Homework

[jsburbidge]

 There's an article in the Atlantic called "My Daughter's Homework is Killing Me", by a father who tries doing his daughter's homework (in parallel, not for her) for a week. And although I do have a good deal of sympathy with the view that (except in languages, where sheer duration of drill is important) homework can frequently be profitably reduced, I have to say that, whatever the burden on the daughter, the father comes across as a special snowflake. 

 

I mean, 40 minutes to reduce 11 polynomials to their simplest form? That's maybe 15 minutes. 20, tops, and quite plausibly 10, given the examples he showed. And similarly with the other examples he talked about. I don't know Spanish, and I can roughly parse the examples he gives. 

 

An adult is supposed to have mastered this stuff long ago. The difficulty in helping my daughter with her homework is not how much work it is but how much my extra generation's worth of experience lets me waltz through things like translations from Latin or chemical bonds or historical analysis, so that I have to slow down, massively, to be helpful.

 

I'm prepared to make the argument that, with some specific exceptions, homework should be minimal until well along in school. The exceptions are straightforward: drill for foreign  and classical languages (almost everyone needs this to succeed - unless they're in an immersion environment or are a linguistic genius); and background reading. (Much drill for math is oversold. It was a critical part in learning to do arithmetic in pre-calculator days, but that's no longer the thrust of the curriculum. And math problems are less effective as drill than sheer brute force memorization when it comes to the times tables. It's also worth noting that if the good students can finish their homework in class, it's not a matter of excessive homework but of student capacity.)

 

There is an argument to be made that learning to write essays requires a fair chunk of homework time. However, even an essay every couple of weeks shouldn't require more than a couple of hours at the length restrictions imposed at that level. An hour a week is not excessive homework. 

 

In university, an analogue to "homework" is essential, but (outside the sciences, with their lab work) the normal load is about 10-15 hours per week in class (2-3 hours per course, five courses a week). In high school the norm is 30 hours in class or so. (26 and 1/4 hours a week in my day) and the daily or near-daily classroom time provides much of the practice needed to keep on top of studies.

 

But it does no benefit to the argument for reducing homework to overstate the burden it provides, or even to treat it as an undifferentiated lump to be measured by time. By presenting things that should be straightforward as difficult the author's approach is not particularly helpful.

 

Its entirely possible, too, that his attention is misplaced: that what is needed in his particular context is curriculum reform for some subjects and, for others, the simple realisation that some subjects are intractable and will require work for those who don't possess the appropriate knack.