On a recent edition of the CBS News “Assignment America” feature, correspondent Steve Hartman met up with a precocious 5th grade student from Long Island, New York who argued in an open letter published last month in The Daily News, that homework is “cruel, inhumane, stressful, unhealthy,” and ultimately, illegal (being a form of “slavery” it’s contended). Berrafato urged his fellow students to rise up and “unite against homework.”
I’m not entirely sure that I agree with the premise, but maybe he’s onto something…
I’m not entirely sure that I agree with the premise,
Oh, I do. No homework before grade 7.
It certainly was a frustrating experience at times when my kids were that age. I would have made a terrible teacher.
I am of the belief that ten minutes of homework per grade is fine. For example, a grade-one student might get ten minutes of reading. A grade-three student might get 30 minutes in total that may include 20 minutes of reading and possibly ten minutes of math. A student in grade-eight could get 80 minutes per night. A grade-twelve student should get two hours per night four or five days per week.
In the early grades, homework that a child brings home should be work that the child already has learned and that his/her family can review how well he/she is learning. If there are difficulties, the family may intervene by helping their child and/or talking to the teacher.
Years ago, I worked at a summer camp where I was a counsellor for kids who enjoyed reading and those who didn’t as much. Those kids who were constant readers where very bright. However, they couldn’t kick a soccer ball or run without getting tired after one minute. The reading kids had different body types. They looked skinny, average, and fat. They lacked the physical coordination and stamina to perform different activities. They seemed more afraid to swim in the water. They lacked teamwork skills with their fellow campers when they had to perform activities together. The readers were very bright. However, they lacked life-skills beyond literacy.
As a sidenote: correct spelling is great; spelling tests are crap. They use up a lot of student time within and outside the class. Students could be using that time writing grade-appropriate compositions using words that are meaningful to them and their activity. Yes, as a teacher, I do expect students to spell words appropriately for their grade levels.
“My brother and i lik spageti.” I will expect a grade-one student to correct “I.” I grade-two student will also be expected to spell “like” correctly. I would inform that students if they like “licking” spaghetti or just “like” spaghetti. This is to get the student to remember the silent E rule. A student in grade-four will be expected to spell every word correctly at the end of completing a formal writing activity.
Standard spelling tests are a poor learning tool for the students. Either they already know how to spell the words and aren’t learning anything new or they receive words that are too difficult for them to learn right now. Some spelling tests that are geared individually for each students do help them learn to spell more difficult words.
Back to homework: children should get the appropriate amount and type of homework depending on their grade-levels. If parents feel that their children are getting too much homework, they should talk to the teacher. Who knows? Their children may not be doing their work at school. There might be other reasons for too much homework.
Damn, I wish I could correct a couple of words.
SD BEd
Getting an organized response to be effective will require they …. errr …. do their homework ….
Snerd
I’m not sure what the correct course is. It’s hard not to say that there’s something to be said for both sides of the argument. But speaking personally as a dyslexic and remedial reader, I quite enjoyed the “homework” I was assigned at an early age — in fact, without that I would have been hopelessly lost otherwise.
$20 this kids Dad is a lawyer. Jr. probably learned at an early age that if you whine/bitch loud enough at the right people you can get out of an honest day’s work.
Heh. That’s one way of looking at it.
I’m not sure what the correct course is. It’s hard not to say that there’s something to be said for both sides of the argument.
My problem here is with homework being just another manifestation of this mania for quantitative measuring of student performance…testing and grades, something which needs to be revisited constantly.
This is probably a consequence of the credentialism that requires k-6 teachers to have BEds.
Well, I’d just like to remind anyone reading this thread, that until twenty years ago, homework simply did not exist in elementary school, except for unfinished work not done during the day and an annual project or two. Nothing, nada, zip. Grades 7-8 had very little. And all of those past generations of kids not only turned out fine, but did some pretty creative things, like write Pulitzer Prize winning books, and invent the internet, and land on the moon.
And that ten minute rule? Utter crap. Every child I know struggles with homework that is supposedly ten minutes per grade, but in reality is hours and hours and hours of repetitive drudgery that teaches nothing. The kids next door, who get the most homework I have ever seen in my life–can barely read. The teacher is too busy dealing with social problems in some of the saddest most desperate kids, and checking homework on the others to teach them! She’d love to actually get to teach!
For elementary level children, homework is the scourge of our age. It destroys family time, makes it harder for two parents to work, enslaves parents as some sort of free tutors for the damn school system, and does absolutely not one fucking thing in terms of learning.
There are zero evidence based studies in fact, that there is any benefit to it all prior to high school.
All the parents I know agree, the politician who bans it, will get reelected forever and ever.
I seem to recall always having massive amounts of homework… Not so much tedious spelling lists, and such, but having to write essays and lengthy “reports” in addition to producing novel science projects and other kinds of skill-testing challenges.
but having to write essays and lengthy “reports”
In grades 1 to 6? We did that kind of work in class.
That kind of stuff was hived off to home in my case. I think you’ll find that’s still the case today. “Book reports” and such are all done exclusive from school.
