But, that is not what I wanted to discuss with you lovely and smart people. I want to ask instead, what your homework habits were, from age 12 and up.
Only from ages 12 and up homework starts to become useful. But even then homework becomes a daily fight. Not just the fight between tired parents who see harping on, and helping with homework as a touchstone for good parenting.
But also the fight between what a kid would really want to do and the homework that waits. And lastly, the fight between the intention to do homework, and the powers of procrastination. Procrastination aided by diagnoses of being gifted, having ADHD. or just by the hardships of having to work after school, or not having an insufficient place to do homework.
Poll to follow!
I voted less then 10 %. Must have been a combo of ADHD, hardly parental supervision, and because I was a shy and gifted geek, my grades were okay enough for no-one to notice. I often did the bare minimum for a class just right before the class, during breaks, or in the bus.
I always did my homework. My parents wouldn’t have tolerated otherwise, and I never had the guts or imagination to wrangle out of it.
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I did my homework, but I don’t remember any of it being particularly difficult or overwhelming in quantity. From what I gather now, it’s more common for kids to be utterly swamped with huge amounts of homework.
I just wouldn’t do it. I already knew the material (or as much of it as I cared to know) and, even as a young teen, I saw it as busywork. I was always bookish, and I had other things I wanted to read.
My grandmother, for instance, had a set of encyclopedias, and I read through it one summer. Didn’t understand everything, but I by god read it. I was… thirteen? Somewhere around there. Other than the math books, I usually read through all of my school textbooks before Christmas break.
There’s nothing that would have helped me do homework. Threats of failure from teachers (“Not living up to your full potential!”), punishments from my parents, and “I’ll give you $5 for every A.” didn’t work.
What would have actually helped me is a more challenging course load.
Same. Even in college, when I knew missing one homework assignment wouldn’t hurt my grade much, I always did it. Not doing it made me feel like a cheat, so I always did it no matter how dumb it was
I went to private schools in the UK for most of my pre-university years. Not doing to homework (“prep”) wasn’t an option; if I didn’t do it, I would have been quickly suspended and later expelled (I assume).
Prior to 4th grade: hardly ever had any homework. As in maybe 3-4 individual evenings EVER.
4th grade: Hello Ms. Norwood! Oceans and oceans of homework every night. Arithmetic. History. Geography. Reading. Science. Bring home 3-6 textbooks each night and be immersed in homework after supper. I did it, though… I did every damn bit of it.
After 4th grade: not so much. Oh, not that they didn’t assign it like crazy, but I had reached my breaking point with the nightly grind. I was also, to be honest, not having a very good year in 5th grade overall, social issues with the other kids etc. Homework seemed an unimportant priority.
Gender was a part of why I originally did all my homework (keeping up with the girls, being a good student) and also a part of my social issues in 5th grade when it fell apart. Picked “other” for your poll.
Always did mine and never had any issues; most was done within minutes of getting home. I was always a little on the smarter side and I knew all the stuff; it was just a matter of putting it down on whatever paper was required for the task at hand. The only time it took more time was trig and calc but even that was no serious big deal.
I either didn’t do it, or rushed it before classes started in the morning. I could have done without the stress, but didn’t learn that lesson (ever, apparently)
Yeah, I don’t quite get the poll options. In no Universe I Lived in would anything around 60% be ‘No Problem’.
You’d be lucky to shine on maybe 2% before a World Of Consternation would fall around your ears.
That being said, I did pretty much all homework, but it was consistently a half-assed effort. You could get away with that, but simply not doing it wouldn’t fly. Kinda like work. You can sleep-walk through it, but you’ll get fired if you don’t show up.
What do you mean by did homework? Through 12th grade, homework was generally a large enough portion of the grade that simply not doing it would result in failing the class even with 100% on all tests.
I almost never did homework at home though. Usually I did them as fast as possible in between classes or in the library before school, often cheating with other students. Dividing up calculus problems and copying answers and such.
Girl and did ALL of my homework. I would have been too stressed out not to do it. And I never minded doing it - it was just something you were supposed to do. I always had good grades. I don’t ever remember my parents saying anything about homework. They must have known that I didn’t have to be told. I just did it because the teachers told me to do it and I wanted to get good grades. The worst thing (in my kid mind) would be being called out in class for not doing a homework assignment.:eek:
Mostly the same for me. I don’t think ADHD was a serious issue for me, but general impatience for anything I perceived as busy work. If I was confident I knew the material well enough to get an A on the the test, then nothing could get me to do the work unless the homework was such a significant part of the total grade that I couldn’t get a B in the class without it.
My dad came home one day my sophomore year of high school and started yelling at me for not doing my homework, apparently my football coach and geometry teacher had complained to him that I hadn’t been doing my home work was “but I’m getting an A”. Which shut him up. I had 100% on every other part of the class and home work was only 10% of my grade so it wasn’t worth my time.
When I was a senior I lost my free period since I was failing AP English since I hadn’t done a single homework assignment since I was accepted to college. Again it didn’t matter, I didn’t need to pass english to graduate so why do the work.
When homework was important I did it when it wasn’t I didn’t do it. I was able to master the material without doing homework all of the way through grad school so it only mattered how high I needed my grade in the class and how the teacher weighted it in the total grade. I just got mad a teachers who over weighted homework in my opinion though so just increasing the weight wouldn’t have helped too much unless getting high grades mattered.
Yeah—in what job would it be “no problem” to do 60% of what the boss tells you to do? (I know, I know—half a dozen people are going to reply “I had a job like that!”)
I don’t remember how much homework I had in elementary school. Some, sometimes, but not an unreasonable amount. I did have homework in middle and high school, and I always at least tried to do all of it (including the assigned reading, in classes in which homework included reading assignments).
Why? Mostly, because it didn’t occur to me not to, I guess. It was part of going to school. It was part of my job, as a student. It helped that, for the most part, the homework assignments I got were not busywork: there was a genuine point to doing them.
Same here. I was (and still am) a very fast reader with high retention. I would early in a semester ignore the lecture in favor of reading the textbook in class. I had a couple of teachers that were understandable annoyed with my habits. They’d see me reading something other than what they were lecturing on and try to trip me up by asking me a question out of the blue. I’d quickly regurgitate the answer without looking up from the book, there would be a moment of silence and they’d give up and move on.
I do recall that my hardest classes (AP chemistry comes to mine) captured my attention. I still didn’t do my homework at home in part due to terrible time management skills, but I always got that work totally done.
I did homework, best as I recall, that had tangible evidence. Math problems would be the prime example of homework I did do. Homework that consisted entirely of reading stuff … for the most part I didn’t do so much.
Sadly, this pattern continued through my English major in undergrad. To this day, I sometimes introduce myself to people as the worst-read librarian they will ever meet.
Boy who did about half of my homework. By high school, daily assignments were generally not graded or were given so little weight that regularly blowing them off didn’t matter. Reports and projects needed to be finished well and on time, so I did those.
I should have done my calculus homework. I was always good at math and I could ace exams based on the in-class lessons without doing a lot of practice problems. Somehow, calculus didn’t click the same way. I fell behind and when I tried opening the book, I just couldn’t keep up. Worst grade I ever got in school by a wide margin. I was generally an A student except for that class.
I always did homework - my mother wouldn’t have it any other way. Plus my first 8 years of schooling was in a Catholic school - you do NOT tell the nuns you didn’t do your homework. (At least you didn’t in the 60s. I have no idea what it’s like now.) By 9th grade, the habit was well-established.