Yes, the amount of homework is insane and it was nothing like I ever experienced growing up. My kids go to public schools in Massachusetts. If Massachusetts as a whole was country, it would rank 6th or 7th in the world in education right alongside Singapore and Taiwan. The suburbs where my daughters go to school is even more exclusive and it would rank near the top worldwide if it was small country.
It gets irritating as parent. They have special projects to do almost every single weekend and hours of homework every night except during school breaks. It is a lot of work for us all. I will freely admit that I went to one of the worst school districts in the country and I didn’t do jack shit all throughout middle school or high school and still made it into an Ivy League graduate school.
My daughters are working their asses off starting at a young age for grades that won’t even count ever 5 years from now let alone when they are adults. I question the utility of t all. It just seems to piss them off at least as much as it does me. I want them to learn but I know from experience that structured classroom learning has little to do with overall success in anything even in later academically oriented fields.
I never had to do any of that. I just showed up, took the test and they let me in to wherever I wanted to go. They are being treated like elemenatry school is the Olympic trials and their life will be ruined if they dont follow the prescribed formula. That isn’t true.
Shag-When you were growing up, we weren’t competing with the rest of the world for high tech jobs. You could make a good living with just a HS diploma, like my Dad did. Those days are gone, never to return.
My kid is in kindergarten and she has pages of homework. She is supposed to read 20 minutes each night. Go through her math program. Work on some writing and learn her 50 sight words. All the common core goals make it much harder.
The teacher said it’s not like kindergarten when we were in school. She even has a tutor to go over her weekly homework so she doesn’t fall behind.
Hah, you don’t! I could barely do it, and yet I knew students in high school (2002-2005) that somehow took multiple AP classes, had part time work, and competed in sports/did theatre/played in band. I thought they were absolutely insane. Every AP class assigned a minimum of 1 hour of homework a night. Most days someone would come in talking about how they fell asleep on their textbook last night.
I only had one AP class in english and a part-time job my senior year, and nearing the end of the school year I’d just come home at 11 after work and cry sometimes. I barely squeaked by with a D in that class because of my repeatedly incomplete homework, but hey, I did it.
After high school, college was an absolute dream. I no longer had to spend 8 hours a day in class as well as 3+ hours a night on homework. It was wonderful to get out from under that.
yeah, astonished by the amount of homework our kid gets - he’s 5 ffs! Started day 1 of reception class (age 4/5 in the UK) in a normal state primary school.
Impressed by the quality of some of it, though. Seems like the educational establishment has basically cracked how to teach reading and literacy with the graphemes / phoneme stuff.
A similarly effective approach seems absent for maths - it appears more ad hoc and I still get a sense that the toxic ‘maths is fun’ attitude exists with the teachers - like you might tell your child that cod liver oil tastes nice. Just my impressions from the UK system.
Really? I hear people say this from time to time but my experience of formal structured education in the 60/70s was that the kids who got high marks carried on to have interesting adult lives. It worked for me.
There were bright people who fell but often the reasons were complex and had nothing to do with the education system.
Formal education provides mental discipline and structure which are strengths we need to cope with the world.
Yeah sorta the same. However this is rare and I remain humble because in my family my siblings struggled to get a low average and worked a lot harder than me. Same education same parents.
I work in education and yes, kids today get a lot more homework.
It is a much more competitive world than it was even ten years ago. Today’s students are competing globally both for jobs, and for university placement. And cash strapped universities are losing spots (not to mention financial aid) for ordinary students. They have to prioritize full-tuition, out of state and foreign students (who bring in cash) just to stay solvent. They leaves the ordinary kids who in a past generation would have easily gone to an average state school, locked out. Even some community college programs are getting crazy competitive.
On the job front, entry level jobs are much more sophisticated and require more skill. Remember the days when you could make a living as a typist? Could you imagine? Today’s secretaries manage schedules, files and correspondence electronically, leaving them with time to take on what is often pretty sophisticated work.
