
My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me - e40
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/my-daughters-homework-is-killing-me/309514/
======
acabal
What stood out for me from this article wasn't the homework load, which only
seems slightly more than what I remember from my own youth, but rather that:

1) a teacher can accuse a parent of "cyberbullying" for an email sent in
purported confidentiality to others, and that the claim can be taken
seriously. Obviously I didn't read the email, but the author seems well-read
and reasonable, so I'm inclined to conjecture that whatever he sent wasn't
outrageous. If I as a parent were "called in to the vice principal's office"
and accused of cyberbullying a _teacher_ , I'd laugh in their face. Is this
teacher _teaching_ middle school, or _in_ middle school?

2) that the parent is having constant meetings with school officials, and
seemingly-frequent interaction with other parents via email. Granted in my
days (mid-90's or so) email wasn't a big thing, but my parents typically took
the hands-off stand of "did the teacher say so? then do it", plus the
occasional PTA meeting. (They did help when asked, but I can probably count
all the face-to-face meetings they had with school faculty on one hand). And
that's a stance I can very much appreciate. I don't know what parent-teacher
relationships are like today, but it sure sounds like the teachers are hearing
almost as much from the parents as they are from the students.

Which isn't to say the system can't be improved. But honestly I remember
nearly as much homework from my days, and those points stuck out more to me as
a sign of the times.

~~~
tptacek
The "cyber-bullying" thing seemed janky when I read it. We don't know exactly
what he wrote to the other parents, or the tone of the conversation they had.
We know that one parent was alarmed enough by the conversation to (apparently)
forward it to the school administration. It may have been nastier than the
author is crediting it for.

~~~
chiph
This is the same teacher who gave his child a C on an assignment because they
didn't put their answers in a separate column. Granted, we only have one side
of the conversations, but I wouldn't rule out the chance of the teacher being
petty & vindictive.

------
mcphilip
I was homeschooled K-12. My days consisted largely of 1-2 hours of bible study
with my 3 brothers followed by a few hours on my own working through a set
number of pages in math, science, literature, etc textbooks. I'd usually get
done by 2 and then play Nintendo until friends got home from school.

I was never tested in homeschool. There were no grades or report cards. The
only accountability was mom checking that the assignments were done. My first
real test was the PSAT. As part of applying to college, my mom had to make up
high school grades for the transcript.

I scored decently on the SAT and got accepted into a university. College was
relatively a breeze since I had spent all my grade school years teaching
things to myself - college was just an extension of this method of learning.

While there are plenty of good arguments against homeschooling, I feel lucky
to have been brought up in an environment where education did not have a
competitive aspect requiring 8-12 hours of work a day.

~~~
callmeed
This might be a weird question and totally based on anecdotes but: are you a
good speller?

I have a lot of friends who were homeschooled and/or homeschool their kids.
I've also hired some and gone to school with some. One thing I noticed about
several of them is they're bad at spelling. I've always wondered why.

~~~
mcphilip
I'm a decent speller. I was homeschooled starting in the mid eighties, so
coursework was done mostly away from the computer (i.e. no autocorrect
crutch). Also, my mom valued spelling and grammar and would be quick to point
out mistakes.

In general, I mostly saw problems with homeschooled peers being weak at math.

------
tptacek
Some quick thoughts, as the parent of a high school freshman:

* If you anticipate your child being assigned 3 hours of homework in a typical evening, it is negligent to allow them to start that work at 8:00PM. Instead of allowing his daughter to watch episodes of Portlandia on her computer all afternoon, he could consider a rule suggesting homework gets completed before electronic entertainment; that's our rule this year (for the first time) and it's working better than I thought it would. Another rule we have: complete or not, homework is done at 9:30PM.

* Japan (a) does not outperform the US (at least on PISA) when normalized for income, which normalization _also normalizes for homework load_ , and (b) has the some of the longest school days in the world, with an abbreviated, homework-encumbered summer break to boot. Japanese students probably do not work less hard than US students, or to greater effect.

* If your daughter answers "Texas City" as the state capital of Texas, the discussion of how she's struggling academically might range farther than homework load, eh? Neither my son in high school nor my daughter in middle school has ever to my knowledge had state capitals homework, and neither would give that answer.

* If your daughter has spent middle school staying up until 1:00AM completing homework†, so much so that you are in open conflict with the school over that load, why oh why would you go out of your way to enroll the kid in a highly selective public school that is virtually assured to maintain or increase that load? We had homework-intensive school options for the boy, too, and (sanely) decided not to avail ourselves of them. Is this a status obsession thing? Because if the end goal is a push to get your kid into an Ivy, stop bitching about workload. You're choosing to make your kid compete.

Minus the cannabis (I substituted Unix exploit development), I had a similar
high school experience to this author. I'm not generally in favor of homework
and would if asked by any of my kid's teachers --- who do actually coordinate
to even out the workload --- vote for less of it. But I think the parent in
this article is suffering from a couple problems of his own creation, and has
probably not come up with an indictment of the US school system.

† _Never once has either of my kids had a middle school workload that kept
them up late at night._

~~~
patio11
_Japanese students probably do not work less hard than US students, or to
greater effect._

Wait wait, people really think American students do more work than Japanese
kids?

HAH. HAH. HAH. HAH. That's a good one.

Seriously: Japanese _schools_ don't assign 3 hours of homework because that
would conflict with the 3 hours of "not required but it will ruin your life if
you don't do it and then fail your next admissions exam" cram school that the
top 30% of Japanese kids/parents assume is inevitable.

If you want I can run down to the train station and take a photo of one of our
local cram schools. It's 8:45 PM right now so the middle schoolers should be
just about _halfway finished_ for the evening.

~~~
barry-cotter
Damn, I thought there was some daylight between Korea and Japan in terms of
messed up zero sum games cram schools. AIUI the pressure lets up rather a lot
once one gets to university, yes? As in there is actual freedom to slack off
and many do. Or is there no point between primary school and becoming a
salaryman to chill out?

~~~
bodhi
> AIUI the pressure lets up rather a lot once one gets to university, yes?

The running joke that I've heard is that university is the only vacation that
a Japanese person will get in their life.

~~~
mathattack
My experience in Japan was similar. "They're allowed a good vacation before
school starts, and during college." The lowest University of Tokyo graduate
has better placement options than the best graduate from any other school.

Some of this comes from good reasons - the companies value teamwork and social
skills, assuming they own the burden of training people.

There are numerous downsides for this method though. (Miss out on good
candidates, people could be learning in college, too much lifetime emphasis on
one admissions test, etc.)

