After Donna Cushlanis’s son kept bursting into tears midway through his second-grade math problems, which one night took over an hour, she told him not to do all of his homework.
“How many times do you have to add seven plus two?” Ms. Cushlanis, 46, said. “I have no problem with doing homework, but that put us both over the edge. I got to the point that this is enough.”
Ms. Cushlanis, a secretary for the Galloway school district, complained to her boss, Annette C. Giaquinto, the superintendent. It turned out that the district, which serves 3,500 kindergarten through eighth-grade students, was already re-evaluating its homework practices. The school board will vote this summer on a proposal to limit weeknight homework to 10 minutes for each year of school — 20 minutes for second graders, and so forth — and ban assignments on weekends, holidays and school vacations.
Galloway, a mostly middle-class community northwest of Atlantic City, is part of a wave of districts across the nation trying to remake homework amid concerns that high-stakes testing and competition for college have fueled a nightly grind that is stressing out children and depriving them of play and rest, yet doing little to raise achievement, particularly in elementary grades.
Yes, most homework is busy work with little point to it outside of the repetition. Of course, that is only effective, if the foundation was properly laid out in lecture during the day.
As I understand it, in the US we started really increasing the amount of homework at some point in the 80s. This was at a time when it looked like Japan was going to take over the world. The observation was that, “Japanese kids have like 4 hours of homework every night and look how well they’re doing!” The logical fallacy that followed was, “if we just make our kids to more homework, we can still rule the world!” That, of course, didn’t take into account cultural and teaching method differences.
Conclusion, Excessive amounts of Homework is a knee jerk reaction, with out the teaching methods and foundation behind it to make it useful.
in #38 tcc3said: subverting the learning process by cheating with a calculator.
Anything that can be done by a machine should be done by a machine.
The key to success in this world is to understand how to use the machines and to do that, you have to understand the system.
When I took Physics back in ’71 or ’72 I used my HP-45 calculator (and my knowledge/understanding of Reverse Polish Notation,) to do the problems as fast as the professor could write them up on the black board. By the end of the term he was writing the problem, pausing for a moment, I’d tell him the answer, and he’d continue on.
I was that way too with all kinds conversions too, to 3 decimal places.
At the same time I was failing chemistry because the idiot teacher was just teaching rote memorization and couldn’t understand that there was any other way of teaching. He was Newtonian in his understanding of how things work.
meh
pfft
do your hw
If I were Newtonian in my understanding
I would only be the the smartest person in human history
but still not up to the bar set by msbpodcast
When I was in Grade 2 I did 400 hours of homework every single fucking night. It’s true because I’m beating my chest and my wife stopped listening to me in 1998.
In # 40 gmknobl said: one of the big culprits of this is NCLB.
As much as I dislike the cretinous Shrub, there is nothing inherently wrong with teaching to a metric, a mesurable demonstration of how well a person understands a concept.
The problem is that the testing and evaluation of how well a person understands a concept requires a great deal more effort (read needs more time and money,) than the current school systems can muster.
NCLB is a noble concept but its implementation is fatally flawed. It only can perform tests way while the student’s understanding may exhibit itself in myriad ways.
I was failing in maths in high school, a total fuck-up. The old biddy who’d been at the front of the class might as well have speaking Urdu. I understood nothing.
y=x2+#x+# is still fucking opaque as shit to me.
I encountered a teacher who diagnosed the problem instantly and called me a visual thinker.
In a single lesson, a single afternoon he taught me the Cartesian coordinate system, trigonometry (sine, cosines, tangents,) (regular and hyperbolic) plane geometry, functions, differential, logarithms, and integral calculus, set theory and some constants such π and ε. (I was left to figure out fractals myself later when I encountered Mandlebrot‘s book: The Fractal Geometry of Nature.)
I went from a null (a concept in set theory) to being asked to be an honors student.
Nothing in me had changed. The way I saw the world had.
#33. I stand corrected. My dictionary lists it as “Chiefly British”. In my forty seven or so years of speaking and forty or so years of reading English, I never ran across it.
Of course, “mathematics” would be a better word, but it wouldn’t fit on the column head.
Hey #1 bite me. An hour of homework per night for anyone below 7th grade is ridiculous. There is pushing to excel and then there is pushing to disaster. My daughter is in first grade. She hates school. There is no reason why a first grader should hate school.
In # 44 Publius</b said: If I were Newtonian in my understanding I would only be the the smartest person in human history…
Far from it dude. The epithet “Newtonian” means that everything that has been discovered in the 19th and 20th centuries would be over your head.
No Einstein, no Dirac, no … the nouns fail me, the adjectives fail me.
Newton said: We see far because we stand on the shoulders of giants but he didn’t mean to imply that you should get off and go back to staring at shadows on a Platonic cave wall.
School policy on how long a given homework assignment takes has one huge hole in it. How long an assignment takes one child has little to do with how long it takes another.
Some of them simply set there looking at it refusing to make a call and answer the question. Three quarters of the class may not have even taken home any homework. A few simply can’t or won’t do it just as some parents can’t or won’t look at and sign work then bleep like crazy when they get that call about, “Your child is being considered for retention.”
Last and not least: Life is very much not fair. I’ve known parents that worked their bleeps off with kids that had much less than average ability and got snake eyes while some other parent didn’t care and their kid was going to zoom through their work and make good grades with any teacher that tried.
