Is it REALLY that bad?!
In scanning the past few weeks' worth of blogs, I see a recurring theme. Actually, I guess the theme has been recurring since the first day a teacher sent students home with an assignment to complete, but recently I've read, seen, and heard more of the grousing and griping about homework than usual. Maybe it's due to the fact that midterm just passed and lots of "projects" were due in various classes. The teacher in me would like to say, "Oh, just quit complaining! Homework is good for you, and we all had to do it, so just shut up and go finish it! If you spent half the time doing the homework that you spend whining about it, you'd already be done!"
But I'm not just a teacher. I'm also a parent. I remember one late night scouring the Internet looking for a web site on organometallic mechanisms of reactions, teary-eyed child at my side with an unfinished worksheet in her hand. I remember wondering why a seventh grader could possibly need to know "how many valence electrons belong to a transition metal complex" and if the teacher really expected kids to be able to find this information on their own.
But I'm not just a parent. I'm also a kid. Maybe I better explain that: While my physical age has been in double digits for 30 years, my maturity level never went much past age 13, so I generally understand (and get along with) teenagers a lot better than I get along with other "adults." (I'll let you in on one great secret of adulthood: You never actually feel "grown up." We adults, we're all just fakin' it! Shhhh!) In other words, my natural inclination is to side with you when I hear you complaining about homework. It would be easy and natural for me to just go along with you and trash talk those vicious ogres whose sole purpose is to make sure you don't have a social life...except that I am one of said ogres. This presents a conundrum for me.
I tell my students on the first day of school that I don't give homework just so they will have something to remember me by when they get home. I've never stood at the classroom door handing out worksheets as the students filed out. Homework is, I say in that first-day speech, something that you get when you don't finish the assignment in class. The more wisely you use class time, the less homework you have. Long-term projects like research papers might require some work at home, but you will have a lot of time to work on them and you will know the requirements well in advance. In my ideal world, all my students would spend an hour a night reading independently, but I'll settle for the 25 minutes of reading time each day at school because, contrary to popular opinion, I do know that you have six other classes and that you'd like to have a little fun once in a while too.
Ever since I read Smiley's blog last week, I've been pondering the homework dilemma. I am in the unique position of seeing this dilemma from various perspectives, so let me tell you what I see.
Research papers are the biggest project my students work on all year. They require not only research but lots of note-taking, organizing, documenting of sources, writing, and revising. I know it is time consuming for students, and this year I set out to make the homework burden a bit lighter by scheduling lots of time in the computer lab for research and writing. I brought all the library books students might need to the lab, so they had every conceivable resource at their fingertips. I gave them a schedule during the first week of the term that clearly showed not only the precise requirements of the assignment, but the day each part of the assignment would be due. In other words, I tried to create an environment in which students could complete almost every step in the process at school, thus minimalizing homework. Many students took advantage of this time and created fantastic projects and papers without having to do much at home, but there were just as many who ended up doing the entire research paper in a desperate rush the night before it was due. Why?
Many students don't use their time wisely. Is it any surprise that Erik Linerider had so much of the project to complete at the last minute when he spent all five days in the lab playing games on the Internet? Is it a mystery that McKenna Talksalot had to rewrite her paper to receive a passing grade when she didn't even bother to log on to her computer in the lab, saying at one point, "I'll just do it at home."? Does it come as a shock that Matt Dragonforce didn't get his paper done at all because his lab time was spent researching not his topic but his favorite band? As a teacher, I have little patience with these folks. I tried as hard as I could to keep most of the project at school, but they actively resisted my efforts. In fact, it seems to me that some students actually prefer to complete school work at home. "I can't concentrate on it at school," they say. Know why? Because they treat school like a social club! If you are going to spend all your days socializing, then don't complain when you have to spend all your nights learning the stuff you ignored during the day...and don't give me that tired "we need a social life!" argument. You've got a great social life right here at school! If a teacher gives you time to complete work at school and you choose not to complete the work, don't blame the teacher for giving too much homework.
"Well, why don't you just quit giving us assignments?"
