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.
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.