Requiring homework on a consistent basis is not an evidence-based practice and actually introduces worse outcomes for kids whose parents/guardians are less present, which disproportionately affects poor kids and kids of color.
Why do we do it? Because there are some parents (you know the ones) who will pester the school and lobby for dropping their funding if they don’t see consistent tangible output from their students. If the kids aren’t coming home with half a dozen papers each day and a bag of books, how can we verify that the teachers aren’t just sitting around on their phones all day not doing shit and collecting a paycheck WITH OUR TAX DOLLARSSSSS?!!!?!?!
So, homework largely serves as busy work to signal to parents that teachers are doing things. And the system is designed for parents to actively encourage and participate in the development of the skills required to regularly complete homework independently by high school. Kids whose parents have less free time are inherently disadvantaged, often labeled as bad kids or lazy early on, and can have a seat on the prison train before they’ve entered middle school. It also harms kids’ self esteem and sets an unhealthy precedent for expectations around work-life balance.
There isn’t a single thing that homework accomplishes by accident which couldn’t be accomplished better on purpose via other methods. Fuck homework.
"homework is fascist"-posting except it's real instead of a joke
Because kids need to be able to read and do basic math and yes they should have the discipline to do something they don't necessarily like to improve themselves.
But for the most part, the studies haven’t looked at whether it matters what kind of homework is assigned or whether there are different effects for different demographic student groups. Focusing on those distinctions could be illuminating.
Quote from one of the articles, which ignores Germand and French studies and literature on the topic of the last 30 years.
which article are you quoting there. Because I read those articles and what kind of homework is assigned was highlighted often
for example in the first linked article
Homework that is linked to classroom work tends to be more effective. In particular, studies that included feedback on homework had higher impacts on learning
and
Pupils eligible for free school meals typically receive additional benefits from homework. However, surveys in England suggest that pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to have a quiet working space, are less likely to have access to a device suitable for learning or a stable internet connection and may receive less parental support to complete homework and develop effective learning habits. These difficulties may increase the gap in attainment for disadvantaged pupils.
Homework clubs can help to overcome these barriers by offering pupils the resources and support needed to undertake homework or revision.
(1) Because kids need to be able to read and do basic math
(2) and yes they should have the discipline to do something they don't necessarily like to improve themselves.
What you say the goal is is not reached by homework. If you are a scientific socialist and materialist I urge you to follow the current discourse on the abolishment of homework. The second part is just grinding for capitalist overlords and isn't achieved with homework either.
I think a little bit of self motivation is important outside of providing value for others.
Especially as somebody who recommends people read long, old political books.
Also my mom was an elementary teacher for 40 years and I've got a kid that just started second grade, they deffinitly need some homework to do without being coached through it to learn to do it themselves they should just have enough time to do that during school hours.
they should just have enough time to do that during school hours.
So supervised exercises.
fuck homework. my spouse is a math teacher and she doesn't give homework for this reason.
Practice can be good, math homework as a laborious practice is not. Math homework also suffers from the classic unknown unknown of "I don't know if my reasoning is even remotely correct."
I think you’re right in that it’s motivated by the anti-labor attitudes that teachers are inherently lazy and need constant monitoring, plus busywork metrics for students, but I don’t think it’s Karen parents behind it. It’s neoliberal shitstain administrators and local/state politicians who see teachers as antagonistic and thus want to subject them to harmful oversight and control. It’s not just homework, there’s been a distinct push to standardize every aspect of the classroom so that teachers aren’t working with students to improve their skills anymore, they’re dull bureaucrats there to administer cookie cutter programs (which, no doubt, the education department paid a pretty penny for to private contractors/publishers). It’s all about churning out metrics to justify systems, with actual education a distant second on the priority list.
being forced to eat my veggies (fed to me lovingly by mother, making airplane noises and gesticulations with her arm and spoon) is settler-colonialism.
okay this is kind of funny but the OP is right, homework sucks. Im in my 30s but I knew it sucked when I was in school and Im sure it still does now.
For every comment in this thread I'm assigning my students another homework problem buckaroos.
Idk, when I was in middle and highschool I didn't do homework because noone made me and I found it boring, and I was able to coast with C's and occasional B's if I forced myself to do a little of it. I built basically no work ethic/culture of after class work and ended up getting kicked out of college as a freshman because not doing homework/after school study there resulted in me failing a ton of classes.
It's only one data point but I think being forced to do the homework in secondary school would have helped me a lot.
Developing the ability to sit down and apply oneself to something not intrinsically interesting is a real positive, and I can definitely see homework being part of that.
A lot of homework is busy work and there's too much even of the helpful stuff, but I don't think the best amount of homework is zero. And it makes sense to think in terms of the type of homework and the assessment of it as much as it does to look at the amount.
