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.
Oh gosh, I would have been absolutely ropeable if the principal had accused me of "cyber-bullying" in that manner. That is entirely, utterly, disgustingly bullshit.
And it doesn't surprise me. Surely it's the bias that is put forward by news media, but the stories that I hear of the American education system scares the shit out of me -- and I went to school in Queensland (which is terrible in and of itself)!
Zero-tolerance, "5 hours of homework a night isn't doing any harm"... what the hell. Who comes up with this shit :/
I had the benefit of attending the British, German, and American school systems.
Schooling in America has little to do with education, and much to do with indoctrination.
Pretty much the only thing I learned was the pledge of allegiance - over which I repeatedly got suspended, as I refused to recite it along with the rest of the class, every morning.
Everything else they "taught" was years behind what I'd been learning elsewhere, and none of it was teaching - it was all just OBEY. I used to kick like a mule whenever they tried to teach us something factually incorrect by rote - and got in trouble for it.
You cannot be suspended for not saying the Pledge. You cannot be compelled to say the Pledge. Your rights were violated. The Supreme Court of the United State has ruled that it is well within your right to not say it. See West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette
Writing for the majority, Justice Jackson stated: "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."
"Words uttered under coercion are proof of loyalty to nothing but self-interest," wrote Black and Douglas in a concurring opinion. "Love of country must spring from willing hearts and free minds, inspired by a fair administration of wise laws enacted by the people's elected representatives within the bounds of express constitutional prohibitions."
In high school I repeatedly got in trouble for not participating in the pledge. I acquired a copy of this case. My government teacher told me I was reading it wrong, and actually the verdict was the pledge is required. It mostly ended one day in the principal's office when I politely threatened to contact the aclu.
Not really. Pure self interest can explain this. As far as I know they were (and still are) underdogs. Free speech is one of the things that favours underdogs, and is not easily openly attacked.
The thing a lot of people don't understand about free speech is the kind of speech that needs to be protected is the unpopular kind; the kind that very few people agree with. Popular speech needs no defending.
I don't understand a lot of Americans who run around talking about "America the free" and then try to pass laws to limit the expression of anyone who doesn't live exactly like they do. Freedom means some people aren't going to agree with you, and you're going to have to accept it, and allow them to express themselves too.
This is right, but there are many religious minorities who engage in unpopular speech. I was raised as a Quaker for example. I just think it is interesting that Jehovah's Witnesses have been a group which has laid so much of the groundwork of this sort of thing.
It also makes me wonder how much cross-pollenation there has been between Anabaptist movements, Quakers, Jehovah's Witnesses and other similarly non-mainstream groups. That however is a question for another time.
Worth noting that there isn't a "British" education system - Scotland has it's own school courses, exams and university level course structure (e.g. it is possible to go to university after 5 years in high school so first degree courses are 4 years rather than 3 as in England).
The Pledge of Allegiance is recited every morning at almost every school in the United States. It is taught to children much too young to understand what it means. Here are the current words:
"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
It is said facing the flag, with your right hand over your heart. Originally it was said while saluting the flag, however, it was replaced with the hand over heart gesture during WWII, as it was similar to the Nazi salute.
Congressional sessions also open with the recital of the Pledge of Allegiance.
By the way, the words "under God" where only added on June 14, 1954.
It wasn't similar to the nazi salute - it was the same. Bellamy salute. The NSDAP thought it was such a great bit of nationalistic fervor they adopted it.
A Supreme Court decision from during World War II[1] requires schools to allow pupils to opt out of the pledge of allegiance. Most states in the United States still make the pledge a default school activity every day of the school year except for pupils who individually opt out.
I found this to be really regional. I did when I was a kid, then I questioned our teacher why she did not after the first week or so. She felt the whole standing, gazing and hand over the heart was a bit too military for an elementary school.
I've had a few "super patriotic" teachers threaten me with detention for not towing the line. But these tended to be in urban and ex-urban, lower socioeconomic schools. The type of places that wanted to make you into factory workers rather than college students.
Where I grew up the Pledge was absolutely a mandatory part of every school day, and was said before morning announcements through the loudspeaker. Every room had a flag in it, so students in that room could Pledge to it. I grew up in an urban area, so my experiences are skewed urban. I couldn't imagine an individual teacher having a choice in the matter.
Of course, as I posted in the parent, the Supreme Court allows for individual students to stay seated and not salute the flag if they choose.
The role of public school in the United States, especially when it first started, explicitly was to churn out factory workers[1]. The fact that non-industrial knowledge is also taught is a side effect of later developments.
Some public schools were started right after the American Revolution, before anything was very industrialized. Horace Mann and Booker T. Washington led a massive expansion that followed through the mid-1800's. I'm quite sure Mann and Washington were not looking to produce unthinking factory workers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Mann#Education_reform
I am pretty sure schools were started shortly after the early settlements were made in the US, i.e., 1650 or so. I don't think factories as we know them existed then.
Industrial schooling only started in the industrial era. That's more of what I meant even though I certainly botched what I meant to say. I'll blame it on the lack of coffee!
Especially funny is criterion that makes it cyberbullying:
> the teacher felt threatened
Am I supposed not to sneeze if the person is afraid of loud noises? Am I supposed to say he's doing great job (if he's not) just because he feels insecure there and feels threatened by any critique?
They only reason they were able to pull this of with straight face is because "cyber" becomes to mean "sinister"
Totally agree, especially with your second point. Both my parents are career educators (teachers, counselors and now professors). They personally tell me about how "helicopter parenting" has increased in the time since they've gotten their degrees up to now.
Parents are getting more and more involved (read: obsessive) about their childrens' education, sometimes to the detriment of the school process. Very often they'll blame teachers when their kids don't do well in class (not necessarily incorrect). My mother works in the inner city - parents there tend to be ambivalent about their childrens' progress unless they are relatively affluent, from what I've seen.
On the other hand, my father works in a suburban private school, and the parents there push back much more often, especially when they aren't right.
I can't say whether or not it's good or bad, but the climate of education in America has shifted from one of parents surrendering their kids and trusting the teachers to one of parents questioning the teachers when kids don't do well. Very curious.
As a teacher, I far prefer to have parents who are involved in their kids' education, than the parents who are not involved.
There's a correlation between affluence and parent involvement, yes, but there's a stronger correlation between parent involvement and pupil engagement/learning.
Edited to add: Helicopter parenting is often a symptom of poor communication between the school and the parent - better and happier personal communication tends to resolve tension.
> Very often they'll blame teachers when their kids don't do well in class
> (not necessarily incorrect)
That's not a new phenomenon, imo, but it's still a pertinent one.
Parents being involved in their kids schooling isn't inherently bad, but it can be taken too far. Just like the kids have limited time to be able to handle 5 hours of homework a night (!), teachers have limited time to handle every parent.
That said, the fact it was done a lot through email is kinda neat, and would possibly make parent-teacher interactions scale better?
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.
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.
"We know that one parent was alarmed enough by the conversation to (apparently) forward it to the school administration.'
There is no evidence that the parent who forwarded the e-mail to the teacher (not the school administration; apparently the teacher did that) was "alarmed" by it. They merely disagreed with it. Here's the quote from the article:
"Back in California, when I raised the issue of too much homework on that e‑mail chain, about half the parents were pleased that someone had brought this up, and many had already spoken to the math teacher about it. Others were eager to approach school officials. But at least one parent didn’t agree, and forwarded the whole exchange to the teacher in question."