Do I even need to justify this idiocy with a response? Doesn't everyone, even the dullest and least gifted, recognize that it is part of a teacher's job to have students complete assignments that will help them learn something and to illustrate they have learned it? The only way a teacher can tell if you have learned what the state says you are supposed to have learned is by giving you assignments that require you to use that knowledge. If I don't require my students to do anything but talk and goof around, I will get fired. So quit trying to change the subject and/or distract me with stupid questions!
So, Thompson, does this mean that you believe all homework is good? No.
I'm embarrassed by some of the stuff my students have had to take home because I underestimated how long it would take in class. I have seen some of the "worksheets" that go home with students in some classes, and I admit that I fail to see the educational value in them. I have seen substitute teachers desperately pull together last-minute lessons for a sick teacher, and those "lessons" include homework that is completely inappropriate for the class. But most often these instances are the exception rather than the rule. I realize there are probably a few teachers that simply have unreasonable expectations about homework, but I think most of us try to be fair.
The district has Homework Guidelines for teachers, students, and parents. Check 'em out! (If you genuinely believe that your homework burden is unfair, compare it to the guidelines and see. If it is, challenge your teachers to change their ways! If it's not, well....) According to those guidelines, ninth graders should expect 90-120 minutes of homework per night. Is that reasonable? When I was in the ninth grade, I don't think I ever did more than 20 minutes of homework a night (I was not a 4.0 student), and I know students at our school that flat-out never do anything at home (and not all of them are failing). Part of the reason Honors students get so bunged up and bogged down by homework is because they care enough to do it all. They try not just to fill in every answer but to get the answers correct. In other words, Honors students do what teachers wish all students would do. Sadly, they often get inadvertently punished for being good soldiers. If three teachers send home 45 minutes of homework and you have to practice your oboe for 30 minutes in preparation for the Christmas concert and that project for social studies is due next Tuesday and you know that you have a basketball tournament this weekend so you won't be able to work on it then, you might find yourself spending four or five hours in one night doing nothing but homework. That sucks, no question. But does that happen every night? If so, I would suggest that you aren't using your class time wisely and/or that you are not planning ahead on those term projects. I think most of you, because you care so much, often feel the burden of homework more than other, "regular" students, and for that reason you may, in fact, spend more time on homework and/or believe you have more homework than you actually have.
From up here on my teacher's toadstool, another homework-related issue that sometimes needles me is how much homework students aren't actually doing for themselves. Kevin Killswitch spent five days in the computer lab working on a PowerPoint show that had five frames; one of them was a title slide which contained three words (two of which were his name), three frames were still blank, and the last frame was a works cited slide that I did for him in hopes that it would spark him to complete the assignment. Five days worth of work? Not even close! Yet, miraculously, on the day the presentation was due, I received an e-mail from his mom: "Kevin worked on this over the weekend." Attached to the e-mail was the most gloriously beautiful PowerPoint show I have ever seen: moving graphics, fantastic design elements, accurate information concisely stated -- everything a PowerPoint should be! When it was Kevin's turn to present "his" work to the class, it was not only painfully apparent that he knew nothing about his topic, but also that he had never even seen this slide show before. His mom got an A. This is an extreme (but totally true!) example of how sometimes concerned or frustrated parents will "help" students a little more than they should on school assignments. It can be a fine line sometimes: Is it okay to have your dad read your research paper before you turn it in and tell you if you misplaced any commas? Probably. Is it okay to let him sit at the computer and "work on" your paper? Probably not. It is, after all, supposed to be your work, and your dad graduated from ninth grade a long time ago.
The problem of parents doing their kids' homework for them is partly a product of a culture that, over time, has put the quest for grades above the importance of genuine learning. It's not just the parents, of course. The students themselves are often more concerned with getting an A than with mastering the concepts. Many students just want a formula to follow that guarantees the A. It doesn't matter if they learn anything or not. I once heard a student voice this sentiment: "It doesn't matter if I get full credit for the research paper because I can get enough extra credit to keep my A in the class." I remember wondering: "But are you a better writer now? That was the purpose of the assignment." Too many students are worried more about the points possible on the assignment than about the spirit in which it was given.
