09.12.06
Tonight’s Homework: Why There’s So Much
As Homework Grows, So Do Arguments Against It
Let’s review… homework, particularly at the lower grades, is rarely useful. Often, it’s actively harmful. Many, if not most, teachers recognize this. So, why does the total amount of homework keep growing?
But teacher knowledge is often trumped by school system policies, created by school boards whose members are often not educators, teachers have said.
Right-o.
yoni said,
September 12, 2006 at 6:29 pm
ay. alfie kohn was on NPR a few weeks back, making a pretty strong argument against busy-work and memorize-this-list work.
My dad’s an educator (he’s an all-but-dissertation PhD in education, even) and whenever one of my teachers assigned “write “i will not misbehave in class” 500 times” as group punishment, my dad would call and rip the teachers a new one. Oddly enough, this was pretty common punishment in the schools i went to in the late 80s/early 90s; no other parents seemed to find anything wrong with it.
on the other hand, if i hadn’t had 4 - 8 pages of calc homework every night in high school, i wouldn’t have been fast enough at that stuff to finish the AP BC test. meh.