Times have changed. Every kid today is special. :-)
My observation is in a hyper-competitive city like NY, the parents do bad together against the teachers of administration if they feel slighted. There's a lot of jostling for position amongst parents, who each want someone else to air their concerns, because they don't want to seem like the problem parent.
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.
Also, you can move at your own pace. I'm sure nobody would work at a company where some terrible nephew who didn't know anything about computing was hired, and where everyone is assigned a random bug report to fix each day, but nobody could leave until the nephew pushed to upstream. So you might finish your daily bug in an hour, but now have to sit around waiting (without Internet access or the ability to leave your cubicle or converse with anyone) until hes done.
I was also homeschooled: I didn't do homework either. I did have to finish each day's work that day. Over time I learned to be reasonably timely. Most days I started school at 8ish and ended 2-3ish, depending on the year.
I did get graded; my mom was meticulous about record-keeping. In terms of college applications; I put down my grade for my high school equivalency tests and that was that.
College was a relatively straightforward transfer of experience as well; I just had to walk about more.
(For the benefit of readers outside the US and outside the homeschooling mileu) Homeschooling is a very diverse set of educational approaches ranging from traditional schooling (8-3 + defined curricula + grading) all the way out to "unschooling" and Montessori-ish approaches. Popular approaches include video classes, where a classroom is taped and the tapes + books are sold to the parents. I had a traditional school experience, more or less. My mother was a teacher (both for children and in college) at times in her life, and this carried over into her homeschooling. This meant 1:1 teaching for many years for myself and my sibling.
For this modality of teaching, with a disciplined parent willing to adhere to a schedule, I suspect that the educational outcomes are very good.
Like McPhilip, I didn't have 8-12 hours of school per day (unless I dawdled), and thus had hours of time every day to pursue my own interests, hold down a part time job, etc. This is, in my biased and minimal data point, a reasonable thing.
> 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.
This was exactly my experience as well, as another former homeschooler. I remember being kind of disappointed when I got to college and thinking, "wait, is this all there is to it?" I expected a radical change and got more of the same. It was actually kind of demotivating for a while.
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.
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.
I was also homeschooled for the most part (k-4, 6-10, then college) and consider myself an excellent speller. For my fifth grade year, I went to a private school where I competed in a spelling bee and won at the school level, then at the state level against other private schools for my grade level. I have never found spelling to be deficient among the homeschoolers I know - quite the opposite in fact.
We homeschool. My son spells words fairly well and my daughter spells like a cat.
We've worked with both of them on spelling, in about the same way.
I wouldn't really call this a cause, but my daughter doesn't really believe spelling words correctly is anything she needs to get fussed over. She thinks it's funny to spell words wrong. Me too, sometimes--though I still hope she grows out of it eventually.
It ends up as a bad thing when it eventually translates to bad public policy. Like banning stem cells research with the justification that a large portion of the public has been schooled to believe in fairy tales.
So, unlike what the OP suggested, I do not consider this a good approach to home schooling at all. Unless children are given both sides of the story - the value of bible study vs. the criticisms - and then choose to study it, then you are effectively force-feeding religion to someone in their formative years. Depending on how "traditionalist" your views are, this could have profound effect on your child's educational achievements in sciences, should you end up enrolling him in a secular educational institution - like a State university.
> Unless children are given both sides of the story - the value of bible study vs. the criticisms - and then choose to study it, then you are effectively force-feeding religion to someone in their formative years.
You assume that homeschooled kids are not given opportunity to learn both sides. And when have you found this to be the case in a public school?
Regarding "force-feeding": It's ridiculous to think that a parent's beliefs and ideas about the world/religion/culture/science/whatever would not have an impact on a child's beliefs.
I attempted to recount my homeschooling experience without advocating it or bible study. Indoctrination at a vulnerable age is a bad thing, for the record. Still, competent minds will learn to question such things over time.
> Still, competent minds will learn to question such things over time.
There's no question that eventually some will.
Unfortunately, that's certainly not true for most. Otherwise all politicians wouldn't be so persistent about pandering to religious groups, we wouldn't end up with representatives that believe the earth is 6000 years old, we wouldn't come up with ridiculous rules about contraception and abortion, we wouldn't be banning scientific research that can alleviate deadly disease and improve the quality of human life.
So, to sum up, good that you've learned to question things with time, but please don't assume that is a universal occurrence.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
> Instead of allowing his daughter to watch episodes of Portlandia on her computer all afternoon
That's a bit unfair -- that was Friday afternoon only.
I don't have any kids in school yet, and I'm not in the US anymore anyway; but I do remember from my HS experience it would have been unkind to force me to complete all homework before any entertainment. School ended at 2:15 (because it started at 7am... ugh), but that's when after school activities started -- and who could have a decent college app without extracurriculars? I worked on the literary magazine, ran track/cross-country, was in a few plays/musicals, and got home either at 4:30 (early bus) or a bit before 6pm (late bus), usually the latter. In theory I could sometimes get some work done during the school day, but when would I hang out with friends, then?
I agree about limits on homework time, and entertainment time; but I think I'd be inclined to make sure they had both downtime and homework time, and if the homework couldn't be completed, so be it.
Doesn't he open the story by saying his daughter starts homework at 8:00PM and routinely gets inadequate sleep?
The "so be it" rule is what we have in my house, but because we require homework to get done before the kids can use the computer, it always gets done before I even get home from work.
* Kids should not be penalized for knowing which is the capital of what, nor which part of Americas grows the most bananas. It is useless information unless the kid loves that kind of stuff.
* Focus should not be on memorizing anything, unless they are a building block of something which they will understand later, and better, with the memorization. May be the Spanish language verb forms are one of those, I'm not sure. From my experience I know a lot of knowledge do fall in this category, e.g. trigonometric manipulations, algebra of integration/differentiation, etc.
* Kids of that age, 13, have a fairly developed brain to decide which subjects they like, and which they are not interested in. They should be allowed to choose not to study Earth Sciences in favor of Physics, if they want to. Or to study Linguistics in favor of Maths (I assume they already know a basic level of mathematics to get by), if they want to.
I wonder how these kids gonna grow up, will the relentless homework on often useless subjects, create the discipline in them that is their most probable intention? Will this discipline help them to do better in life, as opposed to the Captain Kirk types?
There's a legit trade-off. 100% memorization is bad. 100% learn to learn with 0% memorization is bad too. Research indicates that people learn more when they have context, which unfortunately comes from memorization. (I hated memorization, I'm more of a derive the facts person)
> 100% learn to learn with 0% memorization is bad too.
100% learn to learn with 0% memorization isn't bad, its just an incoherent concept (to be bad it would have to be a real thing.) Memorization is an essential component (though not the only one) of learning to learn.
I have to disagree. At that age the things you memorize get seared into your mind permanently. I can still effortlessly rattle off a few Shakespeare soliloquies a teacher had us memorize, for example.
I think having 13 year olds memorize things is a great idea, but the things should be important and useful. I wish we had extensively drilled on mental arithmetic.
With such a method what will be permanently seared into their young minds, is the idea that it is good and proper to guess the answer the boss is expecting, instead of actually searching for the truth. Those are different goals, which often don't overlap.
My point is there's a very valuable window at that age to permanently learn things. The window should be used to, for example, learn a ton of vocabulary in a foreign language. Or learn a bunch of arithmetic tables by heart, so you can do mental arithmetic without even thinking hard. To waste the window is silly. Learning such things as I mentioned isn't "parroting."