I've always held this pet theory that if you need to enjoy the field of study before you're ever going to successfully grind it out. My prime example is in our bjj academy we encourage fundamentals students to only practice a move on one side. If they're doing a choke with their right arm, they'll only do it with their right arm. The main line of reasoning is that it's better to be okay on one side than mediocre on both. My theory is that if you can get a glimpse of what it's like to be good, to feel competency, and see what bjj is about, then you'll start to like it. You'll have a massive gap in your technique and when it gets exposed by a better grappler, you'll have the investment and desire to put the reps in and practice a left handed choke. If we made students grind from the get go they'd get bored and leave.
In that same vein, if you could show a previously uninterested child how to build a computer generated image of a higher dimension(al shadow) then you'd then have their patience and desire to learn Python and mathematics. If I got to see the experiments that culminated in the discovery of DNA being a double helix first, I'd be much more open to learning my AT-GCs. Give them a piano and show them how to improv with the black keys and then teach them about sub tonics.
The flip side of this is that people really need to be able to push through at least some stuff they aren't interested in. Some things just kind of suck but need doing.
CW millennial linguistic depravity
spoiler
Think of what people mean when they use the term "adulting"
I think certain classes homework makes some sense. Math? The repetition is helpful for understanding. Social studies? those fill-in-the-blanks worksheets aren't doing jack. So many classes, so many worksheets. Language classes are better when you're speaking and listening. English classes don't really have time to read the whole book in class, but reading on your own is a good skill to have.
I want to say I did about 70-80% of homeworks in high school. In college I'd be busy from 8am to 10pm between classes and homework but those assignments were actually crucial in understanding what tf was going on in the lecture.
Yeah, Math is definitely the one I get the most having to do homework for. That helped me understand the material better.
Conversely, I wasn't forced at home to do homework in middle/highschool, and I'm forever grateful I wasn't. It bred in me a better ability to refuse unreasonable asks and set reasonable boundaries on work/leisure. If I did all the homework I was set, I would've been even more miserable than I already was, to an excessively problematic degree.
It's possible I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but if nobody was attempting to make you do homework, how did you learn to refuse homework like tasks from that uh, like absence of an event?
Like learning to say no requires something to say no to right?
EDIT: saw your other comment, I did misunderstand, please ignore this comment.
No worries <3 Yep, I refused at school, basically thanks to my parents enabling my attitude.
I always got As in middle and high school with bare minimum effort. Never learned to study or do work I didn’t want to do. Now I’ve failed a few classes in college which costed several thousand dollars while people who weren’t in the top 2 every year like me have already graduated and started their careers.
Similarly, I used to love reading. Long books were fine too. But then around 8th grade, my English classes stopped mandatory reading time at the beginning of each class. Things became more difficult in college because I didn’t have to read shit for like 5 years lol
I repeatedly refused to do homework as a kid. I did well in class but wanted my time to be my time. I got in trouble all over, teachers told me I have no work ethic and I'll never succeed at life.
Since leaving school, I have maintained my attitude to staunchly refuse to take work into my own time. To be honest, it's done me well - The healthy boundaries have spared me a lot of traumatizing lifestyle. Even helped in my career, and I think one of the biggest reasons why is that my bosses start assuming I'm not a prole and wasn't educated in a state school, though I'm very damnedly both of those things.
I do also recognise I'm lucky to have had the circumstances to enable me to refuse that shit. Not everybody gets those opportunities.
When I was in my first year as a nurse we were expected to complete a research project as part of our year long "nurse-residency" program. They gave us maybe 2-3 hours at most per month to complete it. They more or less made it impossible to do without working on your own time, something I didn't do, but my coworkers did. You could come in on your day off and have them pay you for the time you spent in the library, but most of my coworkers had a 30+ minute drive. In the end the person in charge of the program denied our research project stating that the highest levels of the CDC stated that their existing policies were good and correct and that our idea was wrong and impossible to test. In the 4 years since, I've only seen more academic papers come out and prove us correct, that IVs can be changed as needed rather than scheduled every 3 days. We didn't have to do the full project since our proposal was denied which actually let us all kinda coast through the rest of it and just state we were denied testing, but I can't imagine how much more time it would've demanded from us to come in on our days off to do extra work because of this. Most of the other groups went with dumb bullshit like placing more recycling cans around to encourage recycling. I wanted to do staffing ratios but my group was afraid of it being too antagonistic to administration.
I think this is something that isn't an on/off issue. Homework is important. There simply isn't enough time in class (at least in US public schooingl) to do retention work and give a lecture. Reading assignments all but have to be given in order to efficiently give instruction and for things like maths, repetition of problem solving is super valuable. Even the practice of working through material on their own is in itself important for people learning.
