The Case Against Homework(alfiekohn.org) |
The Case Against Homework(alfiekohn.org) |
If they can’t educate you in the time alotted, that’s their problem to solve.
If the company’s work can’t get done with humane conditions for the resources available, that’s their problem to solve.
We keep tolerating this because we are, collectively, idiots. We buy into it and argue in favor of it for the same reason.
It’s a real shame.
Is it really "their" (who is they?) problem when the child gets to 3rd grade and they can't read? It's really the child's problem, they just don't know it yet.
It’s interesting to see how pessimistic they’ve become about the push for engagement and downplaying of lecturing. I sense a growing backlash and a sense that maybe the old ways weren’t as bad as everyone assumed at the time. A common topic at gatherings is how they’re frustrated that some times rote learning and challenging homework are the only way to really get into subjects, but their school district is making it hard to do that without risk of impacting their evaluations. Then at the end of the school year they’re confused about how teachers are nailing their marks and following the best practices but students aren’t doing well.
For what it’s worth, this isn’t an isolated viewpoint. Browse /r/teachers on Reddit and you’ll find no shortage of similar complaints and teachers who are tired of administrators pushing unrealistic idealistic ideas like Bloom’s hierarchy on teachers who are being asked to get students to learn a lot of material without being pushed to, well, learn it.
To be honest recurring cycles happen in tech too, and people play the same game.
I remember about 20 years ago I would read a lot of think-pieces in Time, The Atlantic, and other such magazines about how kids were doing too little homework, and how the US is falling behind other nations in academic achievement, and how one caused the other.
Now the think pieces are all about how there is too much homework and we're suffocating children under the burden.
For what it's worth, I have an elementary school student, and I like that she has 10-15 minutes of homework most nights. It gives me a chance to keep up with what she's learning about.
NeoOO, maybe?
I have no critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
I didn't fully realize the repercussions until interviewing for management consulting jobs; it was humiliating. I became a CPA in my first career, which aligned much more smoothly :)
My brother-in-law earned his degree at a top Liberal Arts college and I witnessed what it means to actually be taught "how to think." He's an interesting case to me, however - a genius at that thinking style, but merely above-average in rote memorization.
The meta in medical school is currently to focus on active learning via flashcards and practice questions, and to minimize the amount of time spent watching lectures passively. I think this is, generally speaking, a good idea. The things I learn from practice questions stick in my head a lot better than the things I heard once in a lecture. However, where practice questions and flashcards come short is in making cohesive mental frameworks that organize several related topics in your head. I still think that good old-fashioned lectures are the best way to present those frameworks to students, because they don't lend themselves well to the rapid-fire questions I use for active learning. However, for learning more discrete details, I think sitting through a lecture is a waste of time. So it's about knowing the tools in your toolbox and when to use which one, if you ask me.
TL;DR active learning generally good, but need some passive lectures to show the big picture
> One mother told me it permanently damaged her relationship with her son because it forced her to be an enforcer rather than a mom.
This is by design, or at least an accepted byproduct. Having parents rolled in and being on the same page as the school is part of the process. This might not be explicited, the school might not even be thinking about it a lot, but it's a no downside proposition for the school, and parents will be more willing to pay, volunteer their tine, not make waves etc. if they're acting as an extension of school at home.
When your kids doesn't do homework it's you, the parent that gets summoned.
The basic purpose of schooling is to preprare a kid for society, and what society wants is not just bright kids, but citizen pushing themselves and following the common line. When they'll be adults they'll have deadline and meaningless overtime instead of homeworks. As pointed in the article, behaviors can reinforced, and that's what homeworks do.
A lecture won’t make you proficient. Doing (homework) makes you proficient.
Is lecture all you need to remember which ideas to look up in future? I think you’ll develop a better understanding of whether you need an idea if you understood it in the first place. For this reason we need to develop proficiency through practice.
And then you need proficiency to achieve success in grading. Grading is feedback that lets you know where you stand relative to other students. And that’s what we use for admissions.
Nobody is becoming proficient from lectures. Students must be proficient.
You either need homework, or teachers can stop wasting everyone’s time yapping and just be there to answer questions for half the class duration.