------
vacri
There are some concepts at odds here. _" The measurements included numbers
like 78 13/64, and all this multiplying and dividing was to be done without a
calculator."_ is not 'rote learning'/'memorisation without rationalisation'.
It's directly exercising an ability. I've had a university-level experience
reach for her calculator to multiply 0.2 by 3, and when I forbade her from
using it, she just stared dumbly at me. That someone of that age can't do that
multiplication 'automatically' was quite a surprise, especially given that it
was a science course.

Similarly, finding the distances between state capitals exercises research and
application skills, and gives a feeling for geographical distances. Doing it
in miles and kilometers is helping to get people accustomed to using the
Standard International set of units alongside the archaic Imperial units.
Likewise, a journalist finding scientific mathematical notation 'unintuitive'
doesn't mean it has no merit.

The workload is ridiculous, absolutely, but the content of the homework
doesn't sound as useless as the article makes it out to be.

~~~
comex
One comment: there's a difference between mental arithmetic, which is as
useful as ever to be able to perform quickly/effectively, and the pen-and-
paper variant (which I assume the cited assignment required), which is not.
Everyone should, of course, know how to do the latter, but doing long pen-and-
paper operations usually doesn't save time over reaching for a calculator, and
is error-prone. Unfortunately, schools (at least here) seem to endlessly
practice pen-and-paper while giving essentially zero attention to mental
arithmetic.

~~~
Tichy
Do calculators even routinely work with infinite precision (like (sqrt(2) x
sqrt(2) = 2)? I guess you could achieve some results with Mathematia or
something like that, but I have my doubts about the average calculator.

Sometimes it is still useful to do calculations by hand, also to understand
what is going on.

(Edit: just tested the OS X calculator, sqrt(2) x sqrt(2) works out by chance,
but sqrt(200) x sqrt(200) fails).

~~~
m_mueller
Edit: Sorry, I just noticed that actually _I_ was missing the point - I
thought your comment was in response to vacri. Leaving my comment here, just
in case.

I think your comment misses the point. It's important to learn when to use a
calculator and when to simplify the equation instead. Your example obviously
should be simplified first on paper, resulting in 2. This can easily be
enforced by requiring the intermediate steps, such that a calculator won't
work. The point of parent is, that learning pen-and-paper _calculation_ is of
basically no value (except if you go into computer science, where remembering
those algorithms can come in handy). Your example is not calculation, it's
arithmetics, a necessary step towards algebra.

~~~
Tichy
I agree that probably training too much manual addition and multiplication is
a waste of time these days. However, a bit of it still seems to be useful. For
example I am often able to calculate the bill in a restaurant (not always,
though). And sometimes it is just faster than going to the calculator,
depending on the situation. Also a lot of the process of addition and
multiplication might also be good practice for arithmetics?

------
belorn
_> But when I ask her what the verb tener means (“to have,” if I recall), she
repeats, “Memorization, not rationalization.”_

I wonder where she got that from, or if it was something she figured out by
herself. It just sound so soul crushing that the goal for children is not
learning, but to memorize something until the test is done.

Memorization should never be used when rationalization could do better. Sure,
there exist a few rare cases where memorization is the only option (such as
remembering names), but those are exceptions. Languages are almost without
exception best learned by actually using the language in communication or by
consuming media (books, movies, and so on).

~~~
edtechdev
Virtually every class focuses on memorization and not conceptual
understanding, unfortunately. That's what students have to do to survive high
school and college courses, because that's how they are taught and assessed.

A recent study of calculus courses found for example that almost 80% of the
test questions simply involved recalling and applying a procedure (i.e., "plug
and chug").
[http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/cspcc/TSG13_Bress...](http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/cspcc/TSG13_Bressoud.pdf)

The students don't want it to be this way: "74% preferred to make sense of
mathematics rather than simply memorizing it and 72% saw the role of the
instructor as helping students to reason through problems on their own rather
than showing students how to work the problem".

And yet because it is easier to test and grade rote learning and memorization,
we end up killing students' interest in STEM (science, technology,
engineering, math) and most students who enter college as a STEM major end up
changing majors, transferring, or dropping out. "students leave STEM majors
primarily because of poor instruction in their mathematics and science
courses, with calculus often cited as a primary reason."

~~~
alanctgardner2
I don't know how much stock I'd put in self-reported reasons for attrition. At
my school the undergrad professors for calc are all excellent - well reviewed
by students, winning awards, etc. Still, a lot of STEM students drop out when
they're taking first-year calc, because STEM programs are also just very hard.
Even if we axed the first-year math requirements, I suspect those people would
make it two or three years in before getting caught up on another class, and
ultimately leaving anyways.

~~~
edtechdev
Student ratings actually negatively correlate with learning

I think maybe I'll trust the decades of research on math education rather than
your intuitions. For example, there is research showing that many more
students succeed in calculus when the math is taught in context, not
abstractly and plug and chug. One set of studies showed that such a course
increased calculus pass rates from 60% to 90% (see the Wright State
engineering math course, and see the ENGAGE Engineering project). Another
large set of studies shows that student learning can double and graduation
rates triple when active, participatory learning techniques are used by the
instructor instead of traditional lecture (The PCAST report - Engage to Excel
cites it).

------
AmiiJewels
I do not understand the authors conclusion: 'The more immersed I become in
Esmee’s homework, the more reassured I am that the teachers, principals, and
school-board members who are coming up with this curriculum are earnest about
their work.' when his own Daughter's strategy boils down to :" Memorization,
not rationalization" \- She isn't learning, she isn't becoming "well rounded",
she is memorizing information that will be useless past her next year of
schooling.

Some of the things detailed sound horrible, A C because there was no answer
column etc. The school sounds broken.

~~~
corin_
Two counter-points I would make to your comment, without agreeing or
disagreeing overall about the effectiveness of the teaching.

The first is that it is possible for the educators to be "earnest" and
unsuccessful in their attempts.

