My Daughter's Homework Is Killing Me

Karl Taro Greenfeld was concerned about the amount of homework his eighth-grade daughter was doing -several hours every night. She wasn't getting enough sleep. Was the homework that hard? So he decided to find out in the most personal way possible: he would do the same homework every night for a week. It was an eye-opening experience, as homework was different when he was a student.

In Southern California in the late ’70s, it was totally plausible that an eighth grader would have no homework at all.

If my daughter came home and said she had no homework, I would know she was lying. It is inconceivable that her teachers wouldn’t assign any.

What has changed? It seems that while there has been widespread panic about American students’ falling behind their peers in Singapore, Shanghai, Helsinki, and everywhere else in science and mathematics, the length of the school day is about the same. The school year hasn’t been extended. Student-teacher ratios don’t seem to have changed much. No, our children are going to catch up with those East Asian kids on their own damn time.

Other parents were concerned about homework, too, but when Greenfeld discussed it with them, he was admonished by the vice-principal. Check out his week of homework assignments and see if you could keep up. How much homework does your child do each night? Link -via Digg

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My daughter goes to school in Southern California. And She gets hours of homework per night. Has since she was in 1st grade. While that is a problem in and of it self, the real problem lies in the fact that she has not been taught how to do the home work before it is sent home. We send her to school, pay the taxes, and for the most part, we have been teaching her for an hour our two each night. This is on nearly every subject, but mostly math. What is the point of sending my daughter to school if we are just going to teach her after she gets home.

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I teach in Canada and at my school we have spent the last few years moving away from homework. The majority of teachers in my school don't give any homework or rarely give homework. This didn't come about because parent were complaining, it came about because very few of the students did their homework. We are an inner city school and the kids are often working at least one job if not two, or going home and making dinner and caring for siblings, or a million other reasons why they don't get to it. So we just stopped the struggle. It meant marks actually went up because there were no zeroes for homework. Instead we came up with different strategies to cover things in class and have the students show us that they understand the information.

It's completely idiotic to deduct marks for not having the correct column in place, Esmee had the right answer, she met the learning outcome!

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Sometimes I see how little some students focus on getting their work done in class. Is all this homework assigned to be done at home? Or is it because she didn't do it at school?

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Pretty much all homework these days counts for a grade. Back when I was in high school only certain homework assignments were graded. I did have a math teacher that would occasionally check student's notebooks to see if they had done their homework and chastise those who may not have done it. I habitually didn't do my math homework, but when I would see the teacher start walking through class looking I would furiously start working a few problems to show I had done my work. More often than not I got caught. He would be FURIOUS and throw me out of class into what was termed "controlled study hall" (a kind of in-school detention). When he asked me why I didn't do the homework, I explained the idea of homework was to practice so I could learn the material, and as I always made an A on my exams, why did I need to practice?

In the end I found out that doing my homework in high school would have taught me better study habits for college.

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Yeah, at least where I live. A kid in my extended family has a "conditional C" in one high school class right now because of some homework not yet turned in. That kind of thing can damage a transcript for college.

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