My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/my-daughters-homework-is-killing-me/309514/

by e40 • 13 years ago

269 333 13 years ago

AmiiJewels• 13 years ago

I do not understand the authors conclusion: 'The more immersed I become in Esmee’s homework, the more reassured I am that the teachers, principals, and school-board members who are coming up with this curriculum are earnest about their work.' when his own Daughter's strategy boils down to :" Memorization, not rationalization" - She isn't learning, she isn't becoming "well rounded", she is memorizing information that will be useless past her next year of schooling.

Some of the things detailed sound horrible, A C because there was no answer column etc. The school sounds broken.

zachlatta• 13 years ago

It sounds like most middle/high schools.

corin_2• 13 years ago

Two counter-points I would make to your comment, without agreeing or disagreeing overall about the effectiveness of the teaching.

The first is that it is possible for the educators to be "earnest" and unsuccessful in their attempts.

The second is that "memorization not rtionalization" could well be the opinion of his daughter, not her educators. Sure, they should do their best to prevent this, but kids with good memories will often use this to shortcut learning. I received an A* grade for my GCSE French (school exams at age 16 in UK - although I took at 15) not because I was good at French, but because I had a good memory. The written paper for example was 50% essay, and thanks to teachers preparing us on what sort of topics to expect, I was prepared. I picked "write about a recent holiday" and wrote an entire essay from memory. As in, I'd written it weeks previously (in the case of this specific essay, I'd actually written it for the oral exam, for which I had to memorize it and speak it... a nice it of duplication luck for me!), but I could write it down word perfectly without any mistakes. Coincidentally I'm sat in a hotel room in Paris right now, having spent yesterday remembering how poor my French language is.

aidos4• 13 years ago

Ha! I did the same thing for History and English in NZ. We had 2 mock exams during the year leading up to the main one and I used all the same essays in all of them. My teachers weren't too pleased about it after the 2nd mock exam (and my English teacher actually failed me for it - though that didn't count) but I got a good final grade. Ironically my father is was teaching secondary school English and History at the time.

saulrh• 13 years ago

If you can do well on your science homework following "memorization not rationalization", your science homework is not preparing you to do science. Same with math.

joseph_cooney• 13 years ago

While I mostly agree with you, she is learning one very valuable thing - how to game the system, which should see her in good stead for the rest of her life.

mistercow7• 13 years ago

It will be useless far earlier than that, because this type of memorization leads to about 0% retention past the point of one or two weeks. And of course the situation completely precludes the possibility of using an effective memorization strategy, like spaced repetition, because there's no time to add that for every class on top of everything else.

rwallace4• 13 years ago

There comes a point when an institution becomes so badly broken that the only rational course of action is to get the hell out, and look elsewhere for a solution to your problems. It looks pretty clear from this article that the US school system is well past that point.

cookiecaper2• 13 years ago

Effective schooling could never occur on such a federated level. There's such a broad range of individual personalities and skills along varying axes that the idea of "let's put all the kids born within 10 months of each other in our geographic area in a classroom, and threaten force on people who don't want to cooperate" is never going to function well.

I hold the opinion that the proper training and education of one's offspring should be a foremost life goal, and that delegating it to the state because "it's easier", "I don't have the time", etc. is an abhorrent cop-out. The state likes this because it gives them an outlet which can be used to program 99% of the rising generation, but I see it as a serious and negligent discharge of fundamental parental responsibility. Please note that "education" means ensuring children learn correct principles -- it doesn't represent any specific extant construct or abstraction, like "high school" or "university graduation". For far too long these have been mechanisms of control. I say this as a successful high school dropout who has never enrolled in post-secondary courses.

The things mentioned in this article are utterly absurd, and as you noted, the fact that people allow their children to go through this for meaningless rewards is really weird. Does an "A" still hold that much sway? I long for the day when it will be recognized at its true worth, which is zero.

GabrielF00• 13 years ago

As a fellow high school dropout I sympathize with what you're saying, but I don't think it can be the basis for effective public policy. How many Americans have the ability to teach their children math, science, writing, history and civics at a high school level? How many American families have the time to provide children with anything close to the amount of hours of instruction available in schools? And what happens if we build an educational system that doesn't delegate education to the state, as you put it. That system might be fine for parents who have free time and/or can afford tutors, but what about everyone else? Public schools are far from perfect, but they provide vastly more equality of opportunity than existed in our society before their invention.

Wingman4l7• 13 years ago

I hold the opinion that the proper training and education of one's offspring should be a foremost life goal, and that delegating it to the state because "it's easier", "I don't have the time", etc. is an abhorrent cop-out.

This is one of the main reasons why I do not (and very well may never) have children; I realized that the commitment to do it properly is just too great for me to make.

rtpg2• 13 years ago

school isn't just about learning, it's also about meeting your peers. The last thing we need is even more social segregation because all the rich kids don't know what it's like to not be able to afford 3 homes.

flumbaps• 13 years ago

Effective schooling could never occur on such a federated level.

Really? You think that state run education is terrible all over the globe? I don't think the problems with the US system are universal. Certainly here in the UK, education is pretty good. The UK is smaller, but we're only talking a factor of five here.

Asking people to educate their own children is unrealistic. Teaching is not easy. Good teaching requires intelligence, skills, knowledge and understanding that most people don't have. Private tuition requires a lot of money, which most people don't have. You can claim these things are a cop-out, but I think you're being naive. You are a successful high school dropout. Which means you're probably very smart, motivated and independent. Most people are not like you. It's unrealistic to judge other people by your own standards. Most people need education while they are young in order to give them vitally important abstract thinking skills they simply wouldn't be able to figure out on their own. Most people are not capable of providing such an education for their own children. Education has always been a mechanism of control, but that's because most people need to be taught some measure of control. The people that don't need it can think for themselves anyway, so it doesn't matter.

bjterry2• 13 years ago

You may find this economics paper by Lant Pritchett to be interesting. It is one of the most enlightening I've read this year. It discusses the ways that a system wherein the state provides the majority of education services at every level of education fails to support the stated goals of education from an economic perspective (although that is actually not explicitly what he's trying to prove, which is that just because a schooling system exists a certain way doesn't mean that way is optimal, i.e. basically efficient markets hypothesis doesn't apply to provided government schooling). He makes the statement that he's not talking about developed economies, only developing, but it's transparently applicable to developed economies as well. This is one of the rare papers that teaches much more than it claims to.

1: https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/11943/1/ber-02...

imperio59• 13 years ago

She is not learning about what she is studying, she is learning to become a well trained parrot. Society has no use for parrots.

These kids need to be taught to look up the words they don't know in a dictionary appropriate to their age and gain an understanding of the new words they come across as they are studying. That is the only way to understand any subject one is studying. No amount of "guessing" or "memorizing" will replace an actual understanding of the words one is reading.

corin_2• 13 years ago

I completely agree that there are much better way to teach people things, but you're exaggerating in saying that memorizing isn't useful.

Take language as an example. Sure there are better ways to learn a language than just memorizing words. (That's debatable but I think most people would agree.) However there certainly is some use, still, in just memorizing things. For example, I don't speak French, but thanks to memorizing things I can at least know the basics I might need to get by (allowing me, last night, to buy a packet of cigarettes, ask for a menu, order a meal and the wine I wanted, from a bar owner who didn't speak a word of English, and I never even needed to point at anything!)

And in the rest of life, certain things just are useful if you memorize them. I have an events manager at work who doesn't know anything about computer networking, but he's picked up bits and pieces from colleagues to allow him to do things he is likely to need to do. He hasn't gained the experience of tinkering with linux, so give him a new problem and he won't figure it out, but there are certain things he can do on a linux server easily - and that's fine, nobody can be an expert in everything, everyone has areas where you just need to be able to get by.

cookiecaper2• 13 years ago

Society has no use for parrots.

In fact, society has a great use for "parrots" whose sense of rational processing is beat out of them, and are taught to keep their heads down and just swallow whatever their superior is cramming down their throat. It is certainly not a noble use, but without these many years of mandatory obedience training, the wage slavery upon which our lifestyle depends would suffer a severe lack of willing participants.

rwallace4• 13 years ago

That was certainly true in the Industrial Revolution, which was the time at and reason for which the education system as we know it was invented; the economy did actually need people who could spend all day every day fitting widget A into slot B without going mad from boredom. But as mechanical drudgery is progressively delegated to computers, leaving an economy desperate for people who can make plans and take the initiative, we should be progressively cutting down the education system, not allowing it to continue growing like a cancer.

stmchn• 13 years ago

I think this is an interesting point. I remember being so intimidated when I started my CS degree thinking that software developers just "know" all these things. Now, I know me and my co-workers look stuff up on Google all day long and it's not a big deal. But that's not something you learn to do in school.

In fact, I think there's some kind of stigma related to not knowing the answer without looking it up. The vast majority of my schooling at least involved a lot of memorization. As a student, you take a test which gauges how well you've memorized things for the most part and that's what determines your "worth" in terms of grades as a student. But that's not how the real world works. In reality, trivial things can be trivially looked up.

