Poll of the Day > Are you in favor of School Homework?

(+) Yeah! (+)

On one hand, it can be stressful and time-consuming, especially since students should be able to relax at home without worrying about school. On the other hand, it lets students learn at their own pace and teaches discipline and time management skills.

PikachuMaxwell posted...

students should be able to relax at home without worrying about school

No they shouldn't. Fuck them.

I don't freaking know. In theory homework is supposed to ensure you have retention of material, but that just made it a pointless waste of time for students who already had good retention, and a frustrating exercise for ones who never understood it in the first place. In an ideal world, I think we'd have better attention to student needs within the classroom to make sure they are retaining material, but we've been going backwards on that. Now I assume pretty much all homework is easily cheatable with the internet, which obviously defeats the purpose, but I don't expect that to be an impetus to change how we go about things in the classroom (certainly not here in America at least). Seems like we're headed down a road where new generations are/will be super dumb and we don't give a fuck about it, so yeah, again, I don't know about homework, not gonna make a difference either way at this point.

when I was in high school my teachers would brag about how much homework they gave and say at least an hour per subject was normal, except we had anywhere between 5-10 classes a day, so its possible to have 10 hours of homework due the next day depending on your class schedule. I do not believe 10 hours of homework on top of 8 hours of school was productive to learning.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

No they shouldn't. Fuck them.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/d/d4da58da.jpg

Done right, it helps to develop independent research and study skills. Done wrong, it's just the teacher's failure to cover everything during class and the students that are least capable of figuring it out on their own end up being the ones that are abandoned to figure out the most on their own (since more capable students get it done in class), causing them to fall further behind.

It's often done wrong.

Yeah. It seems a lot of parents are incapable of educating the kids and would rather just shove a tablet in the kids face to keep them quite.

There's been a big push in education for years that any work done outside of supervision shouldn't be taken for marks, as the person responsible for completing it can't be verified. The real kicker is that there are a large proportion of students that won't do any additional practice beyond what is done within class time, and therefore not assigning homework can lead to those students doing worse as they aren't practicing what they've learned, since they don't directly relate completing practice problems with preparing for exams.

"Homework", as in completing practice problems or conducting further research into a topic on your own time, has obvious benefits to student understanding of concepts. However it can lead to a disconnect between a reported grade and the true level of understanding a student has of the course material.

MomSpringfield posted...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/d/d4da58da.jpg

"Fuck the kids. Just don't, you know, fuck the kids."

---quote from a stand-up comic, whose name I can't remember right now (maybe Louis CK? Or Carlin?)



adjl posted...

It's often done wrong.

The problem is that most teaching is "done wrong", especially once tenure comes into play.

Which is why the argument that "kids don't need to do homework, they learn enough at school" tend to be flawed, because it assumes kids are learning anything in school, which many of them probably aren't.

Especially if they had teachers like some of the ones I did. Like the one teacher who just wrote "Turn to page 346, do problems 1-37" on the board, and then sat back and drank his coffee and read the newspaper (and never went over any of the problems he made us to do make sure we did them right). Or the one math teacher I had who would go "Oh, you all got this" and just spent most of the period taking about basketball.

There's a reason why I'm shit at most abstract math today.

If not for the fact that I actually had solid teachers in 1st and 3rd grade, I'd probably have trouble even adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing at this point.

Ideally, teaching should probably be specifically tailored to the individual student, how they learn best, and move at a place that allows them to keep up without letting them grow bored. But you're never going to get that until AI advances to the point where every student gets their own personal tutor rather than having actual classes. A large part of what hurts in modern day teaching is that teachers wind up teaching classes with like 30 kids, so it becomes impossible to ever adjust to help the stragglers.

But if we ever do get to the point where we all have our own personal Cortanas in our heads, we probably stop learning anyway, considering most studies tend to show that the moment the brain doesn't have to remember things, it won't. Being able to write stuff down killed our ability to remember things orally. Being able to use calculators in school hurt our math skills. Being able to program phone numbers into memory made most of us unable to remember anyone's phone number. Google and Wikipedia basically killed a lot of people's ability to retain trivial knowledge at all.



wwinterj25 posted...

Yeah. It seems a lot of parents are incapable of educating the kids and would rather just shove a tablet in the kids face to keep them quite.

