Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Homework load question

TwoMoose- this is where I fundamentally have struggles with curriculum in the 21st century! Why on earth would you spend time learning capitals of countries? It's easy to look it up on the internet or on a map. Being familiar with the landscape and the locations is one thing, but I see too many teachers spend a month on memorizing mapping. Booooring and totally not practical!

If teachers weren't afraid to work on higher level taxonomy questions for all the students, we'd be better preparing them for problem solving jobs of the future. Even the SATs don't care if you know the capital of Hungary.

Better example- I was observing a teacher last week. She was leading 7th graders in an interesting compare and contrast of the fall of Rome to current US politics. The students were able to draw similarities and differences between what lead to the fall of Rome and the current political climate in the US, make assumptions and conclusions. No homework required, actually no homework even allowed because it would have been unduly influenced by outside opinion.

Or she could have had them just memorize the 5 major factors leading to the fall of Rome...

I think we're saying essentially the same thing. I am trying to contrast superficial learning, that could take just a few hours in a school year, to in-depth exploration of a subject. That's why some out-of-class work is required in my kids' middle school. BTW, state and national capitals show up on the geography bee (required for all students at our middle school) and the AP Human Geography course from what I've seen.

There is evidence that some homework is generally beneficial in 7-12th graders. http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2006/03/homework.html

Anecdotally, my kids have better time-management skills and better study habits than I did - because they have to structure their time carefully.

Boy is this a timely discussion for me. Normally, DD10 has about an hour of homework per night. Last night DD10 had soccer practice and her teacher decided to make it a massive homework night. They didn't get something done in class so the teacher sent it home on top of all their regular work. We get out of school at 4. Soccer practice with travel time takes about 2 hours. She also needs time to eat. We usually can fit in an hour of homework since she's pretty organized. DD usually goes to bed at about 8:30. Needless to say, yesterday by 9 she had come no where close to getting her work done. She was sobbing at this point and I told her that she needed to stop and get some sleep. She had a tough time calming down and going to sleep because she was stressed out that she wouldn't get it all done. She woke up early to try to get things finished before school. She completed the writing assignment, her required reading and spent 45-60 minutes on math. I finally told her that I would write the teacher a note explaining that DD had put in over 2 hours on homework and that I was cutting her off.

I don't always like but can deal with our normal hour of homework. What I find difficult is the unpredictability of the workload. We never know when one of these extra homework nights is coming. Is my 10 year old really getting any educational benefit from staying up late and stressing out because the teacher didn't meet her own goal for getting stuff done in class? I want my 10 year old to have the opportunity to play sports and do other things. I don't think that she has an unreasonable schedule -- she only has practice twice a week. Now, I'm reconsidering whether to let her add private music lessons because her homework load may be too great. Grr!

Could you request advanced notice of the homework for the week? My kids' school has everything on-line, with syllabi for at least 1 week - sometimes 2 weeks - in advance. It helps alleviate those late-evening homework crises.

Sorry your DD had this happen.

Also, could you do the music lessons on Saturday????

deeDee

Sorry for the choice of words - for "delivered" read "taught" - like in:
"the teacher couldn't get the kids to understand some of the lesson so they brought the work home so they could have a go there then be taught it by their parents."

Twomoose - the idea of a curriculum is that boys and girls are taught appropriate stuff in a fixed time frame so they can be examined. Sure, knowledge is infinite, and yes junior could come home from school and spend 3 or 4, or 5, or 6 hours looking at his encyclopedias (or wikipedia) to bone up on Quantum Mechanics but really there has to be a limit.
In the old days there used to be, ah, somewhere where one could study a subject in depth for 2- 3 years, usually at age 18 after being schooled in the basics. Now what was it called - ah yes, it's coming to me - University. They used to hand out Bachelor Degrees to successful students I believe

CAMom - you have it in one (yet again - you're quite a star). Teachers should teach the kids to question, and analyse, and reason and then question again..... That's difficult (more difficult than reciting the capitals of the world for the umpteenth time)

This is loosely related but I thought it was pretty interesting.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/...g-the-new-buzz-word-sweeping-the-US.html

Now why didn't I think of that!
In the olden days (in my youth) this was done from a textbook and was known, affectionately, as 'prep'.