School district to try no homework policy

[proud2BlibKansan]

BLOOMFIELD, Mo. -- A recent change in Bloomfield Middle School policy will mean "little or no homework" for BMS students.

The move, announced in a letter dated Dec. 1 from BMS Principal Dr. Kelly Renfroe, comes following a trend that she says she found to be "rather troubling."

In recent years, administrators have noticed a continued increase in the number of struggling or even failing students, Renfro says. Following some investigation and study, it was determined that a large portion of those poor grades were a result of either low homework scores or failure to turn in their homework assignments.

While it was acknowledged that responsibility does lie with the student, officials hope the new move will serve to help students.

more . . . http://www.susanohanian.org/show_yahoo.php?id=498

[lazarus]

1. the homework

can easily become overwhelming. Too many teachers forget that they're just one of seven making assignments.

[sasquatch]

2. "Too many teachers forget that they're just one of seven making assignments."

That happened at our middle school a lot. A lot looks like a stupid phrase(Note to self: stop going off into tangents).

[dkf]

3. Why can't homework be reinforcement for kids who want to try?

[tonysam]

7. We did this at a private school where I worked.

All the students were given homework appropriate to their age but with schoolwide recognition for the students who turned their homework in each day.

Kids were highly motivated to do their homework in order to get recognition for their efforts.

[Hello_Kitty]

4. I applaud this

When I was a kid I viewed homework as an unnecessary intrusion on my free time. For the most part, it was drills and reviews of what I'd learned that day*. But most teachers devoted a sizable percentage of your grade to turning in homework assignments, which seemed to be more of a reward for obedience than for mastering the material. If I get A's on the tests and on assigned papers, haven't I demonstrated that I've learned the material? Why should I get a B or C in the course because I didn't turn in some redundant fill-in-the-blank rehashes of the day's lecture?


*Projects and papers requiring independent work and research are excepted.

[tonysam]

9. I never assigned homework for my middle school life skills students

I felt they had plenty of work to do in class, not to mention the fact many of the kids couldn't do the work anyway without help from me or the aides.

[proud2BlibKansan]

10. Me too

I hate homework. How are we preparing kids for life as independent adults by giving them homework? What jobs other than teaching require homework?

[alp227]

16. "How are we preparing kids for life as independent adults by giving them homework?"

Lemme try to answer. Homework...
- Instills responsibility and obedience.
- Makes the students value learning as something important, not trivial.

I emphasize the responsibility part a lot. How can you survive if you're zoned out in front of the TV all day not caring about things that actually matter, such as bills or personal health? Isn't life a big homework assignment after all?

On this thread, someone said "let kids be kids outside of school". That's a good point too. However, where's the line between letting the kids roam outside all day between the end of school and suppertime with nothing to do (and who knows the legality of what they could be doing!) or locking them in a cage for hours on end with a busy recap of the day's lecture?

And what about college? For most of the classes I took last semester homework counted in the final grade.

[proud2BlibKansan]

18. We can teach responsibility in other ways

As for college, that is a choice. Homework is part of a college routine. They don't need 12 years of practice in order to learn how to do homework.

[alp227]

20. what other ways can teach responsibility?

OK, I see how enrolling in college is a choice. So is wanting to delve deeper in the material. In that case, I guess that the students with big curiosities can go to the library and read one of them books if going to a school that doesn't assign homework. Regarding your point "they don't need 12 years of practice", well wouldn't it be a sudden shock if you went 12 years with districts soft on homework and entered college swamped with all the studying and time outside of class needed to study?

[proud2BlibKansan]

25. I went to college with plenty of folks who had never done homework

Remember study hall? :)

We can teach responsibility by giving kids responsibilities. Any parent can give a million examples. There are lots better ways to teach responsibility than having kids carry a worksheet back and forth to school.

[Hello_Kitty]

27. Not the same thing.

Studying for exams and working on papers for college is vastly different from filling in blanks to regurgitate what you learned in a junior high class.

[proud2BlibKansan]

28. Or coloring worksheets in elementary school

I would honestly rather see kids playing video games, cause there may be some critical thinking skills involved.

[soleiri]

32. I agree

Every week my son gets a list of words from his PE teacher.
He then has to write out the definitions, he also had to write the words 3 times each,
plus the antonym, a synonym and a sentence using the word.
He's in 8th grade and he's writing the word "participate" 3 times.
it's ridiculous.

[Hello_Kitty]

21. How much of that homework advanced your learning of the subject

And how much was geared toward rewarding you for regurgitating what had already been covered?

Furthermore, does any kind of busy work instill a love of learning?

[alp227]

22. Most of it I'd say advanced my learning beyond the lecture

Some of my work fit the regurgitating category though. And does no work instill any meaning in learning? I think not.