If it’s just busywork then sure, it has no point besides drilling in some sense of “you will have to organise your time and do this or else”
Both students and teachers have tasks that can happen in quiet together time and students can benefit by having both the structure and the presence of the knowledgeable teacher. Two things not all students can rely on parents to provide.
She was a major part of why I just gave up on doing a whole lot of my homework in high school. That's a lot of time period, let alone for just one class, and others would assign work, too. Screw that, I'd already spent a workday of time in school.
College was such a relief. So much more free time even if I did 100% of what professors asked of me. So's work life as an adult. High school is batshit crazy.
- Assign students top-quality lectures to watch and problem sets. Think Khan, MitX etc or similar. (But could be specially formulated)
- In class (Which would be shorter), the teacher[s] go over where the student struggled, had questions etc, and give personal attention where needed based on the previous day's lectures and problem sets.
The conflation here is active learning with respecting people's time and attention-span. Active learning critical, but the article's concerns about the latter are valid.
I feel being physically present with the teacher imparts things better, it’s easier to pay attention, plus also you can’t ask a video lecture questions. For the online class like this, the in-classroom teacher was pretty checked out too, so if you had questions they weren’t all that helpful.
If you ever got behind it was actually harder to catch up.
Now that wasn’t using Khan Academy where there are different learning paths and you can focus on areas you’re weak and breeze through your strengths, so I don’t konw how that compares.
I think it's a good idea™ to give them hard work to solve in-class and with a good dose of semi-structured study groups to work on hard problems with pencil and paper and/or whiteboards. What I have a problem with is spoon-feeding, rote memorization of formulas, low standards. The exercise and gradual transmutation of fluid intelligence into crystalized needs to be through rigorous and challenging work, or there is untold loss of developed potential and a backsliding of academic achievement.
Really? The claim here is that if I do not fully understand a passage or a lecture on first pass, a second or third exposure to the same ideas do NOT contribute to any better understanding whatsoever?
This is stated as a universal and scientific fact.
All my life experience says otherwise. Can't take this article seriously past this.
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> In my experience, people with the least sophisticated understanding of how children learn, or the least amount of concern about children’s attitudes toward learning, tend to be the most enthusiastic supporters of homework.
There has to be some term to describe this style of writing.
"If you don't agree with what I am saying, you are too ignorant of the subject and your opinion is not worth much."
As an educational researcher, I think the author's conclusions are quite likely. A sixth grader isn't going back over their lecture notes and gaining more understanding.
> Still others believe—incorrectly—that more time spent on a task produces better results
Even more foundational skills like reading, writing, speaking, and school math (addition, division, algebra) are unlikely to get better with practice?
Well, today I'm a Machine Learning Engineer at a FAANG company and I have no regrets not wasting my youth on some stupid assignments that everyone forgot about as soon as it was graded.
Strategies optimized for the students who would be motivated enough to pursue top 1% engineering jobs are not useful for the average student. In fact, they’d probably be harmful.
It’s a similar story on the other end of the spectrum: Learning strategies optimized for the lowest common denominator students aren’t good for the average student, and certainly aren’t good for highly motivated learners.
It’s a difficult problem and I don’t have any answers. However, given that your career trajectory is firmly in outlier territory, I don’t think it’s reasonable to project your grade school academic experience on to the general student population.
Even now, even in the US, only 30% of children grow up to be college students. So when we're talking about the average, the median, what I'm saying is in fact typical.
They learn to read. Which they would have done anyway. They learn what arithmetic means, sort of. Might pick up history and geography if they're natively interested in it. At no point is the two hours of homework they're forced into every night of any benefit to learning these things.
I'm an SRE for a high ML product you've heard of and this explains so much.
For me, in 10th grade plane geometry, I did REALLY well -- loved the subject, hated the teacher (with some reason). Sooo, I learned the subject 90+% from "homework"! For each lesson, glanced at the text and then started on the exercises. Started with the hardest ones and worked until they became too easy. Then solved all the harder supplementary exercises in the back of the book!
Net, on the state achievement test, came in second in the class of ~30.