I think the results we get for our coding interviews are pretty telling. Everyone that applies for a software developer position where I work has to take an online assessment. They've got 30 minutes on 3 questions and it's made explicitly clear that you can look up information for it and give the sources. Out of the many people that have taken the quiz, only one or two people have given any sources. It's as if people think they'll be penalized for not knowing everything off the top of their head (which I guess is in fact the precedent in traditional whiteboard technical interviews).

pnathan4• 13 years ago

This is the official guideline from my local school district on average homework times:

K Occasional

1-2 15 minutes (M-Th)

3-5 30-60 minutes (M-Th)

6-8 30-90 minutes (M-Th)

9-12 60-120 minutes (M-S)

nja2• 13 years ago

Per class?

mistercow7• 13 years ago

Surely it can't be per class. Depending on the class schedule of the school, that would be suggesting that 8 hours of homework for a high school student was "within acceptable parameters".

pnathan4• 13 years ago

It doesn't say. But if you have 5 classes in high school, that would wind up to be a max of 10 hours of homework per night, a conclusion of about 15 hours of schooling per day. I would reckon that is not what is expected, so I read it as 'total'.

haldujai2• 13 years ago

The mode of homework time appears to be 3 hours a night during weekdays, this is considered unbearable/a lot? Growing up this was the norm for me. The school in question runs from 8:00 AM to 2:20 PM with a 45 minute lunch break, recesses and homeroom included. With 3 hours of studying that brings you to a total of 9 hours - breaks (I couldn't find a schedule). Assuming 8 hours of sleep, 1 hour for dinner, 2 hours of miscellaneous daily activities and 1 hour to get ready and eat breakfast in the morning you're left with 3 hours of your day left. As a 13 year old with parents that take care of a lot of your responsibilities that's not bad at all. Especially when you consider that this is a school that advertises academic rigor and not intended for your average student.

The only thing I agree with is that this school isn't doing a good job of educating if the student says "Memorization, not rationalization". While the homework appears to be monotonous my understanding was that this is because she is 13, it is important to build the foundation (i.e. comfort with numbers and reading dense literature) that will allow her to pursue more intellectually challenging courses in the future.

The only criticism I have of this system is that the author suggests none of the courses promote critical thinking and creativity. If this is the case then this is a problem, I would think at least 1/5 courses should do that. One of the biggest criticisms of the education system in China (I don't know if this is true but I hear it a lot) is that it promotes rote memorization (with exceptions), and this school appears to be doing the same.

Edit: All of this is predicated on the assumption that this student is academically capable of succeeding at this school. While it takes her 3 hours every night (5 hours max) this may not be the case for the average student, we don't know where she lies on the curve. Anecdotal evidence from some parents is obviously not enough to draw any conclusions.

Afforess5• 13 years ago

Yes. I reached college with 24 AP credits and a 31 ACT (never touched the SAT) 5 years ago and I did barely any homework (~1hr/week total). Instead I played a lot of video games, and when I was 17 taught myself how to program C++ to mod Civ4. I could never have learned programming had I not had tons of free time.

Homework is evil because it's a massive opportunity cost in terms of time.

Emass12• 13 years ago

You're forgetting transportation to and from school in your daily calculation, which could take up to an hour and a half total. And socialization which is non-negotiable. At least an hour for that? Oh and some people might need 9 hours of sleep, and another HN comment actually cited that this is recommended for a 13 year old. You see the problem with cutting it so close that homework just, just barely fits in the remaining hours of the day after all survival necessities have been taken care of? It's either complete the homework assignments or get enough sleep, not both. Is it really supposed to be that childhood is about nothing but school and homework? That seems atrocious to me. Basically you are advocating for a situation in which children trudge through the mechanical needs of the day simply to produce homework output, to be repeated ad nauseum day after day for most of their childhood. This is extremely unhealthy long term. This system eliminates any possibility of these kids exploring their interests and having fun, but that supposedly is not meaningful and too hand-wavy for some people. The author said of parents like that: "I tend not to get along with that type of parent."

neltnerb8• 13 years ago

I did an experiment in college where I tried to see just how much work I could take on and stay sane. I'm very successfully academically (PhD at 26 from a very respected institution), and I found that if I did not have at least eight hours of unscheduled, unplanned time to just do nothing useful it severely impacted my ability to perform on any task.

And I'm an extreme outlier in terms of innate skill, I say without intending it as pride. It's just reality.

Without time to decompress and be mindless, you are constantly building up stress and pressure until you lose overall performance capacity.

Tichy9• 13 years ago

I think studies found that around 8 hours of work per day are the optimum to maximize performance. That means firms, and also schools, take the best out of you. After having worked those 9 hours, forget about doing an interesting project of your own at home. Your best bet is chilling out in front of the TV.

I want my kid to be able to explore and discover things on his own. Sure, maybe 9 hours of school can be handled - but when will he discover and explore new things?

Goronmon3• 13 years ago

How about an example with more homework and my experience with times? Let's say 5 hours of homework on a particular night.

School runs from 7:30 to 2:15 with a 45 minute lunch break (no recess (you still get recess in 8th grade? I didn't) or homeroom as the bell rings at 7:30). Then football goes to 5:30. 15 minutes to drive home, so it's now 5:45. Decompress and eat dinner with the family and it's now 7. If I want to get up by 7 then I need to be asleep by midnight at the latest. If I had a 5 hour homework night then that's pretty much all the rest of my day gone, where a 3 hour homework night I have 2 hours remaining in the day.

My solution? I never did homework aside from the occasional last minute essay or project. By 7 I was mentally and physically exhausted and had no desire to put in anymore time for school.

I can't even imagine having nights where I had 5 hours of homework to do.

jon-wood• 13 years ago

What the hell? By my reckoning that makes a 16 hour day. Any time an article about working hours like that pops up here the overwhelming opinion seems to be that its unsustainable and results in bad things happening, and yet there are countless people defending the US school system.

NemesorZandrak• 13 years ago

When I was at school and that is not USA but Poland. We used to have 6-8 different subjects per day from biology, chemistry, geography, maths and history as examples. Everyone of this subjects converted to at least an hour of homework. What I learned as a kid is that it is impossible to learn all this things at home and I have to filter what is needed the most. Sometimes approximate and sometimes simply take the risk and just read rapidly the book and count on luck. This what most valuable lesson if learned at school. Some of the kids managed to do this 8 hour drill some like me had to adjust and focus on important stuff learn to filter. This gave me ability to play games and program.

VargardObyron2• 13 years ago

Same here. I think there is a massive overload of homework. School should focus on important bits but also don't leave general knowledge out of scope and going for full specialisation.

neltnerb8• 13 years ago

Thanks for the interesting perspective. I guess I was lucky in having teachers who were more concerned with aptitude than homework (luckily before no child left behind). Almost none of my homework was graded -- this seems to be a european thing? You'd know better than me. So I did the amount of homework needed to learn the material, and no more. Like college.

I do wonder if the big issue is that this approach can really burn kids out on cool areas. How many kids think math puzzles are fun in elementary school when taught as a game? I think actually a surprisingly high number. But when you turn it into work it's a totally different approach, and it really doesn't seem to work.

There seem to be some promising alternative possibilities, like Khan Academy, but when you're giving kids so much work that they can't read Feynman's lectures out of actual interest you're being counterproductive.

VargardObyron2• 13 years ago

There is no marks for having homework, there are only negative marks for not having it.

aidos4• 13 years ago

OT but early on there's a quote from the homework:

    "its [sic] significance"

Why is the sic in there? Is that not the correct use of 'its' in this context?

nja2• 13 years ago

I spent a minute looking at that too. I think the author inserted the [sic] because:

    "quotes [...] with 1–2 sentence analyses of its [sic] significance"

If the "its" is referring to the quotes, it should be "their significance".

aidos4• 13 years ago

Ah, of course. Thanks both.

cperciva• 13 years ago

The start of that sentence mentions finding three quotes, so it should be their significance.

Zecc• 13 years ago

Your interpretation explain the use of "[sic]".

But personally I think the "its" refers to the section and not the quotes, making the "[sic]" unnecessary. But I don't have access to the original text.

acabal• 13 years ago

What stood out for me from this article wasn't the homework load, which only seems slightly more than what I remember from my own youth, but rather that:

1) a teacher can accuse a parent of "cyberbullying" for an email sent in purported confidentiality to others, and that the claim can be taken seriously. Obviously I didn't read the email, but the author seems well-read and reasonable, so I'm inclined to conjecture that whatever he sent wasn't outrageous. If I as a parent were "called in to the vice principal's office" and accused of cyberbullying a teacher, I'd laugh in their face. Is this teacher teaching middle school, or in middle school?

2) that the parent is having constant meetings with school officials, and seemingly-frequent interaction with other parents via email. Granted in my days (mid-90's or so) email wasn't a big thing, but my parents typically took the hands-off stand of "did the teacher say so? then do it", plus the occasional PTA meeting. (They did help when asked, but I can probably count all the face-to-face meetings they had with school faculty on one hand). And that's a stance I can very much appreciate. I don't know what parent-teacher relationships are like today, but it sure sounds like the teachers are hearing almost as much from the parents as they are from the students.

Which isn't to say the system can't be improved. But honestly I remember nearly as much homework from my days, and those points stuck out more to me as a sign of the times.

dylangs1030• 13 years ago

Totally agree, especially with your second point. Both my parents are career educators (teachers, counselors and now professors). They personally tell me about how "helicopter parenting" has increased in the time since they've gotten their degrees up to now.

Parents are getting more and more involved (read: obsessive) about their childrens' education, sometimes to the detriment of the school process. Very often they'll blame teachers when their kids don't do well in class (not necessarily incorrect). My mother works in the inner city - parents there tend to be ambivalent about their childrens' progress unless they are relatively affluent, from what I've seen.

On the other hand, my father works in a suburban private school, and the parents there push back much more often, especially when they aren't right.

I can't say whether or not it's good or bad, but the climate of education in America has shifted from one of parents surrendering their kids and trusting the teachers to one of parents questioning the teachers when kids don't do well. Very curious.

girvo6• 13 years ago

    > Very often they'll blame teachers when their kids don't do well in class 
    > (not necessarily incorrect)

That's not a new phenomenon, imo, but it's still a pertinent one.

