s required, and tells the obsessive student who thinks of school as being the goal that they need to think beyond school.
(Now mind you, I think part of what you’re bemoaning is that school has become so demanding that there’s no time left over after doing what’s required).
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That’s very good.
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I love this; thank you for sharing it!
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Thanks for sharing that – I loved it.
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S is in the same grade as Jonah, and she also has a lot of homework, but it doesn’t seem as bad, and I don’t know for sure why. She’s probably super-organized. I wouldn’t know for sure because I have next to no involvement in her homework and never had. I mean, she bugs me to look at her writing sometimes, and when she had midterms she made me study with her (I actually hate doing that; my husband willingly studied for bio with her, which is good because I could not care less about cell biology; I told her she could study for her American history exam, which was focused on the Constitution, by watching West Wing. TRUE STORY.) But we talk about her history class all the time because her teacher is a Reagan-idolizing officer on the local Republican committee.
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Wendy said:
“I told her she could study for her American history exam, which was focused on the Constitution, by watching West Wing. TRUE STORY.”
Best mom ever.
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Pfft, as if she took me up on it. No, she watched every episode of Freaks and Geeks one weekend, but will she watch West Wing? Nooooo.
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Oh, and the grade on the student quiz doesn’t count towards the kids’ grade (to the extent that they have grades, they would be judged on the quality of the work they did in preparing the quiz).
In English, on the essay (which is supposed to be a 1000 words or so, though that required repeated questioning to figure out), we (the parents) are supposed to fill out a form in which we give feedback on a version of the essay that our child reads to us. I am not entirely sure what the purpose of this feedback is, but I think it might be to get feedback from a naive person on whether the arguments are clear (naive because unlike the teacher or other students in the class, we haven’t been discussing the books recently). I am naive in the right sense, for this purpose.
(Oh, and of course, the assignment wouldn’t work very well in a school that had a more diverse population, English language learners and the like. For our population, I don’t think the request for parent feedback is an issue for anyone).
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I didn’t think my daughter had more homework in high school than I had. In both cases, we studied past midnight almost every night. But that is a comparison of Exeter (for me) and a top New York City private school (for her). Possibly what has changed over the past 30 years is that the heavy workload has spread to suburban public schools.
I didn’t feel like the heavy workload did either of us any harm. Obviously some of the stuff I learned has been more useful than other stuff (e.g., Greek is useful because I can read the Bible in the original, whereas integration by parts is only useful for helping my daughter with her homework, which is sort of circular), but there’s no way to predict that for any given individual.
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You know, integration by parts is only useful for a small set of people. These days, most integration in practical use is done numerically, instead of analytically (the power of computing). I still think calculus is useful to learn because of the habits of analysis it provides, but a similar argument can be made for the reasons to study Greek.
Would be interesting to consider which gets used more by the sum of all people — ancient languages or calculus. I’m guessing it would be calculus, though, as you say, it varies among people.
Algebra, on the other hand, I use constantly in my daily life.
I do not think my kids have more homework than I did either, though I was more like my son than my daughter and, I didn’t do nearly as much in extracurriculars.
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I swear, I can’t remember if I had a lot of homework. I know I was never up late studying. Part of it, perhaps, was that if homework involved reading, it went very quickly for me. I am a fast and accurate reader.
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I too stayed up till midnight a lot with homework, especially in 9th and 10th grade while at my Catholic high school. This was the early 80’s. My parents had low quality high school educations so no help from them. But my sister and I did fine via a lot of time on the phone with our friends. Are the late nights due to chunks of time texting or talking with friends? Mine certainly were, minus texting. But by 9th grade my parents certainly weren’t going to police my bed time. And I and my friends all worked too, either babysitting or morning paper routes. I have to agree, I think that private school workloads have made it to UMC public schools. But I don’t remember being miserable during that time. I will say that more kids seem to play sports these days. I played no sports and am grateful no one cared in those days since I hated organized sports.
