<p>My twins attend a Catholic elementary school now and it is not fun to do all this homework. I would love for them not to have it because it makes me nuts. </p>
<p>However, I do not believe it should be stopped. This is the time I can help them when they do not understand a concept. I would not know what they did not know unless I reviewed the homework with them. It gives me the chance to explain the lession in a way that I know they get the concept. My kids have class sizes that are 31 and 32 students. There is no way a teacher can make sure every child understood the lesson even in a small class let alone a large one. </p>
<p>This dumbing down has just got to stop. Yes poor kids fail but is it the school or societies fault? No, it the parents that are not doing their job of parenting. Many poor parents do not value education. How is stopping homework going to make them value it more?</p>
<p>I never minded homework when I was in school, but as a working parent I hate it. By the time I am settled at home to help, it is far too late for my elementary kid to be focused. My high school kid has numerous sleep issues due to homework.</p>
<p>I’d rather go to full school year/longer school year and no homework.</p>
<p>Don’t even get me started on summer homework.</p>
<p>And long term homework over the holidays has ruined many family events.</p>
<p>Cobrat, that is quite a slippery slope you just placed your feet on. Gamesmanship, social climbing, “getting there at all costs” including exploiting the system and cheating are some of the cancers that plague a true system of education.</p>
<p>I don’t doubt that this is true. But again, you are looking at the fever and not at the symptoms. We (collectively) have been forced to accept the failures of our education, and believe that without parental assistance in the SCHOOLING, the children would get hopelessly behind. Draw parallels to other services? Do you need to scout the web for diagnosing illnesses AFTER returning from your pediatrician? Do you go read law books after consulting your attorney? Do you jump in the kitchen to finish a meal at the restaurant? Why do we have to accept an incomplete and misguided education? </p>
<p>And, there is a way to curb the problems. Finland, for instance, has shown the way. The problems are correctable at the … school level. But it takes courage and determination; not abdicating our education’s decisions to the service providers.</p>
<p>In order to avoid having kids up all night to do homework in one night, my son’s school has the teachers post homework once a week (on the day of their choice) and the student can do it whenever they please as long as it is turned in electronically by the due date. This works very well for my son because his biggest problem was getting the homework out of his backpack into the teachers’ hands. Currently, one of his assignments is to make a video related to a municipal problem within NYC, discuss its history, offer possible solutions and particularly discuss the economic consequences of the problem and the possible solutions.</p>
<p>Cheating has also existed in the US systems of education since its founding. </p>
<p>What’s worse is how education accreditation is so decentralized and at times…so lax that some US states have a cottage industry of diploma mills where even your household pet could be awarded an MBA and PhD for merely paying several thousand dollars as one prosecutor found some years back. </p>
<p>This wouldn’t happen in most other First World or many other countries as education accreditation is taken much more seriously with laws cracking down on diploma mills have much more teeth to them. </p>
<p>Moreover, there’s a different cultural mindset such that there’s a reverse of the common US assumption that private colleges are assumed to be better. In many foreign countries…especially those in East Asia, it’s the public universities that are assumed to be better academically and private ones stigmatized because the latter often have the stigma we’d often reserve for the worst for-profit private colleges.</p>
<p>I like the proposal Sally_R mentions. My daughter is drowning in homework, and except for math, I don’t see where it’s necessary. Her honors history teacher is great, though. He says he wants to prepare them for college, and in college you don’t get homework. You study. And you have to be the one to discipline yourself to do that studying a bit at a time, so you’re ready for the test without cramming. He shows them how to take notes. He tells them what’s on the test. (You would think that was obvious, but it’s amazing how often tests have stuff on it that the kids have never seen before.) He makes suggestions about effective studying. He is actually helping them help themselves. I wish (and so does my daughter) that all her teachers were like that.</p>
<p>I don’t have a problem with a little homework - but I think the excessive repetition and busy work is pretty much useless except to destroy the home life.</p>
<p>Instead of 50 math problems, how about 20?</p>
