Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Atlantic article on excessive homework

Agreed. Some parents are buying into it. BUT NOT ALL OF US.



Disagreed.

The guy who wrote that article didn't give me the impression of being a whiner. But it's possible that you're perceiving him the way that gifted-kid parents are seen when advocating for their kids.

My tenth-grade son is doing his daily dose of 30-50 math problems right now, and they tend to be same-y. My daughter (just 9) averaged 20-30 per night last year and the year before that, except they weren't same-y. They were pretty much carbon copies of each other. They were easy, taught her little, yet they took a lot of time just to write out. Especially when you have to "show your work."

With my other son (DS11), it's reams of vocabulary words that he's unlikely to hear or use again until he's 16 or older. Many of these words are SAT/GRE words. "Diffident" isn't exactly in the realm of a 6th grader, even one with an impressive vocabulary.

I have not "bought into" this situation. I hate it. I complain about it to the school. I talk to other parents. But I have no choice. There is simply no other high school around here that will not pile on homework. The neighborhood elementary schools don't seem to pile it on, but...they would prefer to see my 5th grade daughter in 3rd grade because of her birthday.

I'm kind of surprised at these reactions. As parents of gifties, we know how rigid the schools are. People on this board commonly use phrase "least worst option." Too much homework is toxic. It robs kids of time to play and be creative. And what are they doing all day in school that they have to keep working for 2-4 hours each night?

Yes, part of my son's math and science classes this year includes spelling and vocabulary. I suppose I can see that, in part, for science but in no way should it be considered math.

And yes, he loses points for not titling the page, showing work, putting answers in the wrong place, etc. This year (4th grade) seems to have kicked those kinds of nits into high gear. While I understand it is important to follow rules to an extent, it does seem trivial as well.

More importantly, though, my son has a fabulous teacher this year who seems to get him (esp with regard to math). More than makes up for the other trivial issues so far.

Val, I'm entirely with you, FWIW.


Yes. My DD has ZERO problem learning the material at her school (which is a GT magnet but I think you all know that). Actually, much of it is too easy, but it's the closest we can come to an appropriate placement; before we moved her she was having to read Frog and Toad and add 2 + 2 in 1st and about ready to stab her eyeballs out.

She does have problems completing all that effing homework, though. But we could have kept her at Old School, which had much less HW. Should we have? She says this one is "WAY better," "because I actually learn some things" "even though I have too much homework." She also has peers and real friends, which she did not at old school. Which would you choose?

I haven't read all the replies, and have no desire to get into the throws of the debate over whether or not most students have too much homework - I believe that unstructured down-time is important for our children. OTOH, I wouldn't choose this particular article as the starting point for a battle-cry to rage against the amount of homework students are receiving across the US, for a few reasons.

The first thing that struck me when reading the article is that the amount and type of homework described sounds very similar to the amount and type of homework our middle school assigns each night and which is not expected to take more than 10 minutes per grade per year (so an 8th grader would expected to spend 80 minutes max on homework. This formula works out fairly well for my kids - my ds' homework takes about 3 hours on a typical night - but it's not the actual homework that takes a long time, it's fall-out from his writing disability that causes homework time to take him longer than most of his peers at school.

So my first thought when reading the article was that perhaps the HomeworkDad's daughter was struggling with work she wasn't really ready for.

I also don't particularly appreciate the "memorize" attitude - in my own life (which is of course, only a sample of one and not anything to draw conclusions from..).. I've found that homework (or any kind of work) goes *faster* when you understand what you're doing. As a parent, I'd not automatically assume that my child had to fly right to "memorize to get by" mode until I fully understood what was expected and what was going on in school. One really important piece of information missing from this article was the amount of time the teachers estimated students should be spending on each bit of homework. If the teachers are assigning homework that (in their estimation) should be taking less time, and my child is telling me that it's all about memorization, I'd be looking at what's up with my child's learning situation first before condemning the system-wide approach to homework.

