New York school eliminates homework - parents outraged

[Simon_Jester]

To be honest while I agree with S_J in principle I have to agree with Purple in spirit, some of the stuff they teach you in school is of decidedly limited utility in the real world. Not understanding vector calculus eventually cost me my Abitur (twice) and so far it had exactly zero effect on my life because very few people need vector calculus for anything. Same goes for history. The number of jobs you're applying to which require you to know who was POTUS in 1857 is not all that large.

Several key points.

One is that there is no way to tailor the school curriculum to what you will end up doing in life, without implementing a caste system so we know ten years in advance what you'll be doing for a living. Therefore, any curriculum that actually includes advanced information for which specialists will go "gee, thank you for teaching me this!"... That same curriculum is going to include advanced information you personally didn't need.

We can debate whether any particular piece of information is necessary, but that's still the key reality.

Meanwhile, the average twelve year old has NO IDEA what they'd be good at doing for a living, so we can't just track people into specialized high schools the way we specialize majors in college. It simply takes more than eight years of generalized education to produce a functioning adult... while at the same time, much of the information in the last four years of that generalized education MAY not be needed by any particular person.

It's a difficult balance to strike. Not requiring students to practice or research anything outside of school hours isn't going to help much.

I have no problem with kids getting a short 10-15 mins piece of homework, just to reinforce the day's lesson. It's the hour+ projects that I find objectionable. Heck, if teachers of different courses could coordinate things so, say, math homework incorporates vocabulary words and stuff from science class, all the better.

This is exactly the sort of thing we love to do but seldom if ever actually have time for. A really good curriculum office could take care of it for us... but good luck making that happen.

As I'm in no way a professional or relevant expert, I'm going to contain my commentary to my own experiences and extrapolations from them.

I suffered from an overly active bullshit sensor as a child...

You are to be commended on being self-aware enough to have, in retrospect, realized this.

A LOT of children of average or above average intelligence have this problem, especially in the teen years. They've acquired enough information about their world that ordinary adults no longer seem like mysterious godlike superintelligences, so they tend to assume that they now understand everything adults understand, and that the world really is as it appears to them.

Thing is, they're still adolescents. Their brains haven't finished growing in yet, and won't until they're 25. They just plain do not know at a gut level how to succeed in life, even if they're on broadly the correct path to reach that success.

So basically, they're smart enough to think of literally every reason under the sun to dismiss as "bullshit" anything they don't like. But they are utterly, flagrantly incapable of fully understanding the many reasons why apparently 'bullshit' things have to happen anyway.

A lot of people grow up convinced that everything they thought was bullshit as an adolescent really is bullshit. This is generally not true.

Now, while the end effect was a product of my own stubbornness, I can't help but look back on the system that my stubbornness rebelled against as a failure on some level. I can say, conclusively, that a non-zero number of students (at least one; again, I'm limiting myself to purely personal experiences to avoid overgeneralizing) in a large proportion of my classes (basically everything below trigonometry and calculus in math and excepting chemistry in sciences) were being punished with poor grades for, essentially, reacting like kids to having their free time wasted on useless makework.

Not having seen the assignments in question; I couldn't presume to comment precisely.

Ultimately, the system needs to be able to teach people who learn best in different ways and at different rates, but it needs to find a better way of doing that than just pitching every teaching method full-bore at every student and hoping. Overall teaching methods are a complex issue, and one I won't even try to address here as they're beyond the scope of the thread and, frankly, I'm not a teacher.

The biggest problem with this is the overburden of teaching at all tends to stop the professionals from teaching in more effective (but complicated) ways.

Ideally, you don't want to leave any part of the decision-making process in student hands, but you can't avoid that; they already have control of the decision whether to do the homework or not, so you can't avoid 'all zeros, then a 97 on a test' if that's what's going to happen. Maybe some sort of reactive weighting of a section's homework based on the test score for that chapter, weight it more lightly the higher the test score goes? I'm just spitballing at this point; all I know for sure is that one size literally cannot ever fit all, and modern/future IT systems might actually finally let us break out of that going forwards.

This actually may be an area where IT lets us have major breakthroughs in the next 10-15 years.

The hard part is making it work with the students' home lives and cultures- for example, with students who don't have a viable Internet connection at home, or with parents who don't quite grasp that they're supposed to check online to see if their students have homework (or cannot do so).

[Purple]

This is wrong.

Among the many things you learn during those years- not all of them, just SOME:

Than you must have gone to a different kind of school than I have.

-How to actually write, to represent your opinions at paragraph length.

Demonstrate where this actually happens. The only time I had to write any essay was in my primary language class. And there it was either mindless creativity on a made up subject (what I did last summer etc.), which as you might imagined turned into little children handing in loads of crap that the teachers were forced to grade based on grammar, because if it had been content we would all have failed. That or regurgitating literally analysis from a book without understanding what I wrote. And yes, you can find books that pre-analyze your literature for you. Neither taught me anything. I most certainly did not learn how to think or form opinions, things that make learning how to write about them necessary. I had to wait for uni for that.

-How to truly read, not in the sense of being able to recite what it says on the page, but to actually extract relevant facts from text.

Nope. You learn how to memorize certain parts that you feel are important and regurgitate them on demand. You get a test, you complete the test.

I got through almost all of my early education without even opening a book because I have a fantastic auditory memory and can memorize peoples words when I hear them. So I would just basically memorize the lectures I had and regurgitate them come test time like a tape recorder with a pencil attached.

-How to do calculations beyond the most rudimentary ones, and how to use your ability to do basic calculations in order to actually accomplish useful things.

I guess I'll give you that. At least if you are saying what I think you are. Basically the math you do in school boils down to learning how to do piles of made up pointless math problems that always, and I mean absolutely always boil down to the following process:
1. Memorize several formulas
2. Recognize which memorized formula to use based on the type of metaphor used in the text of the problem.*
3. Imply basic, and I mean very basic math to the formula.
4. Understand nothing, as you are basically a mechanical calculator
5. Repeat N times.