I agree, but there needs to be some good selection. Memorizing multiplication tables will serve you for the rest of your life. (Especially since it doesn't even take all that much, there's a lot of symmetry and patterns in there.) Memorizing huge swathes of a foreign language is the only way to learn it. Memorizing state capitals is debatable. Memorizing who exports the most bananas is USELESS. In 30 years, it may not even be true anymore. Learning the basics of geology may be useful; learning intensive, college-geology-major details about mineral crystallization is a waste of precious time.
What burns me is that there is so much good stuff in the world to learn, more than you could ever possibly learn, and they waste our time so frivolously. They sit your child down in front of the world's finest multi-course banquet ever conceived, then thoughtlessly stuff them full of dry crackers, because that's what the standards say we have to do. Augh. Such a waste.
I agree with you. Older minds analyze better than younger minds. They have more knowledge to bring to bear on a topic. Younger minds memorize better than older minds--repeated things make more of a lasting imprint.
Both young and old need to do both, but the best results come from using this time-limited memorization advantage strategically, not haphazardly.
Unfortunately, that's not what we do (in the US). Memorization is described by progressive educrats as "drill and kill". Instead of carefully analyzing what should be memorized to provide the most strategic leverage, they deprecate it almost entirely. Why put a lot of effort, they ask, into memorizing anything in the 21st Century? Multiplication tables? Everyone will have a calculator, they answer. Geography? Google! No, they insist, understanding is what matters: concepts, not facts, as if people reason better with facts stored at Google than with facts in their own heads.
Then they rush students through too much material too quickly for serious analysis. Our minds have multiple modes of operation, and when we don't have time to figure things out, Plan B is to stop analyzing and just try to remember--use memory and metaknowledge about tests to pass. The writer's daughter was explicitly aware of that mode switch.
So we end up with a "progressive" education industry denigrating memorization as a knuckle-dragging, traditional practice with the result that, instead of eliminating memorization itself, they just eliminate the "strategic" part.
I agree. I am thankful for my dull, rote learning of multiplication tables.
I do maintain my reservation above however. Currently, schools are doing way too much rote learning, and do not teach the fundamentals of good thinking.
The things they need to memorize for life are the things that serve you for life. Arithmetic is a fantastic one - you should be able to do all forms of simple arithmetic in your head, and everything to do with fractions and simple algebra on paper, and you should be able to do that stuff so naturally and instinctively that it's like riding a bike or speaking English. Because that's an ability (not just knowledge but something you can do) that will serve you for life.
Literature is a part of life and it forms how we see the world. Those pieces of poetry I have committed to memory, as diverse as "Scaffolding" by Seamus Heeney and several poems by folks like Lord Byron or William Butler Yates, inform the way I look at life.
Living is an art, not a science, and making art a part of us, for example by memorizing poetry, is an important part of being good at that art.
It's very hard to enjoy something you are forced to memorized. The things I remember in the long term I deemed important enough to keep with me. I would even say things that were drilled in me I rebelled against.
There are very different learning types. I for one am very bad at memorizing facts and forget them quite fast after not using them any more, no matter at which age I learned them first. Concerning mental arithmetic, I was quite good in 5th and 6th grade, but now I am painstakingly slow even with simple multiplications like 7•8 ("Seven times eight was something like fifty-six, right? Let's check, so seven times seven was forty-nine, forty-nine plus seven… yeah, fifty six"). I just don't typically have to solve such problems at this time in my life (the closest I've come to needing arithmetic in the last few months was when I was studying Galois theory). But at least I am confident, that I can train myself, should the need arise.
The most frustrating experience with memorizations in school were poems for me, because it always took so much effort and even while I was slowly mastering it I knew it was all for naught, because in a few weeks everything would be gone again, even with those that I actually liked.
Not everyone can memorize as well. Anything I've ever had to memorize in school I can't remember now and I was an honors student. I'm jealous of my husband who can rattle off memorizations of Shakespeare or such. There is also a difference between being able to show off that you can be an actor and memorize Shakespeare and being able to take a second and do the math mentally. Memorization does not teach what something means. When I have to memorize, I spend more time trying to find those mental tricks to remember what to memorize that what I'm memorizing means. You can have a 13 year old memorize a soliloquy, but ask them what it means.
* 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.
The parent doesn't say, but its entirely possible that his daughter has non-academic hobbies. Perhaps she competes in a sport, dances or feeds the homeless. In-fact, wouldn't it be more negligent to deny her the opportunity to take part in those non-academic activities?
If her hobbies are conflicting with her homework, she can either (a) accept poorer grades or (b) set aside some hobbies. What he's doing --- demanding perfect grades with a schedule that doesn't have her starting homework until 8:00PM --- is physically harming his kid.
The author's child is still a kid. I think she's in year 8? Here's my feedback: a. Let her be a kid. b. let her get enough sleep (it's hard to learn without enough sleep). c. Stop taking cannabis. It can lead to mental illness. d. If you are concerned about too much homework, do something about it. For real.
Honestly, whenever I felt like I had too much homework, I just didn't do it. You can always discuss these things with the teachers. Usually they're not complete dicks that want to ruin your life.
Let your kid grow a spine. (continuous) Sleep loss as a kid is very bad.
When I didn't want to keep doing homework in High School, they dropped me from "honors" math to regular math and gave me poor grades. They continued to give me bad grades occasionally (since I didn't do the homework, occasionally) but it seemed like everyone met a decent compromise and the teacher didn't have any particular ire towards me.
The weird thing about the cannabis mention in this article is how irrelevant it was to his story. He mentions smoking up so he can explain how hard it is to do algebra while high. Uh, and? Is your daughter doing her algebra homework stoned?
I got the impression that he mentioned it to signal that he's a "cool parent". But that hurts his point; it makes the rest of the argument seem like it might be the product of aloofness rather than productive, tactical concern.
The way I read it, the marijuana references tie back to his youth and are meant to contrast his youth to his daughter's. I actually found them pretty powerful. The feeling I came away with was: is this (ultimately low-value) homework causing her to miss out on opportunities to be a teenager and do teenager things, like smoking weed behind her parents' backs, making out with other teenagers, and making other irresponsible-but-ultimately-valuable decisions in her personal life? In a way it made me sad for her.
This homework issue is peculiar in New York City. One issue is that parents do so much prepping to get into the elite gifted and talented programs, that kids are there who don't belong. What is challenging to a gifted kid (the programs are competitive) is overwhelming to someone not quite as advanced.
It's worth noting that the author of the original article is an acclaimed multicultural writer, and not just a US-centric hack. Of course if he wants to keep his daughter off of pot she's in middle school, he probably shouldn't have outed himself.
> 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.
My younger brother who is now in his mid-twenties had to memorize state capitals, in elementary school. I had to memorize a map of Europe in 6th grade. It's somewhat meaningless.
The trick is that the Japanese students have student-led after-school homework groups to get this stuff squared away. Look at it this way - if a kid has 3 hours of homework per night, and they get off at 3PM, and they did work in their homework club until 5, guess what? At the time you saw them, they'd only have 1 hour of homework per night. That would be manageable.
I never understood how the knowledge of the capitals of states or countries is useful in any way. It's meaningless. It can be easily looked up, if you need that information. I can't even imagine a practical scenario when one would need to know it.
It's hard to function in the world without some rudimentary knowledge of it.
As for practical scenario, imagine your boss wants to send you to a conference in Paris, and you answer back with "Where?".
To which he answer "the capital of France" and everyone keep going.
If I tell you that you need to go to Sucre for a meeting, do you know where that is? Probably not. You will google it, spend 5 seconds on the internet and boom, you know where it is. Putting countless hours to learn all of them is useless. This is time that could be spent learning things that are important in the modern world. The computers aren't going away. You will never have to search for the name of a town in a dictionary or encyclopedia for hours anymore. It's a 5 seconds tasks.