The second is that "memorization not rtionalization" could well be the opinion
of his daughter, not her educators. Sure, they should do their best to prevent
this, but kids with good memories will often use this to shortcut learning. I
received an A* grade for my GCSE French (school exams at age 16 in UK -
although I took at 15) not because I was good at French, but because I had a
good memory. The written paper for example was 50% essay, and thanks to
teachers preparing us on what sort of topics to expect, I was prepared. I
picked "write about a recent holiday" and wrote an entire essay from memory.
As in, I'd written it weeks previously (in the case of this specific essay,
I'd actually written it for the oral exam, for which I had to memorize it and
speak it... a nice it of duplication luck for me!), but I could write it down
word perfectly without any mistakes. Coincidentally I'm sat in a hotel room in
Paris right now, having spent yesterday remembering how poor my French
language is.

~~~
saulrh
If you can do well on your science homework following "memorization not
rationalization", your science homework is not preparing you to do science.
Same with math.

------
Fuxy
Holy s __t people how can you allow teachers to torture your kids like that.

I'm young and I never had this kind of work load hell if i did i would have
either gone insane or just said fk it and ignored all that homework.

Yes I'm not from America I'm from Easter Europe. I would never allow this to
my children. If this is the state of education I can do a better job.

"If Esmee masters the material covered in her classes, she will emerge as a
well-rounded, socially aware citizen, a serious reader with good reasoning
capabilities and a decent knowledge of the universe she lives in. What more
can I ask of her school?"

No she will emerge as a well informed drone with good reading skill but no
desire to do so because she is reminded of the amount of reading forced upon
her and very weak reasoning and deductive skills.

“Memorization, not rationalization.”

What the point of that? If you don't understand what you have memorized it is
useless not to mention a lot harder to remember.

Cyberbullying really? Is that person a complete idiot? Why would i ever let my
child learn from a person who would attempt to threaten me with some
ridiculous accusation in order to make me back off from my opinion.

It is manipulative and instead of addressing my concerns they are trying to
make me go away.

From what they are telling the parents the teachers are just a bunch of drones
following instructions sent by a higher power.

Exactly what they are teaching the students to become.

Where's the critical thinking where the opinion and power of the teachers to
teach in a manner that they see fit?

------
tudorw
Six and a half hours sleep, this is way too low, Millpond Children’s Sleep
Clinic recommends over nine for a 13yr old.
[http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Childrenssleep/Pages/howmuchsleep...](http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Childrenssleep/Pages/howmuchsleep.aspx)

~~~
Afforess
I once asked a vice principal (way back, 10 yrs ago) why schools started so
early when lack of sleep was known to be bad. He said it was so there was time
for sports in the evening. If you started at 10 or 11 school would run until 6
and it would start getting dark.

Sports are why kids sleep is ruined.

~~~
girvo
A boys school actually did a test where they started the school day at
10.30am, and nearly every teenagers grades improved, sometimes dramatically.

I wish I could find that reference, but it proved to me what I knew: I really
would've done better if I'd not had to get up at 6.30am so I could walk the
hour to school (both parents worked).

~~~
danielford
Here's a link to either the study you're looking for, or a similar one:
[http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/139295/1/2002%20NASSP%2...](http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/139295/1/2002%20NASSP%20Bulletin,%20Vol.%2086%20No.%20633.pdf)

------
rayiner
The entirety of K-12 is a basically a crock. Very little of this stuff is
important. Who cares how crystal structures are defined? Memorizing that
trivia won't improve your thinking skills, and you won't remember it after the
exam anyway. Even if you go on to major in chemistry, you'll have to relearn
all of that anyway because colleges don't trust the K-12 system to teach any
of it correctly.

My wife recently told me she wants to send our daughter to an expensive
private school for 4th-12th grade. My wife and I both attended public school
until graduate school, so I wasn't warm to the idea. But I couldn't argue with
her reasoning: many private schools are exempt from NCLB (because they don't
take federal money under the Act), and as such can dispense with a lot of that
ridiculousness. They teach the important skills (reading, writing, logical
reasoning, math), but otherwise go easy on kids, inflate their grades, and
have old connections to top colleges so they don't have to define themselves
based on the "rigor" of their programs the way public magnet schools do.

I went to a highly-competitive public magnet school for high school, and it
was a huge waste of time. I sorely regret all those hours I spent learning
about earth science or ancient china. My wife went to a very progressive
public school in Oregon and loved it. They had mostly electives, and one of
her classes in high school was a whole class on James Joyce. They didn't
assign a ton of homework, but instead let kids explore their interests them go
home at the end of the day.

------
Al-Khwarizmi
Wow. Everyone in the thread seems to have gotten lots of homework in their
youth. In my case, I went to both a private and a public school (in Spain) and
the homework load was probably like half an hour a day, in both cases. In high
school it was a bit more, maybe 45 minutes, the main difference was that in
high school studying the day before the exam was usually not enough.

I remember that my mother used to be worried that I would have problems at
university, because there I would have to work a lot of hours per day, and I
wasn't getting used to that at school. Well, I did have to work a lot of hours
per day at university, but I did perfectly fine. And I'm grateful that I had
time during my school and high school years to write stories, make drawings,
learn C and C++, write games, compose some music, etc... unlike the poor girl
in the article!

~~~
zanny
When I was in High school (especially my senior year) I'd schedule study halls
at the end of the day, and spend lunch in the study hall, to do homework on-
site so I didn't have any at home.

Pretty much straight A's that year, and I took 4 AP courses I got a minimum of
a 4 on.

------
rwallace
There comes a point when an institution becomes so badly broken that the only
rational course of action is to get the hell out, and look elsewhere for a
solution to your problems. It looks pretty clear from this article that the US
school system is well past that point.

~~~
cookiecaper
Effective schooling could never occur on such a federated level. There's such
a broad range of individual personalities and skills along varying axes that
the idea of "let's put all the kids born within 10 months of each other in our
geographic area in a classroom, and threaten force on people who don't want to
cooperate" is never going to function well.

I hold the opinion that the proper training and education of one's offspring
should be a foremost life goal, and that delegating it to the state because
"it's easier", "I don't have the time", etc. is an abhorrent cop-out. The
state likes this because it gives them an outlet which can be used to program
99% of the rising generation, but I see it as a serious and negligent
discharge of fundamental parental responsibility. Please note that "education"
means ensuring children learn correct principles -- it doesn't represent any
specific extant construct or abstraction, like "high school" or "university
graduation". For far too long these have been mechanisms of control. I say
this as a successful high school dropout who has never enrolled in post-
secondary courses.

The things mentioned in this article are utterly absurd, and as you noted, the
fact that people allow their children to go through this for meaningless
rewards is really weird. Does an "A" still hold that much sway? I long for the
day when it will be recognized at its true worth, which is zero.

~~~
GabrielF00
As a fellow high school dropout I sympathize with what you're saying, but I
don't think it can be the basis for effective public policy. How many
Americans have the ability to teach their children math, science, writing,
history and civics at a high school level? How many American families have the
time to provide children with anything close to the amount of hours of
instruction available in schools? And what happens if we build an educational
system that doesn't delegate education to the state, as you put it. That
system might be fine for parents who have free time and/or can afford tutors,
but what about everyone else? Public schools are far from perfect, but they
provide vastly more equality of opportunity than existed in our society before
their invention.