By the time you are done the only thing you have learned is how to memorize a formula and how to plug numbers into formulas. But I guess that can be an useful skill. It's a skill you can (and I did) pick up in grade 1 with basic math though. That's when you first meat A + B = C, here are A and B, find C. You don't need hours of problems for years to teach children how to solve those.

*For example in college level statistics you have problems where two young people need to meat for a date, so they need to arrive at a buss stop within X hours of one another. That kind is always geometrical probability. That's how you recognize them. I do not want to do it this way. And I don't these days because I actually wanted to learn how statistics work. But that's the easy way to do it. And when you present children with an easy way out of something they do not care about they will take it. And it is up to you, the teacher to make them understand why they shouldn't. Which you can't if you are just making them repeat the same problem with different numbers 1000 times.

And that's really a major part of it. Instead of making people do a problem until they understand the subject they make them do way too much in an effort to ensure even the most stupid, untalented kid is going to get it. So for everyone above the idiot line it's 10 times more work than you need. And when you couple that with just not caring you get resentment. During my schooling I always felt that homework was either pointless busy work or a crutch for the intellectually disabled who needed to do something 1000 times before they got it. One thing I always wanted to do was stand up to my math teacher and say: "Listen up lady. I understood your problem when you first solved it for us on the blackboard. So GTFO with your pointless repetition. And if you don't believe me just give me a test. And when I solve it leave me the F alone."

-Numerous fundamental scientific facts that are necessary to have even the most rudimentary understanding of technology or the world around you.

Nope. You don't really learn any of those as you are not taught to understand and think about them. Instead of concepts to understand they are presented as facts to memorize. So you do. And than you forget.

-The basic outlines of the history of your own country and society, and the world in general, the laws under which you live and the institutions governing them.

I learned more from Wikipedia than I did from my entire education. Because when I go to Wikipedia you can organically walk through the things and explore. Where as in class you have to mindlessly memorize and regurgitate dates.


Personally I am in the same position as White Haven and NoXion. I was always the smart kid who basically newer did any of my homework but at the same times loved to explore science, read books and generally do smart things. When I got the internet and ran afoul of Wikipedia that basically exploded. And now I am completing an university degree where I have projects that make me work every waking hour for weeks and I am not only succeeding but loving it.

[NoXion]

I didn't get homework in primary school, and when I got to secondary school and was assigned homework my reaction was "fuck that shit!" and I didn't do any of it. My parents didn't have their work follow them home, so my position was and still is that school has no right to take up my personal time outside of lessons. Yet later on in life I still managed to complete not one but two maths-heavy distance learning courses on physical science from the Open University.

Lucky boy.

Would it be appropriate for me to counter with half a dozen anecdotes about people who didn't do their homework in high school and turned into ne'er-do-wells. We've already got one such anecdote on this thread, if you want me to research more I could try.

It wasn't luck you smarmy shit, I actually took the effort to apply myself. How many of those ne'er-do-wells you know of actually did that? And if they did, what else was it that prevented them from achieving their goals?

So this notion that one has to be forced into pointless bullshit make-work in order to be prepared for working at higher academic levels is frankly complete bullshit in my experience. Purple is right; there's a whole world of difference when one is doing something hard but which is nonetheless something one wants to do. It was hard work but I succeeded because I was willing to put the required effort in, not because I had the threat of punishment over my head if I didn't.

Quite a lot of people never pick up the knack of doing it at all, even when they want to do it. Or think they want to do it. They say "yeah, I want my business to succeed," then they don't put in the time and effort to make it work. Or they say "yeah, I want a college diploma," and again don't put in the time and effort. Or they say "yeah, I'd like to be able to do X," then they don't do any research about how to do X, just sort of fart around and give up on their goals (or fail hilariously).

You are fortunate, in that you managed to avoid becoming an ignorant slacker, despite not getting the traditional method of training in how to avoid becoming one.

The words you use betray your thinking; you appear to believe there is a single "traditional method of training" that should be applied across the board - in this case, being forced to do bullshit homework during adolescence - to avoid someone becoming an "ignorant slacker". Whereas I'm more inclined to think that people are more willing to do things if they are actually invested in the activity somehow. Squealing about anecdotes is pointless because "ignorant slackers" are generated even under your precious "forced homework for everyone" regime.

Yes, there will always be people who need some kind of externally structured environment through which they can achieve their goals - they need a tutor or someone similar to give them direction and encouragement - but this is precisely what bullshit homework does not provide - instead it effectively says, "here's a load of crap you have to do on pain of punishment". This doesn't teach a love of study and independent learning, it instead teaches that life contains power-tripping fuckwits you can either knuckle under to, or do as I did which is to defy them and find one's own path.

This is wrong.

Among the many things you learn during those years- not all of them, just SOME:

-How to actually write, to represent your opinions at paragraph length.
-How to truly read, not in the sense of being able to recite what it says on the page, but to actually extract relevant facts from text.
-How to do calculations beyond the most rudimentary ones, and how to use your ability to do basic calculations in order to actually accomplish useful things.
-Numerous fundamental scientific facts that are necessary to have even the most rudimentary understanding of technology or the world around you.
-The basic outlines of the history of your own country and society, and the world in general, the laws under which you live and the institutions governing them.

And you seriously think all this is makework?

This is... so obviously wrong it's sad.

Those examples you give are not makework, but if such things are so damn important then why not teach them in class? You know, the time of the day that's actually been put aside for that very purpose, rather than at home with it's practically endless variety of distractions and diversions? The common excuse I hear is that there is not enough time during the schoolday to do that, but if that's really the case then either scholastic methods needs improving or there is some significant dead weight in the curriculum. Possibly both.