I agree with “Aurelia” – the 10-minutes of hw per grade level is a ridiculous idea to enforce. It sounds about as logical as: “Kids must read 10x as many words for their Literature class equal to the difficulty of their Math assignments. I would expect a 1st grader to only read 10 words, since addition and subtraction is easy (Level 1). But I would expect a 5th grader to read 1000 words, because I learned geometry and pre-algebra in 5th grade, and that shit was hard! (Level 100)”
You can’t measure someone’s ability to learn with a stopwatch. I could grasp concepts of college physics after just 1 lecture. But I couldn’t sit down and read about Mesopotamia for “the suggested 50 minutes” and recite it 10 minutes later if my life depended on it.
I forgot to ask: how old is everyone? I hope this isn’t just a big generation-gap argument.
- 22, educated in the Irvine Unified School District, Orange County, CA
I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m 48 (4 kids, all grown now).
I’m not sure if you can make hard and fast rules about homework. I never had a problem with it, but I can’t really attest to its value. It does impart some positive qualities, I think, such as self-discipline, the ability to work independently, etc.
More evidence that our decision-makers have completely lost the plot when it comes to education: the proposal by Josh Matlow, a trustee on the Toronto Board of Education to introduce a course on “financial literacy” in grade four. He debated the proposal with Annie Kidder, the executive director of People for Education on last week’s CBC’s Sunday Edition.
Grade 4? Seems a little premature, don’t you think?
The overwhelming problem with this is that no amount of “financial literacy” would ever have prevented the financial meltdown, which is what motivated Matlow’s proposal. Annie Kidder mentions quite a few times that the people responsible for the crisis were the most “financially literate” people on the planet.
Anyway, there so many problems brought up in that discussion, I don’t know where to start. I’m actually beside myself wondering how anyone could think this was a sensible proposal to begin with, particularly a trustee on a large board of education. You learn “financial literacy” as you move through life and it’s this expectation that schools can replace experiences that, for some reason, are not being had elsewhere (such as in the home or in society at large) is what’s destroying real education.
I doesn’t strike me as a bad idea to propose a course in basic economics and “financial literacy” being taught in middle or high school (I seem to recall taking something similar, but it was an elective), but to introduce those concepts in Grade 4 is simply absurd.
It’s also ridiculous to suggest that such a course would prevent another financial meltdown. I’m thinking more just giving kids a very basic skillset to work with on the subject. Many go out in world quite unprepared. Much like sex education, it’s something that parents should be responsible for, but often don’t like talking about…
I agree with RT, about the need for a course, but I think you could have it start at every age and be scattered throughout the curriculum, until junior high when you start discussing it in terms of how does a family make a budget, etc… and then high school when you really talk about concrete things like picking careers and how much you need to live.
We used to have courses like that in junior high like home ec and shop and life skills courses like how to do a resume, etc…and then some bozos got rid of them in favour of more academic skills.
Anyway, yes parents don’t like talking about it. I finally sat my son down and explained just how much money things cost and how much we made–and really, I think it was a shock to him.
As for me? Age 40, three kids, two in school. I spend a lot of time lobbying education people to fix the system, so I have to admit, this is an area I have a keen interest in.
Basic economics and book-keeping is not what is meant by “financial literacy” as discussed in that episode. What Matlow is proposing is indoctrination into the value system that governs the brand of capitalism we live with.
Teaching “life skills” is not the role of the public education system. We accept this now because the type of communities we have mostly prevent children from picking those up outside school and that’s the issue that needs to be addressed. Why burden the curriculum with yet another subject matter that’s completely unrelated to life outside school? Unless you expect your children to earn a little pocket money and manage it themselves and assign them domestic chores like cooking and housekeeping, what is the point of having them learn these things at school?
I’d have to listen to the episode rather than just read the synopsis then to get a better idea of what the intent of the course was. From the way you describe it, the concept sounds even more hare-brained than I’d originally thought.
As for schools teaching (some) “life skills” I would have to disagree with you there. I don’t see anything wrong in a modicum of resources being devoted to that.
Ti-guy, the synopsis you linked to said it started with basic budgeting and credit cards, and then went right on up to the stock market, etc. If the program is different, then fine, I’ll have to listen later…
I don’t know that they necessarily mean indoctrination, btw. Whose to say what point of view will accompany it all? I know my friend who is a bankruptcy trustee desperately wishes more people had skills in understanding credit cards and other more complicated issues. He sees people everyday with no skills at all who lives have been wrecked.
FWIW, I do teach my kids how to manage money that way as well, but I seem to be the exception. And for the kids whose parents don’t bother, well, isn’t the point of a social safety net and an education system to help those kids and make sure they aren’t left behind?
Nice of Ken to revive this old thread. Too bad he’s not around to contribute.
I think it boils down to what our expectations are from our school system. It’s a complex problem. Perhaps the balance has shifted too heavily to the purely academic side at the expense of some more practical skills. It’s easy to dispense with things like shop, home economics, physical education, music, art, etc., but those are all parts of a well-rounded education in my opinion.
Is it reasonable for these “peripheral” things that are regarded as extraneous to the curriculum to be imparted by parents that are (usually) both working full-time and harried by any number of other factors. Not to mention the fact that they may themselves be unskilled or uninformed about a lot of things…