[Hello_Kitty]

26. False dichotomy

The choice isn't between homework and no work. There's plenty of time in the school day to learn. What if your boss sent you home with extra work to do every day, not because it needed to be done but to "reinforce" your job skills? What if part of your evaluation and pay depended on having done that extra, unnecessary busy work? You'd probably find it insulting and demeaning.

[Sabriel]

5. Yay for this idea!

Much of what I see assigned is busy work. I can see assigning a tiny amount of homework, but for heaven's sake, don't count it.

Like I tell students in the teacher ed program, there are two kinds of students in your class: those who understand and those who don't. How does homework affect each group?

Like Alfie Kohn has said over and over, any benefit homework might have is canceled out by its negative effects.

Here's a revolutionary idea, schools: let kids be kids outside of school. Family, hobbies, and down time are homework.

[Hello_Kitty]

15. I think it was viewed as an equalizer.

The ideas was that the kids who pick up information rapidly will ace the exams while those who don't can work on it at home. However, it turned into a system where homework became a discrete component of the grade, with no justification of its intrinsic merits. Thus, kids who are willing to do extra busy work are rewarded while those who find it boring and redundant are penalized. I wonder how many truly smart and gifted kids are turned off from school because of it. I got mediocre grades throughout K-12 because I refused to do most of my homework, though I aced most of the quizzes and final exams and got A's on nearly all of my compositions. I thought I hated school until I went to college. My professors treated me like an intelligent person and I LOVED it!

[FBaggins]

6. Why must an error in one direction be "solved" by going too far in the other?

This would make it much harder for parents to keep in touch with what their kids are learning and will give them fewer opportunities to help.

I agree that many schools now send home outrageous amounts of work, but surely there's a line between "too much" and "none" that we can walk?

How much time, for instance, can you spend discussing Hamlet in class... if the book has to be READ in class as well?

[proud2BlibKansan]

8. In my experience, 90% of parents don't help their kids with homework

It's a waste of time. I actually resent being required to assign homework.

[tonysam]

11. And the parents really ARE supposed to help their students

in order to foster that home-school connection.

Of course you are special ed. I didn't assign homework when I taught sped.

[FBaggins]

14. I can't believe it's anywhere near that high - especially in your field...

But I certainly agree with your general point.

I know one family that used to homeschool but financial troubles sent mom back to work and son into middle school. Son is well ahead of where he needs to be, but they've expressed a troubling change. He now has 4-5 hours of homework a night. I don't know whether that's an exageration, but it's more time then they used to spend on schooling at home. That simplifies the story somewhat, but he hates that he spends all day in school and STILL spends more time working at home then he used to.

[proud2BlibKansan]

17. Yes it's probably even higher than that

I try to be creative with homework. I ask my kids to do a current event once a week and so one homework assignment I give is to watch the news every night. I also ask them to read every night. I do all I can to eliminate the need for a paper coming back and forth to school.

And I have at least one kid every year who says their mom doesn't want to watch the news. My kids are very poor and most live in homes with only one TV. So if mom doesn't want to turn the channel, they don't get to watch the news.

Naively, when I first started teaching I asked my kids to read the paper every night. Silly me! I didn't understand that not everyone took the newspaper.

Written homework is generally useless busy work. I also refuse to give a grade for any written assignment that has not been completed in my presence. So all I do when I assign written homework is check whether it is turned in or not. I may grade it but I certainly don't record the grade since I have no idea who actually completed the work.

Since I teach sped, I am generally given some room on the homework requirement. But homework is mandatory in my district so a go by the book principal could call me on it if they wanted to.

But I taught general ed for many years before I went into sped so I have lots of experience with homework. And I have always hated it.

A sad reality is the kids who don't do homework in 1st grade are still not doing it in high school.

Other than teaching them to be responsible and return homework, I see no value in it. And we can teach responsibility in other ways.

[exboyfil]

24. In general because parents do not help or are unable to help

on homework we will continue to see social stratification. I am actively involved in helping on math and sciences for my daughters (being an engineer that is to be expected). I also help some on other subjects. My help is not doing the problems for them, but providing additional examples which reinforce the concepts seen in class. They need to make the connections themselves.

Contrast me with single parent families who do have the time and energy to be active participants in their children's education.

I really don't know how Math and Science (and really English, Foreign Languages, and Social Studies) can be taught without doing homework. In class time is insufficient to reinforce these concepts for most students.

[BadgerKid]

12. What, no work time in class anymore?

Given the NCLB, I could see how teachers use up the whole time.

[rzemanfl]

13. I followed that policy in high school, unfortunately the teachers

were not with the program.