~~~
rwallace
Having an adult constantly looking over your shoulder is neither necessary nor
desirable, particularly in the twenty-first century when a vast wealth of
information is at your fingertips free of charge.

~~~
mistercow
Exactly. We spend, on average, over $10,000 per student per year on public
education. For that, you could easily hire a private tutor to teach each child
for one hour per school day, helping them with anything the parents can't
handle. For everything else, there's the internet.

And on that note, just how in the hell is the teacher:student ratio as low as
it is in public schools today?

------
GotAnyMegadeth
The Author and his daughter haven't learnt the tricks of the trade. I was set
3+hrs of HW a day, but I certainly didn't do that much.

First, they need to assess which teachers "Don't mind" if you don't do the
homework. This could mean they stand you up in front of the whole class and
shout at you, but if they don't give you an after school detention, don't do
it. Getting in the teachers good books previously helps with this.

Second, if you've got a joke subject before one with homework due, do the
homework then. Geography before Maths for example.

Third, have a homework team where you take it in turns to do the easily copied
homework (Maths, DT, Science) and then copy each other in the mornings before
school. Of course you need to cover your tracks.

Fourth, always cut corners. No calculator? Lol, use a calculator, but
purposely get a few wrong. Use Google for everything (I didn't have a computer
until yr8). Never read a book when you can read a synopsis/ watch the film
whilst playing Pokémon.

Fifth, work as a team at home. The parent will have to remember things from
their childhood, where as older siblings only need to remember from the year
before. I used to do my middle brother's compulsory homework, whilst he did my
littlest brother's, and my mum did mine.

Other tricks: Try leaving all of you books related to that subject at home one
day and claim you thought it was Thursday.

Miss out a question at the bottom of a page, they might not even notice.

Pretend you are/were ill.

Cry

Hand in last weeks homework again. This one only buys you time, but works well
on a Friday.

Tell your teacher you'll hand it in tomorrow, then the next day tell them you
handed it in yesterday and they've lost it.

Band together with the other kids in your class and tell the teacher they said
the homework was due for next week, or that they didn't even set it.

If you are asked to hand something in on lined paper, just don't do a whole
sheets worth. More convincing if both sheets start/end in the middle of a
sentence. I've done this before and they didn't even comment, I suspect they
felt guilty they'd lost it.

Note: I successfully used all these tricks on several occasions. I would say
that it definitely had no impact on my education (Got a AAAB at A level, 1st
Class degree in Electronic Engineering w/ Hons), and a very significant
positive impact on my life as a whole.

~~~
tptacek
How caustic a lesson to teach your kid, that they should organize to cheat on
homework, so they can artificially inflate their grade. I suppose it does set
them up for a productive life of investment banking.

~~~
rayiner
I think kids should be taught to perceive the mechanics of any system and
leverage those mechanics, within the bounds of ethics and fairness. They
should ignore what people _say_ and focus on what they _do_.

I absolutely don't condone lying or cheating, and I think it's a huge problem
in schools today. But kids aren't the only ones that lie. American education
is predicated on a basic lie: that it's about learning. In fact, it's about
sorting.

In law school, I had a lot of friends who wrote organized exams with good
grammar and coherent structure. This is what school taught them was important.
I wrote these horrible, rambling, repetitive exams with poor grammar and
spelling and no structure other than conforming to what I thought the
professor's grading checklist would look like. Ironically, I now have a job
where I get to really think and learn and write, but I couldn't have gotten it
without playing the sorting game.

Learning is great. But learning is what you do while researching Hacker News
posts. School is no place for it.

~~~
selmnoo
> But learning is what you do while researching Hacker News posts.

How do you research HN posts? Fundamentally it comes down to a lot to knowing
what source, person, or place of knowledge to trust. What are your rules of
thumb to decide what to trust and not to trust?

Do you go to wikipedia and extend your research by looking in the citations,
or use google right from the start?

------
ygra
I don't recall similar homework loads (Germany, school being 10–20 years ago),
but that might be due to laziness on my part or simply the fact that it wasn't
a good time for me anyway. By the later grades (11th and onwards) it
definitely wasn't as much.

I liked what our math teacher said regarding his homework: It's for practice
and not strictly needed and thus voluntary. If we feel confident doing the
homework ad-hoc on the blackboard in class then we don't need to do it at
home. While this won't work for every class (e.g. I guess languages don't
really work that way), it was definitely nicer than having to unconditionally
do the homework (as well as all the rest).

> I’ve often suspected that teachers don’t have any idea about the >
> cumulative amount of homework the kids are assigned when > they are taking
> five academic classes. There is little to no > coordination among teachers
> in most schools when it comes > to assignments and test dates.

This is something my mother (a teacher) can confirm as well. Many teachers
just assume that they're the only ones giving homework and thus don't really
see why it can be so much. That was a problem in uni as well sometimes in the
earlier years (and anecdotally the norm by now that we have the
Bachelor/Master system, depending on your major).

~~~
girvo
Homework for me (I'm 22) while at highschool was mandatory and contributed to
your overall mark.

I never did mine. Like, at all.

Luckily for me, I had the highest grades across my entire year, and did so
well that they bent the rules for me and ignored the fact I never did my
homework.

Still not sure if that was a good thing or not to be honest, our workload
wasn't that large, and it took me a while to build a work ethic.

~~~
tptacek
I did no homework at all in high school. Jesuit college prep, high workload,
homework part of the grade. I got bad grades across the board, and, in math,
that was in part because I wasn't practicing the skills they were testing; I
left high school with subpar math, which still haunts me.

Bad grades kept me (pretty much) out of college, which in my case was
fortunate, because I graduated high school with a couple years in which to
warm up for the first dot-com bubble, which was lucrative for me.

I too feel like I had to learn a work ethic "in the real world", which is less
forgiving than school, and I think I would have been modestly better off had I
done the homework --- except that I might have ended up in college.

------
NemesorZandrak
When I was at school and that is not USA but Poland. We used to have 6-8
different subjects per day from biology, chemistry, geography, maths and
history as examples. Everyone of this subjects converted to at least an hour
of homework. What I learned as a kid is that it is impossible to learn all
this things at home and I have to filter what is needed the most. Sometimes
approximate and sometimes simply take the risk and just read rapidly the book
and count on luck. This what most valuable lesson if learned at school. Some
of the kids managed to do this 8 hour drill some like me had to adjust and
focus on important stuff learn to filter. This gave me ability to play games
and program.

~~~
neltnerb
Thanks for the interesting perspective. I guess I was lucky in having teachers
who were more concerned with aptitude than homework (luckily before no child
left behind). Almost none of my homework was graded -- this seems to be a
european thing? You'd know better than me. So I did the amount of homework
needed to learn the material, and no more. Like college.

I do wonder if the big issue is that this approach can really burn kids out on
cool areas. How many kids think math puzzles are fun in elementary school when
taught as a game? I think actually a surprisingly high number. But when you
turn it into work it's a totally different approach, and it really doesn't
seem to work.

There seem to be some promising alternative possibilities, like Khan Academy,
but when you're giving kids so much work that they can't read Feynman's
lectures out of actual interest you're being counterproductive.

