I’m not sure, but I hope it would be positive. The A student gets the A for helping others in good faith in class, and it’s easier to get the A that way than it is to have to take homework home and do it there. It basically says, if you prove your knowledge and skill and help others in class, your free time after school is all yours.
And it gets the kids who are performing well what kind of treatment from the students who aren’t performing well outside of class?
Also, what impact would this have on those students who weren’t performing well? How would it affect their attitude to be forced into a tutoring session with another student, specifically one who might be younger than them (as when I took geometry and may of the students in my class were two grades ahead of me)?
This is just my personal definition, but I see understanding as being able to explain the concept and mastery as being able to understand it and do it correctly.
The point of school isn’t to help the students do math on the day of the exam, it’s to help students do math now and years from now. Exams aren’t enough for that. The only way to get that kind of long-term retention is practice, lots of it, and for an extended period.
Due to unusual circumstances, I’ve managed to take “qualifying exams” at three different universities. These are nasty, difficult exams intended to test a graduate student’s knowledge in a huge array of mathematical topics; I studied for five weeks for a single oral exam the last time. To pass them once is an accomplishment. To have to pass them three times is just plain ridiculous.
But does the fact that I’ve passed these exams three times mean that I’m now qualified to, say, tackle research problems in functional analysis? Heck no. I barely remember functional analyis, because I don’t do it every day.
Count me firmly in the “pro-homework” camp.
[Bones]
DAMMIT, JIM, I’M A LAWYER, NOT A CHILD PSYCHOLOGIST!
[/Bones]
OK, so drop the tutoring stuff. Thanks for the rebuttal.
The other problem with the tutoring aspect is that it reflects a value judgment, that helping others is so important that you have to do it. And that, IMO, is dangerously close to (the idea of) legislating morality.
AudreyK raised a good point, namely that more than academics is taught at school. Doing homework helps teach a student how to manage time and how to follow instructions.