
When homework is busywork (2009) - EndXA
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-mar-22-me-homework22-story.html
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Rainymood
>Vatterott questioned the quantity and the quality of assignments. If 10 math
problems could demonstrate a child’s grasp of a concept, why assign 50, she
asked? The solution, she said, was not to do away with homework but to clarify
the reasons for assigning it.

Because repetition is important, especially in math. You don't learn something
by doing it once, you must do it over and over again.

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username90
Is it really? I think repetition is dangerous, it might give you the
impression that you understand something when in fact you only learned how to
follow a specific formula.

What you need in math is lots of unique problems to solve, not repetition of
the same equation with different constants.

~~~
bitwize
Unless you are a math prodigy, drills are paramount to understanding the
concepts, especially before about high school. Almost no one needs deep
understanding _why_ three and four make seven, or _why_ long division works.
But if they cannot call upon these elementary tools on demand, in an instant,
they will be flummoxed in later math classes. Hence, drilling until they've
nailed it.

~~~
username90
But the problem is that we spend ~9 years on those drills which is more time
than a typical engineering student spend on algebra and above. How come we can
teach so much higher math in such a short amount of time? It is not possible
from scratch, the reason we can do it is because some bored students played
around with the drills instead of just doing them and thus learned a lot of
related concepts which are cached in on in later years.

The losers are those who just spent years learning how to do the drills,
getting good grades but didn't learn anything worthwhile at all. It would be
good if we could catch those and correct their behavior before they had wasted
9 years on it, but as is we don't notice that most students fail to learn
anything before we test them on more interesting problems in high-school.

Note: I am not saying that we shouldn't teach arithmetic, on the contrary I'd
argue that arithmetic is one of the most important things to learn in math
since everything else is built on top of that intuition. We just have to
realize that we practice arithmetic to build intuition and not to become a
human calculator.

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adrianN
An engineering student can learn more advanced math in a shorter time because
a) they're older, b) they have mastered the elementary stuff already.

~~~
dagw
Also let's be honest, how many engineers actually learn the more advanced
math. Most of them cram it into their brain for the test and then promptly
forget it.

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johnzim
This is the perfect opportunity to test some anecdata of mine: I’m hard
pressed to think of a more anti-homework audience than programmers.

An absurd percentage of programmers I met hated homework and did their best to
do as little of it as possible.

Is my grouping just weird or are most programmers deeply homework averse?

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jbob2000
Can confirm, hated homework. I understood things too quickly so I never had
push myself to learn, thus homework felt like a chore or a petty punishment.

This burned me later in life because “remembering what the teacher said
yesterday” and “using other test questions to answer the current question”
only gets you so far.

~~~
hdctambien
I write my tests specifically so previous test questions do not answer future
test questions on the same test. It's interesting how many "A students" get
B's and C's on the first few tests I give...

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choeger
The thing is: homework can be a rather powerful tool for learning. Students
works on their own. In their own environment and at their own pace. They are
usually done hours to days after the lesson was teached, so it gets better
remembered. They provide an easy interface for parents to help their kids.
They are not bound on the time limits of school lessons. And finally they take
some churn (and boredom for faster students) out of the classroom.

All in all, it would be criminally stupid to outright ban homework.

If the problem is workload, which is just too understandable, then an agreed
upon effort limit seems reasonable. But that would require teachers to
coordinate.

~~~
arkh
> The thing is: homework can be a rather powerful tool for learning.

Not for everyone. Once you've understood something, doing it 10 times won't
help. Especially if you could do something more fun on the side.

I think it is just a symptom of the inability of teachers to adapt their
teaching to their students. Some children will be able to learn something if
it is presented some way. For the other? Just make them do homework, don't try
to present things another way.

> They provide an easy interface for parents to help their kids.

Which is a good way to amplify the problems for people whom parents can't
afford the time or never got the education to be able to help.

~~~
choeger
> Not for everyone.

Except for some rare counterexamples, it does.

> Once you've understood something, doing it 10 times won't help.

That is simply not true. Repitition helps to strengthen memory. Even if you
understand something now, it does not necessarily mean you will still
understand it tomorrow or next week. Repitition as a homework is actually a
simple and efficient method to increase the likelihood that knowledge will be
remembered.

> Which is a good way to amplify the problems for people whom parents can't
> afford the time or never got the education to be able to help.

This is also quite wrong. Do you really think it helps children that suffer
from a lack of parental support if more children artificially suffer the same?
Children need every little bit of support they can get.

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cripti7
More and more people every year turn into freelance mode of work. This is an
inevitable trend, and I'm talking not only about Uber drivers. Programmers,
writers, journalists, designers, many people who need a computer and a cup of
coffee. Read this PDF from Zerocracy, they nailed it there:
[http://papers.zold.io/freelance-deck.pdf](http://papers.zold.io/freelance-
deck.pdf)

