My parents never asked about homework. I never did it at home. I would do it in the prior class or as the teacher was collecting it (extreme sports!).
That’s so remote from my experience that it’s fascinating.
I never got the point of homework. I was always deeply resentful that the adults in my world didn’t bring home work from their jobs. Why the hell did I have to bring work home from school? I hated school with the heat of a thousand Nagasakis, and having it intrude on my homelife, in my mind, was a dark personal injustice.
I was always a good student, but before about sixth grade I wasn’t organized enough to remember to do assignments at home. But we didn’t get a significant amount of homework until seventh grade. My parents rarely I’d wver had to monitor my homework. I hardly ever missed handing in an assignment. But I never had to “study” as such in order to learn ghe material. Whatever the teacher said in class, I absorbed.
Things changed when I hit calculus and physics in high school. It was no longer instinctive for me and I didn’t have a study habit. So I didn’t so as well in those classes.
I voted 100%, but I didn’t do it like I was “supposed to.” I did my homework during class, while the teachers prattled on. I gain knowledge best by reading it, and I’d always read quickly with great comprehension way, way above my grade level, so it was the most efficient use of my time.
The exceptions to my general habit were math courses and the maths portions of science classes, where it was often helpful to pay attention to the instructor as he worked through a few examples. Then I did the homework once I’d comprehended it.
The problem, though, is although I graduated high school with straight A’s, I didn’t develop any real good study habits. Most entry level university classes I was able to treat like high school, but later years required real study, and I couldn’t skate through them, resulting in a suboptimal GPA. Luckily I was non-traditional (“older”), and I wasn’t loaded down with maximum credit hours every quarter/semester.
My experience was pretty much the same as Balthisar’s, above. I did nearly all of my homework during class time. Partly as a result, larger projects that required work outside of class sometimes went undone, or were hurriedly done at the last minute.
Our homework was graded, so hell yeah I did it.
On one epic occasion, and being extremely tired of hearing “she doesn’t put in enough effort”, I brought to my Draftsmanship teacher a much higher pile of drawings than the rest of the class. We had to do a dozen drawings, and one of them had resisted mightily. I brought him 11 clean drawings, plus 23 versions of the one where I had spilled ink, and said “you can say none of them were correct. I agree. But I don’t want to hear ‘she doesn’t put in enough effort’.”
Not doing your homework was not a thing in our house. I don’t even remember it being said. It was just assumed. You do your homework, you clean your room, the sun rises in the east. That’s just how it is.
Male, good but not great student, elementary school during the 60s.
Regards,
Shodan
Boy here. Somewhere before 7th grade, I put my foot down (inside my head at least!), and did the bare minimum, which was usually 0% if the work wasn’t required.
I tried doing the 0% thing in a required class, but my desire to get As won over, and I begrudgingly completed work.
I always viewed homework (at least as far back as I recall) as busy work - why am I doing this if I already understand the work? So I took all the shortcuts I could.
Homework isn’t graded? Won’t do it.
Homework is graded, but answers are in the back? Copy the answers.
Homework is graded? Slap it together as fast as possible, it’s only a small part of the grade.
I’m not really including papers / projects into this, as those are a whole other thing, and we didn’t really define what is / isn’t homework here - I always did projects.
I remember specifically one High school class (Pre-Calc) where the homework check was the teacher walking by and looking at your notebook. That first homework lasted me 2 years.
I had a long bus ride (45 - 60 minutes) so the majority of my [del]busy work[/del] homework got done there, mostly on the morning ride because, you know-- pointless busy work.
Not that I’m denigrating all homework as worthless, it can have value but I suspect a lot of teachers are assigning homework every day just because they think they have to.
These are a lot like me. Girl, 50-20% in the 70’s and 80’s.
Math and spelling were pointless, because it was all busy work that I needed no practice to master. I got mostly B’s and C’s (one D) because I always did well on tests and classwork. I don’t remember any reading homework, but it could be that reading was my favorite pastime, so if I was assigned reading, it wasn’t really work. Parents ought to look at each child as an individual and look for better motivations than threats. Being told I could “run rings around” the other students did not give me any reason to want to. A note to parents: don’t tell your children “Do it right the first time or don’t do it at all” unless you want to walk them through every assignment. That admonishment was the reason I often didn’t do homework.
In elementary, I don’t really remember much homework, but there was quite a bit in middle and high school that I didn’t do. I had a few years of hearing my older sisters and my dad yelling at each other when he helped them with their homework, and I didn’t want any part of that, so I would never ask him for help.
I did what Pork Rind did in 6th grade science. Laura Ingalls Wilder under the desk all year, and I could always answer Mrs. Marks when she tried to catch me.
I never did chemistry homework, because the “teacher” was one of the worst I have ever known. He would write a bunch of numbers on the board, put an = next to them and write the answer without ever once explaining what calculations he did to get the answer. When you consider the extremely large numbers involved in chemistry, there was no way to figure it out yourself. I passed the class because all the tests were questions about facts without any math and I aced them. Some years later I came across an equation written the same way he wrote them with single digit numbers, and I realized what he had been doing. It is the only time in my life I have seen an equation written that way. Shame on him for not teaching.
Come to think of it my first biology teacher was another non-teacher. He said he expected college-level work from the students but never taught us what that was. This was long before the Internet, so there was no help for us.