At the same time, I've definitely had to do bullshit busywork worksheets or had classes that assigned too much homework to comfortably finish in combination with other courses.
I think it’s highly dependent on one’s learning style
I didn’t like homework, but even I will admit the reinforcement was crucial to my learning. I’m more a fan of the college style of homework which could usually be completed in 10-20 minutes, but in middle school and high school, I consistently had hours of work from 5-6 classes. That bullshit needs to end
god my college assignments were anything but that. I routinely had 6+ hours of work to do on any given night, assuming you actually understood the lectures, had the textbooks (which were expensive af and mostly not available online at the time), and were able to churn through the calculations quickly in your head. my school sucked ass - they prided themselves on failing nearly half of all students. god forbid you had anything else going on in your life or if you were anything but perfectly neurotypical.
A lot of my college courses had minimal work outside of class but put the onus on you to study
For real. Kids that take multiple advanced courses in high school are effectively double full-time college students.
My university considered 12 credit hours to be full-time and straight up did not allow you to take more than 18 without explicit permission from your guidance counselor. But high schoolers are all forced to take 30 credit hours no matter what (35 if you count PE I guess). And idk if it's like this across the country, but my teachers gave out homework like it's nothing. On most days I'd have assignments from Math, English, Social Studies, and Science all due tomorrow. It's legitimately the most demanding job I've ever had, I got fucking burn out and suicidal ideation at age 16.
I’m more a fan of the college style of homework which could usually be completed in 10-20 minutes
what are those assignments like?
I thought college homework was like writing long research essays and shit.
I usually only had like 5-10 problems to solve in my more “technical” courses. I did end up writing a shit ton of papers though, but that wasn’t really a problem because I love writing
While sorta off topic it's still sorta related. My mother's school district has transitioned away from traditional grading methods which is in line more with the research that states letter grades are not nuanced enough and end up discouraging students. I don't believe anything outside of quizzes actually holds any solid weight towards pass/fail now, but there are other factors that go into the pass/fail determination. They've changed the curriculum for a third time in three years requiring teachers to make all new plans and basically have to play learn the curriculum a week ahead of the students.
The end result is my mother working basically every day 730a-5p along with work she brings home and continues to work on up until like 7-8pm with a little time for commute and dinner. She's doing close to 12 hour days and grading has become significantly more difficult because these better methods also require more actual labor from a teacher to work properly, but in a country where people don't want to become educators because of the terrible conditions, the conditions continue to get worse.
Between standardized testing and standardized online classwork, there's less of an actual education role they're filling while having to monitor all the students. They also have ended up with more behavioral problems in the past few years likely as a combination of COVID fucking shit up and mainstreaming students that would otherwise be in a specialized classroom for the serious behavioral issues since the theory is that placing students that are lagging behind in with the rest will help pull them forward but the general gist has seen them being more of a disturbance and pulling other students down with them.
Homework is mostly a waste of time and my mother has long since stopped assigning it instead opting that if "you don't finish it in class, finish it at home" with exceptions carved out for students that are just generally slower at the work for whatever reason.
I feel like we just need an top to bottom redo of the American education system. Students aren't benefiting from half these attempts at reform in a positive direction because the teachers are overworked to hell, teachers are less open to change because they're already being asked to do too much with less and less. Students are basically just sat in front of a computer most of the day anymore to do everything. Just like what I see in my line of work in healthcare, the entire thing is standing on the most termite damaged, rotted beams imaginable and it's only through the sheer grace of God that it hasn't all fallen down yet.
The thing you're missing here is that this is a deliberate strategy to privatize and deprofessionalize teaching. The dream is that teachers will be poorly-paid gig workers who oversee the implementation of a digital curriculum created by a private company. This, of course, will not be the case for the wealthy, who will privately educate their children in the traditional style.
I see that very clearly, it's a slow process that continues to eat away at teaching. It's a similar thing we're seeing in nursing with actual gig apps for nursing existing already trying to sell it as a way to control your schedule. COVID did a number on traditional nursing jobs with a lot more going through travel or agency gigs, shit we're seeing with charter schools, something my mother hates but can't fully articulate the reason as to why it's bad beyond seeing them siphoning off a bunch of funding that would've otherwise gone to the district.
Yep. I suspect there's a lot more of this going on than we even hear about. I suspect that if you talk to anyone that works in a field that is still professionalized, there is a version of this going on.
dont people who study education and teaching agree that homework is counterproductive for optimal learning too? Its better to leave all the learning in class so the subconscious has time to process it and form deeper connections or sthing idk
Has anyone mentioned how homework is preparing kids to complete their future labour at home instead of on company time
In the future (and heck, even in the present for a lot of people since COVID) company time will increasingly be served out at home