~~~
VargardObyron
There is no marks for having homework, there are only negative marks for not
having it.

~~~
gambiting
Yup, the same here. Teacher would always only check whatever we had
homework,not how well we've done it. I don't remember ever getting a grade for
my homework,except when I didn't have it - it always meant an automatic
"1"(fail) added to my grades.

------
imperio59
She is not learning about what she is studying, she is learning to become a
well trained parrot. Society has no use for parrots.

These kids need to be taught to look up the words they don't know in a
dictionary appropriate to their age and gain an understanding of the new words
they come across as they are studying. That is the only way to understand any
subject one is studying. No amount of "guessing" or "memorizing" will replace
an actual understanding of the words one is reading.

~~~
cookiecaper
>Society has no use for parrots.

In fact, society has a great use for "parrots" whose sense of rational
processing is beat out of them, and are taught to keep their heads down and
just swallow whatever their superior is cramming down their throat. It is
certainly not a noble use, but without these many years of mandatory obedience
training, the wage slavery upon which our lifestyle depends would suffer a
severe lack of willing participants.

~~~
rwallace
That was certainly true in the Industrial Revolution, which was the time at
and reason for which the education system as we know it was invented; the
economy did actually need people who could spend all day every day fitting
widget A into slot B without going mad from boredom. But as mechanical
drudgery is progressively delegated to computers, leaving an economy desperate
for people who can make plans and take the initiative, we should be
progressively cutting down the education system, not allowing it to continue
growing like a cancer.

------
haldujai
The mode of homework time appears to be 3 hours a night during weekdays, this
is considered unbearable/a lot? Growing up this was the norm for me. The
school in question runs from 8:00 AM to 2:20 PM with a 45 minute lunch break,
recesses and homeroom included. With 3 hours of studying that brings you to a
total of 9 hours - breaks (I couldn't find a schedule). Assuming 8 hours of
sleep, 1 hour for dinner, 2 hours of miscellaneous daily activities and 1 hour
to get ready and eat breakfast in the morning you're left with 3 hours of your
day left. As a 13 year old with parents that take care of a lot of your
responsibilities that's not bad at all. Especially when you consider that this
is a school that advertises academic rigor and not intended for your average
student.

The only thing I agree with is that this school isn't doing a good job of
educating if the student says "Memorization, not rationalization". While the
homework appears to be monotonous my understanding was that this is because
she is 13, it is important to build the foundation (i.e. comfort with numbers
and reading dense literature) that will allow her to pursue more
intellectually challenging courses in the future.

The only criticism I have of this system is that the author suggests _none_ of
the courses promote critical thinking and creativity. If this is the case then
this is a problem, I would think at least 1/5 courses should do that. One of
the biggest criticisms of the education system in China (I don't know if this
is true but I hear it a lot) is that it promotes rote memorization (with
exceptions), and this school appears to be doing the same.

Edit: All of this is predicated on the assumption that this student is
academically capable of succeeding at this school. While it takes her 3 hours
every night (5 hours max) this may not be the case for the average student, we
don't know where she lies on the curve. Anecdotal evidence from some parents
is obviously not enough to draw any conclusions.

~~~
Emass12
You're forgetting transportation to and from school in your daily calculation,
which could take up to an hour and a half total. And socialization which is
non-negotiable. At least an hour for that? Oh and some people might need 9
hours of sleep, and another HN comment actually cited that this is
_recommended_ for a 13 year old. You see the problem with cutting it so close
that homework just, just _barely_ fits in the remaining hours of the day after
all survival necessities have been taken care of? It's either complete the
homework assignments or get enough sleep, not both. Is it really supposed to
be that childhood is about nothing but school and homework? That seems
atrocious to me. Basically you are advocating for a situation in which
children trudge through the mechanical needs of the day simply to produce
homework output, to be repeated ad nauseum day after day for most of their
childhood. This is extremely unhealthy long term. This system eliminates any
possibility of these kids exploring their interests and having fun, but that
supposedly is not meaningful and too hand-wavy for some people. The author
said of parents like that: "I tend not to get along with that type of parent."

~~~
neltnerb
I did an experiment in college where I tried to see just how much work I could
take on and stay sane. I'm very successfully academically (PhD at 26 from a
very respected institution), and I found that if I did not have at least eight
hours of unscheduled, unplanned time to just do nothing useful it severely
impacted my ability to perform on any task.

And I'm an extreme outlier in terms of innate skill, I say without intending
it as pride. It's just reality.

Without time to decompress and be mindless, you are constantly building up
stress and pressure until you lose overall performance capacity.

~~~
haldujai
This is why education is not a one size fits all model. For students like
yourself there are dozens of schools in district 2 one could attend instead of
this institution. Like I previously mentioned, people who attend this school
do so by choice.

Additionally, innate skill does not translate to the ability to handle stress,
discipline, or work ethic. Your schedule is entirely unrealistic outside of
academia today (or being your own boss), judging from the population of
successful people (in finance, software engineers, researchers, politicians,
etc) you'll see that most people get by with less than 2 hours of unscheduled
time whether forced or by choice.

Personally, I find unscheduled time and being mindless hampers my
productivity. I function best under pressure and produce my best work. The
most academically successful year of my life was when I was spending 80 hours
a week on research, class, and studying (1-2 hours). My point in this is that
what works for you is not necessarily the minimum requirement for success.

Also, I am aware of the physiological consequences of stress before anyone
gets to that point.

~~~
neltnerb
Yeah, I've seen that people are different in how much down time they need to
function. I've actually studied it quite a bit in grad school from observing
my fellow grad students.

My observations, in a graduate level lab under a very famous professor.

Exactly one person was able to work constantly and do excellent work. He's
just a freaking genius, I have no clue how he did it with a child, but
apparently he only slept three hours a night. He graduated in 5 years.

About ten people worked really hard, were always stressed and tired, and
accomplished almost nothing useful because they never allocated time to
actually thinking about what they were doing. These were usually people who
had been in the military (Korean and US largely). They usually took 5-8 years
to graduate.

About five people worked reasonably hard, but had outside interests. They took
seven years to graduate on average.

And then there's lazy people like me, who somehow managed to accomplish work
just as useful, but who worked far less and thought far more. I graduated in
four years.

Yeah, the sum of anecdotes isn't statistics. But I saw this pattern over and
over again in graduate school.

But to your point, if you have a 9-5 normal job, how many hours during that
time are you doing effectively what I described? Basically just sitting there
staring at your monitor, or getting coffee, or getting lunch, or whatever. I
bet the vast majority of employees (yes, I have been employed in industry)
spend that eight hour minimum I describe staring blankly into space, they just
do it in the office.

Everyone has different limits. Yeah, that term I pushed myself to my limits I
was doing serious, no distraction work for about 80 hours a week. I forced
myself to take Saturdays off entirely, no homework allowed. That does leave
the bare minimum 8 hours required to be a functional human plus sleeping 7
hours a night, and that is what I had to do. I wouldn't repeat it though, and
I wouldn't even consider doing it long term.

------
ctdonath
The Montessori method: take each child at his own pace thru sensory-grounded
material, giving enough familiarity with material until it is internalized and
the child abstracts it himself - THEN move on to the next step, at individual
pace. Therein lies understanding. Not doing this leads to contempt for the
material and rote memorization (which the article starts out noting is the
plain conclusion) devoid of understanding.