Parents being involved in their kids schooling isn't inherently bad, but it can be taken too far. Just like the kids have limited time to be able to handle 5 hours of homework a night (!), teachers have limited time to handle every parent.

That said, the fact it was done a lot through email is kinda neat, and would possibly make parent-teacher interactions scale better?

ronaldx4• 13 years ago

As a teacher, I far prefer to have parents who are involved in their kids' education, than the parents who are not involved.

There's a correlation between affluence and parent involvement, yes, but there's a stronger correlation between parent involvement and pupil engagement/learning.

Edited to add: Helicopter parenting is often a symptom of poor communication between the school and the parent - better and happier personal communication tends to resolve tension.

girvo6• 13 years ago

Oh gosh, I would have been absolutely ropeable if the principal had accused me of "cyber-bullying" in that manner. That is entirely, utterly, disgustingly bullshit.

And it doesn't surprise me. Surely it's the bias that is put forward by news media, but the stories that I hear of the American education system scares the shit out of me -- and I went to school in Queensland (which is terrible in and of itself)!

Zero-tolerance, "5 hours of homework a night isn't doing any harm"... what the hell. Who comes up with this shit :/

madaxe3• 13 years ago

I had the benefit of attending the British, German, and American school systems.

Schooling in America has little to do with education, and much to do with indoctrination.

Pretty much the only thing I learned was the pledge of allegiance - over which I repeatedly got suspended, as I refused to recite it along with the rest of the class, every morning.

Everything else they "taught" was years behind what I'd been learning elsewhere, and none of it was teaching - it was all just OBEY. I used to kick like a mule whenever they tried to teach us something factually incorrect by rote - and got in trouble for it.

THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!

tptacek12• 13 years ago

The "cyber-bullying" thing seemed janky when I read it. We don't know exactly what he wrote to the other parents, or the tone of the conversation they had. We know that one parent was alarmed enough by the conversation to (apparently) forward it to the school administration. It may have been nastier than the author is crediting it for.

Schwolop• 13 years ago

I suspect from the context that the journalist's email(s) was/were fine but that replies from other parents may have been less appropriate.

chiph• 13 years ago

This is the same teacher who gave his child a C on an assignment because they didn't put their answers in a separate column. Granted, we only have one side of the conversations, but I wouldn't rule out the chance of the teacher being petty & vindictive.

greenyoda• 13 years ago

"We know that one parent was alarmed enough by the conversation to (apparently) forward it to the school administration.'

There is no evidence that the parent who forwarded the e-mail to the teacher (not the school administration; apparently the teacher did that) was "alarmed" by it. They merely disagreed with it. Here's the quote from the article:

"Back in California, when I raised the issue of too much homework on that e‑mail chain, about half the parents were pleased that someone had brought this up, and many had already spoken to the math teacher about it. Others were eager to approach school officials. But at least one parent didn’t agree, and forwarded the whole exchange to the teacher in question."

scotty792• 13 years ago

Especially funny is criterion that makes it cyberbullying:

the teacher felt threatened

Am I supposed not to sneeze if the person is afraid of loud noises? Am I supposed to say he's doing great job (if he's not) just because he feels insecure there and feels threatened by any critique?

They only reason they were able to pull this of with straight face is because "cyber" becomes to mean "sinister"

tedunangst• 13 years ago

"Reasonable person" standard.

mathattack7• 13 years ago

Times have changed. Every kid today is special. :-)

My observation is in a hyper-competitive city like NY, the parents do bad together against the teachers of administration if they feel slighted. There's a lot of jostling for position amongst parents, who each want someone else to air their concerns, because they don't want to seem like the problem parent.

egwor• 13 years ago

Welcome to the educated new world; where education matters. One thing to consider; perhaps the child shouldn't be in that class/level or school? Perhaps their previous school didn't cover the material so this is all base stuff for everyone else?

If it takes you 3-5hrs to do something and you want to sleep before midnight, start earlier. Perhaps when less tired it would be quicker.

I used to have homework that could take me between 30 mins and 2.5 hrs each day (7 days a week). I started when I came in from school and had a break for some tv and then finished to have time to do other things. You learn how to be faster at the homework. When I was 16-18 I most probably spent longer still

I used to have enough time to walk home from school, watch tv, play sport, play trumpet and do that work. Also, at lunch time there is usually time to do some work. We used to collaborate on some stuff too.

voyou• 13 years ago

"Welcome to the educated new world; where education matters."

Right. So why is this school wasting children's time and energy with busywork, rather than teaching them effectively during the allotted time at school?

smsm423• 13 years ago

Because what matters is not effectiveness, what matters is "being educated". I.e. passing through the process of education and having a paper to prove it. That's what HR depts are checking.

vacri3• 13 years ago

There are some concepts at odds here. "The measurements included numbers like 78 13/64, and all this multiplying and dividing was to be done without a calculator." is not 'rote learning'/'memorisation without rationalisation'. It's directly exercising an ability. I've had a university-level experience reach for her calculator to multiply 0.2 by 3, and when I forbade her from using it, she just stared dumbly at me. That someone of that age can't do that multiplication 'automatically' was quite a surprise, especially given that it was a science course.

Similarly, finding the distances between state capitals exercises research and application skills, and gives a feeling for geographical distances. Doing it in miles and kilometers is helping to get people accustomed to using the Standard International set of units alongside the archaic Imperial units. Likewise, a journalist finding scientific mathematical notation 'unintuitive' doesn't mean it has no merit.

The workload is ridiculous, absolutely, but the content of the homework doesn't sound as useless as the article makes it out to be.

rtpg2• 13 years ago

I spent a lot of time up until high school forcing myself not to use a calculator, because I wanted to work on my mental skills in arithmetic, but I always make a lot of small mistakes, even now.

I have a hard enough time concentrating on 'easy' things , please don't ask me to hold numbers in my brain. I am a pretty "mathy" person but mental multiplication is not meant for the human thought process, too much is going on.

I say this half in jest, but I've met people with very good mathematical sense (especially in domains such as topology) who are incapable of multiplying 3 numbers without making a mistake. Some people have very few registers, and RAM is really slow.

anigbrowl4• 13 years ago

That's like saying humans were never meant to run up stairs so you're taking the elevator. In any case, nobody's asking yo to hold numbers in your brain; it's OK to use paper and pencil for your calculations, as generation after generation of mathematicians did.

vacri3• 13 years ago

To be fair, I don't hold her to be the slightest bit representative, it's just that such a simple mathematical process is just... automatic. I'm not mathy at all - I've abandoned several online crypto intro courses because I can't follow at a reasonable speed when the notation comes out - but when it comes to manipulating single-digit numbers?

In her case it was significantly affected by her lack of motivation, but it was just plain odd that such a trivial thing wasn't 'automatic' for someone in a science course (the actual question was calculating V=IR). I had to simplify it with "Well, what's 2x3?", and then, 'given the answer', she could continue.

neltnerb8• 13 years ago

I think a good part of the problem is that we learn to multiply and divide backwards. The standard US algorithm involves starting at the least significant digit and working your way up. It is much easier to do in your head if you do it from the most significant digit down. Or learn to convert hard multiplications into easy ones, for instance:

9x27 = 10x27-27 = 243

The other way to do this would be to multiply 9x7 to get 63, and then hold that in your head while you multiply 9x2 to get 18, add a zero to get 180, and then recall the 63 to add to 180.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgw9Ik5ZGaY

Basically, to do MSB multiplication it looks like:

27x16 = 27x10 + 20x6 + 7x6 = 270+120+42 = 432

We can do accumulators much more easily from big numbers and then adjusting with small corrections than we can the reverse.

kaybe• 13 years ago

It's a well-known fact here that mathematicians can't do calculations. I've had professors in class ask the class to do very simple calculations for their complex examples for them. (Or they get it wrong. A lot.)

comex4• 13 years ago

One comment: there's a difference between mental arithmetic, which is as useful as ever to be able to perform quickly/effectively, and the pen-and-paper variant (which I assume the cited assignment required), which is not. Everyone should, of course, know how to do the latter, but doing long pen-and-paper operations usually doesn't save time over reaching for a calculator, and is error-prone. Unfortunately, schools (at least here) seem to endlessly practice pen-and-paper while giving essentially zero attention to mental arithmetic.

Tichy9• 13 years ago

Do calculators even routinely work with infinite precision (like (sqrt(2) x sqrt(2) = 2)? I guess you could achieve some results with Mathematia or something like that, but I have my doubts about the average calculator.

Sometimes it is still useful to do calculations by hand, also to understand what is going on.

(Edit: just tested the OS X calculator, sqrt(2) x sqrt(2) works out by chance, but sqrt(200) x sqrt(200) fails).

girvo6• 13 years ago

Oddly enough, I like doing maths by hand. Pencil and paper were my friend throughout all of high-school and university (Maths and Chem co-major).

Something about it being tangible makes me appreciate and understand the process better. I then check my answer with the calculator :)

pantalaimon• 13 years ago

there's a difference between mental arithmetic, […] and the pen-and-paper variant, which is not

Until you are working with variables.

mistercow7• 13 years ago

I have to disagree with this a little bit. The skills you use for mental arithmetic are very similar to the skills for pen and paper. I would view pen and paper as training wheels.

It might be argued that mental arithmetic should also at least be taught, but the only way I know of to do that which will tend to generalize to a majority of students is to teach them to use an abacus (seasoned abacus users eventually stop needing to actually have the physical device). And yes, we should almost definitely be teaching children how to use an abacus.

yardie2• 13 years ago

When I got to university the calculus instructor told us "we could use calculators, but they're going to be worthless" sure enough we only had symbols with a few numbers used as filler, but nothing you couldn't work out in your head. ie. (5x+2)^-3n

tudorw• 13 years ago

Six and a half hours sleep, this is way too low, Millpond Children’s Sleep Clinic recommends over nine for a 13yr old. http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Childrenssleep/Pages/howmuchsleep...

