I think it’s great that he has that much HW. I never had much HW, and I’m the biggest slacker I’ve ever met. Case in point, last week I had an essay due on The Metamorphosis, and a week to write it. Because I do not have a good home-work ethic, I waited until the day after it was due to write it. (Hey, I had a good excuse! I had a dentist appointment the day it was due)
At any rate, I truly believe that I had been given any amount of HW in my younger years, I wouldn’t be such a slacker now.
Ha! Work ethic! I’m supposed to have one of those…somewhere…
PLG has it right, developing the ability to learn and study is far more important than what is actually going on at lower levels. (I mean c’mon unless you really love dinosaurs, who cares what order all the ages were in? I’m a Chem E/Philosophy major…by all accounts educated, or getting there, and a happy camper and I can just about split dinos into meat eaters and plant eaters…the rest of it…gone) However, homework teaches you to force yourself to work. To plan, to be almost self motivated and practice storing information and skills.
Its good to practice on stuff that may never matter, means that when you screw it up the first few times it won’t count when you need it.
So do your Latin. Its fun and good for you. You want to learn about paranormal stuff? Google + Library. I wrote papers on gifted education for fun. It was near and dear to my heart. Self motivated learning. Way to go!
Hmm, I don’t spend any time at home on homework, don’t study. That of course has a negative effect on my grades, I am making low b’s and a low A, paaah. All excessive homework ever did for me was make me hate school (excessive being any assigned without time to do it in class). Though any sort of project is my downfall, I generally consider myself lucky to make 60’s on those.
You would definately find that most of the work is quanitity only. Whenever I do do homework I make tons of easily correctable errors and often skip questions and get a 100 on it.
It really all depends on the school you go to. However untill highschool kids really don’t get enough flexibility to get any actual good classes, which basically depend totally on the teacher.
About the 5 oclock, when kids get out at 3. Thats pretty normal. Buses often take longer than that. Usually the kid cannot drive straight home.
And actually most normal parents would sign the kid up for some extra curricular activities so he has no free time past 7 either.
Asmodean wrote:
Yeah! And it was a 40 mile uphill walk through a blizzard each day just to get to school! And it was uphill walking back, too!
If you didn’t force some kids to think about things other then pokemon or Batman they might not think of anything at all.
Marc
Precisely. My boss/professor does research in self-regulation and self-motivation. One of the first lectures he delivered to us (and we then passed on to our own students) was that there is what he calls a hidden agenda in the schools system. The main point of your elementary-high school educations was not to pound material in your head so that you could later spout out facts and numbers effortlessly; the real point was to instill in you the types of skills you’ll need when you enter that goshdarn-awful real world. Ideally, by the time you’ve gotten your degree(s) and are looking for a job, you’ve got the skills that employers value: good time management, organization and planning, problem-solving skills, etc. These things should have been developed up in the process of your education-- as you did that research paper in the ninth grade, for example, you would have had to plan your trips to the library, fight procrastination, make outlines, figure out various obstacles to your writing, and so on. After a few years of honing those skills, you’re likely to be a darn fine student. Darn fine students usually go out to be darn fine workers, employees who are valuable to the companies they work for.
Bah. Try working at the office from 8:30 to 6 or 7, driving home and THEN having to study. Try having to take precious annual leave days in order to revise for exams. Try seeing whole weekends scuppered because you really need to study.
The discipline required to do this came directly from being “forced” to do a few hours of homework every night. I look around me now and I know that those struggling to motivate themselves are precisely those who were let off at school - I know because we’ve discussed this very subject. You think that they’re happy now that they were never taught this life skill?
pan