~~~
jbellis
That's the theory, anyway.
[http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/2013/09/18/montessori...](http://homeschooling.penelopetrunk.com/2013/09/18/montessori-
schools-dont-work-for-young-boys/)

~~~
ctdonath
Upshot of the objection is: boys are busy, rough, and loud.

The objection then practically concludes that letting them play hard as they
desire is the only option, and the acceptable alternative thereto is _At least
in public school, boys get diagnosed with ADHD and plied with Adderal to
enable adjustment to [learning while sitting still for very long periods]._ I
reject any conclusion that reduces to either letting kids run wild or drugging
them into submission.

Montessori finds a happier medium: the child is permitted to move and change
focus as desired, while gently encouraging them to learn focus and self-
control. Maybe it's not optimal for some kids, but it's sure better than the
alternatives the link prefers.

------
mistercow
The answer, of course, is to tell your daughter she just doesn't have to do
this shit. It's middle school. It doesn't matter. When she gets to high
school, if teachers try to put her in non-honors classes (where she obviously
doesn't belong), you sign a waiver and put her in the right classes.

Of course, if you by any means have the time or the money, the real answer is
not to send your kids to these idiotic institutions at all, and to teach them
yourself, or higher tutors. Hire college students; they can use the money.

------
pnathan
This is the official guideline from my local school district on average
homework times:

K Occasional

1-2 15 minutes (M-Th)

3-5 30-60 minutes (M-Th)

6-8 30-90 minutes (M-Th)

9-12 60-120 minutes (M-S)

~~~
nja
Per class?

~~~
mistercow
Surely it can't be per class. Depending on the class schedule of the school,
that would be suggesting that 8 hours of homework for a high school student
was "within acceptable parameters".

~~~
dthunt
I think the better lesson is not, 'how many hours of homework is fair' but,
'teachers, please assign the minimum effective dose of homework'. This is one
of the reasons I think labs are effective in high school science classes,
provided they don't spell everything out for you and require you to understand
what is going on, why you are doing it, and what's the important points are of
what is going on. Applying knowledge is far more effective at making knowledge
stick than balancing chemical equations.

------
kalleboo
This has turned into a circumcision/spanking debate. "Let me tell you what MY
parents/school imposed on me and why that's the best way, and as anecdotal
evidence, I present myself, who as you can see turned out to be a perfect
individual." I can read those on Reddit, Hacker News readers have no
particular insight here. In fact, Reddit readers are probably better suited to
this debate as there are more students and teachers posting there.

Haven't there been any actual studies on this? The article mentions how on a
international scale there's no correlation between homework load and results.
Have there been any studies on a smaller scale (such as intra-class, using the
same teachers/assignments)?

------
code_duck
My high school in Connecticut declared that you should spend 1 hour doing
homework for each academic class every day, which adds up to 12 hours each day
focused on attending school, or more. I have no idea why this sounds
reasonable to administrators and teachers.

The idea of 'memorization' as learning has always bothered me... The most
reliable long-term way to recall things is to learn and comprehend them.

~~~
mgkimsal
Couple of thoughts:

There's _some_ things that need to be memorized - basic multiplication tables
- I memorized those (9*8, etc). Basic articles/phrases in Spanish. Some basic
world/state capitals, etc. But at some point memorization doesn't get you
anything any more (except passing a test, maybe) - memorizing a few basic
building blocks helps for the larger problems, and eventually the truisms of
the building blocks become apparent (if there are any - capitals doesn't
matter).

On 12 hours per day - some of the teachers I know definitely put in that
amount of time, on average (grading homework, meeting with parents, planning,
etc). They may be thinking "If I'm doing it, so can they", but... The teachers
already KNOW their stuff - they're not LEARNING for the most part - they're
doing the job of a professional. The student, by definition, is not a master
at any of this stuff. A 12 hour effort, day in day out, by students, is simply
going to wear most of them down.

This seems like a simple scheduling thing - teachers could coordinate between
themselves better, individually or by subject - to stagger workloads
effectively. Foreign language may get to pile on big assignments on Mondays,
Sciences on Tuesdays, etc., with an understanding of minimal homework
requirements the rest of the time. But if "read 79 pages and do a one page
summary of 3 topics from it" is considered "minimal", there are bigger
judgement issues going on.

~~~
code_duck
I think the results of multiplication of small integers should be remembered
from frequent use, rather than explicitly committed to memory. Acting as if
these values are a member of a group that must be memorized like state names,
as if they are arbitrary, distances students from understanding that they can
easily determine a multiplication result by calculation if they don't know it
(or 'remember' it).

I think we might be working from a different idea of what memorization means.
I associate it with a truly rote impression of abstract strings with no
attempt at comprehension of their meanings individually (as alluded to in the
article). I'd think something like Spanish phrases require comprehension to be
used.

Definitely one problem was lack of coordination between teachers in the area
of homework load; sometimes teachers would arbitrarily declare that we needed
to be spending twice as much time on their class for a period of time.

I suppose teachers may think the student workload is reasonable because they
have their own. Overall I think that would reflect a lack of understanding
that it's improper to expect another person's child's world to be almost
entirely composed of your governments school plan. Academically, I learned far
more outside of school reading and programming on my own, and in music lessons
outside of school. The teacher is being compensated monetarily for their time
and that is his or her choice.

------
marcuspovey
I find the phrase "Memorisation not rationalisation" deeply sinister.

~~~
Afforess
Yes, it could have been a line right out of 1984. Highly Orwellian.

------
graeme
I teach the SAT. My impression is that children are too busy to learn.

I learned a LOT from reading random things outside of school. Students have no
time for that these days. And when they do need to learn something new, such
as math on the SAT, they have no time to learn it.

The schools also don't seem to be focussed on learning. The emphasis is on
covering 'the curriculum'. So I'm dealing students studying trigonometry who
can't multiply 7 * 6 without a calculator.

Needless to say, they don't actually understand trigonometry either. Memorize,
not rationalize is sadly very true.