[Zaune]

Now, what happens when you go to college? For one, the amount of time you spend in a classroom and exposed to your teachers drops off by about a factor of two or three. For another, the work gets far more complicated... even as you're having to do a lot of the actual work of coming to understand the material on your own time. As you're having to sweat over intricate, tricky problems and come up with thorough analyses of complex subjects on your own, with little or no supervision.

As you are, in short, being expected to learn and work like an adult professional, without a caretaker constantly peering over your shoulder and reminding you to stay on task every five minutes.

The trouble is, the first time I was ever asked to come up with a thorough analysis of a complex problem on my own was when I was in my last two years of high school, after a majority of the students had already left for trade school or employment. Everything before that was just an extension of what we'd been doing in class; "read this section of the textbook and answer these five questions based on what you've just learned."

[Thanas]

Zaune I would argue that is more a problem of the teacher/curriculum.

[Zaune]

So would I, frankly. If there's one thing I took away from my own history classes it's that the actual content is less important than the habits of thought you pick up while studying it. I remember very little about "The Workhouse System in England, 1834-1850" or "The Unification of Italy" from A-Level History but I do remember the difference between primary and secondary sources and how to recognise biased reporting of events.

[Simon_Jester]

It wasn't luck you smarmy shit, I actually took the effort to apply myself. How many of those ne'er-do-wells you know of actually did that? And if they did, what else was it that prevented them from achieving their goals?

Let me be more precise. You won the "self-motivation" lottery. Other people have to learn self-motivation, or never acquire it at all.

There is a dearth of reliable mechanisms for taking a child who is not self-motivated to do the work necessary to master a concept, and teach them that motivation. It's not that the school doesn't care about teaching this, it's that we're genuinely having trouble figuring out how because classically that's supposed to be the parent's job, and classically we're supposed to just flunk the kids who never get the hang of it at all.

Thing is, that only works if you're prepared to accept, oh, a 70-80% high school graduation rate in your society. Most people aren't, today. So research is ongoing... and in all honesty, seriously expecting students to work long and hard at various projects and problem sets is the best we've come up with to date. At least to my knowledge.

The words you use betray your thinking; you appear to believe there is a single "traditional method of training" that should be applied across the board - in this case, being forced to do bullshit homework during adolescence - to avoid someone becoming an "ignorant slacker". Whereas I'm more inclined to think that people are more willing to do things if they are actually invested in the activity somehow. Squealing about anecdotes is pointless because "ignorant slackers" are generated even under your precious "forced homework for everyone" regime.

The point is not that there is a single way that works for everyone; it doesn't. The point is that this is genuinely the best I know of.

If you know a way to custom-tailor schooling for every child so every child will take an interest in every thing and yet somehow when the smoke clears they all learned the stuff the state mandates that they learn... great! Hopefully it can be done on the same budget we now have, because otherwise it won't get approved. But I'd love to see it even if it does turn out to be four times as expensive as what we're doing now.

Yes, there will always be people who need some kind of externally structured environment through which they can achieve their goals - they need a tutor or someone similar to give them direction and encouragement - but this is precisely what bullshit homework does not provide - instead it effectively says, "here's a load of crap you have to do on pain of punishment". This doesn't teach a love of study and independent learning, it instead teaches that life contains power-tripping fuckwits you can either knuckle under to, or do as I did which is to defy them and find one's own path.

I don't know about anyone else but I really never do assign homework as a power trip. I assign it because I genuinely think they need the practice.

Does that make me just another fuckwit?

Those examples you give are not makework, but if such things are so damn important then why not teach them in class? You know, the time of the day that's actually been put aside for that very purpose, rather than at home with it's practically endless variety of distractions and diversions? The common excuse I hear is that there is not enough time during the schoolday to do that, but if that's really the case then either scholastic methods needs improving or there is some significant dead weight in the curriculum. Possibly both.

I was responding to Purple's claim that (in essence) students don't learn anything useful between the fourth and eighth grades. They do, or at least they're supposed to.

If you look at what schools actually explicitly state they are trying to accomplish, you will find that they are trying to teach these things both inside and outside of class, with the homework being viewed as a single component of a larger program of instruction.

---

This is wrong.

Among the many things you learn during those years- not all of them, just SOME:...

Than you must have gone to a different kind of school than I have.

You're claiming you went to a school which taught essentially nothing between the fourth and eighth grades.

Could you please back this up by telling me where and roughly when this happened? Because a system that idiotically dysfunctional should be totally failing to produce anyone competent; functional literacy rates would plummet and so on. It should show up in international test results, if your school system was as bad as you claim it was.

-How to actually write, to represent your opinions at paragraph length.

Demonstrate where this actually happens. The only time I had to write any essay was in my primary language class. And there it was either mindless creativity on a made up subject (what I did last summer etc.), which as you might imagined turned into little children handing in loads of crap that the teachers were forced to grade based on grammar, because if it had been content we would all have failed. That or regurgitating literally analysis from a book without understanding what I wrote. And yes, you can find books that pre-analyze your literature for you. Neither taught me anything. I most certainly did not learn how to think or form opinions, things that make learning how to write about them necessary. I had to wait for uni for that.

Perhaps you did not learn everything they were hoping that you would learn, then...

-How to truly read, not in the sense of being able to recite what it says on the page, but to actually extract relevant facts from text.

Nope. You learn how to memorize certain parts that you feel are important and regurgitate them on demand. You get a test, you complete the test.

That's odd; my curriculum wasn't that different from the average American in my school district's, and America isn't a world leader on these issues... and yet I learned how to do these things during that period of time.

what shithole country did you go to school in?

I got through almost all of my early education without even opening a book because I have a fantastic auditory memory and can memorize peoples words when I hear them. So I would just basically memorize the lectures I had and regurgitate them come test time like a tape recorder with a pencil attached.