One day, great fun: One of the exercises in the back of the book was harder than usual, and I started on it on Friday and didn't get it until Sunday evening. In class on Monday, the teacher had the class work on an easy exercise but with the same figure as the hard one. So, for the only time, I spoke up in class:
"There's another exercise in the back with the same figure."
The teacher took the bait and had the class start on the harder one. ~20 minutes later no one had any progress, and the teacher was exhorting the class
"Class! Think of the given, class!"
Not wanting to disrupt the class, I said:
"Why don't we ..."
and the teacher interrupted and shouted:
"You knew how to do it all the time."
Yup, wouldn't have said anything otherwise!
In advanced courses, most of the learning was from study outside of class.
For the Ph.D. qualifying exams, led the class in 4 of the 5 exams, and nearly all the background learning was what I did out of class.
E.g., although took a lot of math courses, none covered Stokes theorem and had to do that on my own, from Buck, Apostol, Fleming, etc.
Beyond such courses and for Ph.D. research, challenging problems outside of school, ... there are few if any classes. For a lot of the learning for computing, there are no classes.
But for the claims of the OP here, sure, maybe only 4 days a week of school and shorter days in school, especially if the kids can make good use of the extra time out of class.
In high school and before homework took minimal amounts of my time. I am for assigning more homework to teenagers generally, since they do not do worthwhile things in their free time, as long as the homework is reasonably complex.
> I am for assigning more homework to teenagers generally, since they do not do worthwhile things in their free time
Do you mean like socializing, hobbies, sports and just being a kid?
It's great that you enjoy homework, but why do you feel the need to inflict your preference on everyone else?
Having assigned homework means you cant do any of these things?
-Or a student spend 1 hours memorizing all the geography location or date for an history class.
To that end it should be short and easy.
I did the entire corpus of coursework over the course of a single weekend and turned them all in on one of the last days of class.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EPoZJ8cZD_4
https://archive.org/details/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanE...
The problem with education IMO is the content not the methodology. Our curricula waste precious time on obscure topics because "that's what I was taught".
Intellectual development is not the only kind that happens during childhood, they're also learning valuable life skills, and if you run their lives for them in pursuit of one kind of development you're going to ruin other kinds.
What would you cut from the curriculum, and what would you replace it with?
Public school in the US has English literature, physics, chemistry, biology, algebra, arithmetic, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, second languages, civics, history... That the material exists, whatever you think of it, and kids aren't learning that material, says something about the methodology.
I think sending a kid to what basically amounts to a prison, in an intensely competitive social environment complete with people from all walks of life, including violent people, while simultaneously handicapping anyone's ability to enforce proper conduct, with a strategy geared to basically encourage cheating, is not conducive to learning anything for a long period of time. Then, telling them their time in their life where they get to do real fruitful things like decide their conduct, who they associate with, what interests to pursue, spend time with their parents, let their minds wander, is not theirs and they have to continue the requirements of school, IMO it hampers intellectual development.
> not a single study has ever supported the folk wisdom that homework teaches good work habits or develops positive character traits such as self-discipline, responsibility or independence
This I know is wrong because, again in my experience hard work is incredibly rewarding. It doesn't matter what I'm doing, whether I'm painting a house, going for a run, or focusing on programming, I feel much better about myself and act with more dignity. The most miserable people I have met have no purpose or drive.
> You can’t “reinforce” understanding the way you can reinforce a behavior
Hard disagree. First you have to mimic, only later you gain an understanding. I remember copying code over and over again, just following the same patterns and then one day it just clicks. It's happened to me in a lot of different domains.
This is a great high signal article, not because it's true, but its exactly false. Everything about it is exactly opposite of the truth. I wish we should push more homework and more arbitrary rote memorization. A lot of religious groups in the US get great benefits from studying their holy books, only to apply that focus and energy on commercial tasks with great success.
We should bring back memorization of poetry, or calligraphy. Because at least then children had some purpose in their studies. Today we purport to teach logic or reasoning that can't be referenced easily by google, but today's students are worse in these fields than people in the past. And at least long ago, children knew some poetry to boot.
Yes I am convinced in my views. Am I uninterested in evidence to the contrary? It depends, what's the evidence?
