The Glade 4.0

_________________
"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

My rage and ire is tempered by the fact that most high school assignments are just busywork assignments anyway. The majority of your grade is not based on how much you learned or how competent you are, but whether or not you turned in the worthless homework assignments.

_________________
Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I would reword the last statement of your comment to:
The majority of your grade is not based on how much you learned or how competent you are, but or even whether or not you turned in the worthless homework assignments.

Sad but true. One of my ex-girlfriends (most recent actually) is a HS Biology teacher for a low SES (PC term for poor as you can be) school. I used to think Private School was a waste...not any more. Not after seeing how much of her life she put in to those kids and seeing 1) how much the students do not care and 2) how much administration does not care as long as they get their money.

I know if you've got a student who gets As on all of his tests, his teachers will still threaten to fail him unless he turns in homework.

_________________
Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

That was me in all my high school math classes. Aced every test, but I got B's for the class because I never did my homework.

_________________

That was me in chemistry and physics.

_________________
"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

In my AP physics class, homework was optional.

I believe in homework. If you memorize the material for the test, odds are you wont retain it for long after the test. The repetition of homework is what turns temporary knowledge into long term knowledge.

I was that student.

_________________
I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Been, there it is super frustrating. God bless the men and women who keep throwing themselves into it every day.

_________________

Memorizing material and understanding material are very different. I understood my math and sciences and didn't need meaningless homework assignments. Believe what you want. You may have needed them, but others didn't and don't.

_________________
Tangu Matraa

Homework is bullshit.

Yes but we are talking about the one size fits all education system here. If one needs it they all need it...

_________________
A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

Not all people require the same level of repetition to learn a skill, but I challenge anyone here to flawlessly, consistently perform a NEW college level skill without repetition, based only on a lecture and then retain that same level of skill 1 year later.

My school district was apparently ahead of it's time. We had a no homework policy...

Some people get it. Some people understand it the first time. Some people get perfect scores on exams because they understand the material, and not because they studied and memorized. For some people, learning is not a struggle. These students do not benefit from the repetition of homework. For them, homework simply serves to punish them for getting it the first time.

The repetition of homework turns A students into C students. There is a benefit to homework, but it is not mastery of knowledge. That is one of the great myths of our society that drives our current economic depression. The bulk of our society is made of of people who worked hard, did their homework, got good grades in school because they were told they needed to go to college to get a good job. They went to college, worked hard, did their homework, and got good grades in college. Unfortunately, they still don't know anything. Then they wonder why their degree is worthless.

It is the person, and not the hard work, that turns temporary knowledge into long-term knowledge. When you've got homework for a grade, what you're going to see is students copying solution manuals, Yahoo! Answers, or whatever else they can find that has the homework posted. They're looking for that grade so they don't get grounded by their parents (or so they can keep their federal aid if they're college students). That's a big problem, because that's not the point of homework. You do homework so that you can do it wrong, and then learn to recognize what a mistake looks like. Homework is so you can **** up, because those are the lessons that stick. Practice doesn't make perfect, failure does.

_________________
Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Hi, my name is Corolinth. I never did any homework in my Physics classes. I work as a TA in an engineering department, and one of my job duties is to teach those topics to struggling first and second year students. I also never did any homework in my Algebra classes, and I recently gave a two hour classroom lecture on matrix operations.

What did I just win?

_________________
Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Forcing everyone to do homework is like forcing people with no interest in tennis to take tennis lessons. It won't make them better at tennis, it will just piss them off.

Someone isn't following the discussion very well...

_________________
Tangu Matraa

This sounds worse than no child left behind.

No. Someone made blanket statements.

Yes, you.

This is me as well. I graduated high school with like a 2.5 GPA because I hated doing the bullshit busywork assignments. Especially when they make you "show your work" on 100 goddamn math problems when you're already at the point where it takes you less time to write the number down than it takes to come up with the number. I got out of college with a 3.6 that wasn't a 4.0 mainly because some of the 1000 and 2000 level classes still have what is essentially homework that I also refused to do.

If I had to guess, I'd say C's in both physics and algebra.

_________________
Tangu Matraa

Bullshit homework (especially 'creative' projects) poisoned me so badly on school that by college I could barely stand to crack a book. I essentially majored in ROTC and got a degree only because it was required for a comission.

_________________
"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."