This is also the reason so many students engage in what, in my day, would have been considered blatant cheating: copying each other's homework. I guess I understand the reason they would do this (grades), but the part that bothers me more is the unashamed way they go about it. Jamie Chicklets sat in the front row of my class, two of the same worksheets on her desk. One of the worksheets was completely filled in, all the answers meticulously in place. The other, Jamie's, was mostly blank...but she was copying the answers across as fast as she could. Did she spend even one minute actually learning the information she was filling into those blanks? Nope. Her buddy did that part. Was the educational purpose of that assignment met for Jamie Chicklets? Nope. But she still wanted credit for it. And there I, the teacher, stood -- right in front of her desk, looking down at her frantically scribbling hand, watching her cheat. She looked up long enough to acknowledge my presence, nodded genially, and then went back to her copying. It didn't even occur to her that what she was doing might be somehow dishonest.
"You know," I interrupted her, "that's cheating."
"No it isn't," Jamie replied. "She let me borrow her answers, so it's okay."
How did we come to this? How is it that many students don't seem to know what's right and wrong? Where is their shame?
Here is what I heard at a recent parent-teacher conference, student-to-parent as they waited in line at a teacher's table: "If they didn't want us to cheat, they wouldn't give us so much homework." That bothered me almost as much as the fact that the parent nodded in agreement, as though cheating is obviously acceptable as long as it is in pursuit of something as important as a grade.
It seems I have strayed from my original theme of homework, but this is really all part of a greater thesis about the real problem in education today: Schooling and Learning are not the same thing. You can go to school for 12 years without learning what the school system wants you to know. And no single group or system is to blame. It's not public education because public education is only as good as the public that feeds it. It's not just the students because most of you are still doing honest work and learning a lot. It's not just the parents because most of them really do want you to get smart and be successful on your own terms. It not just the teachers because most of us are on your side, even though it sometimes feels like we're the enemy. There are many factors that contribute to the homework dilemma: grades, cheating, unreasonable expectations, busy lives, culturally-induced laziness, lack of respect for learning, and so on. I don't have the solutions, but ultimately the question we need to ask about all such matters is this: Does it serve the purpose it is supposed to serve, and is that purpose a worthwhile one?
Got answers? In this case it won't be cheating if you share them.
But I'm not just a teacher. I'm also a parent. I remember one late night scouring the Internet looking for a web site on organometallic mechanisms of reactions, teary-eyed child at my side with an unfinished worksheet in her hand. I remember wondering why a seventh grader could possibly need to know "how many valence electrons belong to a transition metal complex" and if the teacher really expected kids to be able to find this information on their own.
But I'm not just a parent. I'm also a kid. Maybe I better explain that: While my physical age has been in double digits for 30 years, my maturity level never went much past age 13, so I generally understand (and get along with) teenagers a lot better than I get along with other "adults." (I'll let you in on one great secret of adulthood: You never actually feel "grown up." We adults, we're all just fakin' it! Shhhh!) In other words, my natural inclination is to side with you when I hear you complaining about homework. It would be easy and natural for me to just go along with you and trash talk those vicious ogres whose sole purpose is to make sure you don't have a social life...except that I am one of said ogres. This presents a conundrum for me.
I tell my students on the first day of school that I don't give homework just so they will have something to remember me by when they get home. I've never stood at the classroom door handing out worksheets as the students filed out. Homework is, I say in that first-day speech, something that you get when you don't finish the assignment in class. The more wisely you use class time, the less homework you have. Long-term projects like research papers might require some work at home, but you will have a lot of time to work on them and you will know the requirements well in advance. In my ideal world, all my students would spend an hour a night reading independently, but I'll settle for the 25 minutes of reading time each day at school because, contrary to popular opinion, I do know that you have six other classes and that you'd like to have a little fun once in a while too.
Ever since I read Smiley's blog last week, I've been pondering the homework dilemma. I am in the unique position of seeing this dilemma from various perspectives, so let me tell you what I see.