EvanAnderson• 13 years ago

This is what jumped out at me, too. There are studies linking obesity, poor school performance, and problems with emotional control (just to name a few) to lack of sleep in children. Having to stay up late to do homework seems counterproductive.

Afforess5• 13 years ago

I once asked a vice principal (way back, 10 yrs ago) why schools started so early when lack of sleep was known to be bad. He said it was so there was time for sports in the evening. If you started at 10 or 11 school would run until 6 and it would start getting dark.

Sports are why kids sleep is ruined.

comex4• 13 years ago

Maybe, but when I was a teenager, at least, starting at 8 or 10 would make no difference to me - I would just tend to fall asleep 2 hours later. At least in some cases, the real issue is the number of waking hours in a day demanded of a student.

Glyptodon• 13 years ago

It's sports and so parents can drop them off before work. Both play a role.

Tichy9• 13 years ago

I think it's mostly parents who want to be at work in time.

girvo6• 13 years ago

A boys school actually did a test where they started the school day at 10.30am, and nearly every teenagers grades improved, sometimes dramatically.

I wish I could find that reference, but it proved to me what I knew: I really would've done better if I'd not had to get up at 6.30am so I could walk the hour to school (both parents worked).

ja27• 13 years ago

When I drop my daughter off at 6:45 AM (school starts at 7:30), sometimes their football team is out on the field practicing under lights.

tptacek12• 13 years ago

I agree and felt bad for the kid. Why is she being allowed to stay up until midnight doing homework?

code_duck2• 13 years ago

My high school in Connecticut declared that you should spend 1 hour doing homework for each academic class every day, which adds up to 12 hours each day focused on attending school, or more. I have no idea why this sounds reasonable to administrators and teachers.

The idea of 'memorization' as learning has always bothered me... The most reliable long-term way to recall things is to learn and comprehend them.

mgkimsal• 13 years ago

Couple of thoughts:

There's some things that need to be memorized - basic multiplication tables - I memorized those (9*8, etc). Basic articles/phrases in Spanish. Some basic world/state capitals, etc. But at some point memorization doesn't get you anything any more (except passing a test, maybe) - memorizing a few basic building blocks helps for the larger problems, and eventually the truisms of the building blocks become apparent (if there are any - capitals doesn't matter).

On 12 hours per day - some of the teachers I know definitely put in that amount of time, on average (grading homework, meeting with parents, planning, etc). They may be thinking "If I'm doing it, so can they", but... The teachers already KNOW their stuff - they're not LEARNING for the most part - they're doing the job of a professional. The student, by definition, is not a master at any of this stuff. A 12 hour effort, day in day out, by students, is simply going to wear most of them down.

This seems like a simple scheduling thing - teachers could coordinate between themselves better, individually or by subject - to stagger workloads effectively. Foreign language may get to pile on big assignments on Mondays, Sciences on Tuesdays, etc., with an understanding of minimal homework requirements the rest of the time. But if "read 79 pages and do a one page summary of 3 topics from it" is considered "minimal", there are bigger judgement issues going on.

code_duck2• 13 years ago

I think the results of multiplication of small integers should be remembered from frequent use, rather than explicitly committed to memory. Acting as if these values are a member of a group that must be memorized like state names, as if they are arbitrary, distances students from understanding that they can easily determine a multiplication result by calculation if they don't know it (or 'remember' it).

I think we might be working from a different idea of what memorization means. I associate it with a truly rote impression of abstract strings with no attempt at comprehension of their meanings individually (as alluded to in the article). I'd think something like Spanish phrases require comprehension to be used.

Definitely one problem was lack of coordination between teachers in the area of homework load; sometimes teachers would arbitrarily declare that we needed to be spending twice as much time on their class for a period of time.

I suppose teachers may think the student workload is reasonable because they have their own. Overall I think that would reflect a lack of understanding that it's improper to expect another person's child's world to be almost entirely composed of your governments school plan. Academically, I learned far more outside of school reading and programming on my own, and in music lessons outside of school. The teacher is being compensated monetarily for their time and that is his or her choice.

anigbrowl4• 13 years ago

So much whining. These tasks represent actual problems you might be tasked with finding out in the real world; not all of them are directly relevant to students or their utility immediately apparent, but the mothodologies are solid. Growing up in Ireland and going to high school int he 80s, I was doing 3-4 hours/night of homework from the equivalent of your grade 7, and I still found time to watch TV and read for pleasure each evening.

I laughed out loud at the author's complaint that math homework involved doing a lot of calculation without the aid of a calculator. Well yes, that is how you develop math feel. Using a calculator is great, and appropriate in later math classes, but training in mechanistic tasks is important too, for the same reason that athletic exercise involves a good deal of repetition and practice.

It's the same reason musicians play scales every day - it's not because they don't care about the theoretical underpinnings, it's because performance depends on practice. Likewise, understanding the mechanics of a tennis ball hitting a racket won't make you into a good tennis player, and understanding how to punch something into a calculator won't help you develop your mental math skills.

What I am interested in is what my daughter is doing during those nightly hours between 8 o’clock and midnight

Why are you letting her wait until 8pm to start homework? Start at 6, done by 9.

I don’t remember how much homework was assigned to me in eighth grade. I do know that I didn’t do very much of it and that what little I did, I did badly. My study habits were atrocious. After school I often went to friends’ houses, where I sometimes smoked marijuana, and then I returned home for dinner; after lying to my parents about not having homework that night, I might have caught an hour or two of television.

And look at the results: simple problems like calculating the area and perimeter of complex shapes just seem too, too hard for your poor brain. Instead you have the mental equivalent of a beer gut.

Afforess5• 13 years ago

You clearly are very isolated from the world. Even if the author had a good math experience, polynomials do not appear in everyday problems.

As for the start time, likely she is involved in extra-curricular activities, like cheerleading or sports.

I wouldn't judge so harshly.

anigbrowl4• 13 years ago

I can't believe I'm reading someone on hacker news saying 'polynomials don't appear in everyday problems.'

As for the start time, likely she is involved in extra-curricular activities, like cheerleading or sports.

5 nights a week? Not buying it. I don't think I'm isolated from the world at all; I managed to deal with a heavy homework load and still have plenty of fun and get into various sorts of trouble (often at the same time) as a teenager.

neltnerb8• 13 years ago

This is ridiculous. You can't learn when sleep-deprived.

And god forbid you have hobbies. I was on the tennis team in high school, and often didn't get home until 8pm, much less have dinner. If I had 3 hours of homework after dinner, I'm up until midnight and had to catch the bus to school waking up at 5:45am.

Yes, that means I am in school from effectively 5:45am until 8pm in the US. Yes, that is a 14 hour work day. If you asked kids to only be at school 8 hours maximum, including "fitness" and "leadership building" and "enrichment" exercises like athletics and clubs, 3-5 hours of homework might be reasonable. 8 hours actively in school, 5 hours of homework, 2 hours for dinner and relaxing, and you still get 9 hours of sleep.

That is not sustainable. The only reason kids can manage it is that they have way more stamina than I do now. If I was asked now to repeat high school, I wouldn't be willing to put up with it.

anigbrowl4• 13 years ago

I had plenty of hobbies a teenager. Maybe what people need is fewer resume-stuffing directed extracurricular activities, more free time, and starting school an hour later. We used to do 7 hours of school (9-4), 3-4 hours of homework, and had 1-2 evenings a week of structured extracurricular activities. And, no, you're not in school from the moment you wake up, although I do think American schools start stupidly early and then keep the kids in stupidly late.

6d0debc0712• 13 years ago

I laughed out loud at the author's complaint that math homework involved doing a lot of calculation without the aid of a calculator. Well yes, that is how you develop math feel.

IIRC historically, mathematical algorithms used to be encoded as a handful of steps, so that people could do them on abacuses and the like without understanding what they were using.

Just sitting there crunching numbers by hand won't give you a feeling for maths. - Or the ability to approximate well, which is the real thing. That's a selection of tricks to do with multiplication and division that'll get you into the right ballpark.

That's something that can be encoded and taught as its own skill, spending ages doing things by hand in the hope that people will hit on that skill for themselves ain't it.

ygra2• 13 years ago

I don't recall similar homework loads (Germany, school being 10–20 years ago), but that might be due to laziness on my part or simply the fact that it wasn't a good time for me anyway. By the later grades (11th and onwards) it definitely wasn't as much.

I liked what our math teacher said regarding his homework: It's for practice and not strictly needed and thus voluntary. If we feel confident doing the homework ad-hoc on the blackboard in class then we don't need to do it at home. While this won't work for every class (e.g. I guess languages don't really work that way), it was definitely nicer than having to unconditionally do the homework (as well as all the rest).

I’ve often suspected that teachers don’t have any idea about the cumulative amount of homework the kids are assigned when they are taking five academic classes. There is little to no coordination among teachers in most schools when it comes to assignments and test dates.

This is something my mother (a teacher) can confirm as well. Many teachers just assume that they're the only ones giving homework and thus don't really see why it can be so much. That was a problem in uni as well sometimes in the earlier years (and anecdotally the norm by now that we have the Bachelor/Master system, depending on your major).

mcv• 13 years ago

I have no idea how much homework I used to get (Netherland in the '80s), because I never did any. I was lazy and got excellent grades anyway. Well, not for languages, where you did have to memorize lots of stuff (rather than rationalize, which I'm much better at), so I dropped my languages as soon as I could.