<p>Instead of writing a one page essay in one night, how about making it due at the end of the week.</p>
<p>Must it really be so much in one night?</p>
<p>I think not. They’ve been in school all day. They have had recess and physical education removed, breaks shortened, lunch shortened, some have zero hour classes - and they’re all in school for 7-9 hours per day (not including EC’s). Must they REALLY have another 2-4 hours when they get home? Crazy.</p>
<p>Professors telling you what’s on the test wasn’t the norm at the college I attended nor those of most undergrads I’ve known. At the most, Profs will tell you what topics or stage in the syllabus the test would cover. </p>
<p>However, anything more than that would be regarded by many old-school Profs and even many HS teachers as “spoon feeding” that should have stopped by the end of high school or in the case of my HS teachers…at the end of middle school.</p>
<p>IME, first-year undergrads who expected Profs to tell them what will be on the test in greater detail than what I outlined above tended to be in for a rude surprise when they got their first exams back.</p>
<p>My son’s school says the “preparing for college” thing too. I don’t know about that in general, but they started teaching the kids to cite properly in their writing from the first week of school and they had a unit on academic honesty across all their classes at the same time. It was actually helpful. My other kids learned all that stuff a little here, a little there, a little by assumption and sometimes not at all.</p>
<p>And you know this because … ? Oh, I am sure that we could find stories of cheating by little Susan or Alex in victorian lit! But then, does the little guy writing an equation on his palm compares to what happens in the 21st century? </p>
<p>Did the cheating and use of mercenary “assistance” have such deep impact on our education as it does today, especially in terms of social climbing? </p>
<p>And, there is really no need to answer those questions!</p>
<p>Perhaps they mastered the concept of smart work! </p>
<p>It is interesting how we love to deride their extended vacations of five to seven weeks, short work weeks, great affinity for summer vacation, plenty of holidays for the public sector only, and rampant absenteism to boot. </p>
<p>Interesting how the above matches one profession the closest in the United States.</p>
<p>I have never been to an attorney so I can not comment on this service. I have received many a bad meals at restaurants and wished I had fixed the meal. Two different pediatricians have given me wrong information that could have killed my children. One had mono and we were told she had a sore throat. It took several months and visits to get the correct diagnosis. This daughter was a gymnast and could have injured herself. The other child almost died from Kawasaki disease but only because I took her three times into the doctors office with in days and insisted it was not just a virus that she got the treatment she needed. So I do my homework and make sure all the services I receive are done as best as they can be delivered. </p>
<p>I honestly do not think k-12 will be fixed until we stop making it mandatory. The problems with k-12 are the children. I bet if you went to every underperforming school in the system you will find horrible discipline problems. The reason my kids are in private school is because of the bad students in public. The public school teachers were fine teachers. My kids are in private because they were being hurt, and their items were being stolen. The public school teachers were spending more time disciplining children than actually teaching.</p>
<p>I now pay to have them in larger classes. There are 10 more students in their classes in private school than they had in public school. The private school does not have the discipline problems the public school had. The kids are learning because the teachers do not need to stop because some kid is being disruptive. My kids come home happy and not hurt anymore. They also don’t have to worry about their items being stolen. The private school also delivers this service for thousands less than the public school system spends on a child. Money is not going to solve public schools problems. </p>
<p>Can you imagine having to spend time on the wall at recess because someone stole your homework, journal, math blocks and all of your school supplies? My daughter had to spend many a days not having recess because someone took her stuff. They found most of the items in other kids bookbags. Not one thing was done to the offending kids. These kids were not poor kids that took her school items and they had their own. What they did have was a permission slip to do whatever they wanted. They had an IEP that allowed them to be untouchable. I had to go to the principle and convince her that the next time a boy hurt my kids I was going to the police. No kid should come home bloody because some other kid has problems at home. Oh and this was just 1st and 2nd grade. </p>
<p>No I believe in our compassion to educate all, we are now educating none. </p>