According to the author of SuperMemo, the lifetime cost of learning a particular fact for life, in a perfectly structured spaced repetition system, is between 30 seconds and 5 minutes[1]. Thus, you should never memorize a fact that will come up so rarely and is trivial enough to look up that it doesn't exceed that lifetime threshold. The vast majority of state and national capitals fall into the "not worth it" category.
Also, most students don't have nearly the efficiency of learning that a spaced repetition system affords (Especially Wozniak's highly optimized system wherein he has a database that he habitually has quizzed daily for years), so for them the cost is dramatically higher.
> lifetime minimum cost of remembering a single well-formulated piece of knowledge can easily be estimated to fall into the range from 30 seconds to 5 minutes (minimum cost is the cost that is achieved using the optimally spaced repetition schedule). This estimation can be used in cost-benefit analysis in deciding which mission-critical pieces of knowledge should be subject to learning based on spaced repetition
While everyone thinks "What an idiot."
While you are 100% right that you dont NEED to know that Paris is the capital of France, displaying that ignorance for all to see is just bad form.
While your analogy makes sense (bolivian capital no one knows about), knowing that Paris is the capital of France is incidental knowledge when you spend any time looking at western history for the last several hundred years.
The fact that you remember that Paris is the capital of France has nothing to do with what you learnt during high school. You know it, because it is general knowledge. You saw it in the movies. You had a phone call from someone living there. Only someone living in a cave would not know where or what Paris is, hence why you would call him an idiot.
However, the capital of an area that isn't in the media very of ten? You won't remember them. "Quick, what is the capital of Cambodia? No idea? You surely must be an idiot! Let's fire you!" Nobody will ever say that. If I tell someone that they must go to Ankara for a meeting, I would pretty much expect them to answer with "where?"
Having general knowledge is important. Knowing the main capitals of the world is important too. Spending hours and hours to learn all of the obscure ones and commit it to memory in a world where you can say "Ok Glasses, Ankara is the capital of which country?" is useless.
That is a cultural problem, and one that is going away. Trivia used to dominate what people thought of as intelligence, but since it is so utterly useless in the era of online search, that particular brand of intelligence is a complete waste.
People who have absurd volumes of trivia in their heads seem like less intelligent these days (at least to me) simply because it means they are not smart enough to allocate their learning time to things that are actually valuable.
Without looking it up, I would guess a city named after Juan Mariscal Sucre (or is it the other way around?) must be in either Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, or Bolivia. I would probably guess Ecuador on a hunch but that's probably wrong as their former currency was the Sucre and it would be funny to have a city named the same.
> It's hard to function in the world without some rudimentary knowledge of it.
True.
> As for practical scenario, imagine your boss wants to send you to a conference in Paris, and you answer back with "Where?".
That's actually what I would ask if my boss wanted to send me to a conference in "Paris" without any further information (presuming that there wasn't additional context to disambiguate the reference), since there's like a dozen cities with that name in the US, some in Canada, one in Kirabati, and, oh, yeah, a big one in France.
Yes, by the time you are an adult, you're expected to have some rudimentary understanding of geography and the arbitrary names humans assigned to places. I have a hard time imagining that someone would not know where Paris is by the time he reaches adult age. Not all learning is done at schools, you know.
Here's the thing: we have such things as maps. There are still occasions today (I'm almost 33) in which I am unsure where's a particular location. So I look it up. Next time it comes up, I won't have to.
I do not know the name of the capitals of most African countries. There are some small countries which I have probably forgotten about. But, if in doubt, I can research the damn things.
That's different from memorizing the multiplication tables.
1) What does this have to do with knowing Paris is a capital?
2) What's the big deal? I'm sure most people don't know the capital of Mongolia or Canada or Switzerland or Slovenia or Croatia. And these aren't even African countries.
3) What's the practical limitation here? Are you unable to travel to cities that you didn't know the names of 10 minutes before you found them on Google maps?
If you think the only purpose of knowing the names of world cities is finding them in maps to travel there, you will be utterly incompetent at basic comprehension of 1) history, 2) real (not theoretical) economics, 3) sociology, 4) reading the International section of a newspaper.
Forming an understanding of those topics requires connecting the dots between various stories you read about them at different places, and for that it's essential to know at least the vague relative positions of regions where their major cities reside.
Surely it would be better to learn history, economics, sociology and to read the international section of a newspaper than to memorise cities? Knowledge of capitals and so forth is incidentally acquired by doing those other things.
Why are the capitals so important? Maybe I want to travel to Kyoto or Makati instead of Tokyo or Manila. I can see the value in knowing the countries and a little about them, but capitals aren't the entirety of a country, and knowing about them won't tell you much about the country as a whole.
I can learn about the capitals if I ever plan to go there.
Is Washington DC more important than NYC or any city in Silicon Valley? I'm not convinced that capitals are the most important city.
You can talk about the culture, economy, and history of a country without ever talking about the capital. Capitals are usually (not always) where the government sits, but that's only a small part of what you can learn about a country.
It surely has a lot of influence on economy, history (culture is a different thing in a country-continent like the USA, but most countries are the size of a state, not the Union). Is * important to understand the state of *?
Texas City^H^H Austin of Texas
Los Angeles^H^H Sacramento of California
Anchorage^H^H Juneau of Alaska
--
Edited to fix the initial bad example.
--
Screw it, USA states have their capitals assigned to the weirdest cities instead of the largest ones. No wonder that you don't understand why capitals are important to normal countries.
We definitely have an odd way of assigning importance to subdivisions of land. I live in an area where one of the "cities" is a mansion rented out for events with a few businesses and homes built to support it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl,_Georgia
I think it helps to get a sense of the world - though browsing through an atlas, and getting broader lessons is much better than just memorizing state/country capitals.
I loved browsing atlases as a kid, and ended up visiting close to a third of the countries in the world (ok, so I cheated and went to Europe :P ), so YMMV.
PD: I still want to see the remaining two-thirds of the world :)
> 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).
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.
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."
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.
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).
Thanks for an excellent comment with that link for further digging into the subject. The study could have easily been a interesting article on HN by it self. The only thing I wish the study explored is what would be the calculus instructors' preferred teaching method, and compare that to the students'.
I recall that most people can manage 4 hours of intense concentration per day. If you are doing 5 hours of homework per night (after a full day of school), memorization is more effective at completing the workload - since you don't have time/energy to spend on rationalizing.
But it does seem likely that she's repeating this phrase from a teacher. Worrying. A positive interpretation is that the language teacher intends this to mean exactly what you say - languages are best learned through use, and can't be learned rationalizing the rulesets of grammar.
Yes, I was horrified that an educational institution should choose that as their motto. Its little more than an admission of failure.
I guess if its a trade school, some of that would be useful. But every time you rationalize a system, you gain far more. You gain understanding, and maybe the ability to integrate the new knowledge with what you already know.
How about "integration, not memorization"? I'd send my kids to that school.
Holy st 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?
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.
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.
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.
Ha! I did the same thing for History and English in NZ. We had 2 mock exams during the year leading up to the main one and I used all the same essays in all of them. My teachers weren't too pleased about it after the 2nd mock exam (and my English teacher actually failed me for it - though that didn't count) but I got a good final grade. Ironically my father is was teaching secondary school English and History at the time.
It will be useless far earlier than that, because this type of memorization leads to about 0% retention past the point of one or two weeks. And of course the situation completely precludes the possibility of using an effective memorization strategy, like spaced repetition, because there's no time to add that for every class on top of everything else.