My not doing any math homework did get me in trouble when I was 17 (5th class (penultimate before graduation) middle school in the Dutch system), because integration meant memorizing all those standard primitives and having used them a lot, and not having practiced them a hundred times meant failing grades for me. A year later math moved on to geometry and I got perfect grades and finished my homework during class for the first time ever.

I think it would have been better for me if I'd learned to do my homework; I never really learned to work during school, which might actually be a more important skill than all the stuff it seems to be teaching.

But reading 79 pages in a single evening? I hope it's a really easy book, because in anything moderately serious, that would take me a week. Oh yeah, required literature reading put me off of reading for a couple of years. (Until I discovered Terry Pratchett, i fact.)

jalada• 13 years ago

Also strongly agree with the second point about lack of coordination among teachers in schools and university. It really, really annoys me.

girvo6• 13 years ago

Homework for me (I'm 22) while at highschool was mandatory and contributed to your overall mark.

I never did mine. Like, at all.

Luckily for me, I had the highest grades across my entire year, and did so well that they bent the rules for me and ignored the fact I never did my homework.

Still not sure if that was a good thing or not to be honest, our workload wasn't that large, and it took me a while to build a work ethic.

tptacek12• 13 years ago

I did no homework at all in high school. Jesuit college prep, high workload, homework part of the grade. I got bad grades across the board, and, in math, that was in part because I wasn't practicing the skills they were testing; I left high school with subpar math, which still haunts me.

Bad grades kept me (pretty much) out of college, which in my case was fortunate, because I graduated high school with a couple years in which to warm up for the first dot-com bubble, which was lucrative for me.

I too feel like I had to learn a work ethic "in the real world", which is less forgiving than school, and I think I would have been modestly better off had I done the homework --- except that I might have ended up in college.

klmr• 13 years ago

School in Germany also doesn’t last the whole day, it usually ends around 2pm, so even if you have several hours’ worth of homework you can realistically do that before dinner – or, if you prefer, spend the afternoon doing other stuff and then do it after. It was a workable system. Then I moved to France, where school lasts until 5pm and I got home past 6. After a few months spent working until well into the night I stopped doing most of my homework to get enough sleep. Doing anything else during the week if you were actually doing your homework conscientiously wasn’t possible at all.

ygra2• 13 years ago

We regularly had school until past 14, sometimes up until 18. Seven to ten classes a day were more normal than just six (which would have ended at 13:40).

Al-Khwarizmi• 13 years ago

Wow. Everyone in the thread seems to have gotten lots of homework in their youth. In my case, I went to both a private and a public school (in Spain) and the homework load was probably like half an hour a day, in both cases. In high school it was a bit more, maybe 45 minutes, the main difference was that in high school studying the day before the exam was usually not enough.

I remember that my mother used to be worried that I would have problems at university, because there I would have to work a lot of hours per day, and I wasn't getting used to that at school. Well, I did have to work a lot of hours per day at university, but I did perfectly fine. And I'm grateful that I had time during my school and high school years to write stories, make drawings, learn C and C++, write games, compose some music, etc... unlike the poor girl in the article!

zanny2• 13 years ago

When I was in High school (especially my senior year) I'd schedule study halls at the end of the day, and spend lunch in the study hall, to do homework on-site so I didn't have any at home.

Pretty much straight A's that year, and I took 4 AP courses I got a minimum of a 4 on.

jeltz2• 13 years ago

My experience from Swedish schools is rather similar. While my memory isn't perfect 30 minutes per day is a reasonable guess. It could have been 1 hour max.

mcphilip4• 13 years ago

I was homeschooled K-12. My days consisted largely of 1-2 hours of bible study with my 3 brothers followed by a few hours on my own working through a set number of pages in math, science, literature, etc textbooks. I'd usually get done by 2 and then play Nintendo until friends got home from school.

I was never tested in homeschool. There were no grades or report cards. The only accountability was mom checking that the assignments were done. My first real test was the PSAT. As part of applying to college, my mom had to make up high school grades for the transcript.

I scored decently on the SAT and got accepted into a university. College was relatively a breeze since I had spent all my grade school years teaching things to myself - college was just an extension of this method of learning.

While there are plenty of good arguments against homeschooling, I feel lucky to have been brought up in an environment where education did not have a competitive aspect requiring 8-12 hours of work a day.

zanny2• 13 years ago

Also, you can move at your own pace. I'm sure nobody would work at a company where some terrible nephew who didn't know anything about computing was hired, and where everyone is assigned a random bug report to fix each day, but nobody could leave until the nephew pushed to upstream. So you might finish your daily bug in an hour, but now have to sit around waiting (without Internet access or the ability to leave your cubicle or converse with anyone) until hes done.

alt_f44• 13 years ago

You lost me at the emphasis on 1-2 hours of bible study.

jessaustin• 13 years ago

What valuable insight does this comment add to the conversation?

dcre• 13 years ago

Oh, come on.

mcphilip4• 13 years ago

I mentioned the bible study to highlight how I only spent 3 or 4 hours on real schoolwork a day and still somehow managed to get an education.

pc862• 13 years ago

Believe it or not, some families are religious. That's not necessarily a bad thing, even when that translates to structured education.

callmeed• 13 years ago

This might be a weird question and totally based on anecdotes but: are you a good speller?

I have a lot of friends who were homeschooled and/or homeschool their kids. I've also hired some and gone to school with some. One thing I noticed about several of them is they're bad at spelling. I've always wondered why.

joshuahedlund• 13 years ago

Probably anecdotal. In my (also anecdotal) experience homeschoolers tend to read more and be more likely to participate in spelling bees.

archon2• 13 years ago

I was homeschooled and have many once-homeschooled friends, and the ratio of bad spellers is about normal in my experience.

mcphilip4• 13 years ago

I'm a decent speller. I was homeschooled starting in the mid eighties, so coursework was done mostly away from the computer (i.e. no autocorrect crutch). Also, my mom valued spelling and grammar and would be quick to point out mistakes.

In general, I mostly saw problems with homeschooled peers being weak at math.

mlntn2• 13 years ago

I was also homeschooled for the most part (k-4, 6-10, then college) and consider myself an excellent speller. For my fifth grade year, I went to a private school where I competed in a spelling bee and won at the school level, then at the state level against other private schools for my grade level. I have never found spelling to be deficient among the homeschoolers I know - quite the opposite in fact.

mattchew• 13 years ago

We homeschool. My son spells words fairly well and my daughter spells like a cat.

We've worked with both of them on spelling, in about the same way.

I wouldn't really call this a cause, but my daughter doesn't really believe spelling words correctly is anything she needs to get fussed over. She thinks it's funny to spell words wrong. Me too, sometimes--though I still hope she grows out of it eventually.

archon2• 13 years ago

College was relatively a breeze since I had spent all my grade school years teaching things to myself - college was just an extension of this method of learning.

This was exactly my experience as well, as another former homeschooler. I remember being kind of disappointed when I got to college and thinking, "wait, is this all there is to it?" I expected a radical change and got more of the same. It was actually kind of demotivating for a while.

pnathan4• 13 years ago

I was also homeschooled: I didn't do homework either. I did have to finish each day's work that day. Over time I learned to be reasonably timely. Most days I started school at 8ish and ended 2-3ish, depending on the year.

I did get graded; my mom was meticulous about record-keeping. In terms of college applications; I put down my grade for my high school equivalency tests and that was that.

College was a relatively straightforward transfer of experience as well; I just had to walk about more.

(For the benefit of readers outside the US and outside the homeschooling mileu) Homeschooling is a very diverse set of educational approaches ranging from traditional schooling (8-3 + defined curricula + grading) all the way out to "unschooling" and Montessori-ish approaches. Popular approaches include video classes, where a classroom is taped and the tapes + books are sold to the parents. I had a traditional school experience, more or less. My mother was a teacher (both for children and in college) at times in her life, and this carried over into her homeschooling. This meant 1:1 teaching for many years for myself and my sibling.

For this modality of teaching, with a disciplined parent willing to adhere to a schedule, I suspect that the educational outcomes are very good.

Like McPhilip, I didn't have 8-12 hours of school per day (unless I dawdled), and thus had hours of time every day to pursue my own interests, hold down a part time job, etc. This is, in my biased and minimal data point, a reasonable thing.

marcuspovey• 13 years ago

I find the phrase "Memorisation not rationalisation" deeply sinister.

Afforess5• 13 years ago

Yes, it could have been a line right out of 1984. Highly Orwellian.

fcatalan• 13 years ago

When I was a kid the situation was clear for me: Homework made me struggle for hours while the drill sergeant act next day would last for mere seconds. So I did the bare minimum that would keep me from getting in serious trouble and accepted punishment for the rest as a good deal.

My own kids are now growing and should show up with homework quite soon. I dread the day.

webjunkie• 13 years ago

Haha, yeah, that was the way.

“find three important and powerful quotes from the section with 1–2 sentence analyses of its [sic] significance.”

What to do: hastily read the pages, write down anything that might qualify as a quote and write "It's important because blah blah". Done.

belorn2• 13 years ago

But when I ask her what the verb tener means (“to have,” if I recall), she repeats, “Memorization, not rationalization.”

I wonder where she got that from, or if it was something she figured out by herself. It just sound so soul crushing that the goal for children is not learning, but to memorize something until the test is done.

Memorization should never be used when rationalization could do better. Sure, there exist a few rare cases where memorization is the only option (such as remembering names), but those are exceptions. Languages are almost without exception best learned by actually using the language in communication or by consuming media (books, movies, and so on).

ronaldx4• 13 years ago

I recall that most people can manage 4 hours of intense concentration per day. If you are doing 5 hours of homework per night (after a full day of school), memorization is more effective at completing the workload - since you don't have time/energy to spend on rationalizing.