Research papers are the biggest project my students work on all year. They require not only research but lots of note-taking, organizing, documenting of sources, writing, and revising. I know it is time consuming for students, and this year I set out to make the homework burden a bit lighter by scheduling lots of time in the computer lab for research and writing. I brought all the library books students might need to the lab, so they had every conceivable resource at their fingertips. I gave them a schedule during the first week of the term that clearly showed not only the precise requirements of the assignment, but the day each part of the assignment would be due. In other words, I tried to create an environment in which students could complete almost every step in the process at school, thus minimalizing homework. Many students took advantage of this time and created fantastic projects and papers without having to do much at home, but there were just as many who ended up doing the entire research paper in a desperate rush the night before it was due. Why?
Many students don't use their time wisely. Is it any surprise that Erik Linerider had so much of the project to complete at the last minute when he spent all five days in the lab playing games on the Internet? Is it a mystery that McKenna Talksalot had to rewrite her paper to receive a passing grade when she didn't even bother to log on to her computer in the lab, saying at one point, "I'll just do it at home."? Does it come as a shock that Matt Dragonforce didn't get his paper done at all because his lab time was spent researching not his topic but his favorite band? As a teacher, I have little patience with these folks. I tried as hard as I could to keep most of the project at school, but they actively resisted my efforts. In fact, it seems to me that some students actually prefer to complete school work at home. "I can't concentrate on it at school," they say. Know why? Because they treat school like a social club! If you are going to spend all your days socializing, then don't complain when you have to spend all your nights learning the stuff you ignored during the day...and don't give me that tired "we need a social life!" argument. You've got a great social life right here at school! If a teacher gives you time to complete work at school and you choose not to complete the work, don't blame the teacher for giving too much homework.
"Well, why don't you just quit giving us assignments?"
Do I even need to justify this idiocy with a response? Doesn't everyone, even the dullest and least gifted, recognize that it is part of a teacher's job to have students complete assignments that will help them learn something and to illustrate they have learned it? The only way a teacher can tell if you have learned what the state says you are supposed to have learned is by giving you assignments that require you to use that knowledge. If I don't require my students to do anything but talk and goof around, I will get fired. So quit trying to change the subject and/or distract me with stupid questions!
So, Thompson, does this mean that you believe all homework is good? No.
I'm embarrassed by some of the stuff my students have had to take home because I underestimated how long it would take in class. I have seen some of the "worksheets" that go home with students in some classes, and I admit that I fail to see the educational value in them. I have seen substitute teachers desperately pull together last-minute lessons for a sick teacher, and those "lessons" include homework that is completely inappropriate for the class. But most often these instances are the exception rather than the rule. I realize there are probably a few teachers that simply have unreasonable expectations about homework, but I think most of us try to be fair.
The district has Homework Guidelines for teachers, students, and parents. Check 'em out! (If you genuinely believe that your homework burden is unfair, compare it to the guidelines and see. If it is, challenge your teachers to change their ways! If it's not, well....) According to those guidelines, ninth graders should expect 90-120 minutes of homework per night. Is that reasonable? When I was in the ninth grade, I don't think I ever did more than 20 minutes of homework a night (I was not a 4.0 student), and I know students at our school that flat-out never do anything at home (and not all of them are failing). Part of the reason Honors students get so bunged up and bogged down by homework is because they care enough to do it all. They try not just to fill in every answer but to get the answers correct. In other words, Honors students do what teachers wish all students would do. Sadly, they often get inadvertently punished for being good soldiers. If three teachers send home 45 minutes of homework and you have to practice your oboe for 30 minutes in preparation for the Christmas concert and that project for social studies is due next Tuesday and you know that you have a basketball tournament this weekend so you won't be able to work on it then, you might find yourself spending four or five hours in one night doing nothing but homework. That sucks, no question. But does that happen every night? If so, I would suggest that you aren't using your class time wisely and/or that you are not planning ahead on those term projects. I think most of you, because you care so much, often feel the burden of homework more than other, "regular" students, and for that reason you may, in fact, spend more time on homework and/or believe you have more homework than you actually have.