You were definitely not learning what you should have been learning- because you came up with a childish-clever way to avoid having to do what would have been helpful to you, and your teachers failed to realize you were doing it.

-How to do calculations beyond the most rudimentary ones, and how to use your ability to do basic calculations in order to actually accomplish useful things.

I guess I'll give you that. At least if you are saying what I think you are. Basically the math you do in school boils down to learning how to do piles of made up pointless math problems that always, and I mean absolutely always boil down to the following process:
1. Memorize several formulas
2. Recognize which memorized formula to use based on the type of metaphor used in the text of the problem.*
3. Imply basic, and I mean very basic math to the formula.
4. Understand nothing, as you are basically a mechanical calculator
5. Repeat N times.

By the time you are done the only thing you have learned is how to memorize a formula and how to plug numbers into formulas. But I guess that can be an useful skill. It's a skill you can (and I did) pick up in grade 1 with basic math though. That's when you first meat A + B = C, here are A and B, find C. You don't need hours of problems for years to teach children how to solve those.

You very much need to teach the child how to look at a written description of a problem or situation and know which formula to use. Is this an A + B = C problem, or an A * C = B problem, or an A / B + C = D problem?

There is a great deal of ongoing work in how to teach students to do this; so far all the success we have comes from students who did thrive on practicing by reading large numbers of word problems that required them to use a diverse set of different skills.

It's only stupid if you give the kids ten problems that are all solved by A * B = C, rather than mixing them up so that some are A * B = C, and some are A * C = B, and some are C * B = A, and so on.

And that's really a major part of it. Instead of making people do a problem until they understand the subject they make them do way too much in an effort to ensure even the most stupid, untalented kid is going to get it. So for everyone above the idiot line it's 10 times more work than you need. And when you couple that with just not caring you get resentment. During my schooling I always felt that homework was either pointless busy work or a crutch for the intellectually disabled who needed to do something 1000 times before they got it. One thing I always wanted to do was stand up to my math teacher and say: "Listen up lady. I understood your problem when you first solved it for us on the blackboard. So GTFO with your pointless repetition. And if you don't believe me just give me a test. And when I solve it leave me the F alone."

I have kids who develop that kind of attitude with me. When I give them actual, serious tests intended to judge whether or not they know the material to the level the state expects... most of whom fail in ways that would be hilarious... if only I didn't care.

-Numerous fundamental scientific facts that are necessary to have even the most rudimentary understanding of technology or the world around you.

Nope. You don't really learn any of those as you are not taught to understand and think about them. Instead of concepts to understand they are presented as facts to memorize. So you do. And than you forget.

I did, where some of my classmates didn't. I think maybe I was just paying more attention than them... or you.

Please do not blame the schools for the consequences of your own overactive bullshit detector telling you to do the minimum necessary in order to bypass the system your school put in place to detect whether you were learning anything.

-The basic outlines of the history of your own country and society, and the world in general, the laws under which you live and the institutions governing them.

I learned more from Wikipedia than I did from my entire education. Because when I go to Wikipedia you can organically walk through the things and explore. Where as in class you have to mindlessly memorize and regurgitate dates.

Either you attended a comically primitive school system, you attended school long before the invention of Wikipedia, or you don't actually remember your own middle school curriculum and are just making shit up about "it's just memorizing dates," which people have continued to assert long after it ceased to be true.

[aerius]

-Numerous fundamental scientific facts that are necessary to have even the most rudimentary understanding of technology or the world around you.

Nope. You don't really learn any of those as you are not taught to understand and think about them. Instead of concepts to understand they are presented as facts to memorize. So you do. And than you forget.

Must've gone to a shitty school then. By the time I finished high school I could calculate how much uranium is needed to keep the lights on in my city for a year. Or how far an octopus will slide on the ice if it's hit by a hockey puck (Detroit Red Wings fans will know all about this). Along with the minimum stopping distance of a vehicle and why the 1 second per 10mph rule for yellow lights at an intersection exists. Also fun shit like redox reactions and why a chemical battery will never have the energy density of hydrocarbon fuels. And what materials I can use to make a battery in the first place, and how much voltage I'll get out of it. Or how much wood I need to burn to boil a litre of water. They taught us how to figure out all the above by the time I was old enough to vote.

[Purple]

-Numerous fundamental scientific facts that are necessary to have even the most rudimentary understanding of technology or the world around you.

Nope. You don't really learn any of those as you are not taught to understand and think about them. Instead of concepts to understand they are presented as facts to memorize. So you do. And than you forget.

Must've gone to a shitty school then. By the time I finished high school I could calculate how much uranium is needed to keep the lights on in my city for a year. Or how far an octopus will slide on the ice if it's hit by a hockey puck (Detroit Red Wings fans will know all about this). Along with the minimum stopping distance of a vehicle and why the 1 second per 10mph rule for yellow lights at an intersection exists. Also fun shit like redox reactions and why a chemical battery will never have the energy density of hydrocarbon fuels. And what materials I can use to make a battery in the first place, and how much voltage I'll get out of it. Or how much wood I need to burn to boil a litre of water. They taught us how to figure out all the above by the time I was old enough to vote.

The point is that even though I could do all of these, I was not made to care. So the moment the punishment of grading was removed so was any need to retain that knowledge.

[Channel72]

Doing homework assignments (such as essays for English or History class) largely taught me how to write - or at least write in a fashion that doesn't completely suck.

I really don't see the argument for eliminating homework entirely. A large part of learning involves exercising your mind via self-directed work - solving math equations or writing essays, by yourself - unsupervised. It turns out most professional careers which don't entirely fucking suck are similar. In my own career I do a lot of work-related problem solving on my own time, at home, or during my off hours - because I want to and I get a lot done that way. Being assigned homework as a student at least prepares you for this sort of thing.

