The Glade 4.0

Amen!

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

homework is needed for some subjects, but it isn't things like Math.

Homework is good for things that require memorization to get right, where understanding is not enough. (though memorizing your multiplication tables up to 12 or even 15 isn't a bad idea, so maybe it does have its use in math.) This mostly takes place in the earlier, elementary grades (spelling, for example), although other things (Chemistry students memorizing the periodic table might not be a bad idea.) Learning vocabulary or grammar in a second language is another good example.

There are other types of homework that make sense as well. The teacher should be spending the class teaching you. Reading and writing a report on a novel is not something a high school student should get to spend their class time on, that's "homework."

This isn't to say most homework is not bullshit. Doing 100 repetitive math problems doesn't help one remember. It just makes one hate math. But repetition for memorization sake does have a purpose.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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I agree with most everything said here, but I don't find homework to be all that bad nonetheless. Maybe I'm too immersed in university, having spent most of the past 11 years in some program or another, and as such lost focus on what high school homework is like. Maybe it changed since I was there. But I remember very little endless repetition homework.

So despite agreeing with the maligned comments about repetition not doing much for mastery (and certainly doing a lot of negatives, to a varying degree by individual) I mostly see homework do two things:

1) as Coro said, it's a place to make mistakes when you don't have a teacher there to lead you through something. You try something on your own, usually for the first time, usually after some amount of downtime between class where you learned something and when you actually do it. That trying alone tends to reveal things that classroom work/discussion doesn't.

2) what I see most of at the university level, especially grad school: just simply time spent working outside of class. I don't know if this would be counted as traditional homework judging by a lot of the comments here. I've written very, very few papers inside of any class, yet written communication is probably one of the few useful general skills picked up in college. I have one professor now who requires far more time spent working outside of class than we spend inside, and it's basically all doing work that she quickly explains in class. While I grumble about it feeling like being thrown into a lake to learn how to swim, it couldn't be farther from a lot of the arguments I'm seeing here.

This may just be anecdotes at work, but I don't even really mind most of the repetitive homework I have had. Maybe cause I never had teachers assign 100 math problems a night or anything. If I have 10 math problems in one section of homework that all deal with the same concept, if I know how to do them it's over fast and painlessly. If anything, I feel vaguely productive (likely a false sense of productivity, but nevermind that!) Helpful? Not past the first few, but pretty much a nonissue for me all the same. I can see where 90 more would be pointless but does that really happen all that often?

I do think repeated exposure helps for languages... if anyone has ever learned a second language to the point of simply being able to feel when something is off, or when you realize you're doing some reading/listening without translating it to your primary language in your head... in my experience, that comes from sheer exposure. That or immersion programs, anyway. :p They themselves are a form of extended exposure... just not in quite so mind-numbing a way. Rosetta Stone comes to mind as something some of you probably have experience with, though Rosetta Stone is not without its own flaws in trying so hard to be non-traditional. Some of us like having some grammar rules now and then!

I think there is something to be said here for the purpose of university in this country, too. We could probably have a whole thread about this, but I will summarize. If I'm studying to be a programmer or someone that maintains a network at a business, is it helpful for me to write a paper about Oracle's ERP products? Probably not. The network people I know at work don't exactly spend a lot of time writing reports... pretty certain they don't have to research anything at all. Pretty sure the programmers at work don't have to write anything at all, period (sadly, including comments in the code, but that's another story). You could argue these are worthless classes, and given my recent disillusionment at the normal bachelor's program structure in this country and my attempted forays into the job market I would agree wholeheartedly. Universities currently aim for that well-roundedness, though... and frankly it's what you sign up for when you go. If I had my say, I'd probably change the majority of university curriculum to be more practical. I'm not as set on the same idea for high school, especially for college preparatory programs, where I think exposure to many subjects is probably a good thing even if you will end up not using most of them. So when we talk about useless homework, this issue probably rears its head often and is something that should be kept in mind.