[happyslug]

19. My Grandfather, when he was a teacher, followed the same policy

So what was hip for 1900 has come back in 2010.

My Grandfather quit teaching school when the Schools started to demand homework AND he had better offers so he left teaching while before WWI.

[Hello_Kitty]

29. My 3rd grade teacher didn't believe in homework.

She was an award-winning teacher who regularly had top test scores in her classes.

[FBaggins]

30. My problem...

...was that I didn't believe in homework but some of my teachers did. :-)

Seriously... there are plenty of times where homework is appropriate... even preferred. Plenty of subjects where repetition aides retention. Plenty of tasks (like reading a novel) where you need to sit in a quiet place for two or three hours and focus on the content. Plenty of need to learn to extend your thought process beyond the summary and develop the skills to write 8/10/12/whatever pages on a subject.

But it simply can't add up to multiple hours a day on an ongoing basis. It did in college when you have twenty credit hours worth of content vying for your study time... and it might in HS for a special project... but not all the time.

That's just make-work. It wastes the student's and parents' time and, what is more, the student usually knows it. This makes the parents wonder what, if anything, is going on in class... and the students associate school with a waste of their time.

If there isn't any knowledge/skill being transfered... that's a massive price to pay.

[Hello_Kitty]

31. Exactly.

Plus, making homework part of the grade distorts the picture of what is really being learned and mastered in the class. I had classes where turning in the silly homework assignments was as much as a third of the grade. So a kid who gets mediocre exam scores and can't write a coherent essay gets a B in the class because s/he dutifully turned in homework assignments.

[exboyfil]

23. Some classes I feel that it is essential to have homework

Math being the best example along with other problem solving classes (such as Science). Granted some kids do not need the reinforcement of homework, and I would be in favor of a two tier grading system (you get to decide at the beginning of the semester whether you want your homework graded or not - if not then the entire grade rests on time tested material for example). Homework grades are a nice equalizer for those students who do not perform as well on time tested material.

Actually I encourage my daughters to do extra problems in Math and Science to better prepare them for the time tested material. This is what we do in Engineering in college. I need to get to the point that the problem is second nature to perform at a high level on tests.

I agree many classes have what I consider B.S. make work with the best example being the Social Studies classes in my daughter's school system. She started out loving Economics, but it quickly turned to hate as the teacher continued to layer work onto the students. She has over a 100, but I have actually told her to punt some assignments just to concentrate on other subjects such as Algebra. Last year it was the same thing with World Studies. I am to the point that I am trying to convince her to getting onboard with online versions of these classes (assuming I can get the school district to approve).

[LWolf]

33. We cut drastically back on homework this year

in response to the new longer day that goes with the 4-day school week.

I think homework is important. At least, I think independent practice, where the teacher doesn't have to be present, is important, and I think that time to do so in a different setting, away from peers and with fewer people and distractions around, is essential.

Of course, too many students don't have a setting like that to work in after school. I'd like to see regular "study hall" periods added to the regular school day, and "homework" changed to "independent practice" to be done in study halls.

We've done a good job ensuring that our students don't get homework from too many teachers. Our 6th - 8th graders only get homework from 2 classes: math and language arts.

[adnelson60087]

34. Can I imagine my chemistry students' knowledge minus homework?

I remember homework as the point where I really saw what I did and did not understand. Homework and study habits were essential to my success in science, and I think that is probably true for most people. What is disturbing is that homework is being jettisoned since it LOWERS STUDENTS' GRADES as they do not have it done. That's just bad pedagogy.

[Jkid]

35. That's good news.

At the last year of elementary school all I did after school was homework. I never watched any tv, or video games, or any leisurely reading because my homework lasted through the night. All I did was after homework I ate dinner and went to bed. Unless its a major project, school children should not have any homework.

[SheilaT]

36. This is a homework story

not related to K-12, but I'll share it anyway.

Some years back I was taking Algebra Two at my local junior college, after having last taken a math class about thirty years earlier. I was so grateful that the teacher assigned as homework problems those ones which had the answers in the back. The first couple of weeks I was having trouble remembering the algebra One stuff I needed, despite the fact that I'd tested into the Algebra Two class. When I'd was completely unable to figure out how to work a problem, I could look at the answer and then work the problem backwards, to get to how it was done forwards.

After a few weeks I was able to do the problems without looking at the answers first, but if we'd been assigned the ones without the answers in the back of the book, I'd have had to drop the class. In the end I got a nice, solid B which I was very proud of.

[tonysam]

37. I did the same thing in a correspondence math class

Of course the correspondence classes are basically homework anyway. I, too, hadn't taken a math class in something like thirty years. I was surprised how well I did.