Posted on 03/28/2012 5:55:30 AM PDT by jda
Research reveals primary school homework offers no real benefit - and only limited results in junior high school.
Only senior students in Years 11 and 12 benefit from after-school work, associate professor Richard Walker said.
"What the research shows is that, in countries where they spend more time on homework, the achievement results are lower," Dr Walker, from Sydney University's Education Faculty, said.
"The amount of homework is a really critical issue for kids. If they are overloaded they are not going to be happy and not going to enjoy it. There are other things kids want to do that are very valuable things for them to be doing.
"I don't think anyone except senior high school students should be doing a couple of hours of homework.
{snip}
While the majority of 10 and 11-year-olds - 59 per cent - do less than two hours of homework per week, 22 per cent do three or four hours a week. Five per cent do seven or more hours a week.
It's not only kids who get tied down with homework - parents are also heavily involved. Dr Edwards said almost half of mums and dads - 41 per cent - helped out three or four days a week, with 15 per cent also chipping in on five or more days.
"A little bit of homework is probably OK at all ages, if part of the reason is to help kids become self-directed learners," Dr Walker said.
"But what the research shows is that only happens when upper primary and middle school students are given some assistance.
{snip}
(Excerpt) Read more at dailytelegraph.com.au ...
One misspelled word or grammatical error indicates that the writer either does not care about doing his best work or that he was not educated well enough to work for me.
I’ve never been a believer in homework. People need time away from studies.
I never did homework, except for special projects like papers. Neither did either of my children and they both graduated National Honor Society and 4 year A averages.
Unless you are in some field that requires extra hours, most workers do not have to take their work home with them. In fact, it’s detrimental in many cases to do so.
In other cases, it’s avoidance of family life, like standing out in the yard holding a hose, or lying under the car.
There was always a hour study hall when I was in school and that sufficed for any assignments I had. I admit I was smart (in a dumb kind of way).
Schools today don’t do as good a job because of poor teachers (teachers unions) and having to deal with difficult children.
I confess I forgot how to calculate a square root. Ditto cube root (if I ever knew)
However..... My I Phone can do it in a flash to 14 decimal places and convert the anglo value to metric in the bargin
So what else do you have them do with their day?
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
They played....hard and intensely. I think the play was vital to their development. Because their play was rarely interrupted, they learned to concentrate intensely for many hours. Sometimes their projects would consume many months. Some projects spanned years.
We did what other successful middle class parents do. We read to them at night, took them to the library once a week, and visited educational sites on weekends, and the summer went camping and to the beach.
Actually, it was an amazing process to watch. Gradually their play became their adult work and avocations. The same intensity that they directed at their play became highly focused work.
For example, my oldest become a highly accomplished athlete. He competed on the national and international level and was on the team the represented the U.S. As a result, he has traveled widely. All play musical instruments. All sing in their church choirs. All are accomplished ball room dancers. The two younger were highly active as well in ballet, jazz, tap, and modern dancing.
I hated homework. I thought of it as busy work. I did it, though, without any help from anyone. There was no one to ask for help. My brother always told me that he wasn’t going to help me because I should be able to figure it out by myself.
I loved geometry, though. I loved the progression of rational thought in the theorems. I saw as a kind of brain teaser. When my daughter took geometry, however, it wasn’t the same. They didn’t learn to prove the theorems, they were just supposed to memorize them and apply them and there tests were all scantron, so there was no learning from the mistakes, either.
It's your prerogative to eliminate a perfect candidate for a misspelled word on his résumé. Having said that I hope I never have to work for a pin head like you.
Yeah, but you’re missing out on all the fun.
Don’t worry.
By the way, I don’t consider reading as homework. We read all the time from when we were 6 or so. Daddy had a large collection of books.
Reading is pleasure and recreation with educational benefits thrown in.
Life is way too structured as it is and kids need time to hang out, ride their bikes ... and yes, kids do still do that... I see them in my neighborhood all the time.
NP
I agree completely with you about divorce and the circle of people you associate yourself with. I too don’t know anyone in my circle of friends who has had a divorce, and I am in my mid 40’s. Nearly everyone we know has been married 15-20 years, has 4 to 5 kids, went to college and most of them graduate school and nearly all of them are doing very well financially.
Interesting. Did you go to public HS? What was your final GPA? What do you have your PhD in?
So, uh, what did you learn at school?
That's a bit easier to accomplish when you're not one of 20+ students under one teacher.
Along with "definately" and "could of" / "should of" / "would of".
Of possible interest ping.
Luckily by the time high school rolled around, homework was limited to math (where it is needed) and major work projects (again where it is needed). My grades also went up then to a solid B, enough to get me into college where I eventually became an attorney.
I'm not against quality homework. I had tons of it in law school. It wasn't graded, but if you didn't keep up with reading, you're gone. Almost everyone did it. Those who didn't, did it when they learned how important it was after the 2nd class.
"Heaven discloses it, Bevin proposes it, and no one ever opposes it. Everybody wants a little peace."
--Billy Gray (Los Angeles band leader), 1947
I'm not referring to the occasional typo or grammatical error. I, too make occasional typos and an occasional grammatical error, especially if I get careless when using "cut" and "paste" features on the computer to move text around. However, in my view, any adult whose native language is English and who doesn't know--or maybe doesn't care--about the difference between "there," "their" and "they're" is a pinhead.
I rarely did homework. When stuff was assigned I did it in remaining time in class or mostly not at all. Aced all my tests. Repetition is overrated as a learning tool. Some stuff clearly needs to be homework, reading assignments and similar. But most homework was “now that we’ve taught you this do it 20 times” when really all you need is to do something 3 or 4 times in ways that are different than what was taught so that you have to apply it.
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