Posted on 10/26/2015 5:42:18 PM PDT by Kid Shelleen
Amy Clipston had a request that was a new one for her daughter's first-grade teacher.
Many parents had marched in to demand that their children, even those who couldn't tie their shoes yet, get more homework. Clipston was the first to request the opposite - that her daughter opt out of homework altogether.
"I felt my child was doing quite fine in school," said Clipston, a chemist with three children, noting that her daughter's schoolday in the highly competitive Lower Merion School District was 61/2 hours, with a 20-minute recess. "I felt 10 to 20 minutes of homework a night was not accomplishing anything."
(Excerpt) Read more at philly.com ...
Kids in my area get out by 230. The buses are lining up at the school at 215. The older kids are hitting the library computers by 305. If you want to get on a library computer, be there early or the kids will be playing games till dinnertime.
10 to 20 minutes doesn’t sound like much, but I’m not sure a first-grader who is all of six years old really needs it. At that age they’re still learning to read, and can probably barely write.
I read somewhere that in Scandinavian countries, kids typically don’t even start school until they are seven years old.
Exactly. If a child was locked in a closet every moment they weren’t at school, but a teacher has them 8 hours a day. They should be able to well educate that child.
Most homework today is the teachers showing they are “doing something”.
Its also the government controlling your home life all evening.
and the dumbing down of America continues
But it’s 1st grade.
The kid is in 1st grade only!
1. Casual reading (anything, really -- except what was assigned to me at school)
2. Working an after-school job
3. Watching contractors at work on construction sites near where I lived, and during the summers when the family was on vacation
Don’t know about Scandinavia. But in Germany it’s half day. And they don’t turn out idiots.
Don’t know about Scandinavia. But in Germany it’s half day. And they don’t turn out idiots.
FYI, this article is about a FIRST GRADER.
The ONLY reason for homework at that age is to crush the spirit, and train the child to accept oppression.
Yessir, all three of those. Fine examples.
In my younger days I taught math in high school. There is no way for a student to learn, to master the concepts without doing homework to practice and internalize the material that will help them in their life ahead - not just knowing the math but using the discipline learned in other phases of life as well. Ditto - history, English composition and literature, civics, etc..
And you don’t have the kid 8 hours a day. Most teachers have them for an hour a day, some for three. If you want educated people you must work at it - demand it.
I guess you never had any homework in "relevance."
Homework? So kids can just be told they’ll shoot their eyes out? It’s a conspiracy.
If you sat me down in an Algebra II class and taught me the material directly, then gave me 10 problems to do for homework, I might get half of them right at best. But if you gave me one homework problem and told me I had to write a program in BASIC or Pascal to solve that problem and user-input variations of it, I'd get the best grade in the class by a wide margin.
there were no computers in my teaching days. But where word problems were involved they were real applications. And sure some struggled, but they were the ones you spent more time with, one on one. In those days most kids wanted to learn.
“Once they hit high-school, college-bound students had better be doing homework.”
Bahh! I avoided homework at all costs in highschool, and avoided it at all costs in college. I have a a degrees in math and mechanical engineering, from University of Washington with a 3.7 GPA, but it wasn’t until later that I discovered that unless you are trying to work somewhere hoity toity, that absolutely nobody gives the flyingest f*%#k where you went or what your GPA was...in fact, too high of a GPA can actually be a hinderance.
You don’t need to learn very much in school in order to sign up for government handouts and spend your life sucking on the government teat.
A child who can not write out a two paragraph story is considered "behind" and not ready for first grade.
They seem to be putting way too much on kids in the early grades.
The really bright kids can do it, the normal kids struggle and the kids who are not that bright or are not as mentally developed are screwed from the start.
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