The problem there is:

a) Most parents have been repeatedly told by society that it's not their job to teach their kids, because that's the point of the school system they're paying taxes into. So they're discouraged from accepting that's their responsibility in the first place.

b) Even if parents WANT to tutor their kids independently, most parents don't have the knowledge of how to do so effectively anyway, so they wouldn't necessarily make good teachers. Combined with the fact that many kids at a specific age will actively resist that sort of thing. I definitely avoided talking to my parents about school as much as possible, and if they ever asked if I was having trouble I'd just say everything was fine even when it definitely wasn't fine.

c) Even if we assume a situation where a parent both wants to help and has the ability to do so effectively, they may not have the time. A lot of families today have basically become two-income families by default, with parents not necessarily having a ton of free time to even interact with their kids at all (especially if those kids are doing extracurricular stuff like sports or socializing with friends).


When I was a kid my parents never would have been able to tutor me, because I was always way more advanced than my mom, and my dad (who had an actual teaching degree!) usually worked nights (and occasionally out-of-state), so I spent a lot of my childhood never seeing him. And I'd say kids today probably have it worse.

I never did homework, I still did great on tests.

Unfortunately my at the time school curriculum made homework 50% of the grade. Tests were only 10%. So I did well in the school and still failed.

It really solidified how the entire purpose of school was just daycare, it only served to waste kids' time and shut them up.

Shame because I always really enjoyed when teachers gave lectures. Hated when they made me do busywork.

Only if its held before or after school, thus not a mandatory part of everybodys day.

KJ_StErOiDs posted...

Only if its held before or after school, thus not a mandatory part of everybodys day.

???

Are you confusing homework with homeroom or something

Separate from homeroom.

That doesn't make it any clearer

faramir77 posted...

There's been a big push in education for years that any work done outside of supervision shouldn't be taken for marks, as the person responsible for completing it can't be verified. The real kicker is that there are a large proportion of students that won't do any additional practice beyond what is done within class time, and therefore not assigning homework can lead to those students doing worse as they aren't practicing what they've learned, since they don't directly relate completing practice problems with preparing for exams.

"Homework", as in completing practice problems or conducting further research into a topic on your own time, has obvious benefits to student understanding of concepts. However it can lead to a disconnect between a reported grade and the true level of understanding a student has of the course material.

If memory serves, you are a teacher, and what you're saying (which is what I was taught and do believe to be true) greatly changed my perception of homework and how I assign homework.

I treat homework(and regular class work) as just "practice", meaning that it's low stakes - students will not receive a grade based on how many questions they got correct.Homework and class work is only worth 10% of the total grade in my class. In class projects/labs, and assessments make up the rest of the grade (25 and 65 percent, respectively).

I don't assign homework every day, just two days a week, and I post the homework in advance. The homework should take students roughly 5-15 minutes to complete for my general population classes (advance classes are assigned more homework). The day the homework is due in class, we go over the problems and make sure that we understand the material, and what steps to take if we don't.

The goal of my homework policy was to disincentivize cheating - especially given how good ai has gotten. If students know that homework is to make them better at the concepts, and that even if you cheat on all homework assignments, you will still fail the class because you have no clue what you are doing.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Ideally, teaching should probably be specifically tailored to the individual student, how they learn best, and move at a place that allows them to keep up without letting them grow bored.

This is actually already a thing, at least in math/science. There are programs that assess your work, provide feedback, give you more practice problems if deemed necessary, and move you on to more difficult problems/topics if you show mastery of the current topic.

'No'

I would have said "I don't know", because my issue with homework (back in my day) was that in a worse case scenario you had up to six different subjects giving you assignments.

I said "No" in this poll because of A.I. advancements and maybe Chatgpt coming into play. At home, teachers can't watch the kids, and it is likely easy to get away with a little "help".

bachewychomp posted...

That doesn't make it any clearer

Detention maybe. There were some teachers that didn't let students do homework during detention.

VioletZer0 posted...

I never did homework, I still did great on tests.

I was the same. The problem is, that isn't necessarily a good thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUjYy4Ksy1E



To tl;dr it, you basically learned to memorize mostly useless facts but never learned how to actually work, which probably left you less capable of actually dealing with life after school as opposed to the kids who actually learned how to study and do the busywork.

Most schools deliberately put the brakes on gifted kids to "mainstream" you back into the pack with everyone else. I know my school absolutely did.

