Reading this thread made me think of what my best experience was in school. I remember getting stressed at the sheer volume of homework when going to Knox county schools. I took AP Biology in HS (in Union County), and the first day of class the teacher said that, having known each of us from previous classes, he felt comfortable telling us not to worry about grades at all and that we would spend all of our time learning the material for the AP test. There would be tests and such, but we would have to retake them over and over again until we satisfactorily completed them (100%). We also spent a lot of time in pairs, teaching each other in preparation for these assessments. And I mean TEACHING, he was walking around the room and making sure we were. This was the first year that school offered AP Biology. Usually, no one passes an AP test unless an instructor has had a couple of years teaching it. 40 % of us passed, which is unheard of in a first offering. There is too much focus on grades, There is too much focus on the individual. In single room school houses, older kids helped teach younger kids. You don't master anything until you can teach it. These are things I now attempt to incorporate in college environments, especially in lab settings. Learning is an interactive experience. It isn't about pushing through material and repetitiously laboring through pages and pages of worksheets.
I rarely, if ever, gave homework. They did the work in class while I was watching. Sending a student home with ridiculous amounts of homework does no good.
As a history teacher, I rarely send out homework. I did in my first years and it was incredibly hard to get them to actually do the work, no matter the penalty. Plus, they cheat like hell. I decided to not fight that battle and come up with a way that still teaches them the material, so I do nearly everything in class, under my supervision and then move on. I found the worst thing to do is to simply add on a bunch of work for them to get thorough practice. I realized I hated doing 45 math problems when I understood the concept after 5, so why add on a bunch of crap for them to get annoyed with me and the class? I can say that I'm far from a perfect teacher, but I am continuously figuring out how to do things better. I've also found three things really have helped me; (1) having a sense of humor, (2) knowing your shit and (3) admitting when you don't know something. I get a lot of leeway from my students from those three factors.
Only classes where I had homework on a nightly basis were my Spanish classes, and that normally only took a few minutes.
My 5th grader gets all of his homework on Monday with a due date of Friday. He has a Reading/Vocabulary contract, math contract, and science contract to complete by Friday. It's probably a total of 6 hours of work spread out over a week. No other homework is given. Works out pretty well, imo. Allows him to get into a home routine at the beginning of the year. My 2nd grade daughter rarely ever has homework. She reads a book for the accelerated reader program every night but that's about it. My oldest, who is a junior, has quite a bit of homework on a weekly basis. He is taking AP History, AP English, AP Pre-Calc (they call it Pre-Calc, I think it's actually like Math 800) along with working 3 or 4 nights a week ... builds character. He says that AP English has been the hardest class he's ever taken in high school and that class constitutes most of his homework.
"Well, we were very impressed with your writing and communication skills, and your resume seems pretty solid, but I'm sorry. We just cannot hire someone with no kicker evasion skills."
Hard to see that happening. I'll be in Newport beach next weekend though. First time ever going to Cali. Sure gonna beat the shit out of the crappy weather we've been dealing with here.
Do you guys consider reading as homework? I think there should be more required reading and less of everything else. I don't know how they do it now, but when I was in grade school they somehow pushed me to hate reading. Now I'm an English major, and not because I couldn't do math or Econ. It kinda pisses me off that they somehow made me hate it when I was a kid.
