Broward County School Board sets homework limits

[Are_grits_groceries]

FORT LAUDERDALE - The Broward County School Board is giving a new assignment to teachers for the upcoming school year: Take care when you're handing out homework.

The School Board on Wednesday unanimously approved homework guidelines that urge teachers to assign academically challenging work while also being considerate about not assigning too much homework.

While the policy doesn't stipulate time limits for homework, the district's guidelines suggest 10 minutes of work for each grade level. A first grader's assignment would take about 10 minutes to finish, while a high school junior's total homework load would take 110 minutes.

Board member Phyllis Hope said she sympathizes with overloaded students, and the parents who help them. She watched her 12-year-old grandson Tuesday night, and spent four hours helping him with a project.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/community/news/fort_lauderdale/sfl-flbhomework0219sbfeb19,0,5805379.story

*sigh*

[rpannier]

1. If tests scores go down watch how quickly these same board members blame the teachers

I can't understand why anyone would want to be a teacher.

You're damned no matter what you do

[exboyfil]

3. A typical simplistic solution

Layering on homework is also not the answer. My youngest (5th grader) brings little homework home because she has time during the day to finish it (which I have mixed feelings about). Her motivation is that, once she gets her homework done, she gets to crack open her Harry Potter tome. It must be working because her ITBS scores this last time were great.

At the last conference we mentioned that we thought she should be bringing more home. He said that this was kind of funny because the parents before us thought their son was bringing too much home.

Teachers can't win.

Since my kid is high performing, I have turned to playing the game. My daughter will need a 90 on the ITBS in math in 6th grade to get the opportunity to take the test for placement into the track for Algebra in 8th grade. We will be spending the summer prepping for the ITBS test, and next Christmas prepping for the placement test. The sooner you take Algebra the better shot you are going to have at getting merit scholarships down the line.

My older daughter, a really high performer, got a 97 on the ITBS in Math, but did not get a 90 on the Algebra assessment test for placement into PreAlgebra in 7th grade. It turned out that half the concepts on the test had not even been covered yet by her teacher (her peers at another school were about 3 weeks ahead). Well she was able to jump this year (by passing the next assessment test) so she can take Algebra in 8th grade, but it required a good deal of intervention by me to ensure that this would happen). Of the five kids out of 40 who jumped four were from my daughter's elementary which is one of three approximately equivalent sized feeders to the Junior High.

Homework is not as important as understanding which assessment tests are coming up and what doors doing well on these tests will be opened or closed if your child does poorly. I am a firm believer of teaching the test at home. Prep all the way from elementary to High School - even one time getting behind your peers will mean lots of extra dollars out of your pocket later on. Be a mama or papa bear about your kids.

I can say this because my kids are creative and are wonderful readers and writers. They have this covered on their own.

[Mariana]

2. Good.

I believe that students need REASONABLE homework. However, I watched my stepdaughter slaving five hours or more, night after night after night doing homework when she was in high school. Much of it was ridiculous, time-consuming busywork that appeared to have been given just for the sake of making sure the kids had plenty of homework to do every single night.

I understand the teachers were in a rough spot, as they had plenty of parents demanding MORE homework for their kids if the kids came home with a B or C on the report card.

It was very stressful for the kids, and in the long run was counterproductive. Most of the kids, from what I gathered, coped in one of three ways: 1. Some simply refused to do it. 2. Some chose to take less demanding classes. 3. Some quit school as soon as they turned 16. Frankly, I didn't blame any of them. We handled it by giving my stepdaughter permission to blow off the BS busywork assignments and spend her time on those she really needed to do in order to learn the material well.

Good for Phyllis Hope.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

4. It's about time the school board set limits.

I graduated from high school in 1972.

Every teacher would assign homework with NO consideration for what you had to do for other classes.
They all think that their class is the MOST important class, and the ONLY one with homework.

The worst one I had was a high school English teacher who counted us absent, with UNEXCUSED absences, when we were gone on a school-sponsored Orchestra trip around the state.

What a witch :wtf:

Teachers like her made me hate English, even though I made A's in English and was in spelling bees.
However, Orchestra was the class that kept me from going completely crazy in high school.
I lived for classical music and I was in that world. I didn't care about the other classes.

[tkmorris]

5. I interact with Broward County students regularly

And I can say without any reservation that the one malady they do NOT suffer from is an excess of education. We could discuss the actual value of homework to a good education, or whether Broward County teachers are assigning an excess of it to replace actually teaching them while in class, but it surprises me that they would focus on this issue as opposed to so many others.

[MadBadger]

6. Its about TIme!

[anonymous171]

7. They should assign less homework but make it more challenging, IMHO.

[BlooInBloo]

8. (shrug) Doesn't matter. They can't end up much stupider than they're already doomed to end up.

[OmahaBlueDog]

9. I'm laughing because I remember when they were all pressured to give out more HW..

..because those kids in Japan were doing 5 hours per night.

We left Broward. In part, we were really unhappy that their main focus had become teaching kids to pass the FCAT, instead of actually teaching them to think.