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I love bj’s quote! I see a lot of this at my school. I give basically no homework in my class. I might give them a short reading or ask them to finish up some class work, but I’d say the most homework I’ve ever given is about 20-30 minutes worth. I do work on trying to get my students to use class time effectively and have shifted my in-class work a little to make them more accountable. So, I have students show their progress on a lab to the whole class. I ask them questions about it both to make sure that they understand what they’re doing and to help those who are watching understand as well.
For my own children, I encourage balance. I don’t have them enrolled in 50 extra after-school activities. Their weekends are free. Geeky Girl has a fair amount of homework, but not an overwhelming amount. I think she doesn’t feel as anxious about it as some of her classmates because she’s not taking piano lessons, on a school and a league sports team, and doing volunteer work so that she can get into an ivy league school.
Geeky Boy got into a decent school without doing that well in high school. He’s doing okay (we think). He’s learning to shift more effort into school and away from fun, but still leaves room for fun. Life is short. Getting all As in high school is not going to guarantee a great life and getting Bs isn’t going to ruin your life. We need to get that message out more.
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I hear you. My son starts ninth grade next year and figuring out his schedule was somewhat depressing. I found myself in the position of advising him against taking the “enriched” classes… my thought was that many of them would only make a big difference if he were going to an Ivy League school, and he’d only have MAYBE a 20% chance of getting in even then, so why subject himself to advanced social studies (he hates history!) and skip an interesting science class (in favor of one that will give him more time to take additional AP classes later on)?
He opted for the more challenging schedule for the most part anyway, but at least he knows that if he wants to step down in future years, I’ll support him in that
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Biology seems to demand lots of memorization. Chemistry and Physics should be easier for a kid who’s strong in math.
Denise Clark Pope’s _Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students_ is worth reading. She shadowed high school students.
_The Overachievers_, by Alexandra Robbins, covers the same territory.
You might like Cal Newport’s _How to Be a High School Superstar: A Revolutionary Plan to Get into College by Standing Out (Without Burning Out)_. I’ve seen it referred to frequently. He does make a case for building free time into the high school student’s life.
That can be hard to do at a school which has an “honors” track and a non-honors track, and you’re either on the track in all subjects, or you’re off it.
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cranberry said:
“Biology seems to demand lots of memorization. Chemistry and Physics should be easier for a kid who’s strong in math.”
That’s a very good point.
My husband was a math/physics kid in high school and college, and he didn’t really need to study (and didn’t) until very late in his college career (at which point, he wiped out in quantum mechanics).
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Who do you want to hire, the B student who developed a life and learned skills outside of class or the A student? Guess it depends what you need, but I’d take the B+ hire.
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Well, as the answer is to what classes do you want (to the admissions director), the A’s in the regular track or the B’s in the AP, the answer is, you want A’s in the AP (though only a few schools will say that).
I want to hire the person who got A’s & has life skills and developed a life out of school (though I might not care that they know how to do laundry, I do care that they know how to manage their time).
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I was a dorky nerd in high school and got really good grades and got into a good school — but if I had to do it again, I think I would have gotten a few B’s and learned some social skills instead. I think I have experienced a fair greater detriment in life from being immature and having few social skills than I would have had from getting a few B’s. The data shows that people with B averages in college end up making more money than the A students. I think I understand how that works.
I have a kid who is now doing surprisingly well in college acceptances — despite the fact that he has not studied all that hard in high school. Of course, he plays the violin for five hours a day! (Apparently that can even cancel out low math grades. Who knew?)
