I remember wanting to dislike school but never being quite able to. Eventually I grew to be uneasy with the other students, but I was always interested in picking up what Teacher was putting down. I don’t think it ever occurred to me to resist homework. It was just puzzles to me, and I’ve always loved puzzles. Literature I resisted, though. Couldn’t stand reading–just tell me what it said and I’ll work out what was meant. Wasn’t until college that I was able to use literature as a means of getting inside someone else’s head (and out of my own for a little while). Then I dug it.
I’m pretty sure if teachers had reasonable class sizes they could get nearly all the teaching done during school and would not need to assign homework. But as it is The School People seem to not care how kidbrains are wired, and that the young ones need to play–as a break from lecture, as a chance to socialize, and as a means of working off energy. It is mind-blowingly ironic that kids who disrupt classrooms, for instance, lose recess. They’re the ones who need it most.
I generally did homework. I do recall not reading the assigned book in 12 grade English. An entire semester about that book and I think I read 20 pages of it.
I also vividly remember a geography teacher whose homework would be repeated, word for word, as the Friday quiz. This went on for an entire semester and a bunch of dumbasses still couldn’t be bothered to do the homework, and crapped out on the quizzes.
Generally, yes. I did my homework. IIRC, anytime I didn’t do my homework, was largely due to me forgetting that it was assigned. Not out of any willful refusal to do it. Even though I was mostly an avid reader, sometimes I procrastinated on reading books over the course of a class.
Interestingly, even though I have always been identified as highly intelligent and have been generally intellectually curious, I’ve never been a great student. I hold an engineering degree and an MBA from two highly regarded universities, but completing them was a gigantic chore.
As a kid (i.e. before age 12), I would do all but four assignments per quarter, which was the maximum number of assignments you could get a 0 on and still get an “E” on your citizenship grade, which let you out at lunch for a pizza party. That said, I did a hell of a lot of it in class. If I could figure out what the assignment would be, I’d be doing it in class while the teacher was talking. I also took heavy advantage of stuff that wouldn’t be checked, though that was more a thing in higher grades.
It was just doing the minimum amount of homework I could get away with and get what I wanted.
Oh, and, of course, I didn’t do any reading homework, since that couldn’t be checked. I’d just read a little just before class, or read ahead during class while the teacher wasn’t talking.
Didn’t do much homework but got 98-100% on nearly every test. Told the teacher straight up I had to work every day after school. (High school) it affected my grades but frankly I didn’t give a shit.
Girl, did far less homework than I was supposed to. I mostly passed my classes on the basis of my test scores, which were inevitably in the A/High B range unless it involved a lot of writing. ( I wasn’t very good at writing on the fly. Still not good at all on BS’ing)
Definitely undiagnosed ADHD (PI). I turned in a LOT of homework in late. What would have helped me was training in organization (Here, you need to turn this paper in on the 14th, so let’s back up and set daily or weekly goals to accomplish before the paper is due)
Studying? I understood the material when it was presented to me in class, assuming I hadn’t already read about it before class started. I didn’t study until 2 years into college.
I was willing to do most of it, but only in a very half-assed fashion. I put the most effort into algebra homework, but I almost flunked it anyway. In other classes I could skim the readings and get an A or B.
I always did my homework, but that was sometimes the result of Herculean efforts on the part of my mom. In retrospect, I might have been able to get away with telling her that I didn’t have any, but it never would have occurred to me at the time. And i might not have gotten away with it, too: She was in regular communication with all of my teachers.
I did not, however, do any “studying”. I either got it or I didn’t, usually got it.
I don’t even know how to quantify my own compliance with homework (and not ONLY because I’m not given any choices between 50% and 60% or between 10% and 20%). Does an expectation that I would put in an entry to the school science fair count as homework? Or to bring in a sugar-cube model of the California Mission of my choice (along with a written report)? If those both count, I could argue for a score of less than 50%. My science fair project, (the one year I turned one in) consisted of a lemon with two pieces of copper wire stuck in it, along with an instruction that if you placed the wires against your tongue, you’d feel a tingle the same as if you licked the terminals of a 9-volt battery; my California Mission looked like Mission San Fernando AFTER the San Fernando Earthquake of 1971, because I ate most of the sugar cubes (pretty sure I blew off any written report).