While I mostly agree with you, she is learning one very valuable thing - how to game the system, which should see her in good stead for the rest of her life.
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.
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).
Which is insane. These are kids not professional football players. I like sports, but the entire culture of children and teenage sports in the US is totally whack.
The same could be said about traditional academics. Just like elite academic schools, there are elite athletic schools that are the early proving/training grounds for aspiring college and pro athletes.
Why is ok to devote hours to an academic pursuit and not okay to do the same for an athletic pursuit? You could argue the "middle ground" doesn't exist in athletics like it does for other professions, but that would assume you're classifying school as simply vocational training.
Maybe, but when I was a teenager, at least, starting at 8 or 10 would make no difference to me - I would just tend to fall asleep 2 hours later. At least in some cases, the real issue is the number of waking hours in a day demanded of a student.
The teens are actually a particularly problematic period for humans in this respect, because it's a time when you have the sleep requirements of a child, but the natural bedtime of an adult. Most 8-year-olds can't easily stay up past 11. Most 13-year-olds can't easily fall asleep before 10. Both need at least 9 hours of sleep.
This is what jumped out at me, too. There are studies linking obesity, poor school performance, and problems with emotional control (just to name a few) to lack of sleep in children. Having to stay up late to do homework seems counterproductive.
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.
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!
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.
My experience from Swedish schools is rather similar. While my memory isn't perfect 30 minutes per day is a reasonable guess. It could have been 1 hour max.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
I never saw school as a place to learn facts, but as a place to learn how to socialise and how to deal with life. Learning how to get a good grade is important, but only because people think that it represents your worth as an employee. My parents/TV/books/the internet taught me most of what I know.
Agreed. Though I wasn't saying I cheated to get my grades or that they were artificially inflated, just that I avoided homework. In my school your homework grades never counted towards you actual grades, and if your homework wasn't going to teach you something, what is the point?
Or simply learn how to hack around nonsense rules, that are there just to make the school board like they are doing something useful. The important part of school is learning, all the grades and that are just instruments. Worshiping those instruments as sacred, doesn´t make sense.
I guess that kids learning to play a dumb system will on average perform better at a later stages.
In terms of morality you may be correct, but if the child in the article could skip some rote memorisation or other busy work for an extra hour or two of sleep I would bet on her learning "more" at school.
The problem with that is that, in society currently, your grades are what matter -- at least if you want a normal job at a normal company.
To get a job, you have to have a college degree and a good GPA. To get that, you have to get good grades in college -- which means doing the homework and taking the tests. To even get into a decent college you have to have a good GPA in high school -- which, again, means doing the homework and taking the tests. Most companies don't care if you actually have the skillset, or if any of those homework assignments actually taught you anything, you need the credentials to get in the door to show it.
Grades aren't as big of a deal if you're going to be your own boss or start a business or found a startup, but in typical corporate America it's the end-all-be-all until you've got years of experience to show instead.
Does anybody really care about your GPA when applying for jobs? Resumes are filtered by many random criteria, but I've never seen grades being one of them - most jobs that require a degree won't particularly care about what you majored in, they want someone who can provably do the job - so experience matters, connections matter and can replace experience; knowledge and skills matter, but grades? Not really.
I guess we in technology have some immunity to that. I work with musicians, carpenters, and yes rocket scientists. Not all got good grades, not even the best ones.
You're obviously right (although I think a lot of us figured these without parents helping us), but "memorization,not rationalization" isn't much better.
I have been letting this roll around in my head for a while after reading the article and the comments here and I wonder....
To live is to work and to work creatively. To live is to accomplish things. To be great is to accomplish more. If we teach kids to value doing things by the book what kind of a lesson is that?
Our virtues are built out of the stuff of our vices. Productive laziness, the kind which says "I want to accomplish such and such but there must be a way without working that hard" is a virtue.
My advice is to figure out what homework is really important and try to figure out what you want to do. Shortcuts aren't cheating. Picking which homework to do is not cheating.
If what you learn out of school is to work hard, memorize things without understanding them, and do without sleep, then it is the perfect preparation for, say, doing data entry for someone. But if you want to be great, learning how to get out of homework is a much more valuable lesson....
I did some of this too. Not everything (no crying), but I had a group who would take turns copying assignments for instance.
I particularly remember when writing long papers, I would do things like increase the character spacing, change the font size to 12.5, subtly adjust the margins, add a few words to the last sentence of a paragraph in order to push it on to the next line, etc. If I had to write a 10 page paper, I could get away with writing 8.5 pages and use these tricks to bring it up to the required length in a minute or two.
There were kids in my school who spent 3+ hours a night on homework, but certainly not me. I in no way regret getting a few Bs and Cs, coasting by with some cheating and the aforementioned tricks, and in general blowing off most of high school. I still got into a good college, in part due to SAT/PSAT scores, and I probably learned more and certainly had a better time than most of my classmates.
I know what A levels are. What does AAAB mean? Does this mean you gave four subjects and scored 3 A's and 1 B? If that is correct, I'm curious what subjects you gave?
I had a transient stay in a commonwealth country when I was a teenager. I "gave" a few A-level exams. I.e. I studied on my own and just showed up for a grueling exam organized by the British Counsel in my country. I picked the subjects that were easiest for me to study on my own ... Econ, Accounting and General Studies. Since I didn't take A-level math, I had some trouble in college (in North America).
While I agree that 3+hrs of homework a day doesn't accomplish much true learning, I think that most of these "tricks" don't either.
The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted.
I would rather my child got interested in some areas and pursued them out of passion, getting mediocre grades; than followed these tricks to get good grades, but not have learned much else.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
This is one of the main reasons why I do not (and very well may never) have children; I realized that the commitment to do it properly is just too great for me to make.
I sympathize but would urge you to reconsider. There are activities where "properly or not at all" is a good policy, but raising children isn't one of them; had such a policy been universally applied, nobody now living would be alive. Those who were never born are just as dead as those who were born and then died, and surely your children would be much better off dealing with the imperfections that are an inevitable part of life, than not being alive at all.
Yeah, sure, but that doesn't make "those who were never born" any more meaningful to argue about than, you know, the present bald King of France or whatever.
"Logical Positivism" has been roundly debunked, but I think some of its principles, and those of the movements that came before and after it, are important and applicable. I call a lot of these "logical positivism" more by habit than by way of endorsing the philosophy as such.
>Effective schooling could never occur on such a federated level.
Really? You think that state run education is terrible all over the globe? I don't think the problems with the US system are universal. Certainly here in the UK, education is pretty good. The UK is smaller, but we're only talking a factor of five here.
Asking people to educate their own children is unrealistic. Teaching is not easy. Good teaching requires intelligence, skills, knowledge and understanding that most people don't have. Private tuition requires a lot of money, which most people don't have. You can claim these things are a cop-out, but I think you're being naive. You are a successful high school dropout. Which means you're probably very smart, motivated and independent. Most people are not like you. It's unrealistic to judge other people by your own standards. Most people need education while they are young in order to give them vitally important abstract thinking skills they simply wouldn't be able to figure out on their own. Most people are not capable of providing such an education for their own children. Education has always been a mechanism of control, but that's because most people need to be taught some measure of control. The people that don't need it can think for themselves anyway, so it doesn't matter.
