Parents Fight Legal Battle For Less Homework

Sherri and Tom Milley may be the coolest parents in the world, at least in the eyes of their children. The Milley's were tired of having to help their children with hours of homework each night so they negotiated the "Milleys' Differentiated Homework Plan" with the school. The plan, which ensures their youngest two children will never have to do homework again, was signed by the children, parents and teachers. "It was a constant homework battle every night," Sherri told Canada's Globe and Mail newspaper. "It's hard to get a weeping child to take in math problems. They are tired. They shouldn't be working a second shift."

homework detracts from learning

[czarangelus]

the purpose of homework is just like the purpose of school. Neither of these institutions have any educational objective outside to teach a child how to be a radical conformist. I learned very little in all my years in school; in fact, the pressures of punch clock education only provided a distraction from my efforts to read every book ever written and to educate myself. The prison-camp of school, where you have to ask permission to take a piss, exists to train students to swallow the insane ravings of authority mindlessly assuming it's all for their own good. Eventually I just stopped doing any of the work, to my own betterment. I started inventing my own cirriculum and the teachers went along with it just to keep me from disrupting their lessons. I'm sorry I ever went to school in the first place, thankful I got expelled, and ecstatic that outside of the mainstream "education" system I was able to complete my high school studies in a fraction of the time and got into an excellent college despite the obstructionism of those twits on the school board.

Re:This is nothing new.

[WilliamBaughman]

When I was in fourth grade, I had trouble learning my multiplication tables. So I had to write out from 1x1 to 12x12 (144 problems) 12 times a night. That's over a 1000 math problems a night in fourth grade!

I'm going to put my jerk hat on and say that's 66 math problems, total. Each table of 144 entries is identical, and multiplication is commutative, so almost half of those 144 problems are identical to another problem in the table, i.e. once you have 4*6 you don't have to solve for 6*4.

I think that's the most valuable lesson you can learn from multiplication tables, that multiplication is commutative and that the answer to those problems don't change day-to-day.

homework's real purpose?

[prozaker]

i decided to go back to school to finish what i've begun some 3 or 4 years ago. while the school does have an interesting catalog of courses, it does leave a lot of homework.

i've never been a fan of homework, i don't really know the purpose of it, i don't think it compares to something in the real world, apart from studying for something you want to learn outside the working hours of your job. i don't see any point of doing it, most of the time its dreadful, boring, copy pasted, paper wasting, nonsense. i support the idea of assigning something for reading and then asking someone in class what was it about. apart from that i think everything should be done in the classroom.

Its hard for me to keep up going to school + working + taking care of the house, on top of that school wants to creep into my free time? ...sad

Re:Are you people all Americans?

[frosty_tsm]

That's why I made that xenophobic reference - it is now common opinion that the majority of US citizens lead carefree hedonistic life. And it's nobody's fault but their own. Reading the previous comments made my head spin.

Homework is many things:
- Practice what was taught in class to make it familiar (Math)
- Absorbing information and analyzing it (English, History)
- Learning to teach yourself

Sure there are people who don't need all of this and just get it.

Re:Are you people all Americans?

[frosty_tsm]

Personally, I think the parents should have just started homeschooling.

This was about time, not principles. They still need someone to babysit their kids during the day.

usefulness of homework

[jarkus4]

I can't agree that homework is useless. It's actually a mean of forcing the children to do something they don't like to do - repeat what they learned in school. And repetitions are the only way for most people to really learn something. I'm personally skilled in mathematics and in high school I tended to skip the homework completely because I was to lazy to do it(it was mandatory, but usually wasn't enforced). With this I got around 60 - 65% in tests (it was a class with math as "specialization", so it wasn't THAT bad :D ). The few times I was actually forced to do some homework it usually raised my results up to about 80 - 85%. Also later, in my college days, I had experienced cases where simple lack of practice caused me to perform much below expectations on exams - even though I knew how to do something, I simply wasn't fast enough to complete it and other assignments in a given time.

Homework serves several purposes

[davidwr]

1) to do projects which are not feasable during the school day, such as interviewing family members to construct a family tree, visiting a city council meeting, etc.
2) to do necessary work the student ran out of time to do in class
3) to develop a value system that education, and by extension, adult tasks like work, are not simply an 8AM-3PM proposition.

Homework, like classwork, can be abused. Assigning meaningless drill-and-practice work to a student who has already mastered the material or telling a student to "do all the problems" when only doing a handful would suffice to achieve mastery is a waste of time.

Re:usefulness of homework

[v1]

And repetitions are the only way for most people to really learn something.

There's never one "right way" to teach anything. Maybe that works best for you, but maybe not for me.

In my case, application of what I've learned, as soon as possible after learning it, is critical. I don't have any statistics atm but that's true of a LOT of people. For me anyway, the reason is I have a severely defective factual memory, and a near perfect memory for method, audio, and visual. Tell me to write down a spelling word 100x and see how far you get. Now ask me to read it aloud three times and get a surprise. Give me a list of steps to assemble something and have me study it all day long and still get it wrong. Or show me how to do it hands-on and I have it down by the second time, regardless of complexity.

The homework itself isn't useless, but when you're sending all 70 of your students home to learn the exact same way, some of the students are just getting screwed. For some, it ends up being boring, frustrating, and completely unproductive. There's a reason we have teachers, to find the best way to teach the children in their class, by whatever method works best for the student, which varies from child to child. Once you send them all home with the same assignment, you completely remove that from the equation.

Unfortunately for me, 95% of what I was sent home with when I was in school was of little or no value whatsoever, and only served to bitter my view of education in general. Even when I got back to school the next day all I got to hear was how poor the quality of my homework was, which affected my motivation to try when I was in school. I vastly preferred 6 hrs of school over 1 hr of homework.