I never made a progress report on a term paper, and usually composed my term papers on a typewriter the night (early morning) before they were due.*
OTOH, on the strength of my entrance examination to my Catholic high school, I was admitted with honors, which pleased Mom and Dad. What DIDN’T please them, and led to their decision to let me pay my own tuition in my freshman year**, were the grades on my eighth grade report card.
wtf IS a “rough draft,” anyway?
** $250 for the year, which I covered by working for the HS janitor during the summer. No cash for me; it all went towards the tuition
Boy here. In the second grade I decided/realized that homework was bullshit makework, and resolved to never do it again. This effected my grades less than you might think - homework was usually only 10% or less of the grade, and I tended to get 100%s on all the tests. (Literally - one frustrated teacher showed my mom my grades, which were all 100s or 0s.)
Upon arriving at middle school I read the syllabus, did the basic arithmetic, and realized that one couldn’t get away with skipping the major projects that most classes assigned a couple of times a year. So I changed my rule - I did all major projects, but none of the minor homework. Once again this worked reasonably well.
Upon reaching high school I did the math again and decided that homework was no longer optional. From that point on I did all my homework.
ETA: My homework-free days were mostly in the eighties.
Wow, I’m really surprised at some of these answers. I did 100% of my homework, without exception. It probably averaged a couple of hours a night. I never even considered the option of not doing some of it. It was just part of life.
That’s when you type the report up the night before the required rough draft is due, and then turn it in a second time unaltered when the report is due.
Was in elementary school in the 40s and there was little to none until about 6th grade. Mostly of the sort, bring in a poem and read it in class. Even learning the multiplication was not an assignment. What we had was a big times table on the wall and did problems in class and you eventually learned it. Starting in 6th grade, we did have some homework and I did it only if I could learn something by that. The teacher that taught 7th and 8th grade math used to give us boring, busy-work assignments. Like find pictures of spheres in magazines and cut them out. I blew them all off. Then the stupid lady would give me straight B through all four terms even though she knew that I had learned everything she taught. Subsequently, I figure I took maybe 30 math courses in HS, college, and grad school and never got less than an A.
Like a lot of people, I don’t even know how to answer the poll because the choices are so weird. I definitely did less than 100% of my homework, but almost certainly more than 60%, and most of the time when I blew it off, I at least tried to fake it in ways that involved doing some portion of the assignment (e.g., doing the first three or four algebra problems and then filling the remaining pages with gibberish that looked vaguely like algebra if you weren’t paying attention). Sometimes it even worked.
I pretty much always did homework that was low-effort and at least marginally interesting, like reading novels, but I tended to blow off math because I didn’t want to do the work, and I nearly always tried to ignore long-term projects until they were due, with predictably disastrous results. (In retrospect, I don’t think I really developed the executive function to be able to do stuff that involved long-range planning until my mid-teens, and I doubt anything would have helped except maturing a little more.)
When I bothered to do my homework I typically did it on the bus on the way to school or just before class. The teachers quickly learned that yelling at me was a waste of their time, especially after I consistently aced their tests and knew all the answers on demand. Blowing off homework gave me more time to read what I wanted to, which was pretty much everything I could get my hands on, and taught me more than I learned in elementary and high school anyway.
So I was consistently a B-C student, and aside from the endless lectures and feigned disappointment all parents heap on their kids it made no difference whatsoever to my past, present, or future. I do what I like doing, and if I don’t like doing it anymore I have options that will pan out in short order. No long-term harm came to me over homework.
I’m not sure how to answer either. I had very few teachers who actually assigned homework (as in, “Your homework tonight is questions 1 through 5 on page 203 of your textbook.”) Any homework was mainly, “Okay, by tomorrow, do questions 1 through 9 on page 203 of your textbook. You can get started now, in class; if you don’t finish by the end of class, you can complete the assignment at home.”
Then there were the things that were due at some point in the future: projects (e.g. science fair projects), essays, presentations, and speeches. Not specifically assigned as homework, but expected to be done on your own time, in whatever way you allocated it before the due date.
I did the projects, essays, presentations, and speeches always; but a lot of the “questions 1 through 9” stuff? I’d usually get as much done in class as possible, and blow the rest off. Not always, but often.