Should teachers limit the amount of homework that they’re allowed to give to students? Many times, it has taken my eleven year-old cousin two hours to finish his homework. I think this may be just a bit excessive. I agree that the only way to learn is to do, but this is a bit too much doing. My cousin usually gets home at five, and his first minute of free time is, at the earliest, 7:00! I mean come on! That much homework should be for college students, not sixth-graders.
Usually he has to do some of a paper for L.A., about forty problems in math, two exercises in Spanish, translate four paragraphs in Latin, answer two pages of questions in Social Studies, . . . the list goes on and on.
:eek: :mad:
I see that no one cares that their children are up to their eyebrows in drudgery.
Four paragraphs of Latin and he’s in 6th grade? This doesn’t sound like a run of the mill student to me. Is he in advanced classes or some sort of private school?
Marc
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alloran – if you post a new thread and nobody responds within a half hour, that doesn’t mean you should post to it again…and again, just to bring it back to the top. Give it time – not every thread explodes immediately like your abortion one did. And if it dies, it dies. That’s just the way the message board works.
David B, SDMB Great Debates Moderator
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What’s wrong with two hours of homework? If it’s EVERY night, then perhaps it’s a bit much, but when I went to school we were constantly given overnight assignments that would take at least a couple of hours.
What would you rather he be doing with his time? And why does learning have to be ‘drudgery’? At his age, there is hardly a task that could be more important.
In an age when the average kid watches four to six hours of television a DAY, I can’t imagine what could be wrong with a couple of hours of actual reading and thinking.
A. he goes to a private school
B. I like it when kids think, but forced thinking about topics they don’t care about is not the answer. I think an after-school class in the paranormal would attract droves of kids.
If it’s a private school, then what do you want anybody else to do about it?
Learning doesn’t have to be drudgery. But usually, the second that a child stops caring about a topic, which in some cases takes quite a long time, the discussion becomes boring.
Learning doesn’t have to be drudgery. But usually, the second that a child stops caring about a topic, which in some cases takes quite a long time, the discussion becomes boring.
It’s not just private schools that do that, it’s also public schools. If you wait about a minute, I can give you a site.
Never mind. There was an article about it in Junior Scholastic a while back, but I can’t find it.
Oh, for the days when I had only two hours of homework a night…if I were more cynical, I might say that “they’re just preparing him for the real world.”
Gets home at five? Doesn’t school still end at 3? Does he have a two-hour commute? Why doesn’t he do his homework then? Or is it because of extracurricular activities (in which case he actually starts doing something he wants to do at 3)?
IIRC, most schools have some standard length of homework they suggest teachers assign students every day.
At the private school I taught science for, the standard was 45 minutes of work, four nights a week. Only english and math were supposed to assign homework over the weekend. That would usually add up to about three hours of work a night, for students who were two years older than your cousin. Two hours sounds close to the standard for sixth graders, but I don’t recall exactly what that was.
I think most of my assignments probably took less than 45 minutes, because I wasn’t as concerned with the volume of work as the quality of the assignment (did it require actual thinking or was it just drudgery?). Sometimes the workload would be more, sometimes less.
Given that you want to be very careful about how much sleep kids this age get, I’d err on the side of caution and be perfectly comfortable with about one and a half hours every night for sixth grade. So I don’t think two hours is way off base, it’s just a little much.
I don’t see how time spent=drudgery…I’m a lazy college student. My first class is at 11 am (I laugh at all you people who have to work!) I’m out of bed and out of my room an hour and a half before to go study. Because I love my Latin class and I like studying for it. No drudgery there.
If he doesn’t like what he’s doing get him in a different school or program. If not, just get used to the idea he’s got some work to do when he gets home.
However, Like David B said…its a private school…you don’t like it, stop paying tution to them.
I hope that your cousin’s parents appreciate the fine job his teachers do. Remember that the more homework teachers assign, the more work they have to do grading papers. They wouldn’t give so much homework if they didn’t feel that it was absolutely necessary.
Of course, I’m biased in favor of teachers. I am one.
2 hours? When I was in private school, I used to have about four hours a night. MUCH much more than I ever had at a public high school or even in college-(most of my assignments aren’t things to turn in-and I get most of it down in the computer labs if it is).
Really, I’d say about 1 hour and a half is probably about average. Although I still don’t see how a kid can get home at five o’clock when school lets out at three…
According to my parents, I should have 4 hours of homework a night by going to a private school. According to my school, in class work is far more educational than homework, and I agree with them.
2 hours for sixth grade might be a bit excessive, but wait until he’s a junior or senior in high school with 4 AP classes and about 8 hours of homework a night.
I really think that the nature of the homework makes a big difference. Some teachers don’t seem to have any idea about the real function of homeworkor how to make if effective, but they know thye should be assigning some. These types tend to send home lots of worksheets or whatever the book excersises are without any thought. If junior is bringing home an unending stream of word finds, crossword puzzles, and “circle the verb” style things, well, yes, he will go crazy with boredom.
One of hte problems with homework is that different children need very different amounts of drill work and teachers can’t really customize. SO the kid who gets long division hte forst go still has to do 39 more problems because others need the repetition. Also, kids work at very different speeds–what is 20 min of work to one kid can take a perfectionist 2 hours.
One recomendation I heard that I liked is for the parent to pencil at the bottom of each assignment how long it took to complete it. Teachers are not pschyic and it is entirely possible they don’t realize how longa particular assignment takes.
If we all let kids study only the subjects they want, the world would be full of papers on Pokemon. The fact is, kids that age aren’t qualified to determine what they should and shouldn’t study.
Mind you, judging by the rash of threads we had a while ago titled, “Why does my poor kid need to study math?”, many parents don’t either.
Sam Stone,
A. I’m not saying that kids should be allowed to study whatever they want, only that 20 minutes of talking about out of the ordinary stuff does wonders.
B. You’d be surprised at the level of interest a lot of kids have in things that schools ignore. A lot of the time, theyare qualified to decide if they could study the paranormal in addition to their normal homework.