If research comes up with a conclusion that significantly diverges from common sense I don't pay much attention to it unless it's been replicated and the experiments are well designed.
edit: removed my inflammatory comments
Do you just say "well, but practice work!" and ignore your results?
* A is in S
* For many B in S, P(B) is true
* Therefore P(A) is true
Step three in this chain doesn't logically follow from step two, so preemptively rejecting evidence against P(A) is irrational.
Good teachers are engaging, interesting, passionate, and you listen to them like they're good story tellers. Everything they say seems obvious and clear. Then you try to replicate what they tell you and you fail.
At home or at school, you need to get stuck on your own into the problem and try to solve it yourself, else you won't learn - is my hard-earned experience.
Perhaps you can do homework at school, so to speak. But the other truth about homework is that it takes a lot of attention from an adult. Kids young and older often get stuck, someone needs to help them, and there aren't enough teachers.
Maybe AI can help, but until then, I can't see a viable alternative.
In fact, the absolute best jobs are for people who lead the form fillers in one way or another, either by creating the new ways of doing things or by setting direction. An awful lot of the best leaders I know, whether thought or organizational, have a learning disability and did very poorly in early education with its emphasis on drilling the skill of form filling without question. It wasn’t until college when they were finally asked to understand and explain their understanding did they do well.
But most people aren’t that type of person, and public education at minimum is industrialized education. It is absolutely imperative we build a machine that industrialized the production of form fillers, after all - it’s not like AI won’t be filling those forms out in a few years!
If that's really the goal. You should be upset at the trillions of dollars wasted.
Also parents do love their kids. It takes a lot to actually have them side with the higher entity and align their behavior, and I think the current system strikes the balance by giving the kid a fighting chance to succeed, and have parents agree to let their kids be out for most of the day and follow school's rules even after (for funsies: there's schools in Japan where kids have to wear the uniform even outside school, even on short vacations. They quite literally belong to the school during the school year.)
PS: Many teachers really want their students to succeed, and many will do what they can to not have them eaten by the system. I'd wager it could one reason for burn out for some of them.
I rarely see homework going along these line.
Interestingly, there's practice books for exams, which can help a lot if you do them under your own control.
This is crucial. Without a short feedback loop you're not practicing, you're just doing take home quizzes.
The best teachers that I had would assign only odd-numbered problems as homework so you could check your work in the back of the book. In classes where they didn't do that, I usually "cheated" by plugging the problem into Wolfram Alpha or similar, because I knew that learning what I did wrong after we'd already moved on to the next unit would be pointless.
After trying a problem on your own, taking your results and collaborating with peers is a one of the best ways to learn. Sometimes you have to assume the role of teacher and share your idea, which requires you to really understand it.
Also, in the article they stated:
> Still others believe—incorrectly—that more time spent on a task produces better results, or that because practice is required to be a good athlete or musician, it’s also at the heart of intellectual growth. It isn’t. You can’t “reinforce” understanding the way you can reinforce a behavior. In my experience, people with the least sophisticated understanding of how children learn, or the least amount of concern about children’s attitudes toward learning, tend to be the most enthusiastic supporters of homework.
I’m all for practice, but study hall or dedicated study group time were much better for me.
So homework is important at all stages of education, just for different people. For you that happened at college. For someone else it might have been very important in middle school to understand percent, without that work they would have been much worse off in life.
No amount of homework or practice or whatever you want to call it has helped me learn something whose value I could not discern nor find fun. Same goes with lectures.
It's not career limiting to keep your work during.. work. and it isn't education limiting to keep the schoolwork at school.
She had to be fired, that was clearly the only option. It also should have raised the question of how she got the job in the first place.
I know the fact that you meet essentially every kind of person in school is a good thing, but I never fit the mould of learning the way school taught, so providing more diverse ways of learning I think could be a big boon to education.
My wife is a music teacher and frequently objects to the phrase "practice makes perfect" because the kind of practice that you're doing has an enormous impact on the outcomes. Practice works to solidify behaviors, but ill-conceived practice will actually end up solidifying the wrong behaviors.
I think it's likely that it turns out that homework solidifies behaviors that are objectively a net loss for the individuals and society.