But it does seem likely that she's repeating this phrase from a teacher. Worrying. A positive interpretation is that the language teacher intends this to mean exactly what you say - languages are best learned through use, and can't be learned rationalizing the rulesets of grammar.

edtechdev2• 13 years ago

Virtually every class focuses on memorization and not conceptual understanding, unfortunately. That's what students have to do to survive high school and college courses, because that's how they are taught and assessed.

A recent study of calculus courses found for example that almost 80% of the test questions simply involved recalling and applying a procedure (i.e., "plug and chug"). http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/cspcc/TSG13_Bress...

The students don't want it to be this way: "74% preferred to make sense of mathematics rather than simply memorizing it and 72% saw the role of the instructor as helping students to reason through problems on their own rather than showing students how to work the problem".

And yet because it is easier to test and grade rote learning and memorization, we end up killing students' interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) and most students who enter college as a STEM major end up changing majors, transferring, or dropping out. "students leave STEM majors primarily because of poor instruction in their mathematics and science courses, with calculus often cited as a primary reason."

belorn2• 13 years ago

Thanks for an excellent comment with that link for further digging into the subject. The study could have easily been a interesting article on HN by it self. The only thing I wish the study explored is what would be the calculus instructors' preferred teaching method, and compare that to the students'.

alanctgardner2• 13 years ago

I don't know how much stock I'd put in self-reported reasons for attrition. At my school the undergrad professors for calc are all excellent - well reviewed by students, winning awards, etc. Still, a lot of STEM students drop out when they're taking first-year calc, because STEM programs are also just very hard. Even if we axed the first-year math requirements, I suspect those people would make it two or three years in before getting caught up on another class, and ultimately leaving anyways.

JoeAltmaier3• 13 years ago

Yes, I was horrified that an educational institution should choose that as their motto. Its little more than an admission of failure.

I guess if its a trade school, some of that would be useful. But every time you rationalize a system, you gain far more. You gain understanding, and maybe the ability to integrate the new knowledge with what you already know.

How about "integration, not memorization"? I'd send my kids to that school.

Grue3• 13 years ago

So the guy is too stupid to do his child's homework and somehow sees this as a bad thing? Like, he wants his daughter to end up as dumb as him? That's what I get from this article.

forrestthewoods• 13 years ago

I am eternally grateful that I went to dumb kid rural high school with a 50% drop out rate. I only did homework or studied for a test a couple of times per semester. I has more than enough time for sports, friends, and video games. Much, much better than laborious studying no matter how useful or not useful it may be.

mistercow7• 13 years ago

The answer, of course, is to tell your daughter she just doesn't have to do this shit. It's middle school. It doesn't matter. When she gets to high school, if teachers try to put her in non-honors classes (where she obviously doesn't belong), you sign a waiver and put her in the right classes.

Of course, if you by any means have the time or the money, the real answer is not to send your kids to these idiotic institutions at all, and to teach them yourself, or higher tutors. Hire college students; they can use the money.

Fuxy• 13 years ago

Holy st people how can you allow teachers to torture your kids like that.

I'm young and I never had this kind of work load hell if i did i would have either gone insane or just said fk it and ignored all that homework.

Yes I'm not from America I'm from Easter Europe. I would never allow this to my children. If this is the state of education I can do a better job.

"If Esmee masters the material covered in her classes, she will emerge as a well-rounded, socially aware citizen, a serious reader with good reasoning capabilities and a decent knowledge of the universe she lives in. What more can I ask of her school?"

No she will emerge as a well informed drone with good reading skill but no desire to do so because she is reminded of the amount of reading forced upon her and very weak reasoning and deductive skills.

“Memorization, not rationalization.”

What the point of that? If you don't understand what you have memorized it is useless not to mention a lot harder to remember.

Cyberbullying really? Is that person a complete idiot? Why would i ever let my child learn from a person who would attempt to threaten me with some ridiculous accusation in order to make me back off from my opinion.

It is manipulative and instead of addressing my concerns they are trying to make me go away.

From what they are telling the parents the teachers are just a bunch of drones following instructions sent by a higher power.

Exactly what they are teaching the students to become.

Where's the critical thinking where the opinion and power of the teachers to teach in a manner that they see fit?

gambiting2• 13 years ago

But it can be done better. My sister attends a private boarding school in the UK and they only have 2 hours set per day for homework(always between 7pm and 9pm). Teachers coordinate between each other to make sure the work never takes more than these two hours,but also that it doesn't take any less. So my sister spends two solid hours each day working on her homework,and it doesn't cut into her sleep pattern - they need to be in bed by 10.15pm after all.

Obviously a non-boarding student doesn't necessarily have the regime at home to solidly sit down for 2 hours and work without access to their phone/ipad/computer/playstation for that period like at a boarding school, but I believe that if the system was better teachers really could coordinate between themselves and arrange homework that was manageable.

nicholassmith• 13 years ago

With the education system pushing for rote memorisation over comprehension it's going to grind the enthusiasm to learn out of kids before they even have chance to start enjoying education. I hated doing homework that was just memorisation and didn't have a component where you had to either comprehend or be able to rationalise as it felt like all I was doing was trying to avoid looking something up in a book. If you're just training memorisation you may as well play a memory game.

kalleboo• 13 years ago

This has turned into a circumcision/spanking debate. "Let me tell you what MY parents/school imposed on me and why that's the best way, and as anecdotal evidence, I present myself, who as you can see turned out to be a perfect individual." I can read those on Reddit, Hacker News readers have no particular insight here. In fact, Reddit readers are probably better suited to this debate as there are more students and teachers posting there.

Haven't there been any actual studies on this? The article mentions how on a international scale there's no correlation between homework load and results. Have there been any studies on a smaller scale (such as intra-class, using the same teachers/assignments)?

GotAnyMegadeth7• 13 years ago

The Author and his daughter haven't learnt the tricks of the trade. I was set 3+hrs of HW a day, but I certainly didn't do that much.

First, they need to assess which teachers "Don't mind" if you don't do the homework. This could mean they stand you up in front of the whole class and shout at you, but if they don't give you an after school detention, don't do it. Getting in the teachers good books previously helps with this.

Second, if you've got a joke subject before one with homework due, do the homework then. Geography before Maths for example.

Third, have a homework team where you take it in turns to do the easily copied homework (Maths, DT, Science) and then copy each other in the mornings before school. Of course you need to cover your tracks.

Fourth, always cut corners. No calculator? Lol, use a calculator, but purposely get a few wrong. Use Google for everything (I didn't have a computer until yr8). Never read a book when you can read a synopsis/ watch the film whilst playing Pokémon.

Fifth, work as a team at home. The parent will have to remember things from their childhood, where as older siblings only need to remember from the year before. I used to do my middle brother's compulsory homework, whilst he did my littlest brother's, and my mum did mine.

Other tricks: Try leaving all of you books related to that subject at home one day and claim you thought it was Thursday.

Miss out a question at the bottom of a page, they might not even notice.

Pretend you are/were ill.

Cry

Hand in last weeks homework again. This one only buys you time, but works well on a Friday.

Tell your teacher you'll hand it in tomorrow, then the next day tell them you handed it in yesterday and they've lost it.

Band together with the other kids in your class and tell the teacher they said the homework was due for next week, or that they didn't even set it.

If you are asked to hand something in on lined paper, just don't do a whole sheets worth. More convincing if both sheets start/end in the middle of a sentence. I've done this before and they didn't even comment, I suspect they felt guilty they'd lost it.

Note: I successfully used all these tricks on several occasions. I would say that it definitely had no impact on my education (Got a AAAB at A level, 1st Class degree in Electronic Engineering w/ Hons), and a very significant positive impact on my life as a whole.

tptacek12• 13 years ago

How caustic a lesson to teach your kid, that they should organize to cheat on homework, so they can artificially inflate their grade. I suppose it does set them up for a productive life of investment banking.

GotAnyMegadeth7• 13 years ago

I never saw school as a place to learn facts, but as a place to learn how to socialise and how to deal with life. Learning how to get a good grade is important, but only because people think that it represents your worth as an employee. My parents/TV/books/the internet taught me most of what I know.

Djehngo• 13 years ago

In terms of morality you may be correct, but if the child in the article could skip some rote memorisation or other busy work for an extra hour or two of sleep I would bet on her learning "more" at school.

mcintyre1994• 13 years ago

You're obviously right (although I think a lot of us figured these without parents helping us), but "memorization,not rationalization" isn't much better.

meddlepal• 13 years ago

Do you really need to teach your kid this stuff even? The smart and smart-enough-but-lazy ones seem to figure it out just well enough for themselves.

konstantintin• 13 years ago

nobody needs to do 3+ hrs of homework a night. when the load is so needlessly excessive, I think it's fine to cut some corners.

omegant• 13 years ago

Or simply learn how to hack around nonsense rules, that are there just to make the school board like they are doing something useful. The important part of school is learning, all the grades and that are just instruments. Worshiping those instruments as sacred, doesn´t make sense. I guess that kids learning to play a dumb system will on average perform better at a later stages.

rayiner3• 13 years ago

I think kids should be taught to perceive the mechanics of any system and leverage those mechanics, within the bounds of ethics and fairness. They should ignore what people say and focus on what they do.

I absolutely don't condone lying or cheating, and I think it's a huge problem in schools today. But kids aren't the only ones that lie. American education is predicated on a basic lie: that it's about learning. In fact, it's about sorting.

In law school, I had a lot of friends who wrote organized exams with good grammar and coherent structure. This is what school taught them was important. I wrote these horrible, rambling, repetitive exams with poor grammar and spelling and no structure other than conforming to what I thought the professor's grading checklist would look like. Ironically, I now have a job where I get to really think and learn and write, but I couldn't have gotten it without playing the sorting game.