The usage of homework in the primary and secondary schools (both public and private) is at odds with the actual purpose it serves. Homework is assigned for the sake of having homework to grade. There is a general consensus somewhere, whether it's the teachers or the administration, that you have to be assigning homework every week or else people aren't learning. Homework is not something that can be institutionalized if it is to be useful, which is why the slickest homework policies I've ever encountered could never be implemented in a high school. Administrators would throw a fit.

1) I had a professor for multivariable calculus who set homework at 10% of your grade. You could get an A without it, if you were on fire with everything else. Before each exam, she'd pick five problems she was going to grade. You didn't know which five until the exam came. If you were lucky, you could just do five problems and have "all of your homework finished." That isn't the slick part. The other thing she did was refuse to give partial credit on exam questions. Instead, she gave you a week to fix your incorrect answers for half credit, but that was pro-rated based on the amount of homework you'd turned in. The percentage of homework you turned in with the exam was the percentage of that half credit you could recover. On paper, homework was 10% overall grade. In practice, it was closer to 30%.

2) I had another professor who gave everyone a sheet of paper with about 300 recommended homework problems on it, and a third of them were bolded. We had to complete 100 homework assignments, 50 of which had to be chosen from the bolded list, and the others could be whatever the hell we wanted to do. The recommended list was just that - his recommendations. It was due at the end of the semester, when we took our final. Each one of us did the homework we needed to do in order to understand the material. We decided what we did and didn't do.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Oddly, my toughest courses this semester are the ones that assign the least homework.

Religion and Philosophy are easy As, even at minimal effort, but I have to do the assignments; OChem and DiffEQ require focus, but I have no homework for them (except OChem expects a lab report every week, but that's not too difficult).

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Grenade 3 Sports Drink. It's fire in the hole.. Your hole!

It's occurred to me that "Universities" have, to my mind, traditionally more about research and/or a "well-rounded" (i.e. liberal arts) education, rather than something more practical/technical. The more modern idea that vocational/technical schools/colleges (not to mention trade schools/apprenticeships) were less "prestigious" and should be looked down upon has given rise to what is pretty universally lamented as a glut of useless degrees just to have the piece of paper. It's further exacerbated by the idea that kids "need to have a degree (from a university) in order to succeed" that is pushed so hard by those who want the Gov't to pay for it.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

There's nothing wrong with the universities or the education they provide, it's the students who attend them. They want to do the "campus life" stuff. They major in Sociology because they liked the slick professor who taught the 101 class, or they major in Psychology because of their hip, cool high school psych teacher. They gravitate toward the courses that are trendy and fun, and leave them time to get involved in activism. They want to get involved, because getting involved looks good on a resume! They don't participate in any of the campus programs that will actually get you a job, such as majoring in engineering.

Now, studying something like Sociology because you like it is perfectly fine. That's what those degrees are for - people who really like it and really want to be there. It isn't flawed thinking to study something because you had a teacher that made you like the field. Where everything falls down is the mistaken notion that employers are interested in someone who set themselves apart by participating and being active in the community. To be fair, employers might actually be looking for that, but first you have to be able to do the job. College students spend too much time trying to impress prospective employers with what they've been told looks good on a resume, and never learned how to do any of the jobs that people want done.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Making money is about creating something of value (or doing something of value) and trading it for something in return. If you can't create or do something of value, then don't expect to make a living.

FTFY

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College students aren't any more focused on getting laid than, say, you are.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

All I'm saying is that if the Save the Whales movement was full of fatties then right now we'd be surfing an internet powered by sperm whale blubber.

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ditto, but in just about every subject junior and senior year! well, b-'s and c's cause I slept through half of the classes lol. damn "participation grade"

I believe in homework. I do not believe in homework as it is given in most primary and secondary education courses. In my classes, your grade is your homework, because you better produce some damn solid research or you fail.

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In my classes that was an F. Fully half your grade was homework. You could show up every day, ace every test, do every quiz, and get every participation point, as well as working in some extra credit and STILL fail the class based on homework. I once failed a class I was tutoring for credit in.