You may find this economics paper by Lant Pritchett to be interesting. It is one of the most enlightening I've read this year. It discusses the ways that a system wherein the state provides the majority of education services at every level of education fails to support the stated goals of education from an economic perspective (although that is actually not explicitly what he's trying to prove, which is that just because a schooling system exists a certain way doesn't mean that way is optimal, i.e. basically efficient markets hypothesis doesn't apply to provided government schooling). He makes the statement that he's not talking about developed economies, only developing, but it's transparently applicable to developed economies as well. This is one of the rare papers that teaches much more than it claims to.
school isn't just about learning, it's also about meeting your peers. The last thing we need is even more social segregation because all the rich kids don't know what it's like to not be able to afford 3 homes.
There's really not any reason that socialization and academics have to be mixed though. It is just convenient and probably cheaper than the alternative.
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).
I have no idea how much homework I used to get (Netherland in the '80s), because I never did any. I was lazy and got excellent grades anyway. Well, not for languages, where you did have to memorize lots of stuff (rather than rationalize, which I'm much better at), so I dropped my languages as soon as I could.
My not doing any math homework did get me in trouble when I was 17 (5th class (penultimate before graduation) middle school in the Dutch system), because integration meant memorizing all those standard primitives and having used them a lot, and not having practiced them a hundred times meant failing grades for me. A year later math moved on to geometry and I got perfect grades and finished my homework during class for the first time ever.
I think it would have been better for me if I'd learned to do my homework; I never really learned to work during school, which might actually be a more important skill than all the stuff it seems to be teaching.
But reading 79 pages in a single evening? I hope it's a really easy book, because in anything moderately serious, that would take me a week. Oh yeah, required literature reading put me off of reading for a couple of years. (Until I discovered Terry Pratchett, i fact.)
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.
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.
School in Germany also doesn’t last the whole day, it usually ends around 2pm, so even if you have several hours’ worth of homework you can realistically do that before dinner – or, if you prefer, spend the afternoon doing other stuff and then do it after. It was a workable system. Then I moved to France, where school lasts until 5pm and I got home past 6. After a few months spent working until well into the night I stopped doing most of my homework to get enough sleep. Doing anything else during the week if you were actually doing your homework conscientiously wasn’t possible at all.
We regularly had school until past 14, sometimes up until 18. Seven to ten classes a day were more normal than just six (which would have ended at 13:40).
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.
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.
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.
Same here. I think there is a massive overload of homework. School should focus on important bits but also don't leave general knowledge out of scope and going for full specialisation.
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.
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.
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.
I completely agree that there are much better way to teach people things, but you're exaggerating in saying that memorizing isn't useful.
Take language as an example. Sure there are better ways to learn a language than just memorizing words. (That's debatable but I think most people would agree.) However there certainly is some use, still, in just memorizing things. For example, I don't speak French, but thanks to memorizing things I can at least know the basics I might need to get by (allowing me, last night, to buy a packet of cigarettes, ask for a menu, order a meal and the wine I wanted, from a bar owner who didn't speak a word of English, and I never even needed to point at anything!)
And in the rest of life, certain things just are useful if you memorize them. I have an events manager at work who doesn't know anything about computer networking, but he's picked up bits and pieces from colleagues to allow him to do things he is likely to need to do. He hasn't gained the experience of tinkering with linux, so give him a new problem and he won't figure it out, but there are certain things he can do on a linux server easily - and that's fine, nobody can be an expert in everything, everyone has areas where you just need to be able to get by.
I think this is an interesting point. I remember being so intimidated when I started my CS degree thinking that software developers just "know" all these things. Now, I know me and my co-workers look stuff up on Google all day long and it's not a big deal. But that's not something you learn to do in school.
In fact, I think there's some kind of stigma related to not knowing the answer without looking it up. The vast majority of my schooling at least involved a lot of memorization. As a student, you take a test which gauges how well you've memorized things for the most part and that's what determines your "worth" in terms of grades as a student. But that's not how the real world works. In reality, trivial things can be trivially looked up.
I think the results we get for our coding interviews are pretty telling. Everyone that applies for a software developer position where I work has to take an online assessment. They've got 30 minutes on 3 questions and it's made explicitly clear that you can look up information for it and give the sources. Out of the many people that have taken the quiz, only one or two people have given any sources. It's as if people think they'll be penalized for not knowing everything off the top of their head (which I guess is in fact the precedent in traditional whiteboard technical interviews).
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
I hate the fact that it is possible to push yourself 80 hours a week and get ahead. That kind of work pace is possible, but hardly healthy, and in my experience tends to produce outbreaks of mental illness.But if it is possible to push yourself that hard to get ahead professionally, then of course a ton of people will be doing it, because if they don't they fall behind.
It's even more depressing when you realize that the majority of people that push themselves to these unhealthy extremes aren't even working on the kind of stuff that matters.
>No I'm not. Lab is a public school restricted to district 2 in NYC. Assuming a drive (I wouldn't put a 13 year old on a subway in NYC alone) it's a 15 minute commute from the furthest possible location in the district to the school factoring in morning traffic (according to Google).
I said up to an hour and a half, In this case you have to tack on a half hour if your numbers are right, but it's not like the issue doesn't apply to rural areas with longer travel times. In addition, you didn't address the larger point that it's simply cutting it too close; you can never account for mitigating circumstances people have in their lives that shave off available time for homework, meaning they have to choose between finishing their homework or getting enough sleep. And the fact that many people that age need 9 hours not 8 hours of sleep.
>Socialization in addition to lunch, recess, and homeroom on weekdays?
Homeroom and recess is not socialization for kids that age. Socialization is hanging out with your friends after school for two hours discussing things of interest and relevance to you or doing something you actually enjoy. You can't assume the time in homeroom, recess, lunch, etc. are actual socialization; opportunities for socialization in school are usually very restrictive and arbitrary. If it isn't socialization by the choice of the student on their own time you can't assume it's actually happening.
>I'm sorry but if you're aiming for academic rigor sacrifices have to be made somewhere.
Sacrifices of what? Adequate sleep? Eating breakfast in the morning? Having free time to hang out with friends after school? You're not addressing the fact that according to the author, empirically many students were sleep deprived according to their parents, so clearly it's the school giving unreasonable burden.
Yes. I reached college with 24 AP credits and a 31 ACT (never touched the SAT) 5 years ago and I did barely any homework (~1hr/week total). Instead I played a lot of video games, and when I was 17 taught myself how to program C++ to mod Civ4. I could never have learned programming had I not had tons of free time.
Homework is evil because it's a massive opportunity cost in terms of time.
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.
How about an example with more homework and my experience with times? Let's say 5 hours of homework on a particular night.
School runs from 7:30 to 2:15 with a 45 minute lunch break (no recess (you still get recess in 8th grade? I didn't) or homeroom as the bell rings at 7:30). Then football goes to 5:30. 15 minutes to drive home, so it's now 5:45. Decompress and eat dinner with the family and it's now 7. If I want to get up by 7 then I need to be asleep by midnight at the latest. If I had a 5 hour homework night then that's pretty much all the rest of my day gone, where a 3 hour homework night I have 2 hours remaining in the day.
My solution? I never did homework aside from the occasional last minute essay or project. By 7 I was mentally and physically exhausted and had no desire to put in anymore time for school.
I can't even imagine having nights where I had 5 hours of homework to do.
What the hell? By my reckoning that makes a 16 hour day. Any time an article about working hours like that pops up here the overwhelming opinion seems to be that its unsustainable and results in bad things happening, and yet there are countless people defending the US school system.
And I actually missed some time. In 8th grade I was taking the bus to school, so shift the timeline up 40 minutes or so to handle that (was over a half a mile to my bus stop).
I think studies found that around 8 hours of work per day are the optimum to maximize performance. That means firms, and also schools, take the best out of you. After having worked those 9 hours, forget about doing an interesting project of your own at home. Your best bet is chilling out in front of the TV.