As you get closer to the college application process, you may also come to see the complete randomness of the whole thing anyway, and this may confirm your suspicions that there really doesn’t seem to be a huge correlation between how many hours you study, how you do in college admissions and ultimately how you do in life. We’re seeing really weird stuff play out in our area in college admissions and the weirdest part of all is that almost uniformly the smart kids go where they get the most merit aid and therefore the kid we all thought was going to go to Annapolis didn’t get the nomination and instead is going to the University of Alabama which apparently lures kids from all over the US with whopping merit aid, etc. The kid whose mom is Canadian is going to McGill, somebody else got more money from a school in Minnesota than anywhere else, etc. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that if our kids actually knew that in the end they were going to end up at the University of Idaho, they might have been less keen to stay up all night studying. Your mileage may vary.
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I don’t think it’s random; other students and parents don’t see the applications, and we don’t see the test scores. I think there’s a bias against kids who have top grades, but so-so test scores, and no extracurricular activities. So, lots of hours studying doesn’t help with selective college admissions if it seems that that’s all you’ve done.
As in the AP, but leadership in ECs is more important than lots and lots of APs. This link from the MIT admissions blog is good to read: http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/on_aps_1
Let me state clearly: we do not admit students solely because of their AP courses/scores. There is no minimum or recommended number of AP courses. AP scores are not part of an admission formula. We’re not simply going to look at a weighted GPA and throw everything else out. Challenge yourself in a way that is reasonable for you, while making sure that your courseload provides your with material that keeps you excited and engaged, and that you have balance in your life. What we are saying is that, despite what you may have heard, college admissions isn’t a game of whoever has the most APs, wins.
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Biology shouldn’t feel like a lot of memorization if it’s taught right. There’s a beautiful story in most of the things you need to know about biology, and if the structure isn’t being taught, but the facts are, it’s not being taught right.
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Maybe not, but there are lots of terms for things which must be memorized. If the course aims to prepare students for the SAT II Bio test, it’s preparing for a multiple-choice test at the end.
(Aside to Laura: You should be able to ask the teacher if the Bio course prepares for the exam. If it does, he should take the SAT II test while it’s fresh in his mind. He should review bio terms in a prep book beforehand, to make certain his course covered the SAT II topics. The College Board sells a book which covers all the SAT II exams. )
My high school student and college freshman (when in high school) have had periods of working until after midnight. On the other hand, they had to do that in part because they were involved in so many activities–all of which they chose to do. And the current high school student loves to blow off time with friends in the dorm playing cards or watching movies. They work(ed) late because they’re building life skills.
It gets easier once they get to college, because they don’t have to be tippy top students in all things. They can choose their major.
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Yeah–somewhat later hours are very natural for adolescents.
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I know that’s what we’ve been told. The whole “adolescents have a different body time” thing.
BS. My eldest child’s college schedules events to start at 10 pm (!). A 9 am class is an “early class.” It seems to me that this generation reared on the belief that the little darlings need more sleep has basically the same distribution of time…it’s just been shifted to about 2 hours later. Instead of going to bed at 12, and getting up at 6, they’re going to bed at 2, and getting up at 8.
They’re not better students for the change, nor are they getting more sleep. They do represent a step towards a society which never sleeps (and is that a good thing?)
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Twenty five years ago, 9 am was still an early class. I don’t know about scheduled events. 10 pm was when we’d start drinking. I don’t think I ever got up by 8 am.
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From my daughter (9th grade, all honors classes, getting 90s in everything except English, where she gets 80s) (no snarking about the lack of caps being a reason):
“ok well i do lots of my homework at school or i don’t take my time on homework that is not worth a lot of points so my times may not count:
a few weeks ago i had only 0-1 hours of homework a night
this week i’ve had 2-3 hours, but sometimes i have more
if i have a big school project, i’ll usually take the weekend and have ~6 hours or more
at school today my health teacher asked the class how many hours a night we spend on homework and this girl said 3-6 hours and everyone agreed”
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My daughter is in grade three and this is what she has right now for homework: 15 minutes of reading to us each day, a half page creative writing assignment a week (takes an hour or two), a math word problem once a week (both solving it and then creating a new one in the same style) that takes a half hour.