Another issue is there is no way that I or any other teacher can completely make up for what is going on at home good or bad. The amount of time a teacher can spend with any given student is amazingly limited if you just do the math. We are hirelings and the students know it. They don’t go home with us and I pray to God that you love them more than we do even though most of us do.
The good news is if you love them and act in a reasonable and prudent manner things normally work out okay or did. Things are changing.
The bad news is that while accountability is a good thing we are getting into a situation in which the teachers, admin, and students are purely under the gun. In the end the main thing that determines if the student passes or the teacher and admin keep their jobs is going to be test scores on tests the teacher and admin has never seen.
While stake holders will see the scores the teachers and Admin will be fired if they ever by word or deed indicate they saw even one question on the tests. In TN tenure isn’t going to matter when it comes to this. People are already being fired. I don’t recommend that young people get into this profession. Spending four years to get a teaching certificate that somebody may revoke is not a smart thing to do.
Just having you class fail to make the cut off score which amounts to having the class average or better whatever the state says amounts to one years progress for that class pretty much amounts to the same thing because nobody in the state who is sane will hire you or keep you on the payroll because nobody has to attend your class. Of course your evaluation is going to in the sewer anyway because that is 1/3 of it so…
If teaching skills follow a bell shaped curve and they fire every teacher that falls below the halfway point this is going to cause a few issues as in what do you do once you fire half of your teachers? Not my problem exactly because I plan to retire at the end of they year.
Of course a major hunk of the scholars final grade starting this year is going to be based on those test scores…Since that is the law everybody can like it or lump it.
Don’t you go worrying about education in America. We all know that our law makers are wise and prudent people who understand best practices in education and this is going to work out fine.
Actually I’d feel better about this if the Fed Gov was out of this and the states were each running their own show. That way while some of them failed wretchedly some of them would be doing well and you can imitate the more successful ones. As it is we are all being forced into the same boat which may well sink.
#32 for the record,
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
King Lear, by William Shakespeare (well, technically a play, not a book and perhaps not actually written by Shakespeare)
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Free to Choose by Milton Friedman
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heihlein
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
to name a few. Some were class assignments, some were recommended by teachers, some were laying around the house.
Standarized Testing treats the Students and Schools as though they are FACTORIES THAT CAN APPLY STATISTICAL TECHNIQUES to the educational process !!! A FALLACY FROM THE START !!! Children are NOT BALL BEARINGS !!!
#51–spsffan==Good List, Thank you. Now, I have to wonder why you “needed” school to have read these books. You said a few were laying around the house? You read them because you had to but found out you liked them? I assume you read more books after that? What did not give you a love of reading before that?
It just now occurs to me you haven’t read general literature lately?
Once you can read, you can, do, and will read whatever interests you.
What to do with people who are not interested?
“How many times do you have to add seven plus two?” Until the little fucker gets it right with using his fingers or toes.
in # 52 JimD said: Children are NOT BALL BEARINGS !!! well actually he said: Standarized Testing treats the Students and Schools as though they are FACTORIES THAT CAN APPLY STATISTICAL TECHNIQUES to the educational process…
It depends on what their testing for and how they’re testing.
I’ll grant you that testing under these circumstances requires more teachers and therefore more investment in the school population for every single student.
I really don’t see any politician with the common sense that God gave a gnat running on a platform of: “We’re going to bankrupt ourselves for the sake of our kids teaching them until they commit sepuku and the teachers succumb to Karōshi.
It is not necessary either.
We can eliminate every school tax, every school, every dollar currently spent maintaining the enormous and extremely expensive education system from K through 12.
Say bye bye to school lunches, school busing, school anything and everything.
Its a question of giving every parent the resources necessary to home-school their children.
That means the physical resources, free internet access and the time necessary to bring back the school marm into the one room school house, in this case the parent’s house.
That won’t happen either. The first people to reject it is the administration (who never interact with kids.)
#53: Expose students to good books that actually have a decent plot, and that will get people to read more. Heinlein (when spelled correctly) is good. So is Slaughterhouse Five. Anything by Sam Clemens/Mark Twain is worth reading. Send students to the school library while you’re at it so they can pick out their own books.
On the other hand, “The Scarlet Letter” read like Death warmed over to me…
Further to my last missive, here’s one way to get everybody else but the school administrators behind this:
Turn all the schools into low-cost housing for the homeless. 1 family = 1 classroom. If they want to subdivide it, we supply the lumber and she sheetrock. (Maybe we rent them the tools, after some form of refundable deposit of course, [in cash or in sweat equity.])
This would be hugely profitable and every mother-fucking politician out there who’se trying to reduce our taxes would love it.
No more pretending to be anything other than the greedy scumbags they are.
Six hours a day in school is enough for a second grader. It’s ridiculous to make them do more at home.
Instead, the kids should be running around, building forts, free reading, playing with dolls, etc.
There are exceptions — homework projects which involve the parents are good because it reinforces school in a fun way and gets the parents involved. (science fair projects and similar) Another exception is parental reading to the child, which should be mandatory.
But filling-out math sheets at home in second grade? No way. There is plenty of time in school to do that.
>> So what said, on June 17th, 2011 at 3:19 pm
>>>>“How many times do you have to add seven plus two?” >> Until the little fucker gets it right with using his fingers or toes.
You’re going to make one heckuva great dad someday.
I’m betting that kid manages to get in 4-6 hours of TV/internet/video games a day without any problems.
Maybe the mother should sit down with her kid and spend an hour each day “playing” a mathematics game. Of course it could be that it’s the mother who has difficulty adding 7+2.