I remember watching that video, since I'm a resentful gifted kid myself, but I don't really relate at all to hitting the "wall" where studying and learning became hard. I do relate to feeling like I didn't achieve much out of my life, which I do think is connected, because a lot of it comes down to social soft skills, and I think the gifted kid labeling can be detrimental to social development.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Most schools deliberately put the brakes on gifted kids to "mainstream" you back into the pack with everyone else. I know my school absolutely did.

This is kind of true from my experience too. I do remember in elementary school they pulled me out of class once in a while for something called "Excel", which I recall was just a brief session where they did some slightly more abstract thought exercises. But if you were "gifted" they don't really do much to nurture that or find out what kind of track you should really be on. It kind of just ends up placing a "smart kid" label on you that ostracizes you from all the other kids who hate teacher's pets

I'd be in favor of it if schoolwork wasn't already as excessive as it is. Students are already overworked and over-stressed on top of dealing with social issues. Schools need to take things down a notch. At least that's how I saw things.

Do your own HW, PotD.

bachewychomp posted...

This is kind of true from my experience too. I do remember in elementary school they pulled me out of class once in a while for something called "Excel", which I recall was just a brief session where they did some slightly more abstract thought exercises. But if you were "gifted" they don't really do much to nurture that or find out what kind of track you should really be on. It kind of just ends up placing a "smart kid" label on you that ostracizes you from all the other kids who hate teacher's pets

We had something similar. Except it was called "ETC" for us.

It was technically two separate things - in kindergarten it was the "let's grab a few smart kids, throw them into a room, and get them to do abstract thought puzzles and outside-the-box stuff" deal. Then in first grade they basically had one day a week (mine was Monday) where they'd bus you to a different school (our district had like a dozen different elementary schools, and they'd bus all the smart kids from different schools to a central location) for half a day, and make you do higher-level logic and problem-solving stuff.

It also went a long way towards making me hate advanced programs, because it was run incredibly poorly, and generally felt like you were being punished for being too smart. They separated you from your friends, and threw you into classes with kids who were total strangers who you'd only see once a week (so you definitely weren't making new friends) - which is terrible and borderline torture for a shy introvert. You'd be expected to get on the right bus (out of a dozen or so) to go back to your original school (which was pretty fucking terrifying for a six-year old paranoid about winding up who the hell knows where if they made a mistake and got on the wrong bus), and once you got back you were forced into taking gym class with a different class than your own (because you missed your regularly scheduled gym class while you were at the other school, and NJ state law says you have to have gym class every day so they won't just let you miss it), so now you're YET AGAIN thrown into a group of kids you don't know being forced to participate in sports (which you probably suck at), so there's a high level of stress and embarrassment. And to top it off, because of how class scheduling works, you basically have to miss your weekly assigned Library period because the gym class they force you to take overlaps with when your class is going to the library (which was phenomenally stupid, because you'd think if there was one thing you'd want gifted kids to do, it's go to the library and read).

After the first few weeks I basically loathed it and wanted out. I told my teachers I wanted out and they said no. Then I pretty much begged my parents to let me quit and they had to go to the school to tell the teachers they didn't want me in the program (because my parents were awesome). The teachers tried to badger my parents into keeping me in the program but my father basically told them that if they didn't remove me there was going to be a serious fucking problem (because my parents were awesome).

So basically, their program for gifted kids essentially helped turn a kid who absolutely loved to learn into a little anti-authoritarian shit who had no respect for any of his teachers unless they "earned" it, because even at that age I realized just how much the people running the schools were complete fuck-ups (an opinion that has not changed over 40 years). It's a miracle the stress of it didn't give me PTSD, or absolutely kill any interest I had in ever learning on my own (fortunately, I still found self-motivated study to be fun and interesting, even if school almost never was).

On the plus side for them, all of their fuckery basically slowed me down so much, it let the other kids in my class catch up with me, so they basically succeeded in mainstreaming me backwards into normality. Whee!

If it weren't for homework, I probably would have been a straight A student instead of a "barely doing enough to pass" one.

Even 24 years out from high school, my philosophy has always been work like hell during school/work hours, but once you are out you don't so much as think about school/work again until you are back in the building. If you are giving me homework and I don't have a study hall between now and when it's due, it's never getting done.

Yes. It can be incredibly useful for learning.

However, we hay doesnt mean that all homework is good or that it cant be misused. I also dont believe in using it towards grades or punishing those that dont do it.

Homework was fine, it was all the assignments needing to be due in the same week/same day.

I don't know. I think it depends on situation.

