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

This month's Atlantic has an article about excessive homework. It has all the usual suspects and some other stuff too.

For example, the author's daughter also loses points on her homework if she doesn't put her answers in the right places. This suggests to me that teacher is only looking at answers and not at the process used to get there.

For math class, his daughter had to calculate the distance from Sacramento to all other state capitals (in miles and kilometers). When dad protested that the assignment seemed somewhat less than useful, the teacher argued that his daughter needed to learn her state capitals. When he said, "But that's not math," she told him that combining subject areas is popular these days.

Looks like my DD's Ms. T. isn't the only one. How sad.

This reminded me of the endless nights when DSS20 was still in high school. Add a learning disability on top of it and oh, what a nightmare all that homework was!

I identified with this article all too well. DD9 has about 1.5 hours of HW a night--2 hours if she's not particularly on task (and what 9yo is 100% on task all the time?) That does include reading time, but still.

When I was a schoolkid (not in the USA) we didn't have homework. I think the idea was that you learn in the classroom. I think that's good idea.

Now we are in the USA we are homeschooling so there's still no homework.

We see far less homework from the full TD program than we did in the mixed classes. The public HG program sends no homework home.

The US Dept of Ed has a position that 3-5 problems are all that are needed to practice and show you know. Seeing that there are 50 state capitals....that is 10 times the number of problems necessary. That is just a ridiculous assignment. I would not be above after my child did 5 of each type (miles and kilometers), doing the rest for him/her.

My mom used to do all my word searches for me because I just.couldn't.do.it. And I had one every week in sixth grade for vocabulary. It was beyond my scanning ability and wasn't an activity that helped me with my vocabulary. And today I can do word searches just fine.

I wish I could find where I read the three to five problems quote.

Our school district has a 'no homework' policy. I think it works great when a child has proactive parents who ask for extra work in areas their child is struggling. Not so much for the child with lax parents. Leading into the second problem... how do you tell your child is struggling if you NEVER see their work. I think this is part if the reason it took us so long to realize that DD had a learning disability. There was little homework and the teachers did not notice she was struggling in class. It wasn't until she emptied her desk at the end of grade 3 that I had a chance to see where she struggled.

We compensate for the 'no homework' by having DD work with a math tutor and spending 30 minutes each night on self-directed learning apps. On the plus side, it gives her more time to learn about things that interest her.

My recollection of the research is the HW has little to no benefit till middle school or so, and even then, it's only for things like math and possibly science--subjects where concrete practice increases mastery.

I wouldn't mind if DD had a sheet or two of math and was assigned to read nightly (though she does that anyway). I actually think the special projects they do are cool, so those are fine too. But the rest of it is busywork and drudgery. Part of the reason DD does not play an instrument is that she and I both know that adding 30 minutes of practice time would eat into the little bit of free time she has left after school (she does belong to some clubs she enjoys). She's 9. That's awful.

That state capitals math assignment will come in handy one day, when the internet is broken, all the libraries are burned down, and knowing the capital of New Hampshire is the difference between life and death.

Or not.

You don't have to wait until middle school for this sort of thing, though. My DD was 6 when she played on a soccer team full of kids from a particular religious private school, and a common conversation was the hours of homework their kids were doing. These little ones were typically getting 6-8 hours of sleep a night. This was creating battles to do the homework and get through it, then get up the next morning.

I wondered aloud why they paid people to do this to their children. Nobody had a good answer.

Dude, you're making my side hurt.

Okay, while I do think knowing the capitals is a good thing for kids to learn, calculating the distance to everyone one of them seems like a pretty useless waste of time, unless you keep getting the calculation wrong.

That private school is the reason I am really hoping my DD10 wants to homeschool next year because that is our option 2 that I really don't want to use. She also knows her friend in ballet who goes to that school always has books with her because she is always trying to get her homework done.