I want my kid to be able to explore and discover things on his own. Sure, maybe 9 hours of school can be handled - but when will he discover and explore new things?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't say. But if you have 5 classes in high school, that would wind up to be a max of 10 hours of homework per night, a conclusion of about 15 hours of schooling per day. I would reckon that is not what is expected, so I read it as 'total'.
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".
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.
"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."
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)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
But personally I think the "its" refers to the section and not the quotes, making the "[sic]" unnecessary. But I don't have access to the original text.
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.
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can't believe I'm reading someone on hacker news saying 'polynomials don't appear in everyday problems.'
As for the start time, likely she is involved in extra-curricular activities, like cheerleading or sports.
5 nights a week? Not buying it. I don't think I'm isolated from the world at all; I managed to deal with a heavy homework load and still have plenty of fun and get into various sorts of trouble (often at the same time) as a teenager.
Even purely from a practical perspective of "I have to get into college", if you are not very active in extracurricular activities you are screwed on your applications.
If you're doing athletics, you're spending five days a week for three hours after school every day during the sports season.
Even not during the sports season I was spending a minimum of two hours every day on extracurriculars including Boy Scouts, Academic Superbowl, Chess Club, and Science Olympiad. Those I all did because I had honest enthusiasm and got a lot out of all of those things (contributed more to my engineering and general life education than many classes for sure). But this kind of load is not and should not be unusual in children trying to find out what they enjoy in life.
Perhaps the problem is that there has been a shift from unstructured extracurricular activities to structured ones. I've seen this both in high schools and in universities. Writing poetry used to be something you did in an unstructured fun way, now it's a poetry club at school. So perhaps the difference is that what you define as "fun and trouble" is now a formal extracurricular activity.
If you're doing athletics, you're spending five days a week for three hours after school every day during the sports season.
And when I played sports in high school, there really wasn't an 'offseason'. Wrestling started the Monday following the Thanksgiving game for football, and if you did well in wrestling, your season butted up pretty close to baseball season as well.
That's not a polynomial, but an exponential, discretized (x^2 is a polynomial, 2^x an exponential)
In everyday life, I would guess most polynomials you encounter are of order zero or one. Most people would not call those polynomials.
Second order ones you encounter when doing quick math for computing how hard an impact will be, or how far a car accelerating from zero to X in T seconds will go.
The average person may not be called on to solve it analytically, but should have a general understanding of function, solution, and so on. Having worked through some example polynomials may make retaining the general concepts easier.
As noted, compound interest is exponential, not polynomial. Which brings me to one of my favorite pet peeves - I don't think schools still have any basics of financial literacy - like understanding how compound interests work, what present value and net present value is, how to estimate value a cash flow, etc. And those are things which you can encounter every day - taking a loan, negotiating a raise, figuring out if you can afford a new car, etc. Much more useful than knowing how exactly crystals which 99.999% would never see in their life are built.
Maybe polynomials appear in everyday problems of Hacker News users. But Hacker News isn't exactly representative of your average everyday person.
Also, I think a lot of people are forgetting the relative privilege they had while growing up. I was always forced to do the majority of my homework during the schooldays because I was busy taking care of my three younger siblings in the evenings. Expecting every child in a class to be equally capable of completing an assignment at home is making a lot of assumptions about their home situation.
> 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.
IIRC historically, mathematical algorithms used to be encoded as a handful of steps, so that people could do them on abacuses and the like without understanding what they were using.
Just sitting there crunching numbers by hand won't give you a feeling for maths. - Or the ability to approximate well, which is the real thing. That's a selection of tricks to do with multiplication and division that'll get you into the right ballpark.
That's something that can be encoded and taught as its own skill, spending ages doing things by hand in the hope that people will hit on that skill for themselves ain't it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have to disagree with this a little bit. The skills you use for mental arithmetic are very similar to the skills for pen and paper. I would view pen and paper as training wheels.
It might be argued that mental arithmetic should also at least be taught, but the only way I know of to do that which will tend to generalize to a majority of students is to teach them to use an abacus (seasoned abacus users eventually stop needing to actually have the physical device). And yes, we should almost definitely be teaching children how to use an abacus.
It's my impression that doing basic mental arithmetic effectively tends to depend on understanding what happens to the magnitudes of numbers after various operations and making good approximations, which has very little resemblance to the brute force long multiplication/addition/division that is taught, but is teachable; yet approximations are almost never acceptable in school, despite being very useful in real life. Meanwhile, more advanced stuff requires random numerical tricks like these:
The first thing you described is what is called "Fermi estimation". Basic mental arithmetic is being able to do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in your head. That kind of arithmetic is strictly a prerequisite for Fermi estimation. The main purpose of Fermi estimation is not to make the calculation easier (although it can be used for that too), but to get answers while not having very good data.
For example, the other day I was trying to figure out, supposing I built a small 4-foot deep swimming pool in an apartment (not on the base floor), if I could expect it to weigh less than what the builders would assume the floor needed to be able to tolerate over that area. I didn't know the mass of a cubic foot of water off the top of my head, so I went off of guessing at how many 2 liter bottles would fit in the volume, and how much a crowd of people would weigh if they all clumped together tightly. Based on these estimations, I knew my answers would be within an order of magnitude of reality. Since the first answer was several orders of magnitude larger than the second answer, I knew that the final answer to my question was "no".
I generally do this kind of thing several times per day, because my brain is filled with crazy ideas like building swimming pools in apartments.
The answers Feynman came to could be done with ordinary mental arithmetic, assuming you have good tools (better than I have) for moving numbers between working memory and short term memory, and the tricks he used to get there faster are shortcuts you simply learn with time and practice.
But basic mental arithmetic is very similar to pen-and-paper arithmetic. The main differences for me are small mechanical adjustments to make use of results that I have cached. For example, if I'm doing division, it might be easier to multiply the number by four first, and then divide by four at the end. And of course if I'm getting a rough estimate, I'll do some rounding here and there to make things more convenient.
The other major difference is that I usually reduce a fraction as far as possible before doing long division, since that makes the multiplication steps (necessary for getting the remainder) simple table look-ups instead of long-multiplication.
Metric would have made your indoor pool example way easier.
4 foot is around 1.2m,so you have around 1.2 metric tons of water per square meter. Most buildings are designed for at most a few 100kg per square meter.
> The skills you use for mental arithmetic are very similar to the skills for pen and paper.
Speak for yourself. Pen-and-paper arithmetic, to me, is a completely mechanical process, pure symbol manipulation, whereas mental arithmetic is very, very heuristic-heavy and involves a much richer mental model that often borrows from geometry.
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).
Well, I was talking about basic arithmetic, addition/subtraction/multiplication/division of integers. Doing algebra (which is usually where you'd find square roots) on paper is certainly still useful, but usually the numbers aren't very large, so it's essentially orthogonal to the type of work mentioned here. Algebra and more advanced math has multiple ways to go about dealing with an expression and requires understanding to proceed, but long multiplication or addition is just rote application of an algorithm.
(I suppose the fraction in the problem in the article makes it a bit trickier, but I suggest that the dilemma of ordinary four-function calculators not being able to do exact fractions is not a common real world problem, or they would be able to do them.)
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.
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?
A current-generation Casio scientific handles this well - the display shows exact numbers such as 1+√(2) which suggest it's doing the precise calculation where reasonable.
The problem is that something like sqrt(2) can not be represented as a number in a calculator. So as long as the calculator only operates with numbers, instead of doing algebra, it will do it wrong. In the case of sqrt(2) x sqrt(2), most calculators will convert sqrt(2) to an approximation of sqrt(2), then multiply those approximations. If you are lucky the result will be rounded to 2, but you will not always be lucky.