In college, I realized that homework wasn’t graded, so I didn’t do it then, either. I was on the Dean’s List most of the time, so it didn’t seem to hurt me.
Throughout grade school / high school most homework I was able to do during class time while listening to the teacher or while taking notes, or between class breaks. This wasn’t practical for everything, such as writing up essays or reports, but for most. I rarely ever did homework at home. If anything was done at home, it was quick skimming and studying for tests.
I recall one class in 5th grade, World Studies or Social Studies or something, that relied on most of the grade being a term-long paper/diorama/poster thing. I did zero work on it until only a couple weeks left in term when the teacher threatened to fail me. I spent a hasty busy weekend of construction paper and glue and put together some passable crap that got me a C.
In college it was more of a time-management strategy vs grade impacts decision. I was working my way through school and had very little leftover study time available. If homework was only 10% of the final grade, and I otherwise felt I knew the material, I’d skip it and take the minor grade hit. If 20% or higher, I’d do enough to at least gain enough credit to not tank my grade, but wouldn’t worry about being a completionist.
I answered “other”, because my approach to homework varied throughout my childhood.
Through about 3rd grade, I did my homework, like a good girl. And I did it in 4th grade because I liked my teacher and wanted her to like me back. But I was always horrible at rote memorization; unless something had a logical framework, I couldn’t remember it at all, and I hadn’t yet developed any of the mnemonic tricks that help you get through memorizing stuff like times tables. (I was also ADHD, undiagnosed. I got my diagnosis at the tender age of 38, when my life had already been built around my dysregulation of attention. But that’s another story for another time.)
In 5th grade, I had a change of heart. I decided not to do anything that required what felt like pointless rote memorization, because I couldn’t do it worth a damn, anyway. And I decided that any work that didn’t actually teach me anything was crap.
By then, I’d also become convinced there were whole areas of human activity in which I was never going to be even barely adequate, so trying was pointless. Because I had trouble memorizing my multiplication tables and didn’t see the point of most other arithmetic, I was always in the slowest, lowest math group. Which was incredibly boring and didn’t suit me at all. But I figured I was there because I was a reject, it was obvious to everyone that I was a reject, and that reject-ness was a fundamental part of me, whether I liked it or not. It took until the summer after my freshman year of high school to get over the conviction that I was math-impaired. (I won’t talk about my high school experience in this post, since I don’t think that’s what the OP was asking about.)
By the end of 6th grade, I’d also decided that, if I could do well on tests without doing the homework, then the homework was a waste of time. (And I could do well, effortlessly, on everything except math.) And if my grade relied largely on homework, then screw my grade, because the grade was meaningless. I was also certain that, if you had to do homework to learn something, you were too stupid to learn it. Smart people knew stuff automatically. That’s what being smart was. Having to work at things meant you were bad at them, and you should give up and go do something else. (I did, eventually get over mindset about effort, but not until I’d flunked out of my first year of college and come back.)
It would have been wonderful if, back in elementary school, someone had actually: 1) acknowledged my experience, rather than just writing me off as a stupid, lazy, pain in the butt; 2) taught me how to memorize things; 3) actually put me in a position in which I had to learn things; and 4) showed me that there was an intrinsically rewarding payoff to slogging through boring stuff. It might have also helped if I’d gotten an ADHD diagnosis before I’d already constructed an adult life for myself.
I love that many schools now teach mindfulness, a growth mindset, persistence, and self-efficacy. If I’d had that, I think my life might have gone differently.
Girl, always did my homework (though I did procrastinate a lot). I was a brain and an overachiever (basically Hermione Granger) so I didn’t need my parents to force me to do it. I just did it because that was what you did and I didn’t want to jeopardize my straight-A average.
None of it was very hard. I usually got most of it done at school before I left. The procrastination was mostly for class projects with longer deadlines, which I often did the night before they were due.
+1
I did my homework and voted that I did it but I hardly ever remember having to do it at home. I think I did most of my homework in class while the lesson was going on. I also remember breaking up math HW with a few others and only having to do 4-5 problems out of twenty.
this was me ….I only did enough to pass the class
on the last day of hs I was sitting in the library with all the work I didn’t bother to do and had percentage sheet of what I needed to do for each class… picked out the easiest assignments I did 4 classes in 3 hours dropped it off 45 minutes before the day ended … although due to my problem with physically being able to write some assignments were modified
The only reason I wasn’t kicked out was most of the teachers knew id out read 99 percent of the class in literature, history, and a couple of subjects and could pass the tests…
Boy, <10%. In fact, I would often go weeks without doing a single lick of homework.
The simple truth of the situation was that I already knew almost all the material covered, and that which was new to me I would pick up quickly during class. Teachers still wanted me to do the homework but, while they would castigate other students who didn’t do their homework, they tended to ignore me because they recognized that I was keeping up without it. I suppose it’s hard to get on a student’s back for not doing their homework when they frequently score the highest marks (grades).
I never had homework grades 4 and below. In 5th grade, different school all together we were assigned homework, I had to ask the teacher what that was. I didn’t like her reply and still to this day think WTF.
I just… didn’t do it. I had completely run out of fucks to give by Day One of my freshman year of high school.
What helped, though, is that I was a bright kid who soaked up information. I could generally ace quizzes and tests without cracking a book, but my complete refusal to turn in assignments bedeviled my parents and teachers to no end.
I was a C-D student. If I’d done my homework I’d have probably been a straight-A student.