Learning is great. But learning is what you do while researching Hacker News posts. School is no place for it.

throwaway19792• 13 years ago

I know what A levels are. What does AAAB mean? Does this mean you gave four subjects and scored 3 A's and 1 B? If that is correct, I'm curious what subjects you gave?

GotAnyMegadeth7• 13 years ago

Yes it does. I got As in Maths, Physics and Electronics and a B in General Studies which is a joke compulsory subject that tested your writing skills.

Interesting: I would say "I took four subjects", and you say "I gave four subjects". Never heard that before!

danielweber2• 13 years ago

This seems horrible, but I upvoted it nonetheless because of its perspective.

rayiner3• 13 years ago

This is great advice (besides the cheating, obviously).

ledge• 13 years ago

I did some of this too. Not everything (no crying), but I had a group who would take turns copying assignments for instance.

I particularly remember when writing long papers, I would do things like increase the character spacing, change the font size to 12.5, subtly adjust the margins, add a few words to the last sentence of a paragraph in order to push it on to the next line, etc. If I had to write a 10 page paper, I could get away with writing 8.5 pages and use these tricks to bring it up to the required length in a minute or two.

There were kids in my school who spent 3+ hours a night on homework, but certainly not me. I in no way regret getting a few Bs and Cs, coasting by with some cheating and the aforementioned tricks, and in general blowing off most of high school. I still got into a good college, in part due to SAT/PSAT scores, and I probably learned more and certainly had a better time than most of my classmates.

gshubert172• 13 years ago

While I agree that 3+hrs of homework a day doesn't accomplish much true learning, I think that most of these "tricks" don't either.

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted.

I would rather my child got interested in some areas and pursued them out of passion, getting mediocre grades; than followed these tricks to get good grades, but not have learned much else.

retrogradeorbit• 13 years ago

Some of John Taylor Gatto's writings on the education system shed some light on all of this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto

tptacek12• 13 years ago

Some quick thoughts, as the parent of a high school freshman:

* If you anticipate your child being assigned 3 hours of homework in a typical evening, it is negligent to allow them to start that work at 8:00PM. Instead of allowing his daughter to watch episodes of Portlandia on her computer all afternoon, he could consider a rule suggesting homework gets completed before electronic entertainment; that's our rule this year (for the first time) and it's working better than I thought it would. Another rule we have: complete or not, homework is done at 9:30PM.

* Japan (a) does not outperform the US (at least on PISA) when normalized for income, which normalization also normalizes for homework load, and (b) has the some of the longest school days in the world, with an abbreviated, homework-encumbered summer break to boot. Japanese students probably do not work less hard than US students, or to greater effect.

* If your daughter answers "Texas City" as the state capital of Texas, the discussion of how she's struggling academically might range farther than homework load, eh? Neither my son in high school nor my daughter in middle school has ever to my knowledge had state capitals homework, and neither would give that answer.

* If your daughter has spent middle school staying up until 1:00AM completing homework†, so much so that you are in open conflict with the school over that load, why oh why would you go out of your way to enroll the kid in a highly selective public school that is virtually assured to maintain or increase that load? We had homework-intensive school options for the boy, too, and (sanely) decided not to avail ourselves of them. Is this a status obsession thing? Because if the end goal is a push to get your kid into an Ivy, stop bitching about workload. You're choosing to make your kid compete.

Minus the cannabis (I substituted Unix exploit development), I had a similar high school experience to this author. I'm not generally in favor of homework and would if asked by any of my kid's teachers --- who do actually coordinate to even out the workload --- vote for less of it. But I think the parent in this article is suffering from a couple problems of his own creation, and has probably not come up with an indictment of the US school system.

† Never once has either of my kids had a middle school workload that kept them up late at night.

rorrr24• 13 years ago

I never understood how the knowledge of the capitals of states or countries is useful in any way. It's meaningless. It can be easily looked up, if you need that information. I can't even imagine a practical scenario when one would need to know it.

lgieron• 13 years ago

It's hard to function in the world without some rudimentary knowledge of it. As for practical scenario, imagine your boss wants to send you to a conference in Paris, and you answer back with "Where?".

GFischer• 13 years ago

I think it helps to get a sense of the world - though browsing through an atlas, and getting broader lessons is much better than just memorizing state/country capitals.

I loved browsing atlases as a kid, and ended up visiting close to a third of the countries in the world (ok, so I cheated and went to Europe :P ), so YMMV.

PD: I still want to see the remaining two-thirds of the world :)

VBprogrammer• 13 years ago

  * If you anticipate your child being assigned 3 hours of homework in a typical evening, it is negligent to allow them to start that work at 8:00PM. Instead of allowing his daughter to watch episodes of Portlandia on her computer all afternoon, he could consider a rule suggesting homework gets completed before electronic entertainment; that's our rule this year (for the first time) and it's working better than I thought it would. Another rule we have: complete or not, homework is done at 9:30PM.

The parent doesn't say, but its entirely possible that his daughter has non-academic hobbies. Perhaps she competes in a sport, dances or feeds the homeless. In-fact, wouldn't it be more negligent to deny her the opportunity to take part in those non-academic activities?

chris_wot• 13 years ago

The author's child is still a kid. I think she's in year 8? Here's my feedback: a. Let her be a kid. b. let her get enough sleep (it's hard to learn without enough sleep). c. Stop taking cannabis. It can lead to mental illness. d. If you are concerned about too much homework, do something about it. For real.

tptacek12• 13 years ago

If her hobbies are conflicting with her homework, she can either (a) accept poorer grades or (b) set aside some hobbies. What he's doing --- demanding perfect grades with a schedule that doesn't have her starting homework until 8:00PM --- is physically harming his kid.

jtheory• 13 years ago

Instead of allowing his daughter to watch episodes of Portlandia on her computer all afternoon

That's a bit unfair -- that was Friday afternoon only.

I don't have any kids in school yet, and I'm not in the US anymore anyway; but I do remember from my HS experience it would have been unkind to force me to complete all homework before any entertainment. School ended at 2:15 (because it started at 7am... ugh), but that's when after school activities started -- and who could have a decent college app without extracurriculars? I worked on the literary magazine, ran track/cross-country, was in a few plays/musicals, and got home either at 4:30 (early bus) or a bit before 6pm (late bus), usually the latter. In theory I could sometimes get some work done during the school day, but when would I hang out with friends, then?

I agree about limits on homework time, and entertainment time; but I think I'd be inclined to make sure they had both downtime and homework time, and if the homework couldn't be completed, so be it.

tptacek12• 13 years ago

Doesn't he open the story by saying his daughter starts homework at 8:00PM and routinely gets inadequate sleep?

The "so be it" rule is what we have in my house, but because we require homework to get done before the kids can use the computer, it always gets done before I even get home from work.

patio11• 13 years ago

Japanese students probably do not work less hard than US students, or to greater effect.

Wait wait, people really think American students do more work than Japanese kids?

HAH. HAH. HAH. HAH. That's a good one.

Seriously: Japanese schools don't assign 3 hours of homework because that would conflict with the 3 hours of "not required but it will ruin your life if you don't do it and then fail your next admissions exam" cram school that the top 30% of Japanese kids/parents assume is inevitable.

If you want I can run down to the train station and take a photo of one of our local cram schools. It's 8:45 PM right now so the middle schoolers should be just about halfway finished for the evening.

knowaveragejoe• 13 years ago

His phrasing was confusing, but I think what tptacek said agrees with you.

barry-cotter• 13 years ago

Damn, I thought there was some daylight between Korea and Japan in terms of messed up zero sum games cram schools. AIUI the pressure lets up rather a lot once one gets to university, yes? As in there is actual freedom to slack off and many do. Or is there no point between primary school and becoming a salaryman to chill out?

foobarbazqux• 13 years ago

A misunderstanding.

> Japanese students probably do not work less hard than US students

  !(work (J) < work (U)) 
  --> work (J) >= work (U) 
  --> work (U) <= work (J)

> American students do more work than Japanese kids

  work (U) > work (J)

altrego99• 13 years ago

* Kids should not be penalized for knowing which is the capital of what, nor which part of Americas grows the most bananas. It is useless information unless the kid loves that kind of stuff.

* Focus should not be on memorizing anything, unless they are a building block of something which they will understand later, and better, with the memorization. May be the Spanish language verb forms are one of those, I'm not sure. From my experience I know a lot of knowledge do fall in this category, e.g. trigonometric manipulations, algebra of integration/differentiation, etc.

* Kids of that age, 13, have a fairly developed brain to decide which subjects they like, and which they are not interested in. They should be allowed to choose not to study Earth Sciences in favor of Physics, if they want to. Or to study Linguistics in favor of Maths (I assume they already know a basic level of mathematics to get by), if they want to.

I wonder how these kids gonna grow up, will the relentless homework on often useless subjects, create the discipline in them that is their most probable intention? Will this discipline help them to do better in life, as opposed to the Captain Kirk types?

a8da6b0c91d2• 13 years ago

Focus should not be on memorizing anything

I have to disagree. At that age the things you memorize get seared into your mind permanently. I can still effortlessly rattle off a few Shakespeare soliloquies a teacher had us memorize, for example.

I think having 13 year olds memorize things is a great idea, but the things should be important and useful. I wish we had extensively drilled on mental arithmetic.

tod222• 13 years ago

as opposed to the Captain Kirk types?