The main difference from when I was a kid is the amount of extracurriculars – she’s in drama, gymnastics, soccer and karate. One of those will fall off the table within the next few years as the academic version of organized sports hits (for example serious streaming in soccer).
Throw in a few playdates plus wanting family time together and you have a week where planning is key.
I’m fine with homework at this age that needs daily practice (reading, math facts, etc). I don’t like homework that is better done in the classroom.
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Our 3rd grader seems to knock his homework out in about half an hour–there’s assigned reading, times tables practice, and maybe one more thing. He’s very efficient and focused because he feels stressed out until the work is done. When our 6th grader was that age, it was nonstop drama to get her through the assigned homework, with endless negotiations over appropriate amounts of break time between assignments (although, to be fair, I think she probably had more total homework).
The 6th grader lately says she’s been able to finish homework at school (presumably the motivation is that she wants to maximize her Minecraft time). That’s a little suspicious, but her last report card looked fine.
When I remember it, I also ask the kids to put away 20 items from their laundry baskets.
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As I recall, I also suddenly became much more organized, focused and school-oriented in 6th grade, so it may be that all those wonderful girl hormones are working their magic on our 6th grader’s work habits.
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presumably the motivation is that she wants to maximize her Minecraft time
I still can’t find a village or a carrot or wolf or a saddle. I just got some potatoes going.
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MH,
My daughter has built a replica of our house in Minecraft, right down to a chandelier and black-and-white floor in the playroom/dining room.
There’s always some sheep dying and saddle-making going on. My daughter sewed a version of this creeper in green fleece fabric with her sewing machine:
http://www.instructables.com/id/Minecraft-Stuffed-Creeper-Doll/step11/SSSSSSssssssssss/
The latest craze at our house is an old Ukrainian computer game called Cossacks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cossacks:_European_Wars
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You can’t make a saddle. You have to find it.
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Speaking to the laundry, what I DO like about homework is the discipline and responsibility. The girl has a little schedule that we put together about what happens on what days – she’s responsible for making sure that she has her gym strip M-W, writing for Thursday and math problem for Friday.
We also have chores for her to do – just trying to get across that we all pitch in to make a home together as a family.
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MH said:
“You can’t make a saddle. You have to find it.”
I bow to your expertise.
The kids tell me that the saddles can be used on either pigs or horses.
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You have to have a carrot to ride a pig and I can’t find one of those either.
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This is one of my favorite essays ever about homework.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/my-daughters-homework-is-killing-me/309514/
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I have the impression (just an impression) that the older teachers in the demanding courses are more realistic about homework loads. The courses are just as rigorous, if not more rigorous, than the courses taught by younger teachers. I think teachers learn from experience how much homework is enough.
In honors/AP courses, some younger teachers seem to fall into the trap of thinking that “preparing for college” must mean “producing a heavy workload,” i.e., assigning more work than necessary in the thought that time management through overwork is a valuable skill. Both my high school students have been savvy about asking other students for estimates of the workloads different teachers or courses demand.
For some of their proposed schedules, older students have given the feedback, “you can’t take those four courses at the same time–you’ll die.”
(This may not work well in a large suburban district, in which course placement is not predictable.)
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I found out from a h.s. teacher a dirty little secret that no one talks about. Parents help with the homework/projects all the time because few students can get all the work done in a reasonable period. Certain learning and work has to be done by the student for mastery, but the other….eh.
We had a B+/A- student who did 7-9 hours of homework every single night and 6-7 every Sat and Sun. S/he had no life. We helped (probably sometimes too much) but she got into a good/ good enough college, learned time management skills, and the ability to figure out what had to get done and what could be delegated. In college she is very successful, although her thirst for learning was almost quenched by the overwhelming and onerous h.s. experience. As a parent, unless you want your student to go to a top tier school, we have to step in and say “enough”, either to the student, or teachers and administration if it won’t backfire. Our mantra is “No one drowns on our watch”. Our student has internalized this message and stepped up when s/he has seen fellow students losing it.