[Flagg]

In 9th grade I decided not to do homework period. I got by on C's and D's. When I'm at school is when I should learn and do work, not at 1am on a Tuesday morning writing a 5 page essay on a book that we had to read over the weekend (HA! Like that happened.) for English, 20 pages of new algebra shit I still can't do (despite being tutored and really trying) nor have ever needed to for Math, and last but not least, write a 3 page biography of a randomly assigned important historical American person with no material on them given to us, we were to go to the library and check out books on our person. I got Sacagawea. I don't know that I entirely believe this person existed. That was for History. It was the last time I ever did a homework assignment.

So I'm 100% behind this. Make it national.

So... some time in the middle of high school, you decided to stop learning new mathematics and seeking applications for it, to not actually learn how to research a previously unknown topic because if you don't already know what it is it can't be very important, and to not try to practice picking up information from text quickly and representing it accurately on the fly.

Gee, I wonder what kind of lifestyle the average person can expect if they adopt that as their willfully-ignorant-and-slacking stance toward life...

It's almost like I got a GED with a score in the high 90's and proceeded to enroll in community college at the age of 16 to get the college credits needed in 3 classes a weekday for 6 months before my body started betraying me which scuttled any plans for future education due to sudden months long bouts of illness. Oh, but you know jack shit about me and can die slowly in a fire.
Also, that you ignored the fact that I was tutored in math and gave it my all and still failed to grasp it, which doesn't surprise me because you've always been a dishonest cunt, makes me question if you even read my post. I also excelled at history, English, and science, at least until the math became a major part of the course because in the early 2000's I was diagnosed with a learning disorder regarding mathematics that hadn't been picked up by my incompetent high school teachers and administrators.
Also, the fact that I was gainfully employed in several fields which required little to no supervision puts your bullshit into serious question. I'm sure I'd be in middle management for security consulting by now if I wasn't on disability.

I guess what I'm getting at is that considering the biological, social, and all around stress being in high school entails without the added pressure of being sent home with a mountain of extra work that keeps you up until 2am every single night is completely and utterly unreasonable and that maybe your entire life at that age shouldn't revolve around nothing but school. But you're essentially a robot of stupid and I wouldn't expect a non-human to understand such things.

[Flagg]

To be honest while I agree with S_J in principle I have to agree with Purple in spirit, some of the stuff they teach you in school is of decidedly limited utility in the real world. Not understanding vector calculus eventually cost me my Abitur (twice) and so far it had exactly zero effect on my life because very few people need vector calculus for anything. Same goes for history. The number of jobs you're applying to which require you to know who was POTUS in 1857 is not all that large.

James Buchanan, worst PotUS of all time, in case you were curious. (Technically speaking, Franklin Pierce was finishing up his term until inauguration in March, but Buchanan held the office for most of the year.)

My story is much the same as White Haven's. When 10th grade/sophomore year rolled around they made us take the pSAT like they do, and I aced it. When I got called into the principal's office afterward I had no idea what the hell I'd done this time, only to find out he wanted to grill me on why I had a C in English class but a perfect 800 on the English portion of the SAT prep test. The answer? High school English classes are nonsense makework and I knew it. I could already write essays, reviews, and persuasive papers backwards, forwards, and in my sleep, and had a command of the language more advanced than my teacher's, so I felt no need to do said nonsense makework about subjects I didn't give two shits about.

This is it exactly. As far as I'm concerned a teacher who needs to assign more than one homework assignment a week that takes an average of over 45 minutes to complete is a shitty teacher and should look into getting into a profession more suited to them. Like mowing lawns or working at Walmart.

[Simon_Jester]

Doing homework assignments (such as essays for English or History class) largely taught me how to write - or at least write in a fashion that doesn't completely suck.

I really don't see the argument for eliminating homework entirely. A large part of learning involves exercising your mind via self-directed work - solving math equations or writing essays, by yourself - unsupervised. It turns out most professional careers which don't entirely fucking suck are similar. In my own career I do a lot of work-related problem solving on my own time, at home, or during my off hours - because I want to and I get a lot done that way. Being assigned homework as a student at least prepares you for this sort of thing.

This is kind of my point.

We've got a barrage of people here who are upset that their teachers required them to exercise their minds outside of the classroom, while simultaneously talking up how well and effectively they exercised their own minds on their own.

When I hear this, I find it a lot easier to believe "this guy had a hyperactive sense of I'm-being-cheated-out-of-my-free-time as a kid" than to believe "essentially every teacher this guy ever had was a drooling sub-moron who assigned homework just for the power trip."

Which is more likely, that dozens of adults were on average that incompetent? Or that one teenager had an exaggerated sense of grievance? You know, like the one virtually every teenager in the developed world seems to have?

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

This is kind of my point.

We've got a barrage of people here who are upset that their teachers required them to exercise their minds outside of the classroom, while simultaneously talking up how well and effectively they exercised their own minds on their own.

When I hear this, I find it a lot easier to believe "this guy had a hyperactive sense of I'm-being-cheated-out-of-my-free-time as a kid" than to believe "essentially every teacher this guy ever had was a drooling sub-moron who assigned homework just for the power trip."

Which is more likely, that dozens of adults were on average that incompetent? Or that one teenager had an exaggerated sense of grievance? You know, like the one virtually every teenager in the developed world seems to have?

It's a culture thing. My High School etc. equivalent swamped me with so much homework and tests that I could hardly breathe, but being Asian, one just had to either suck it up and keep pace or just drown and die. Take your pick. There are always people who end up in the latter option, not entirely by choice either.

[Simon_Jester]

If you're actually being given four or six hours of homework a day, you have grounds to complain- but that is pretty sharply at odds with what I see from most US (and Western-in-general) schools. This is why I asked Purple where he went to school, not that he ever bothered to answer.