~~~
mathattack
Very good point. I really enjoyed being out of school so that I could control
my reading list. The one thing I didn't like about going back for grad school
was giving up control over my reading list for a few years.

------
loup-vaillant
> _Esmee […] got a C on her math homework from the night before because she
> hadn’t made an answer column. Her correct answers were there, at the end of
> each neatly written-out equation, yet they weren’t segregated into a
> separate column on the right side of each page._

I almost snapped my pen in half.

------
aidos
OT but early on there's a quote from the homework:

    
    
        "its [sic] significance"
    

Why is the sic in there? Is that not the correct use of 'its' in this context?

~~~
nja
I spent a minute looking at that too. I think the author inserted the [sic]
because:

    
    
        "quotes [...] with 1–2 sentence analyses of its [sic] significance"
    

If the "its" is referring to the quotes, it should be "their significance".

~~~
aidos
Ah, of course. Thanks both.

------
nicholassmith
With the education system pushing for rote memorisation over comprehension
it's going to grind the enthusiasm to learn out of kids before they even have
chance to start enjoying education. I hated doing homework that was just
memorisation and didn't have a component where you had to either comprehend or
be able to rationalise as it felt like all I was doing was trying to avoid
looking something up in a book. If you're just training memorisation you may
as well play a memory game.

------
segmondy
"When I get home, Esmee tells me she got a C on her math homework from the
night before because she hadn’t made an answer column. Her correct answers
were there, at the end of each neatly written-out equation, yet they weren’t
segregated into a separate column on the right side of each page. I’m amazed
that the pettiness of this doesn’t seem to bother her. School is training her
well for the inanities of adult life."

:-(

------
fcatalan
When I was a kid the situation was clear for me: Homework made me struggle for
hours while the drill sergeant act next day would last for mere seconds. So I
did the bare minimum that would keep me from getting in serious trouble and
accepted punishment for the rest as a good deal.

My own kids are now growing and should show up with homework quite soon. I
dread the day.

~~~
webjunkie
Haha, yeah, that was the way.

“find three important and powerful quotes from the section with 1–2 sentence
analyses of its [sic] significance.”

What to do: hastily read the pages, write down anything that might qualify as
a quote and write "It's important because blah blah". Done.

------
egwor
Welcome to the educated new world; where education matters. One thing to
consider; perhaps the child shouldn't be in that class/level or school?
Perhaps their previous school didn't cover the material so this is all base
stuff for everyone else?

If it takes you 3-5hrs to do something and you want to sleep before midnight,
start earlier. Perhaps when less tired it would be quicker.

I used to have homework that could take me between 30 mins and 2.5 hrs each
day (7 days a week). I started when I came in from school and had a break for
some tv and then finished to have time to do other things. You learn how to be
faster at the homework. When I was 16-18 I most probably spent longer still

I used to have enough time to walk home from school, watch tv, play sport,
play trumpet and do that work. Also, at lunch time there is usually time to do
some work. We used to collaborate on some stuff too.

~~~
voyou
"Welcome to the educated new world; where education matters."

Right. So why is this school wasting children's time and energy with busywork,
rather than teaching them effectively during the allotted time at school?

~~~
smsm42
Because what matters is not effectiveness, what matters is "being educated".
I.e. passing through the process of education and having a paper to prove it.
That's what HR depts are checking.

------
auggierose
"for example, converting 0.00009621 to scientific notation is tricky (it’s
9.621 x 10¯5, which makes no intuitive sense to me)"

Are math skills out there really THAT bad?

------
retrogradeorbit
Some of John Taylor Gatto's writings on the education system shed some light
on all of this.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto)

------
grandalf
The trend toward memorization homework is part of the larger view of education
as social assimilation training and obedience training.

If the homework required "rationalization, not memorization" then the
brightest students would easily coast through in minutes the same material
that would take the dimmer students hours. With memorization, the curve is
flattened significantly and grades are much more closely tied to effort than
to innate ability.

All this is intentional and has the desired outcome -- colleges offer many
classes where the student who is used to drudgery and memorization can simply
thrive by putting in the hours with flashcards, and can then go on to a career
where obedience and compliance with drudgery are highly valued traits.

The problem with this is that it misses the more important point, which is
that abstract reasoning skills can be taught too, they are just often taught
very poorly and so kids who have a small leg up (largely by accident) get a
big unfair advantage and in a non-memorization world reap significant
benefits.

I'd be extremely concerned if my child were being asked to memorize material
that was not strictly necessary for some kind of reasoning exercise.

------
Zigurd
His daughter is in a high-pressure selective school that appears to market
this workload as a feature. It might be the right thing for kids who breeze
through their school material and then get bored for lack of any challenge. It
probably isn't the right thing for everyone.

His daughter seems like the victim of needing to get into some college prep
program where choices are limited, waiting lists are common, and many private
school prices are out of reach. I did not see where she was asked about a
choice of schools.

Middle school seems way too early for a program this intensive. What is the
retention for all this material when the students are high school juniors? The
only purpose for the homework grind appears to be to get students that they
don't want in this school to self-select out of it.

It seems like what the author is wishing for is a good free normal public
school in New York City. Ha! The bottom line is that he can't actually afford
to live where he lives unless he sacrifices his daughter's childhood this way.

~~~
danielweber
I think schools follow this algorithm:

1\. Great students (read: students who get into selective colleges) do a lot
of homework.

2\. Therefore, give everyone lots of homework, and all students will be great
students.

I've seen that pattern replicate itself down to kindergarten.

Not everyone is going to be a biochemist. Stop punishing the kids who won't
be.

------
joelhooks
We homeschool and our kids do 2-4 hours of academics per day, generally. Frees
up a lot of time for things like "being a kid" and "enjoying life". Some days
they don't do any and spend the day building things in minecraft or drawing
pictures.

It's _awesome_ , and I highly recommend it to anybody interested in non-
institutionalized kids.

------
forrestthewoods
I am eternally grateful that I went to dumb kid rural high school with a 50%
drop out rate. I only did homework or studied for a test a couple of times per
semester. I has more than enough time for sports, friends, and video games.
Much, much better than laborious studying no matter how useful or not useful
it may be.

------
gambiting
But it can be done better. My sister attends a private boarding school in the
UK and they only have 2 hours set per day for homework(always between 7pm and
9pm). Teachers coordinate between each other to make sure the work never takes
more than these two hours,but also that it doesn't take any less. So my sister
spends two solid hours each day working on her homework,and it doesn't cut
into her sleep pattern - they need to be in bed by 10.15pm after all.