<p>I am also mad that I will spend tens of thousands of dollars for my kids education even before they hit college to keep them safe.</p>
<p>I chose to keep my kids in a PreK-8 parochial school with a lot of homework. You know what, when they and their classmates got k high school, they said it was easy and have been straight A students since. They are very diligent workers and have learned that sometimes we DO have to stay up for a big project, just as I do for my “9-5 job” sometimes. </p>
<p>But sometimes is was just TOO much. My D’s math teacher/team sponsor has them do a ton of work, but you know what. It works. They have every scenario worked and these kids are flying when they get to college. Again, a bit of hard work never hurt anyone.</p>
<p>Also … Someone above mentioned that “poor parents don’t value education”. I don’t know where you got that from. The issue is generally that lower income parents are working longer hours for minimum wage (or less) just to provide shelter and food. Sometimes, they may not be able to assist their children as readily due to language barriers or cultural misunderstandings. Like Mazlov’s hierarchy of primal needs, food and shelter are always concern #1. Education would come well after. </p>
<p>But, growing up in an immigrant community and a lower economic student, I can tell you that my parents as well as most of my classmates’ families were more supportive than any family you can imagine. They know that education is the key to a better future.</p>
<p>Like my grandmother told us when speaking of their exodus from Cuba, “The government too our homes, business, and family homes & Business. BUT, they can never take our education or thoughts. And knowledge is power.”</p>
<p>momof3greatgirls - I feel ya. If I was starting fresh, my kids would not go to public school K-8, no matter what. And 9-12 would be greatly truncated/altered to minimize time spent on campus. It’s not an education anymore. It’s babysitting and social services for children with behavioral issues and problems at home.</p>
<p>It has deteriorated so much since I was in school (or even just 10 years ago) that it’s shocking.</p>
<p>And again, this supports my point. What is your reaction when you get served a poor meal or receive bad advice from a doctor? You won’t go back or recommend the service to friends and family. And I am sure you won’t find the service acceptable.</p>
<p>However, we do not have that luxury with schools. The students do have to return, and changing teachers is difficult if even possible. Yet, the overall expectation is that OUTSIDE help is necessary to stay afloat.</p>
<p>Fwiw, I can relate to the issue of misdiagnosing mono and a sore throat and missing a potentially lethal bacteria. A lengthy stay in the ICU and barely surviving sepsis convinced me that the medical field still has limitations. I do, however, think that the parallel between doctors and teachers in terms of selection and preparation are not compelling.</p>
<p>Social climbing, I did not know that this is what we, the Asian uppity wanna-bes, are called in some penthouses of this social hierarchy. We should have known our lot in this hierarchy, and just stay down there.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, a violently disruptive kid doesn’t necessarily need to have an IEP to be “untouchable”. There were plenty of such kids at my childhood neighborhood’s local public schools…a reason why many parents like mine opted to send us to local Catholic schools and why I ultimately went to a NYC Specialized High School.* The latter was private/were given the latitude to have similar policies so they were free to be strict enough to be able to threaten expulsion for such behaviors and actually carry it out. A reason why when such students did act up, they were suspended for the first offense and if repeated, the rest of us never saw them again as they were booted out of the school. </p>
<p>Public schools on the other hand are hamstrung by having to take all students…including the violently disruptive because separating them out of the general school population “is so passe” since the '80s, parental pressures/laws/policies undercutting the teacher/school’s ability to maintain classroom discipline/standards, and the disturbing tendency to use teachers/schools as scapegoats for problems that really originated outside of the school such as crappy parenting. </p>
<p>This isn’t helped by some parents/public who feel the chaotic violently disruptive behavior is “how kids are” or “kids will be kids” as demonstrated by the parents of a convicted violent stalker who threatened and beat up a client’s granddaughter in a well-off Midwest suburban town. They and the idiotic local educrats who sided with them tried to get him back in the high school despite 2 successive judges ruling said convict was too dangerous to be allowed back into the general student population. :(</p>
<ul>
<li>Thankfully, the Specialized High Schools were allowed to kick students out for violent behaviors like private schools.</li>
</ul>