Kids in China are going to school until 9 or 10 at night, and spending the weekends in cram school (which many actually consider to be their fun time). China’s system isn’t great in a lot of ways, but they certainly so have sheer effort behind them.
That’s me, pretty much. I went to Catholic schools grades 1-5, and we had lots of homework every night. I was so excited to go to Public School after 5th grade as I had heard that there was “no homework”. Well, we had some, but nowhere near as much as in Catholic school.
High School was a breeze, and except for term papers I did all my homework during class. College was a bit of a wake-up call. You mean you can’t get an A by coasting?
I wonder if this rise in homework is due to eliminating study periods in school? There’s not a whole lot of down time/study hall in schools anymore. Even in elementary school, we had a little bit of time at the end of the day to get started on our homework. By the time I got to high school in the mid-90’s, though, study hall was gone. They changed the high schools to a two-semester schedule my sophomore year, so we only had 4 classes for 90 minutes with no place to shoehorn in a study hall. It would have helped to have had one.
Kids in excellent schools in the 'burbs or private schools have a ton of homework - and are expected to be involved in activities as well - but they aren’t expected to work. They need this because their parental expectations are not reasonable - very few of these kids will get into Ivy League schools because there just aren’t enough slots in Ivys for all the really bright kids from great schools - but the school wants to say “we did everything we could” so the parents don’t blame the school.
Kids in more average or below average schools have far less homework - if any - and often hold jobs. They aren’t expected to apply to great colleges (for the below average schools, if they go to college at all, its likely to be a community college or - you are in the Twin Cities - Metro State).
It’s not just kids with Ivy League Dreams that are following that path. If you want to go to UT Austin or UNC-Chapel Hill or Tulane or Baylor or any number of mid-tier colleges, you are expected to bring more to the table these days than a 3.25 and an SAT in the 65%.
My daughter is in eighth grade - has little homework (Math, and if she wasn’t ADHD she could get it done in school, and she has to keep a reading log) is in an “average” school district.
And scored well enough on the ACT as a seventh grader to go to a state university in Minnesota. (She would have needed to take remedial math, middle school math isn’t sufficient for even St. Cloud State - she doesn’t yet have the ACT scores for the University of Minnesota - but she was in SEVENTH grade).
If you don’t want to go to a competitive school, there is no reason that when you are four years older than my thirteen year old daughter, you shouldn’t be getting equivalent ACT scores and be able to get into a four year school. She’s bright - but she isn’t a prodigy.
And I was just a hiring manager - there isn’t a wealth of smart talented young people looking for work either. We hired an college intern - intern, willing to work around their schedule - paying $14 an hour, good chance to get hired on - and got seven applicants - and only two of them could form complete sentences in English.
Yes and I think it’s terrible. I lived with a single dad for a short time - his son was in kindergarten and had homework. One time it was taking a fun-size box of Smarties, sorting it into colours and making a bar graph! A five-year-old learning about bar graphs!
I’m so thankful I don’t have children - I’d be like Oh Hell No to excessive homework. One hour is fine, no more than that - for heaven’s sake, let kids be kids. I’d rather my kid be outside playing or enjoying a sport or hobby or traveling than be stuck indoors doing what they just spent all day doing at school. You don’t see me doing my job’s work after 5 pm, I wouldn’t expect my kid to do school work after 4 pm.
Early 1980s suburban Houston kid here, and we started getting homework in about 3rd grade (1981-82). Not a lot- maybe an half-hour a night when we started, but it fairly rapidly moved up to about an hour and a half a night for me all the way through 8th grade. I wasn’t always so diligent though, and I was in the G&T classes, so some courses were probably easier for me than for others. I can totally believe that an average student did at least one to two hours of homework a night in elementary and middle school.
Once I hit high school, it ramped up a lot, but more was reading and less was actually exercises and “work”.
