I tried to do my homework in study hall, but always did it. How else are you supposed to reinforce the concepts you learn in class without doing problems containing those concepts? How are you supposed to research for a paper without homework? Or study vocab words or history lessons?
I don’t understand the “homework is bad” crowd.
Similar situation – and same country – for me. (I’m male, for what it’s worth.) While not doing “prep” was for me too, indeed not an option; I have perhaps a bit of a different “take”. In the main, I hated my time at my, boarding, fairly hidebound, “public” (=private, in idiosyncratic British school-type terminology) school. However, we learn that even Stalin’s Gulag had a few – even if unintended – positive aspects. Since I and my fellow-“zeks” were “in the joint” anyway, and herded into the appropriate physical spaces in which to do “prep”, at the appropriate times: alternative things to do, and temptations to do them rather than one’s scholastic assignments, were just not there. This is one pain which I feel that boarding school spared me, among the many others which it inflicted.
I’m younger than most here, so I’m in the generation where they started to give loads and loads of homework. My generation was the one where I saw nightly on the news, horror stories about kids getting back problems because they had to carry around 40 pounds of books every single day. They expected multiple hours of homework every night. Every night was at least 50 math problems as the most “regular” homework I remember throughout all my schooling, and that’s just for a single class. I was in the “gifted” program in grades 1 through 3 and that had its own homework on top of regular school homework. I remember times when I was supposed to go home and construct a trojan horse out of household objects, or go home and make a cage to hold a cricket (it was in relation to reading The Cricket in Times Square, I think). They’d send me home with sheets of foreign words to remember for that program (memorize about 50 words a week, the ham-fisted way), on top of assigned reading, reports, multiplication tables, and memorizing the spelling and definitions of dictionary words. Somehow, at that point in life, I did mostly ok, except for the complicated construction projects. My parents would yell at me for procrastinating on those and then asking them for help, but I think I just had too much to do.
Grades 3 through 6, there was no longer a second, additional gifted program, but homework was assigned by every class every night, on top of large long-term science projects and english papers. I remember one teacher required you to save every handout that she ever gave you, and you had to organize it into a binder and show it to her quarterly. Homework was graded in two waves, essentially, the first time for doing it, the second time for keeping it for months and then showing it to her organized in a binder. I would only do maybe 75% of the homework the first time around, and then lose half of it rather than get it into a binder. I was given a lot of talking-tos, my parents were brought in and talked-to. Nobody actually tried to help me though, and instead the solution was “write what you have to do down in a notebook, while the teacher watches you do it.” My doing homework did not get much better, because the issue was I would get home and I’d finally feel like I was out of prison, and let all memory of school (and most of the homework I had to do) float out of my brain as I tried to do fun things to distract myself. I developed depression in this time period at age 10! Shit was really bad.
Grades 7 through 12 was more homework. I can’t even quantify how much, but I remember sometimes the number of math problems each night would get to 100, I’d have an english paper due every week, there was a test every other week in every class, science fair projects, public speaking projects, history papers, assigned reading. I couldn’t keep up. I’d usually get As and Bs first quarter, Cs and Ds second quarter, Cs, Ds and the occasional Fs third quarter, and Bs and Cs fourth quarter, making my final grades work out to be a high C. At this point I knew high school grades were a scam so long as you could get into college somehow - nobody cared what they were. My parents apparently thought I was a lost cause and never helped, only punished me with 6 months of grounding for not getting passing grades. I felt like I was going to die every day. I had no idea how anybody did multiple AP classes and extracurriculars - the stories were of kids getting home after extracurriculars, and then doing homework until 1 am and literally falling asleep on their books. I took one AP class my final year of school. I had to read an assigned book (200+ pages) and write an essay (8+ pages) every week for it. The amount of courseload was absolutely ridiculous. I broke down halfway through the year an emotional wreck. They smugly claimed that this was a “normal” amount of work for college. I got a D and barely graduated high school, but got my college credits because I got a 4 (out of 4) on the exam.