When I hear from someone who went to American schools in the past few decades "yeah, they gave us like seven hours of homework a night and I was up until two in the morning doing it every night," my nonsense alarm rings.

[Purple]

If you're actually being given four or six hours of homework a day, you have grounds to complain- but that is pretty sharply at odds with what I see from most US (and Western-in-general) schools. This is why I asked Purple where he went to school, not that he ever bothered to answer.

I wonder why anyone would refuse to answer personal questions that might lead to his identity and location online.

This said, reading your posts here and in other teaching related threads I must say that if I were a parent you would be the last person I'd want teaching my children. It's nothing personal but your attitude is some times just WTF. A lot of times your basic approach is to lift your hands up in the air and go: "Well this system sucks/works but that's the system we have." And you just give up. Like I remember in the bullying thread where you flat out said that teachers can't possibly control all the children. WTF? That's your job. If you can't do it, don't be a teacher. And don't give me any of that "oh but I have to pay my bills and not starve" talk. You ain't any more special than me or anyone else. And the world can do just fine with all of us here dying of starvation. It can't do without future generations getting a good education. I just had to get that one off my chest. It's been on there since the bullying thread.

[Terralthra]

If you want teachers to control the attitudes and behavior of all of the children in the classroom at all times, perhaps you should be willing to pay teachers a salary commensurate with babysitting 24-30 children and teaching them, too. As a (fairly young) college professor, I make between $60-$80 per class-hour just to teach, with no babysitting whatsoever: if a student's behavior is inappropriate, I simply tell them to leave the classroom. Now, that's college-level teaching, and Simon teaches secondary school, so maybe there's a bit of a pay-cut there, so we'll figure what, $45/hr?

Then let's see, that's 27 (mean) children times $10/hour per kid (average baby-sitting wage) makes $270 + $45 for teaching them stuff and Simon would get $315/hr. 6 hour school day, 180 school days per year. $315*6*180, making for a gross yearly income of $340,200 per year. That's...about 6 times what the average high school teacher makes in the US.

I guarantee that if you offer teachers $350k/year salaries, you will get plenty of people with boundless energy and enthusiasm for preventing bullying. Until and unless you're willing to spend that kind of cash, no, it's not the teachers' jobs to make students not act like little sociopaths. That's parents' jobs.

[Starglider]

Annecdotal personal evidence is even more useless than usual when talking about education. Your memory of your personal school experience is highly subjective, self-edited and (typically) distorted. Parents watching their children go through school are a bit more rational but obviously still biased and looking at a very small sample.

[LaCroix]

Contrast that with primary school where it's just busy work pushed on you for reasons you do not understand in fields you do not care about and are likely not talented in and are most likely not going to pursue in your life.

What? In primary school my homework consisted mostly of learning how to write properly and how to do basic maths. I don't see why homework in that are things that one is not going to pursue in his life. Primary school gives the foundation for high school, you better believe students need that.

Perhaps I am confusing my terminology than. English is not my first language.
Put simple I am referring to the part of your education after grades 1-3 (during which you pick up basic skills such as reading, math etc.) and up until what Wikipedia tells me you in Germany would refer to as the 9th grade. So basically the period where the student is first exposed to a myriad of subjects such as Geography, Chemistry, Physics etc, most of whom will due to the inherent nature of human specialization only be relevant when trying to solve crossword puzzles. It is in that period 4-9 that homework is just busy work with no engagement for the student. For it's purpose is, or at least should be to expose the students to just enough of each field so that they can chose where to specialize toward. Not to bury him in labor.

Just to clear this up - at least in Austria, but probably in Germany, too - 'side subjects' (Geography, chemistry, physics, etc) never give any homework. They are completely taught during school hours. The only courses giving homework are the various language classes and math. And in case of higher "berufsbildende" schools - the main focus of the school (engineering, business) might have you electrotecnis or accounting homework, but these schools are basically mini-universities in their trade, to the point you can skip one or two semesters of courseload in uni if you enrol with such an diploma.

[Flagg]

Which is more likely, that dozens of adults were on average that incompetent? Or that one teenager had an exaggerated sense of grievance? You know, like the one virtually every teenager in the developed world seems to have?

You'd be surprised how fucking stupid and petty many teachers can be without any consequence whatsoever. Throughout my entire school career starting in kindergarten I was subject to physical, emotional, and verbal abuse by teachers, their assistants, and especially head administration.
Not to mention the outright lies told to my mother who had no choice but to believe them and punish me for things I never did, including "lying about a teacher stabbing me in the scalp with a pencil during a fieldtrip" which was witnessed by several students who were all afraid to tell the principal what they actually saw (likely because the principal wasn't going to see one of his teachers brought up on charges of child abuse under his incompetent watch) and suffering verbal barbs from the bitch essentially twisting the knife throughout the rest of the fifth grade. The reason I was stabbed? She demanded everyone be quiet (no one was, in fact most of the class was talking to each other like usual) while we waited for an orchestra to perform (something I had been looking forward to since it was announced and insisted on going to school even though we had the option to not attend that day) and the kid next to me asked me something I don't remember in his normal tone of voice and leaned over and kind of talk/whispered ala Kiefer on '24' an answer and suddenly this sharp pain erupted in the center of my scalp and when I turned around I saw the asshole with pencil held in a fist with the point facing down and I was in too much shock to ask her why, but I didn't have to bother because she snarled at me "I TOLD YOU TO BE QUIET!" A few kids laughed, but most who saw it were just slack jawed. Then as quick as the monstrous face emerged, it disappeared into a sweet smile in all but her eyes and she adjusted the pencil in her hand to again be able to write on her clipboard. Actually, looking back I guess I was lucky. She could have hit me with the wooden clipboard.