Im a teacher. For kids, for base knowledge like language and writing, there needs to be repetition. Doing some of that every day is useful, but not at an unhealthy amount. I think principals need to coordinate with teachers on which classes prioritize homework over others (language and math should be vital, for example, where some other classes should give a minimum amount)

Independent study is important, helps kids to grow critical thinking skills (which you are all about to see in a few decades what growing up without said skills does to a person) and teaches them about the world around them.

Im glad I had good teachers. They usually gave me projects that I thought were dumb, but I still remember things from them. Im also glad I had teachers who pushed reading and writing.

Roachmeat posted...

'No'

I would have said "I don't know", because my issue with homework (back in my day) was that in a worse case scenario you had up to six different subjects giving you assignments.

I said "No" in this poll because of A.I. advancements and maybe Chatgpt coming into play. At home, teachers can't watch the kids, and it is likely easy to get away with a little "help".

Get ready for adults who just answered questions and cant apply any of it. There is a reason teachers told you to show your work, check for errors, or cite it.

VioletZer0 posted...

I never did homework, I still did great on tests.

Unfortunately my at the time school curriculum made homework 50% of the grade. Tests were only 10%. So I did well in the school and still failed.

It really solidified how the entire purpose of school was just daycare, it only served to waste kids' time and shut them up.

Shame because I always really enjoyed when teachers gave lectures. Hated when they made me do busywork.

Homework is (if you have a good teacher) for students to apply independent and critical thinking skills with the knowledge they gained before.

Tests often turn out to make students simply memorize answers and never apply them again. Or they are made as an end goal for students to latch on to, because without a goal, students wont do most work. I tried to be the cool teacher when I was new, and didnt give tests, and noticed that most of my students were just coasting (only the ones with experienced parents or truly driven students tried). Then I started giving very simple tests that were clear and easy to study for, and most of them started learning faster and actually applying stuff, sooooooo. Im really torn on it in the end haha..

_____Cait posted...

Tests often turn out to make students simply memorize answers and never apply them again.

There've also been multiple studies done that imply that cramming for tests is one of the worst ways to learn, because it dramatically hampers retention.

Basically, we learn what we need to know to pass, take the test, and immediately forget everything because our brain never really shifts the information to more long-term storage. Human brains are lazy, and will always take the path of least resistance if they can.

Meanwhile, the act of just taking notes in class improves retention, because writing things down encourages your brain to remember them better, even if you never actually look at your notes again. So the implication would be that homework - where you're forced to implement what you're supposed to learn - should tend to reinforce it even more via repetition.

The concept of each class giving an hour of work, each day, so that you are expected to do 8 more hours of school work once you are home, even if it's not needed, just because it's expected, offends me.

These days, I can really only frame things in terms of higher education, I'm just too far from being young.

If the work is required to keep up with the class, with the assumption that the class will be able to go faster if everybody puts the work in. Sure. Yes. Fine.

If it's the occasional assignment that checks for understanding, and is used by the teacher to judge if they have to do more work to help the students. Sure, fine, just don't use up too much of folks time doing it.

If it's just an excuse to be lazy, fek them, sideways, with a yardstick.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

There've also been multiple studies done that imply that cramming for tests is one of the worst ways to learn, because it dramatically hampers retention.

Basically, we learn what we need to know to pass, take the test, and immediately forget everything because our brain never really shifts the information to more long-term storage. Human brains are lazy, and will always take the path of least resistance if they can.

Meanwhile, the act of just taking notes in class improves retention, because writing things down encourages your brain to remember them better, even if you never actually look at your notes again. So the implication would be that homework - where you're forced to implement what you're supposed to learn - should tend to reinforce it even more via repetition.

Thats what Im saying

All studying (the learning part) should be done in school, in home you should revise all the work you did and prepare for tests and such.

Violet_Blooded posted...

All studying (the learning part) should be done in school, in home you should revise all the work you did and prepare for tests and such.

Its not always the most effective way to do things. Pre-learning can be hugely helpful in areas like mathematics.

Looking back on what courses I did well in and also what I retain most of today can be traced almost one on one to what I properly did my homework on. I've never had children myself, but it seems to have served its purpose where my adolescent mind permitted.

I don't mind the concept but we got way too much homework from every class and almost all of it was due the very next day. Some classes would give us a long term project, but still give us daily 1 hour+ homework on top of that. I have a hard time paying attention in classrooms, so reviewing the material at home and doing homework is the best way for me to learn and retain everything. If they toned the quantity down, then I wouldn't have a problem with it