This was my reality as well. It's the reason that I almost didn't graduate HS despite making a lot of my "peers" look like mouth-breathers come test time.

Homework was for most of my life my punishment for understanding every lesson the first time. Then I got to be bored in class while they went over it to get 10 minutes of new material that took me 5 minutes to understand to be assigned more punishment.

Repeat every day.
Die a little more.
Get worse grades.
Give up caring.

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"...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

There are benefits to homework. Lots of assignments cannot be done in class. For example, essay writing and research projects are important, and are too time consuming for class, and difficult to test.

True, but the day to day make-work is not that.

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

I agree that a certain degree of homework is excessive and certainly non-instructional. The blanket statement "homework is useless" (or however it was phrased) can't be backed up.

Lets be more specific:
Math homework: Specifically pages of problems are useful to a certain point, until the lesson is learned. Some students might get it after 5 problems. Others get it after 100, some after 1000. I don't disagree that there are diminishing returns and in the long run the high end students may become bored/disillusioned/disinterested by too much homework. One can always improve however, so it isn't useless as long as interest is held. The real issue is finding that sweet spot for each student. All students will benefit from doing a type of problem a few times. No one does every mathematical operation right the very first time without ever having tried it before.

Reading: Again, diminishing returns. Once you've got a student who can read, retrain and regurgitate the information that has been read and has mastered the requisite vocabulary, its time to advance the student to harder material. It isn't that homework here is useless, its more likely that its the WRONG homework.

Writing: One can always improve ones skill. The more you right, the better you'll get at it. However, if a student has mostly mastered the 5 paragraph argument paper, they should be assigned harder material.

Again, the issue is not Homework=Bad. The issue is assigning the correct homework.

Sciences are a little weirder. Rote memorization is sometimes of value and sometimes not. (cf. Fennyman's Map of a Cat) However experimentation & observation a skills and can be improved upon. A better experiment can be made, better, tighter conclusions and theories can be developed. Again, this is a question of the type of homework given.

I should also point out (thinking now of the homework that my daughter is given) that sometimes homework is used to emphasize information for the test, as it points to what the book authors consider the salient points. It teaches children how to pull the correct information out of text, a skill they'll use much later in college when there is no homework.

Homework isn't inherently bad. It's bad when teachers base grades on homework completion that may have never been necessary for that particular student.

I'm ok with homework being a requirement after falling below a certain testing benchmark. For example, if you can't complete 9 of these 10 math problems, you need to do a few extra assignments until you prove you can do so. Once done, homework can go back to being unnecessary.

I firmly believe that overall grades should be based on a real world application of some kind, whether it be through tests or projects. Homework should have ZERO impact on a grade if you can prove you understand what the homework is trying to cover.

Interesting that none have mentioned this yet, but homework is also a vehicle to encourage, or require, interaction with the child's education process and the parents, especially at the younger ages.

I guess that depends on if you're trying to evaluate if student's ability to perform a task in a test environment or a 'homework' environment.

In many cases homework represents more of what you would do on the job. (the ability to repeatedly produce results in an assembly line fashion)

Take writing for example: The test may prove you can write one article. Homework may prove you can reliably turn out articles on a repetitive basis.

From, say, a newspaper hiring point of view, they want to be able to judge that a person not only has the skill, but also the discipline to continue to produce.

Yeah but school shouldn't be a vehicle for becoming a worker drone. It should be a vehicle for educating, that's it.

I DID once have a teacher who agreed to grade me purely on test scores. A math teacher. I'd show up in class and either pay attention to the lesson if I needed to or read quietly, or sometimes work some of the odd problems (the ones with the answers in the back) to self-check.

There are also students who dont perform well on tests due to time pressure.
My niece has been tested has having extremely slow processing speed. (bottom 2%) but also better than 90th percentile IQ. She simply can't do anything fast though. She understands material but completely flips out if you give her time pressure. (She has a breakdown if you put a clock in front of her) but has no trouble actually doing homework.