What do you mean by "Captain Kirk type"?

mathattack7• 13 years ago

There's a legit trade-off. 100% memorization is bad. 100% learn to learn with 0% memorization is bad too. Research indicates that people learn more when they have context, which unfortunately comes from memorization. (I hated memorization, I'm more of a derive the facts person)

E D Hirsch has some of the research behind this. http://www.coreknowledge.org/books

aestra6• 13 years ago

My younger brother who is now in his mid-twenties had to memorize state capitals, in elementary school. I had to memorize a map of Europe in 6th grade. It's somewhat meaningless.

mathattack7• 13 years ago

This homework issue is peculiar in New York City. One issue is that parents do so much prepping to get into the elite gifted and talented programs, that kids are there who don't belong. What is challenging to a gifted kid (the programs are competitive) is overwhelming to someone not quite as advanced.

Many private schools face the same issues. Riverdale is one of the few elite uber-expensive schools that is bucking the trend on overwork. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/what-if-the-secre...

It's worth noting that the author of the original article is an acclaimed multicultural writer, and not just a US-centric hack. Of course if he wants to keep his daughter off of pot she's in middle school, he probably shouldn't have outed himself.

Pxtl2• 13 years ago

The trick is that the Japanese students have student-led after-school homework groups to get this stuff squared away. Look at it this way - if a kid has 3 hours of homework per night, and they get off at 3PM, and they did work in their homework club until 5, guess what? At the time you saw them, they'd only have 1 hour of homework per night. That would be manageable.

shoover• 13 years ago

We have no context on the Texas City answer. Could be she didn't know the answer, didn't care, and put Texas City as a joke.

pyre2• 13 years ago

Neither my son in high school nor my daughter in middle school has ever to my knowledge had state capitals homework, and neither would give that answer.

When/if that happens with my children, I have the perfect answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCieT1dQWlo

I actually own that on an official CD somewhere from my childhood, too.

mathattack7• 13 years ago

It seems these are very upper middle class issues. Compare this to Chicago... http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2013/09/03/one-week-in-safe-pass...

tptacek12• 13 years ago

To be clear, that's the worst neighborhood on the south side. Public schools in Chicago do not as a general rule have "safe passage" programs.

The "safe passage" program is kind of silly.

outworlder2• 13 years ago

Instead of allowing his daughter to watch episodes of Portlandia on her computer all afternoon

That was a Friday!

tptacek12• 13 years ago

Not the "starting at 8, up till midnight" bit. That's just what she did instead of homework until 8 on Friday.

wintersFright• 13 years ago

I'm surprised he is so open about the weed. Especially since his daughter will read that. I thought the USA was all gung ho on the war on drugs?

smsm423• 13 years ago

USA is absolutely insane on war on drugs. Same person can openly admit in his youth he was using marijuana and cocaine and advocate decades-long mandatory sentences on people who are found in possession of the same now. I tried to understand what's going on in the heads of those people but I've given up. It looks like when it comes to certain subjects, people are just switching off their brains and think with some other organs, I dare not guess which ones.

auggierose• 13 years ago

"for example, converting 0.00009621 to scientific notation is tricky (it’s 9.621 x 10¯5, which makes no intuitive sense to me)"

Are math skills out there really THAT bad?

anaphor• 13 years ago

I'm in an honours program at university and I get orders of magnitude less homework. Of course the work requires much more thought and maybe more reading, but the people designing public school curriculums really need to learn how people actually learn.

Zigurd• 13 years ago

His daughter is in a high-pressure selective school that appears to market this workload as a feature. It might be the right thing for kids who breeze through their school material and then get bored for lack of any challenge. It probably isn't the right thing for everyone.

His daughter seems like the victim of needing to get into some college prep program where choices are limited, waiting lists are common, and many private school prices are out of reach. I did not see where she was asked about a choice of schools.

Middle school seems way too early for a program this intensive. What is the retention for all this material when the students are high school juniors? The only purpose for the homework grind appears to be to get students that they don't want in this school to self-select out of it.

It seems like what the author is wishing for is a good free normal public school in New York City. Ha! The bottom line is that he can't actually afford to live where he lives unless he sacrifices his daughter's childhood this way.

danielweber2• 13 years ago

I think schools follow this algorithm:

1. Great students (read: students who get into selective colleges) do a lot of homework.

2. Therefore, give everyone lots of homework, and all students will be great students.

I've seen that pattern replicate itself down to kindergarten.

Not everyone is going to be a biochemist. Stop punishing the kids who won't be.

ctdonath2• 13 years ago

The Montessori method: take each child at his own pace thru sensory-grounded material, giving enough familiarity with material until it is internalized and the child abstracts it himself - THEN move on to the next step, at individual pace. Therein lies understanding. Not doing this leads to contempt for the material and rote memorization (which the article starts out noting is the plain conclusion) devoid of understanding.

jbellis• 13 years ago

That's the theory, anyway. http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/2013/09/18/montessori...

ctdonath2• 13 years ago

Upshot of the objection is: boys are busy, rough, and loud.

The objection then practically concludes that letting them play hard as they desire is the only option, and the acceptable alternative thereto is At least in public school, boys get diagnosed with ADHD and plied with Adderal to enable adjustment to [learning while sitting still for very long periods]. I reject any conclusion that reduces to either letting kids run wild or drugging them into submission.

Montessori finds a happier medium: the child is permitted to move and change focus as desired, while gently encouraging them to learn focus and self-control. Maybe it's not optimal for some kids, but it's sure better than the alternatives the link prefers.

loup-vaillant5• 13 years ago

Esmee […] got a C on her math homework from the night before because she hadn’t made an answer column. Her correct answers were there, at the end of each neatly written-out equation, yet they weren’t segregated into a separate column on the right side of each page.

I almost snapped my pen in half.

rayiner3• 13 years ago

The entirety of K-12 is a basically a crock. Very little of this stuff is important. Who cares how crystal structures are defined? Memorizing that trivia won't improve your thinking skills, and you won't remember it after the exam anyway. Even if you go on to major in chemistry, you'll have to relearn all of that anyway because colleges don't trust the K-12 system to teach any of it correctly.

My wife recently told me she wants to send our daughter to an expensive private school for 4th-12th grade. My wife and I both attended public school until graduate school, so I wasn't warm to the idea. But I couldn't argue with her reasoning: many private schools are exempt from NCLB (because they don't take federal money under the Act), and as such can dispense with a lot of that ridiculousness. They teach the important skills (reading, writing, logical reasoning, math), but otherwise go easy on kids, inflate their grades, and have old connections to top colleges so they don't have to define themselves based on the "rigor" of their programs the way public magnet schools do.

I went to a highly-competitive public magnet school for high school, and it was a huge waste of time. I sorely regret all those hours I spent learning about earth science or ancient china. My wife went to a very progressive public school in Oregon and loved it. They had mostly electives, and one of her classes in high school was a whole class on James Joyce. They didn't assign a ton of homework, but instead let kids explore their interests them go home at the end of the day.

vickytnz• 13 years ago

An aside: I've been reading Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Book Store. Good, breezy, semi-techy read.

graeme• 13 years ago

I teach the SAT. My impression is that children are too busy to learn.

I learned a LOT from reading random things outside of school. Students have no time for that these days. And when they do need to learn something new, such as math on the SAT, they have no time to learn it.

The schools also don't seem to be focussed on learning. The emphasis is on covering 'the curriculum'. So I'm dealing students studying trigonometry who can't multiply 7 * 6 without a calculator.

Needless to say, they don't actually understand trigonometry either. Memorize, not rationalize is sadly very true.

mathattack7• 13 years ago

Very good point. I really enjoyed being out of school so that I could control my reading list. The one thing I didn't like about going back for grad school was giving up control over my reading list for a few years.

grandalf2• 13 years ago

This article reminds me of being in school (some high school and surprisingly many college classes). I simply didn't do the memorization homework. I turned out OK but my GPA was definitely lower than it would have been if I'd spent all those extra hours memorizing.

grandalf2• 13 years ago

The trend toward memorization homework is part of the larger view of education as social assimilation training and obedience training.

If the homework required "rationalization, not memorization" then the brightest students would easily coast through in minutes the same material that would take the dimmer students hours. With memorization, the curve is flattened significantly and grades are much more closely tied to effort than to innate ability.

All this is intentional and has the desired outcome -- colleges offer many classes where the student who is used to drudgery and memorization can simply thrive by putting in the hours with flashcards, and can then go on to a career where obedience and compliance with drudgery are highly valued traits.

The problem with this is that it misses the more important point, which is that abstract reasoning skills can be taught too, they are just often taught very poorly and so kids who have a small leg up (largely by accident) get a big unfair advantage and in a non-memorization world reap significant benefits.

I'd be extremely concerned if my child were being asked to memorize material that was not strictly necessary for some kind of reasoning exercise.

modfodder• 13 years ago

One subject I don't remember learning; how to learn. Maybe it was just taught so early that I don't remember, but although I was always a good student that breezed through school for the most part, I take horrendous notes and feel really inefficient when it comes to learning.

joelhooks• 13 years ago

We homeschool and our kids do 2-4 hours of academics per day, generally. Frees up a lot of time for things like "being a kid" and "enjoying life". Some days they don't do any and spend the day building things in minecraft or drawing pictures.

It's awesome, and I highly recommend it to anybody interested in non-institutionalized kids.

alexeisadeski3• 13 years ago

Why would he read 79 pages in one night if all he had to do was find three quotable sentences? Read three pages picked at random from that 79 page section and move on.

This isn't rocket science.

segmondy• 13 years ago

"When I get home, Esmee tells me she got a C on her math homework from the night before because she hadn’t made an answer column. Her correct answers were there, at the end of each neatly written-out equation, yet they weren’t segregated into a separate column on the right side of each page. I’m amazed that the pettiness of this doesn’t seem to bother her. School is training her well for the inanities of adult life."

:-(

My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me

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