Not necessarily… if you’re in Texas and go to some rural, podunk school and that 3.25 / 65% percentile SAT puts you in the top 10% of your graduating class, you’re automatically admitted to UT and A&M. Conversely, if you go to a huge, academically oriented school where a 4.0 and 90% SAT puts you in the 11% of your class rank, you’re not automatically admitted, and are put in line BEHIND that person from the hick school with the 3.25 / 65% percentile score.
/most idiotic legislation by the Texas Legislature ever.
It’s really hard to judge how much work is being handed out by how long any one individual kid spends doing work at home. You can take two kids in the same classroom, same socio-economic standing and home situation, equal intelligence, and have them spend vastly different amounts of time doing home work for the exact same assignment. Work habits and time management skills make a much bigger difference than most people realize. That’s why my friends with kids always go on about how their kids have soooooooo much work in the fourth grade, but then so much less in the fifth grade–the work assigned has almost certainly not gone down between the grades, their kids have just gotten a lot more efficient.
My big brother had a couple of hours of homework a night even in the first grade. Not because his teachers were just piling it on, not because he didn’t understand and know how to do the work, just because he’s…him. He has fairly severe ADD that wasn’t even suspected till he was in middle school, but he’s also got a severe case of pure bloody-mindedness, wherein if he doesn’t see the point or want to do something and you insist, he’s going to make the entire experience as miserable as humanly possible. First you had the argument about how stupid the assignment was and why did he have to do it. Then there was the physical wrestling him into the chair. Then there was the cycle of pick up the pencil, write a character or two, drift off, get recalled, write another character or two, drop the pencil and crawl around in the floor a few minutes to retrieve it, then have another argument about how stupid the work was and why did he have to do it. It’s the ultimate proof my mother is a better, more patient person than I am–I would have bludgeoned him to death within the first month. In fact, I often did want to bludgeon him to death just* listening* to this ordeal while trying to do my own homework.
This precisely sums up my experience as a student in the 80’s and 90’s. We almost always had time to at least get started–most kids worked fairly steadily and were done or nearly done at the end of class, some worked intermittently and took home about half, and a small handful spent pretty much the entire work time whispering, passing notes, biting the erasers off their pencils and throwing them at people, folding up little paper footballs, etc, with the occasional stab at doing a little work when the teacher was standing right over the top of them. And yes, if there was a student griping about having too much work to do, or a parent complaining about how overworked their child was, it was a 95% chance we were talking about a member of that third group. If someone wanted to copy your homework, it was pretty exclusively one of those kids.
You call times tables and handwriting the basics? Bah! If you’re not using an abacus and carving cuneiform symbols into clay tablets, you’ve strayed from basic education.
The alternative to “basics” education is to educate kids to function intellectually in a world with the technology they’ll have access to. Five thousand years ago that didn’t include paper, but now it does; one hundred years ago it didn’t include caculators, but now it does; forty years ago it didn’t include word processors and spreadsheets, but now it does.
The problem isn’t the lack of basics education. The problem is that a kid can reach the age of ten without knowing how to do a simple =SUM function in a spreadsheet.
And yes, learning the multiplication tables IS part of the basics. I don’t care if you can whip out your smart phone and figure what 9X8 is, this is knowledge that should be immediately retrievable from your brain.
I don’t see how it’s possible to function at an adult level if you can’t make quick decisions about numbers. You need to be able to rationalize all kinds of decisions at work, while shopping, etc. without relying on a machine.
How do you calculate tips? How much will this $39.99 item cost with 13% tax on it? Should I buy 8, 8 foot 2 by 4s, or 6, 12 foot 2 by 4s? Will I run out of gas if I put in $40 worth at $130 a litre and I get 7 litres per 100 kilometers. It goes on and on. People should be able to do this kind of simple math in their heads. Multiplication tables are a damned fine start, and it only takes about one school year to memorize them for life.