And college? A fucking breeze. I couldn’t believe, honestly. They lied to me for so long. My english college course had me read about 3 books for the whole semester and write 3 papers. Uh-huh, exactly the same courseload as that wretched high school class, huh? And I was no longer in school for 8 hours every single weekday, with an hour commute by bus before and after. I finally felt free. College was amazing. Only 15 hours of in-class time a week, compared to high school’s 40? All your “homework” actually matters? I got on the Dean’s List almost every semester because they weren’t giving me 13 hour working days every day the way they did in high school. Damn, was college a real eye-opener as to how bullshit the current high school homework system is.
I’m confused about the people who did less than 60%. Are we not considering things like essays and projects as homework? In high school, the only thing in class that ever really counted as a grade were quizes and tests. Everything else was done outside the classroom.
I slacked through as much homework as I could get away with. If homework was important or counted for a significant part of my grade, I tried to do it. Otherwise I left school at school and had fun at home. I had woods and fields, TV, bikes, and video games.
What are you confused about? I did probably 60% or less of my homework, and I’m counting all those projects and essays. The result was I would get Cs, Ds, and sometimes Fs because tests can’t save everything. It’s not like you pass with flying colors when you don’t do your homework, but it won’t necessarily completely tank your grade so that you don’t graduate. There is of course a generational gap at play where older people would have had less homework due overall, and younger folks would have had more assigned. Probably 60% of my grade came from homework.
Always did it, and tried to get it done as early as possible, to a fault.
In 9th grade, we had to do a book report / summary. I had the “smart” idea of reading a chapter, summarizing it, reading the next, etc.
Chose “The Lost World,” as I was a big fan of Crichton at the time. A paper that had a 200-word minimum ended up being just over 10,000 words. Got some extra credit out of it, but definitely learned my lesson.
Boy. Did all the homework. Hated every minute of it.
This was the mid/late 1970s, so I can’t speak as to the volume of homework as compared today.
Anyway, I did it all for a simple reason: I didn’t want to catch any static. In one particular class, math in 9th grade: a class I struggled mightily just to keep my head above water, the teacher kept a list of everybody and checked a box for every day homework was handed in. I revealed later that anybody who had a perfect hand-in record for the quarter would have a 100 percent test grade averaged in to all the other tests. It really helped to keep at least a 70 average in the class, come report card time.
I don’t remember having many projects that weren’t in-class. Had a woodshop project in 8th grade, and my granddad showed me how to nail a bunch of heavy sticks together as a mounting base for the display. Can’t remember any others offhand.
I usually did essays and book reports (overdid them, really), but I counted those in the 10% or less.
My teachers rarely graded homework.
Having something to turn in is all that mattered.
I often rushed through it and didn’t really apply myself.
That hurt me later when the classes got harder in college.
I did it, but I was one of those kids who worked on it on the bus to school, during an earlier class or, at a pinch, 5 minutes before it had to be turned in.
Later on, reports by typewriter got done the night/weekend before. I wish I could organize my thoughts and write that quickly now.
I usually got very good grades.
Lots of teachers wanted us to copy the question from the book and follow it with our answer. I thought that was stupid, so I didn’t do it on one homework assignment. The teacher bitched me out for not following her directions. The next time she assigned that sort of thing, I again did not write the questions, but I did include footnotes pointing her to the location of the questions should she wish to do further research.
Learned what ibid was from that encounter.
I really dislike lumping “homework” together as one category. All these things have very little to do with each other:
[ul]
[li]Reading the text/watching a lecture[/li][li]Working practice problems[/li][li]Writing a paper/lab report/etc.[/li][li]Reviewing/studying for a test[/li][/ul]
When people talk about the impact of homework, I think you have to differentiate between those things.