From up here on my teacher's toadstool, another homework-related issue that sometimes needles me is how much homework students aren't actually doing for themselves. Kevin Killswitch spent five days in the computer lab working on a PowerPoint show that had five frames; one of them was a title slide which contained three words (two of which were his name), three frames were still blank, and the last frame was a works cited slide that I did for him in hopes that it would spark him to complete the assignment. Five days worth of work? Not even close! Yet, miraculously, on the day the presentation was due, I received an e-mail from his mom: "Kevin worked on this over the weekend." Attached to the e-mail was the most gloriously beautiful PowerPoint show I have ever seen: moving graphics, fantastic design elements, accurate information concisely stated -- everything a PowerPoint should be! When it was Kevin's turn to present "his" work to the class, it was not only painfully apparent that he knew nothing about his topic, but also that he had never even seen this slide show before. His mom got an A. This is an extreme (but totally true!) example of how sometimes concerned or frustrated parents will "help" students a little more than they should on school assignments. It can be a fine line sometimes: Is it okay to have your dad read your research paper before you turn it in and tell you if you misplaced any commas? Probably. Is it okay to let him sit at the computer and "work on" your paper? Probably not. It is, after all, supposed to be your work, and your dad graduated from ninth grade a long time ago.
The problem of parents doing their kids' homework for them is partly a product of a culture that, over time, has put the quest for grades above the importance of genuine learning. It's not just the parents, of course. The students themselves are often more concerned with getting an A than with mastering the concepts. Many students just want a formula to follow that guarantees the A. It doesn't matter if they learn anything or not. I once heard a student voice this sentiment: "It doesn't matter if I get full credit for the research paper because I can get enough extra credit to keep my A in the class." I remember wondering: "But are you a better writer now? That was the purpose of the assignment." Too many students are worried more about the points possible on the assignment than about the spirit in which it was given.
This is also the reason so many students engage in what, in my day, would have been considered blatant cheating: copying each other's homework. I guess I understand the reason they would do this (grades), but the part that bothers me more is the unashamed way they go about it. Jamie Chicklets sat in the front row of my class, two of the same worksheets on her desk. One of the worksheets was completely filled in, all the answers meticulously in place. The other, Jamie's, was mostly blank...but she was copying the answers across as fast as she could. Did she spend even one minute actually learning the information she was filling into those blanks? Nope. Her buddy did that part. Was the educational purpose of that assignment met for Jamie Chicklets? Nope. But she still wanted credit for it. And there I, the teacher, stood -- right in front of her desk, looking down at her frantically scribbling hand, watching her cheat. She looked up long enough to acknowledge my presence, nodded genially, and then went back to her copying. It didn't even occur to her that what she was doing might be somehow dishonest.
"You know," I interrupted her, "that's cheating."
"No it isn't," Jamie replied. "She let me borrow her answers, so it's okay."
How did we come to this? How is it that many students don't seem to know what's right and wrong? Where is their shame?
Here is what I heard at a recent parent-teacher conference, student-to-parent as they waited in line at a teacher's table: "If they didn't want us to cheat, they wouldn't give us so much homework." That bothered me almost as much as the fact that the parent nodded in agreement, as though cheating is obviously acceptable as long as it is in pursuit of something as important as a grade.
It seems I have strayed from my original theme of homework, but this is really all part of a greater thesis about the real problem in education today: Schooling and Learning are not the same thing. You can go to school for 12 years without learning what the school system wants you to know. And no single group or system is to blame. It's not public education because public education is only as good as the public that feeds it. It's not just the students because most of you are still doing honest work and learning a lot. It's not just the parents because most of them really do want you to get smart and be successful on your own terms. It not just the teachers because most of us are on your side, even though it sometimes feels like we're the enemy. There are many factors that contribute to the homework dilemma: grades, cheating, unreasonable expectations, busy lives, culturally-induced laziness, lack of respect for learning, and so on. I don't have the solutions, but ultimately the question we need to ask about all such matters is this: Does it serve the purpose it is supposed to serve, and is that purpose a worthwhile one?
Got answers? In this case it won't be cheating if you share them.
posted by MRT at 12:08 PM
9 comments