No, I don't believe you are correct: a calculator can represent sqrt(2) as sqrt(2), just the same as we can on paper (perhaps you are calling this an algebraic representation).
In fact, I'm confident that Casio - probably the market leader in scientific calculators - is doing exactly this, storing the exact number.
Casio does not appear to approximate simple surds as floats until it becomes necessary, and stores the exact number sqrt(2), just as it stores exact representations of rational numbers wherever reasonable (and, it correctly distinguishes whether it knows a number exactly or only as a float - it refuses to convert inexact floats into fractions, but will convert exact numbers).
Calculator phone apps don't compete at this level - which is surprising, I would have thought smartphones would have put calculators against the wall.
Well that is also wrong, or at least the .0 shows that the calculator is not doing the equations, it is just calculating. It doesn't know know that sqrt(2) x sqrt(2) = sqrt(2 x 2) = sqrt(2^2) = 2
And that is the kind of thing you get to understand if you do the calculations by hand.
I spent a lot of time up until high school forcing myself not to use a calculator, because I wanted to work on my mental skills in arithmetic, but I always make a lot of small mistakes, even now.
I have a hard enough time concentrating on 'easy' things , please don't ask me to hold numbers in my brain. I am a pretty "mathy" person but mental multiplication is not meant for the human thought process, too much is going on.
I say this half in jest, but I've met people with very good mathematical sense (especially in domains such as topology) who are incapable of multiplying 3 numbers without making a mistake. Some people have very few registers, and RAM is really slow.
I think a good part of the problem is that we learn to multiply and divide backwards. The standard US algorithm involves starting at the least significant digit and working your way up. It is much easier to do in your head if you do it from the most significant digit down. Or learn to convert hard multiplications into easy ones, for instance:
9x27 = 10x27-27 = 243
The other way to do this would be to multiply 9x7 to get 63, and then hold that in your head while you multiply 9x2 to get 18, add a zero to get 180, and then recall the 63 to add to 180.
Our insanely good fuzzy classification skills let us select and continually update a solving strategy. In computing terms: writes to long-term memory are slow, but reads are fast; short-term memory is extremely size-constrained and time-volatile, but fast for both writes and reads.
Efficient algorithms for human brains should rely as much as possible on pattern matches, long-term memory reads, and limited short-term storage—exactly the opposite of what you want to do on a computer! It’s no wonder that the polynomial-time multiplication algorithms that work fine on paper aren’t going to perform very well in our heads.
Why isn't this type of mental calculation actually taught at schools? Not every kid thinks of these "tricks". Instead, they do how the teacher showed them and do it on paper the long way. Seems like we are crippling our kids.
I heard as well that teachers are moving to a more sane method to teach multiplication.
The best part about MSB math, to me, is that at least you get a close approximation to the answer quickly. It's like successive approximations, the errors from making a mistake go down as you move along if you don't need a precise result.
For instance, what's pi * e? Good luck calculating that from the LSB... ;-)
But with MSB, you know it's about 9 because pi is on the low end of 3-4 and e is on the high end of 2-3.
So you can do
3.14 * 2.72
33 + .143 - .28*3 - something small
(idea here is that the cross term is small, three sig figs)
9 + .4ish - .9ish
8.5ish
Actual result is 8.5397.
So you can get a few sig figs by saying "eh, these digits are too small to matter" and ignoring cross multiplication of the LSBs for problems that aren't for the purpose of arithmetic.
I use this often in engineering estimation on the fly, because so many constants are only known to 1 sig-fig anyway that it's really hardly worth worrying about more accuracy. Particularly when you're building in a safety factor anyway.
Huh, so I'm not the only one who goes most-sig to least-sig when doing it in my head. Really makes things easier, oddly enough -- you end up with big numbers with lots of zeroes on the end, and add them to the smaller numbers.
In my head, what I do in the end is 9x27 = 3^2 * 3^3 = 3^5 = 243 ('everybody' knows that, because of 7^3 = 343)
And 27 x 16 ends up being (32 - 5) x 16 = 512 - 80 = 432.
And yes, I could be way faster at mental arithmetic if I just did the calculations instead of switching to cuter approaches halfway through all the time.
It's a well-known fact here that mathematicians can't do calculations. I've had professors in class ask the class to do very simple calculations for their complex examples for them. (Or they get it wrong. A lot.)
The driving factor for mathematics is laziness. I didn't even memorize the basic multiplication table (1-10) for a long time, but I remembered some shortcuts (like multiplying stuff by 9 was easy) and got by.
The multiplication table really bothers me. It's considered to be the least a child can learn in elementary school. And kids that haven't learned to do math mentally just memorise it like a poem. I really don't think this is the correct approach.
We teach multiplication as an algorithm based on breaking the problem into single-digit pieces. If you're trying to learn that algorithm, and you keep needing to figure out what all the pieces are, you won't be able to follow along with the bigger picture. It would be like trying to write an essay, but having to look up the spelling for each word in the dictionary... it would take you a lot longer, and be much more of a struggle. Instead, you memorize the pieces, and then later can focusing on understanding how all of those pieces fit together.
I feel a bit bad for not memorizing it, to be honest. Not sure if there is any other way for learning to multiply?
How do you "understand" that 6x 8 = 48?
With bigger numbers, then you can apply a system. And as I mentioned I also "cheated" a bit with the basic table. For example I would have remembered that 5 x 8 = 40 and then calculated 6 x 8 = 5 x 8 + 6 in my head, because the multiplications for 5 are easy (half the other factor x 10 +/- 5). But there might not be a cheat for every point in the table?
You can learn to better comprehend a quantity or amount. So you understand that 6 * 8 is larger than 2 * 8, and then understand that it is actually 3 times that. Another approach would be to always think of multiplication as condensed summation, so 6 * 8 = 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 = (8+8) + (8+8) + (8+8) = 32 + 16 = 48. I would let my kid write out the summation and apply an analytical approach rather than memorising it blindly. I guess you have to memorise it eventually, but a lot of kids are lost if they fail to recollect the answer.
I have a hard enough time concentrating on 'easy' things , please don't ask me to hold numbers in my brain. I am a pretty "mathy" person but mental multiplication is not meant for the human thought process, too much is going on.
That's like saying humans were never meant to run up stairs so you're taking the elevator. In any case, nobody's asking yo to hold numbers in your brain; it's OK to use paper and pencil for your calculations, as generation after generation of mathematicians did.
To be fair, I don't hold her to be the slightest bit representative, it's just that such a simple mathematical process is just... automatic. I'm not mathy at all - I've abandoned several online crypto intro courses because I can't follow at a reasonable speed when the notation comes out - but when it comes to manipulating single-digit numbers?
In her case it was significantly affected by her lack of motivation, but it was just plain odd that such a trivial thing wasn't 'automatic' for someone in a science course (the actual question was calculating V=IR). I had to simplify it with "Well, what's 2x3?", and then, 'given the answer', she could continue.
I'm enjoying your comments. Regarding the crypto: that's too bad, because a big chunk of crypto involves de minimis math, and that chunk is the most useful; crypto is as much algorithms and computer science as it is math. Consider letting us beat you over the head with crypto challenges sometime; we wrote them in ASCII text, so there's no notation. :)
When I got to university the calculus instructor told us "we could use calculators, but they're going to be worthless" sure enough we only had symbols with a few numbers used as filler, but nothing you couldn't work out in your head. ie. (5x+2)^-3n
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.
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.