My own homework patters varied a lot because we moved a lot and I was a pretty different person each place. I tended to undervalue school for a lot of reasons–first and foremost, because I at least perceived my parents as undervaluing it (I felt like they saw work as “real” and school as “unreal” and because I didn’t really understand that what I did in school would have long-term applications on my life.
Maybe this is why my workload always felt so different than what studies reported as a kid’s “homework” - perhaps they only counted working practice problems and essays as homework, when I definitely count studying for tests as well. After all, it was work I had to do at home, so it made no difference to me.
I also notice several studies asked kids how much work they did “yesterday” as a way to measure their workload which totally discounts procrastinators. I could definitely have said “I didn’t do any homework yesterday” to that question, because I had been putting off my english report entirely, which I would be crunching 4 hours of research and writing into tomorrow rather than spreading it out appropriately. I remember the difficulty of doing these research papers before the internet; it took a while to look up multiple books in the library, read them to see if they said something relevant to your paper, and then properly cite them. Minimum 3 sources required! Oh and you still have 40 minutes of math homework tonight, and that history test in two days. Maybe my problem was when I did do my work, I did it to the letter rather than half-assing it. I should’ve just faked my sources. I once did fake an entire science project (I didn’t do it, and made up my public presentation for it almost on the spot) and got a B on it anyway. That taught me a valuable lesson, but it was too late in my high school career.
Maybe. I was kinda sneaky about it. I made an ‘A’ in keyboard class but I never went to that class. My friend did my turn in work.
I was a teachers aide in the Library for a couple of years and had access to lesson books. Got all the answers. The only problem was trying to figure what the teacher was gonna assign. I probably did more work than my actual homework would have been. I learned more.
I missed a lot of days in my last two years of grade school due to clinical depression and sexual harassment. I may have missed a few assignments, but certainly not 60 percent.
No kid could miss 60 percent of assignments and pass. I’m sure of that. I’m not sure what the OP is talking about.
I always did all my homework. This was back in the 70’s though, probably not so much as they give out now. I did a lot ahead of time - I always did my vocabulary booklet for the whole year the first weekend. I let other kids copy it. I was a nerdy straight-A student.
I didn’t do homework. I was the smartest kid in school, I knew it, the teachers knew it, all the other students new it. I could pass any test just from sitting in class and sorta paying attention. Eventually, the teachers just learned to let me do my thing. One day we had a substitute going around checking homework. He stopped at my desk and the entire class burst out laughing. “Oak doesn’t do homework” they said. Teacher was confuddled, but went away and left me in peace.
As several others have posted, I went to grade school in the 1970s, and I suspect that the assigment load that’s expected to be completed outside of class time is considerably higher now.
I’m not sure that we regularly had homework, at all, until I was in 3rd or 4th grade. That changed, to an extent, from then on, but even in the upper grades and in high school, I was usually able to get any “homework” done during study hall, or immediately after school (when I was in high school, I had about an hour wait in between the final bell, and when the bus would pick us up). At that age, schoolwork was always very easy for me, and as I was motivated to learn, I didn’t look to avoid homework.
Going to college, and discovering that I would, in fact, have to spend considerable time studying outside of class, was a bit of a culture shock. 
I, ah, hated/hate homework…or any sort of mickey mouse make work bullshit. So, what I would do is figure out how many assignments I absolutely had to do if I got straight A’s on all my quizzes, tests and finals so that I could get a nice, solid C. A C was acceptable to my parents, so that was my goal in grade school and high school. What was funny is when we all took SATs and I aced it, there were a ton of surprised faces and I actually had to endure some questions (not from my teachers, who knew better) about whether I cheated (I mean, young hispanic male with a 2.7 GPA gets the highest score on SATs, something MUST be wrong).
I did raise my standards in college, which also didn’t have quite as much busy/make work, plus I figured I should step it up since it might impact my career and, more importantly my salary (I might as well not bothered though, at least in IT they don’t really care).