Then there was my second grade teacher who allowed my classmates to essentially do whatever the fuck they wanted to do to me (which was quite a bit since I was the new kid as we'd just moved from North Palm Beach and the only good teacher I ever had) because "I didn't pay attention in class" despite the fact that I got all A's except for a B in math. I'd have made the honor roll but every time I was ambushed by 3 or 4 assholes and did what every adult constantly told me to do instead of fighting back, tell my teacher, she would say it was my word against theirs and there were more of them so I was obviously lying despite my torn shirts and broken glasses so I would get sent to the principal (same asshole) for "instigating". Oh, and then there was how I learned I was allergic to wasp stings! We were going back to the trailer that passed for a classroom and walking up the wooden steps that had no backing when a kid in front of me dropped a quarter and it landed on the step at about the same time my foot did and I guess it got kicked under the staircase. Rather than not be a giant bitch and accept it for the accident that it was and not freak out at me, she made me crawl under the staircase on my hands and knees to retrieve it. After picking up the quarter and starting to back out from under the stairs I got stung in the spot in your ear right before the canal. When I started screaming and crying in pain (I was she told me not to be a crybaby and to get my ass inside the tornado deathtrap classroom. I begged her for 5 minutes to go to the nurse. When kids next to me noticed my face was turning bright red and told her she finally took upon the laborious task of picking up and handing me the 12 inch piece of wood with "Hall pass [classroom number]" on it and luckily the school had epi-pens and the "nurse" knew how to use them (school "nurses" were just parents that volunteered and had a CPR and first aid card which I attained in a single 1 hour course for my security job) or EMT's would have been the ones saving my fucking life over an accident involving 25 cents.

The worst was 4th grade where I had a Southern Baptist Christian Fundamentalist who essentially refused to teach evolution without also saying it was all lies from Satan and then proceeded to tell us about Genesis and "lovingly" called the black male pupils her "Lil' Sambos". When I questioned why the biblical stuff wasn't in the textbook that was when she decided I needed "special treatment" and went full bore YEC psycho on me for the rest of the year heaping verbal abuse at me whenever given the chance. There was also the time she decided she needed to put me in "detention" (despite the fact she had no such authority and there was no detention for elementary school students in that counties school district) and physically prevented me from leaving the classroom at the end of the day, therefore making me miss the daycare van. After an hour she said I could go home as she was leaving despite the fact that she knew that I was picked up by daycare and I had nowhere to go. The result of this was me having to go to the locked administration building and pound on the door until a deeply annoyed dipshit secretary reluctantly allowed me to use her stations phone to call my mother at work so she could leave work in the middle of her shift and come pick me up. It was decided that my mother would meet the woman whose name I fully remember but whom shall only be referred to as the Bible Thumping Cunt. Apparently the BTCunt lied and said I never told her I was in daycare and had to go to the van before they left and never laid a finger on me (the bruises and nail indentations on both upper arms proved this a lie and my mother called BTCunt on it. That's when BTCunt told her my only problem was that I hadn't accepted Jesus into my heart. At that point my mother went to the Principal (same as grade 5) and told him what had been going on and showed him the marks on my arms. He dismissed them suggesting I had somehow engineered them, either by myself or by having a friend do it and said that he really didn't care about BTCunt blatantly raping the First Amendment because "she has tenure, everyone likes her, and we lived in a God Fearing community". He also refused to allow me to change classes as he "felt her style of discipline was good for me". Since the county had no right of school choice at the time I was essentially fucked until the end of the school year and the verbal abuse just got worse until the last day of school when I got some measure of satisfaction in leaving a drawing of a pentagram with the words "Lucifer is Lord" written backwards on the page of the New Testament with John 3:16 on it that I ripped out of the largest bible I could afford in K-Mart on BTCunts desk. She knew I did it, but she had no idea I knew that she knew and when confronted on the first day of the wonderful 5th grade, I asked her who John three hundred and sixteen was. We never spoke again. But I did just happen upon her obituary one day about 16 years ago. I have it on my fridge held up with a "Darwin Fish".

I'm not going to get into JHS and early HS as it involves very personal shit I'm not willing to disclose publicly or privately here, but suffice it to say, I was burned out by grade 6.

But do I really need to go on? I mean I'm not willing to beyond one incident that's going to remain vague:
In 7th grade there was an incident where an incredibly stupid teacher who claimed I punched her in the face in front of dozens of witnesses and was going to stick with that story until the school resource officer (yeah, an actual cop) said he was going to charge me with assault and battery once he talked to the eyewitnesses and suddenly her story changed to she "thought I was going to punch her in the face when I yanked my arm out of her hand when some assholes who spent an hour during the event this occurred during trying to goad me and a friend into a fight. When we didn't bite, they went to their "special education teacher" (basically a "teacher" who babysat and attempted to teach the 30 or so kids too unruly and disruptive to be in "mainstream" classes along with 3 other teachers and a very large and imposing "teachers assistant") and told her some fairy tale about mean old me and my friend. So instead of alerting an assistant dean, who are there for the specific purpose of dealing with these situations, she took it upon herself to walk up behind me, grab my left forearm like the fucking Terminator and attempted to drag me off to "have a talk about respecting those with differences".
That's when said person with differences who orchestrated this little clusterfuck sucker punched me in the back of the head at which point I yanked my arm out of her fucking deathgrip (and had the acrylic fingernail marks to prove it) and proceeded to defend myself against 3 attackers (including the 2 dipshits who had attempted to get me to "start it" earlier) while backing out of the crowd so I could get some room to maneuver. I kicked the one I hated most in the balls and punched him full on in the face as he fell forward when one of the other fuckers bashed me on the left side of the face with an unopened soda can (it did not explode or open, nothing so dramatic and cool as that) which put me on the ground and it got "broken up" (how you can "break up" 3 attackers (well, 2 at that point) ganging up on a single individual attempting to retreat from people using weapons I have no idea) before the third guy who found a big thick stick somewhere could further attempt to damage me (seriously, I've taken better beatings play fighting).
Anyway, since el stupido teachero initially claimed I punched her in the face I was immediately suspended for 10 days with the intent to expel (basically I'd have been railroaded in a hearing at the school district headquarters) and the 3 fuckers who orchestrated the entire thing got suspended for 1 day each despite my friend and the person sitting to my left who I didn't even know except to recognize the face as one I'd seen around school vouching for me and telling the alcoholic dean the exact same story I did, each in a separate room. But dean fuckface decided that since I had a teacher saying I slugged her it didn't matter what really happened. At least until her story took a 180 when faced with filing a false police report (turns out the cop was so pissed at her for lying (he'd already talked to the eyewitnesses before they left for the bus home) that he was willing to call her bluff and let her commit a felony; exactly what she accused me of doing). Anyway the further events of the aftermath I'm not willing to talk about in any detail but suffice it to say dean AA decided not to try to expel me, though it was almost a year before I was back at that school and said dean was long gone.