I also am not surprised that it took a lot of time, effort, and frustration for HomeworkDad to do his daughter's homework - he's not in school studying those courses, listening to the teacher's lectures, participating in classwork during the day - so he has none of the background prep going into his homework sessions that the actual students have. He's also far-removed from his own middle school days, and he's not in a career where he is actively using either Algebra or Earth Science skills - so I wouldn't expect him to be as quick-on-his-toes at working Algebra problems or prepping for a science test as I would expect a student to be.

He's also admitted he wasn't a stellar student himself back in middle school

So that's just my take on it. I empathize with you Val, and with other parents who's children are bogged down with too much homework - but I wouldn't be quoting this specific article as particularly supportive of that concern in a meaningful way.

polarbear

The school in the article would have gotten an earful from me with their insipid and beyond inappropriate attempt to stamp out free speech and right to assembly under the guise of preventing cyber bullying. Finally, they could learn the appropriate place to put those mounds of redundant home-busywork.

School is for opening young minds, not conditioning them to dormancy through useless tasks.

He gave specifics that indicate that he's complaining about a homework workload which is less than 1/4th of what you just listed for your 9yo, Val.



What he reported (not in the first school, but the Lab school, which is an exam school in NYC, yes?) seemed not at all unreasonable to me.
THAT is why I think that yeah, he's being a bit whiny.

I also strongly suspect that the 79p reading assignment was a matter of a reading assignment which was intended for 3 evenings, not one-- or was intended not as a FIRST read-through, but as a second one specifically for the purpose of pulling out quotes. DD did quite similar activities in middle school. Not excessive, and not necessarily busywork.

What Val describes is not even comparable to what the Dad in this article is listing.

He specifically describes algebra homework which is 10-11 problems per evening, yes? Assume for a moment that this is two, maybe three types of problems-- seems entirely in line with the idea of reasonable repetition for mastery of the concept.


I just don't see this parent as anything but a different sub-category of the parents who-- being honest in my opinion-- tend to ruin authentic GT classes with their fervor to get their kids into them.

Well, if it can't be hard, (because then not very many students can actually DO the work) then it still needs to FEEL hard. Voila-- the body double of rigor, there, is volume of output.

That's not really appropriately meeting anyone's needs, of course. The GT students NEED what most students can't legitimately do. The others need instruction that is meaningfully on their level, too, and could really do without all of the more-more-more-more frenzy.

I just don't think that is really what this author was accurately reporting. Val-- YOUR kids' situation seems like the real thing to me. So does what our local high schools do to kids in honors/college-prep. But this seems kind of tame, honestly. He's reporting EXCESSIVE homework, via time-to-completion, and I'm seeing that the details of this homework shouldn't be taking that long if this student is appropriately placed (apparently taking high school college-prep coursework). Which-- um, is what the teacher told him, too.

Basically, I interpret that as "Sorry, this class IS hard. Maybe it's too hard for your kid."

Don't we all wish that administrators and teachers WOULD do a bit more of that rather than watering down content?



I also think that he's being a little sensationalistic here. It's a modern twist on the similar wry editorials about "ha-ha- I can't do my fifth grader's math homework because I don't understand it, how ridiculous is that?" that were in vogue in the 60's-70's.

I had the same thought. In fact, I would have told the veep that, in pretending that my email discussion amounted to cyber bullying in order to shame and silence dissent, he was the one doing the bullying. When he said the teacher felt threatened, I would have demanded that he immediately point out any passage that indicated threatening language, and if he couldn't, invite him to immediately apologize instead.

Oh, and because I walked away before hitting post-- what Polarbear said.


Some people really do have the problem that this author seems to think he's having.

Trust me, though-- too little in-class instruction and too few graded assignments creates other issues.

Indeed... 10 to 11 problems of simplifying polynomials, which takes him 40 minutes.

Yeah, I suppose 40 minutes, for an adult who hasn't used algebra in ages, and was an uninspired student in the first place, makes sense. But for the student who is actively doing it and understands the concepts, there's no reason for it to take more than 2 minutes per problem. That's a 22-minute homework assignment for the average student, and 11 minutes (or less) for the gifted one.

Agreed. The whole feigned offense and calling a parent into his office for a dressing down is laughable.