Anononymous to avoid the haters (not that there are any/many here)
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Tutoring is another form of parent-supported cheating. Not tutoring for skills, but the sort of tutoring which gives an academic edge. The New York times and New York Magazine have articles on this sort of thing. There’s a private school in NYC which has a very famous, hard course which all students must take. According to the NYT, there are also tutors who have helped numerous students over the years with this paper–the tutors could probably write the paper. They know what the teachers like, what they don’t like–so it’s a really unethical supplement which renders the competition unfair.
Over the years, I have noticed a movement by some teachers away from projects coming home. That’s fine, except in comparison to earlier years, that means class instruction time is sacrificed. I don’t know if “flipping the classroom” via taped lectures makes up for it. A longer school year? I would favor moving grading towards being test and quiz based, rather than homework and project based, given the tendency for some parents to meddle.
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Jumping in as a 6th grade Language Arts teacher. I hate homework. I tell parents right off the bat that we don’t have a lot of homework. They immediately smile and breathe a sigh of relief. The only times that I think homework is necessary in the elementary grades is reading and reading practice (hard to monitor and I refuse to use one of those dreaded logs), writing practice (6th graders are just getting to the point where they have so much to say!), and math facts. If a student struggles in math, then the repetition of math problems can be a good thing.
Even though I rarely assign homework I have extremely high expectations in class and run my day with near military precision. The students are busy from the moment they come through the door until they walk out at 3. There is hardly a minute of free time/visiting time/etc. except for a daily 20 minute noon recess and the relaxed atmosphere of PE and art class. In exchange for this tight schedule, the students are rewarded for evenings free of homework, for the most part.
I have four children myself (18,16,14,12) and my theory is this: Teachers with school age children assign the LEAST amount of homework. Teachers that are single or newly married or near retirement assign the most. I found this to be truly at both high school and elementary levels.
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And here’s something else: One of my high schoolers is bright, but has to work very hard to maintain As and Bs. He is on the college level/advanced placement track this year. He is starting to feel stressed, particularly about calculus. The school sent home paperwork to help him decide what classes to take next year. We’re also looking at colleges and what classes he’ll need for his major (undecided…narrowed down to two). We realized that if he backs off the accelerated track and enjoys life a bit more because of the lack of stress, he will lose his entire friend group. All of his friends are in advanced classes. He attends a small school. Cliques were decided years ago. Should he plug along, possibly do poorly, and become even more stressed and stick with his friends or venture out on his own…enjoying classes and feeling confident academically, but basically friendless?
We’re trying to keep the big picture in mind and support whatever he chooses.
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My kid who’s now a university freshman went to high school with a cohort where 1 a.m. bedtime was the norm. IB was super-competitive and the work expectations unreal. Even with cutting sleep down to 5 hours, the kids couldn’t do it all and just blasted through what they had to at the last minute for many classes. It’s built a lot of bad habits with kids who continue the burn-out routine in university, and end up battling all sorts of other problems.
As a professor myself, I try to make realistic workloads for my courses that include helpful guides. Read the chapter with these study questions to focus your attention. Stop at this point and fill out this sheet so you have fodder for our in-class discussion.And, for God’s sake, if you’re hospitalized or in crisis, don’t try to keep up with my class assignments! Call me or drop me an email and we’ll put it all aside until you’re well and we can organize a recovery plan for the term’s coursework. Most individual high school teachers that I know gamely accommodate all sorts of problems but they can’t fight the system whereby the workload creeps up and up in line with assessment guidelines and standardized test preps.
We’re teaching subjects to students. We need to do it humanely. The problem with individual high school students opting out of the rate race and settling for the B when they could work their butts off for an A is that they won’t get the university offers that open doors later on. So they won’t step back if that means enough to them and, thus, it helps to perpetuate the system of homework abuse.
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McMegan reads your blog. But you knew that: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-20/go-ahead-let-your-kids-fail.html
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