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

I thought about this idea.

The algebra definitely didn't seem excessive, but I can see that it could take 30 minutes for a learner to finish 11 or 12 detailed questions. It's easy to forget how much time a learner can need.

As for Angela's Ashes...well, I read the first 6 pages online. I loved it and may end up downloading it tonight. But it's not a quick read. Unlike the HomeworkDad, I have not slowed down in middle age. I can read 200 or more pages of a good novel (as opposed to an easy-read trashy one) on a weekend day when I'm not working. But it still took me 1-2 minutes per page to read Angela's Ashes--- and I lived in Ireland for many years and got everything he wrote on the first pass. His sentences are long and convoluted, use Irish-style punctuation, and their general tone is very Irish. Easy for me, not so much for people who haven't spent a lot of time in Ireland, I think. IMO, 79 pages by tomorrow for an American 8th grader is way too much. I would easily assume 1.5 hours just to read 79 pages at a quick pace, and maybe 2 for a bright high schooler. Well, an American could read it that quickly, but not understand it, if you see what I mean.

But more than that, books like this one should be savored, not consumed in a hurry so you can glom out three "powerful quotes" and "analyze" them. When you have to spend 1.5-2 hours on one assignment before rushing to the next one, appreciating the book as a work of art is almost impossible. This approach cheapens the book in a lot of ways.

I don't know about the earth science homework. The book was originally for college students, but apparently has a "high school binding."

DSS20 is a great example of how excessive homework (especially when combined with attention issues) can kill one's spark for education. He went from being in gifted pull outs in elementary, through still being identified in the gifted range in middle school, to barely graduating high school. It wasn't that he wasn't smart enough or did not want to do it, he simply was not able to concentrate on the homework load after coming home from school where he had to keep it together and concentrate for 8 hours. And I am not talking about some challenging private school or big city magnet. I am talking about regular 7/10 score suburban school district. Granted he had a lot of undiagnosed challenges but his friends had the same issues of too much to do for every single class. When you start seeing homework for the GYM class, it just makes you wonder ... And when I brought up his attention issues and other problems, rather than getting him tested I was told he was "lazy". I wish I had known back then what I know now and had him tested privately! But even for a non-LD kid, the workload was crazy! And the way weight was assigned to homework / in class assignments / tests made very little sense too. Homework in many cases was a matter of passing or failing the class. Thankfully DSS20 was great at test taking and barely made it through high school by getting As and Bs on mid-terms and finals.

Reminds me of a blog post by a high school teacher:

http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/homework-and-grades/
Homework and grades.
By educationrealist
February 6, 2012


I think math grades should depend nonlinearly on homework and test scores. Students who can show they can do a certain type of problem should be exempted from doing lots of homework problems of the same type.

This approach cheapens the book in a lot of ways.

Agreed.

Which is why-- based on what I know my DD's 8th grade literature course did-- I strongly suspect that Dad, there, was not being entirely forthright on the subject. I suspect that the student was being asked to "review" reading and pull out the quotes. On a second read-through, not so outrageous.

On the other hand, as I noted in my first post, I have some concerns with either of the books mentioned being used for students in this age/grade cohort in the first place, as they are VERY adult in theme and content, and really I doubt very much if they can be appreciated as works of literature by adolescents who are only picking up the narrative surface, and not the deeper aspects of both. Alexie's work is often deeply disturbing-- both of those novels are about what it means to grow up as a deeply disenfranchised and impoverished youngster who has an inner core of... something... that won't allow them to be pulled under no matter how strong the undertow. Both feature alcoholism and fairly unflinching portraits of family dysfunction. Both raise questions about reliable/unreliable narration, and whether or not there is intentionality present in unreliably narrated memoir as a genre. Like I said-- my concerns there are that neither book is probably very well suited to analysis by students of this age, because they lack the maturity for a nuanced look at either one that goes past the shocking, wry, and titillating content. Can they be read at a surface level? Of course. I just think that cheapens them.

Learning how to get into GT? Yikes! That says it all.

I admit I'm way too far away from the algebra assignment as a student and not there yet as a parent, so I couldn't judge that at all.

But wasn't it that, plus 79 pages of reading and the pull quotes, plus studying multiple irregular Spanish verbs, plus Earth science reading? (Might be remembering wrong.)

So we're saying if you can't do that in...what do we think is reasonable? I think an hour, hour and a half is reasonable for 8th grade, even pushing it--you're not college prep material?

15 minutes for math, 20 minutes to study Spanish, 60 minutes for 79 pages of reading and pull quotes, 20-30 minutes for the science...hmm. (Or do we think this should be less? How much less? How lightning-fast are these kids required to be?)

It's also important to keep in mind that, of course, the school day IS long and arduous in mutiple ways for most kids. I don't really mean intellectually. But my DD is sort of cooked when she gets home, which is why HW tends to drag on some days. That's why the HuffPo piece is so funny.

If that were the goal, they'd have to add "intrinsic motivation" and "dynamically synergize/synthesize information from disparate topics/sources" to the list, just for starters.

Of course, the point isn't to learn to be GT, just how to look like one to the untrained eye.

Dude, you forget that everyone is gifted.

I learned how to make a GT student in middle school. It was called health class.

You know, ultramarina has a good point. (Now that I'm done laughing at the series of posts which follow, that is. )

What are the kids doing during the school day?

I mean, none of the tasks assigned is UNreasonable, I think most of us can agree. None of what he listed is inherently 'busywork' of the nasty variety that any one of us could no doubt enumerate ad nauseum or at least until the cows come home.

But the real question is-- why is it HOME-work? What did this child do IN CLASS?

My daughter's school, for high school students, is quite frequently a 9-14 hours-a-day endeavor for students during their first weeks in the program. Eventually, for most of them, that settles into more like 7-8 hours.

But many students struggle with the workload of their first high school courses. The output demands are a lot higher, and they are expected to work quickly.

Here's my hypothesis, having spent some time around my DD (and her friends, who are all B&M students and a couple of homeschoolers); I think that this student is bringing home nightly homework which she maintains is "I have to do this tonight-- it's tonight's homework," whereas the intention in the assignment might be considerably different.

I think that the child in question here is deadline-driven, and that she probably KNOWS about things like that reading assignment and quote thing a lot of time prior to the deadline.

Ergo, I strongly suspect that the real problem for the dad here isn't that the homework is "too much" or that the difficulty, even, is all that much beyond his daughter. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. The fact that she's using "memorizing" as a coping thing would be a red flag for me personally, but I'm not him. Not judging.

What I suspect, however, is that in the move to the east, they moved from one school to another-- and that the scaffolding that preceded the current placement shifted under them.

Perhaps (speculating) at the OldSchool, this was the year that students would be shown how to manage time well in preparation for high school. Don't eat an elephant all in one bite, kids... use your planners, break things down!

Whereas at NewSchool, evidently kids are expected to be doing those things with a fair degree of fluency already. Now, one might debate endlessly about how developmentally appropriate such a thing is either way in a population 12-15yo, but at any rate, this IS now the expectation in high schools.

That might explain why she is rushing to do things the night before they are due, for example, and that some things seem to be in way larger chunks at once than I think is typical.

I view behavior like that as a warning sign, myself. It's a warning that my DD is putting things off and not managing her time well, or maybe that she's not PLANNING her time well.