Posted on 06/12/2015 4:29:10 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A mother in Spain has started a popular petition against what she views as an excessive amount of homework.
The final straw came when Eva Bailen's 10-year-old son started being given up to three hours of homework a day. "If he doesn't finish it, the following day at school he is not allowed out to play," she told BBC Trending. The Spanish mother started a petition on Change.org to ask the government to regulate homework - a call to action that has been echoed thousands of times on Facebook.
Bailen has three children - aged 8 and 12 in addition to the 10-year-old - who all go to the same primary school, but not all of them have the same amount of homework. "The problem in Spain is that the burden of homework is up to each teacher," she said.
Her campaign has some unlikely supporters. When secondary school teacher Alfonso Gonzalez heard of Bailen's petition, he not only signed it but sent her a confession which he'd written to his daughter's teachers. "I've done loads of homework for my daughter, and I don't regret it! I did it because I wanted her to have a happy childhood and ten hours of sleep at night," he wrote. "I would argue that thanks to that, my daughter is now a healthy teenager, and a great athlete who loves to read."
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(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Three hours of homework would be nothing to Asian kids.
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True. We already have less days at school then other countries, less hours at school then other countries, less passing test scores then other countries and now we want less homework then other countries. I miss those days when we were “number 1” in all things. Our country is dying a slow agonizing death.
I have always opposed homework. The school gets your kids most of the day and that is not enough for them?
My Daughter teaches at a Montessori school and she agrees with me. When she first began teaching at a regular school right out of college, she was named “teacher of the year”.
Who cares about the homework situation in Spain?
This is in Spain. And the amount of homework here is ridiculous, too. You’d think with all of the homework assigned here in the U.S. that we’d be top of the heap.
I know. I have four kids and they go to Catholic School and the amount of homework is massive, but I also went to Catholic School and had a ton of homework and actually it made it so much easier in college and life.
I completely agree with you.
I hope she has a large basement.
If the time spent while at school was efficiently used to teach and study then there would be no need for homework. I think many teachers are shirking their duties by assigning homework. Keep the students hard at work while at school and then leave them alone when the final bell rings.
Kids here have a lot of homework, too, what with the condom bananas, learning their Islamic prayers, their global warming studies, etc.
You are right. Homework is a way of passing on responsibility. The schools are lazy so they pass on the work to the parents.
I wish I could homeschool. That’s when homework makes sense.
Most of the homework is not “graded”, just processed as done or not done. It’s part of the regulation of the pupils, who are for the most party quite unruly.
As best I can figure it, homework is now assigned so the parents can teach the kid. That way, the teacher won’t need to do so.
FWIW, I did very little homework in high school. However, I took calculus and used CLEP to get rid of my general ed requirement in college. I’m puzzled why it is that I could learn without a ton of homework, but my kids (and now grandkids) need hours of it every day.
Asian Students, Depression, and Suicide
http://chinspirations.com/mhsourcepage/asian-students-depression-and-suicide-begin-with-the-parents#.VXtz6lIYGSo
It doesn’t have a damn thing to do with time in class. It is WHAT IS TAUGHT that counts. 40+ years ago we went fewer days and were a lot better educated. Homework was given but didn’t take all night. It was used to reinforce the lessons given at school and it was graded for accuracy. No Common Core, no irrelevant feel good crap. Most of modern school time is taken up with STATE TESTING. Most people are unaware of just how much testing goes on.
I teach and we state test almost 3 months out of the year. It is very disruptive and we burn out the students with so much testing. State mandated tests take up most of our time. I have about 14 years in and 5 more to retire.
Most of us try very hard but we are burning out and the replacements are drones that follow the “party line.”
BTW I don’t know many teachers who approve of Common Core. We are fighting with our local state senator to get rid of it in our state. Hard fight as the money interests are throwing big bucks into keeping it.
I Afterschooled my kids, and they were years ahead of their grade levels. I was smart, I didn’t waste my time on anything other than reading and math (mostly math, teaching reading is breeze with phonics, but math still takes a few years to be ready for Calculus). They went to school (private) mainly because they wouldn’t study if I wasn’t around and my wife, being from the other side of the planet, really couldn’t help. School helped also socially and in filling in the other areas that I wasn’t covering.
Homework was a royal pain in the butt, particularly the TOTALLY USELESS “projects” that kept getting assigned. I wound up doing most of the projects, so they wouldn’t deter from learning math. Other homework was so pathetic that it almost seemed as if they were just trying to keep the kids ‘busy’, so they wouldn’t have time for friends or learning other important stuff (like working on cars).
It all worked out in the end for them, they did fine. But for most parents, the ones that put them on that big yellow bus thinking that a bunch of sex and drug crazy Gen-X’ers would actually teach them properly - maybe homework is better than just having them at home with their computers and smart phones spending endless hours on Facebook and playing video games.
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