Obviously a non-boarding student doesn't necessarily have the regime at home
to solidly sit down for 2 hours and work without access to their
phone/ipad/computer/playstation for that period like at a boarding school, but
I believe that if the system was better teachers really could coordinate
between themselves and arrange homework that was manageable.

------
anigbrowl
So much whining. These tasks represent actual problems you might be tasked
with finding out in the real world; not all of them are directly relevant to
students or their utility immediately apparent, but the mothodologies are
solid. Growing up in Ireland and going to high school int he 80s, I was doing
3-4 hours/night of homework from the equivalent of your grade 7, and I still
found time to watch TV and read for pleasure each evening.

I laughed out loud at the author's complaint that math homework involved doing
a lot of calculation without the aid of a calculator. Well yes, that is how
you develop math feel. Using a calculator is great, and appropriate in later
math classes, but training in mechanistic tasks is important too, for the same
reason that athletic exercise involves a good deal of repetition and
_practice_.

It's the same reason musicians play scales every day - it's not because they
don't care about the theoretical underpinnings, it's because performance
depends on practice. Likewise, understanding the mechanics of a tennis ball
hitting a racket won't make you into a good tennis player, and understanding
how to punch something into a calculator won't help you develop your mental
math skills.

 _What I am interested in is what my daughter is doing during those nightly
hours between 8 o’clock and midnight_

Why are you letting her wait until 8pm to start homework? Start at 6, done by
9.

 _I don’t remember how much homework was assigned to me in eighth grade. I do
know that I didn’t do very much of it and that what little I did, I did badly.
My study habits were atrocious. After school I often went to friends’ houses,
where I sometimes smoked marijuana, and then I returned home for dinner; after
lying to my parents about not having homework that night, I might have caught
an hour or two of television._

And look at the results: simple problems like calculating the area and
perimeter of complex shapes just seem too, too hard for your poor brain.
Instead you have the mental equivalent of a beer gut.

~~~
neltnerb
This is ridiculous. You can't learn when sleep-deprived.

And god forbid you have hobbies. I was on the tennis team in high school, and
often didn't get home until 8pm, much less have dinner. If I had 3 hours of
homework after dinner, I'm up until midnight and had to catch the bus to
school waking up at 5:45am.

Yes, that means I am in school from effectively 5:45am until 8pm in the US.
Yes, that is a 14 hour work day. If you asked kids to only be at school 8
hours maximum, including "fitness" and "leadership building" and "enrichment"
exercises like athletics and clubs, 3-5 hours of homework might be reasonable.
8 hours actively in school, 5 hours of homework, 2 hours for dinner and
relaxing, and you still get 9 hours of sleep.

That is not sustainable. The only reason kids can manage it is that they have
way more stamina than I do now. If I was asked now to repeat high school, I
wouldn't be willing to put up with it.

~~~
anigbrowl
I had plenty of hobbies a teenager. Maybe what people need is fewer resume-
stuffing directed extracurricular activities, more free time, and starting
school an hour later. We used to do 7 hours of school (9-4), 3-4 hours of
homework, and had 1-2 evenings a week of structured extracurricular
activities. And, no, you're not in school from the moment you wake up,
although I do think American schools start stupidly early and then keep the
kids in stupidly late.

~~~
neltnerb
If you're on the bus for an hour each way, it hardly counts as "not at school"
either.

But yes, I agree that what used to be unstructured activities are shifting to
structured formal clubs. I don't think I'm willing to just assume this is for
resume-stuffing, but it's a definite trend. So that could be part of the
mismatch in the arithmetic of how many hours are in a day.

I also think it's too cynical to assume that all extracurricular activities
are "resume-stuffing". As it turns out, plenty of extracurricular activities
are vastly more rewarding and often more important in the long run to being a
happy and productive person in whatever your career is than classes. I was in
the choir in high school, which was a major time sink. I still sing in choirs
now, 15 years later. I find this a very valuable life skill. Similarly, I did
science olympiad, which has made me a vastly better engineer and scientist
than any official science course -- I learned all sorts of important lessons
in a practical context. And that's not even mentioning athletics, which taught
me that maintaining fitness is critical for body and mind. Or Boy Scouts,
which taught me a huge amount about leadership, project management, and lots
of generally useful skills. And god forbid you get into a romantic
relationship... I was lucky in being a closeted gay guy, so I didn't have to
worry about that at least. Or having a job, like mine where I was a cook
working ~10-15 hours a week to make money to save for college.

Anyway, there is more to life than school. You don't seem to disagree with
that, so I'm not saying this to argue with you. But there is a lot more
incidental stuff in there that is just as valuable as school.

There are some interesting solutions to this that I think are good. For one, a
trimester system where you take three 2-hour courses each trimester instead of
trying to take 4-6 45 minute classes.

You can get into better depth because you get into a groove. I teach now --
not high school -- and 45 minutes is enough to basically take attendance,
introduce at most one idea at a very basic level, and practice it a half dozen
times. With two hours, you can actually engage at an individual level and get
into far more depth. Plus, you only have three classes giving you homework
each night, so it's likely to actually be less outside work each day.

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alexeisadeski3
Why would he read 79 pages in one night if all he had to do was find three
quotable sentences? Read three pages picked at random from that 79 page
section and move on.

This isn't rocket science.

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wintersFright
I'm surprised he is so open about the weed. Especially since his daughter will
read that. I thought the USA was all gung ho on the war on drugs?

~~~
smsm42
USA is absolutely insane on war on drugs. Same person can openly admit in his
youth he was using marijuana and cocaine and advocate decades-long mandatory
sentences on people who are found in possession of the same now. I tried to
understand what's going on in the heads of those people but I've given up. It
looks like when it comes to certain subjects, people are just switching off
their brains and think with some other organs, I dare not guess which ones.

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modfodder
One subject I don't remember learning; how to learn. Maybe it was just taught
so early that I don't remember, but although I was always a good student that
breezed through school for the most part, I take horrendous notes and feel
really inefficient when it comes to learning.

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grandalf
This article reminds me of being in school (some high school and surprisingly
many college classes). I simply didn't do the memorization homework. I turned
out OK but my GPA was definitely lower than it would have been if I'd spent
all those extra hours memorizing.

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anaphor
I'm in an honours program at university and I get orders of magnitude less
homework. Of course the work requires much more thought and maybe more
reading, but the people designing public school curriculums really need to
learn how people actually learn.

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vickytnz
An aside: I've been reading Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Book Store. Good, breezy,
semi-techy read.

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Grue3
So the guy is too stupid to do his child's homework and somehow sees this as a
bad thing? Like, he wants his daughter to end up as dumb as him? That's what I
get from this article.