So the obvious question arises: Did I bring this all onto myself?
Can a 5 year old kindergartener bring upon being beaten with a rolled up newspaper like a fucking dog for not "napping right"?
Can an 8 year old 2nd grader bring upon a teacher declaring open season on the new kid for anyone who wanted to fuck with him?
Can a 10 year old 4th grader bring upon the mountain of abuse heaped upon them by a radical Christian fundamentalist like BTCunt who also encouraged the class to participate when she would call that 10 year old insulting names, so many that most are forgotten but the worst will be remembered until death?
Can an 11 year old 5th grader bring upon being viciously attacked with the repercussions being that they somehow managed to turn the person they trust the most against them, calling them a liar and then being constantly taunted for the rest of the school year?

I don't think they can. Now I know that I have brought plenty of shit on myself, but it's odd that once I finally took my education into my own hands I excelled and have never had issues like that again, isn't it? Granted I gave up on higher education due to constantly falling ill and eventually when I was stable enough I went into the work force. I tried a few things out, (fired once because the guy who had a ton of experience and left for greener pastures that I guess weren't green enough wanted his old job aka my new job back and the company didn't want to have to pay unemployment, quit 3, once because I was lied to when hired and the manager was such a douche asshole my direct boss wanted to stab him in the heart with a screwdriver and throw him face down in the swimming pool, once was the longest job I held which I hated because I was working my ass off yet made the exact same amount of money the old retired fuckers sleeping all day did but I stuck with it for 3 years to gain experience in the industry to eventually try to get into security consulting rather just being a uniform to make people feel safe and the only reason I quit was because I decided to move to WA where I thought there would be more opportunity (which there is if you can stay healthy for more than a month), and the other was the last job I had which I loved but that's when my health destabilized, apparently for good and I knew that I just wasn't operating physically or mentally on a level that I felt comfortable enough to take responsibility for securing the lives or property of the customers I was being paid to secure and I'll be damned if someone gets injured or killed on my watch because of my personal health and mental issues, and the other was my third job, a dental lab tech which I was good enough at for them to keep me for 6 months until my "probationary period" was up aka they had to pay me a dollar more an hour and give me health and retirement benefits at which point I was "laid off" but since probationary period (I still wonder if 6 months is a legal probationary period) no unemployment. I later learned this was SOP for the position I held as I actually met 3 people that had the same job at the same place for the same length of time who worked there both before and after me) but never had any real problems with superiors except for that one manager and apparently everyone hated him.

So considering the fact that aside from my health and mental issues (severe social anxiety disorder being one), some of which are likely directly due to the abuse heaped upon me by teachers and administrators... Yeah I think dozens of adults can, in fact, be that incompetent and in plenty of cases, downright abusive. I don't know if it's the type of person the profession attracts since you're a shining example of obtuse holier than thou douchebag grade school teacher, or if we just have a system that needs to be purged, destroyed, and rebuilt.
Then again, given the corporate, douchebag politician, and scam artist PR campaign the utter failure that is the Charter School System gets I don't know that I'd trust local and state governments to handle it. Frankly like many things in this rotten empire I think the entire system of government and economics needs to be purged, destroyed, and rebuilt. Unfortunately given the poor public education anyone who isn't in an upper middle class school district received things would probably end up worse.

[Flagg]

Doing homework assignments (such as essays for English or History class) largely taught me how to write - or at least write in a fashion that doesn't completely suck.

I really don't see the argument for eliminating homework entirely. A large part of learning involves exercising your mind via self-directed work - solving math equations or writing essays, by yourself - unsupervised. It turns out most professional careers which don't entirely fucking suck are similar. In my own career I do a lot of work-related problem solving on my own time, at home, or during my off hours - because I want to and I get a lot done that way. Being assigned homework as a student at least prepares you for this sort of thing.

This is kind of my point.

We've got a barrage of people here who are upset that their teachers required them to exercise their minds outside of the classroom, while simultaneously talking up how well and effectively they exercised their own minds on their own.

When I hear this, I find it a lot easier to believe "this guy had a hyperactive sense of I'm-being-cheated-out-of-my-free-time as a kid" than to believe "essentially every teacher this guy ever had was a drooling sub-moron who assigned homework just for the power trip."

Which is more likely, that dozens of adults were on average that incompetent? Or that one teenager had an exaggerated sense of grievance? You know, like the one virtually every teenager in the developed world seems to have?

Exercising their minds, how? By reading what you tell them to read and studying what you tell them to study? Give me a fucking break. And most people who despise teachers don't think you're on a power trip. They see that you're just lazy assholes half of which wouldn't have a job except for their fucking union. You know why college diplomas are practically required to succeed? It's because, as opposed to grade school, colleges and universities teach you important things like critical thinking. Something you pathetic twats fail to do. The kids who chafe under the bullshit that is American grade school somehow already knew how to think critically and saw through your bullshit. And once you see through the bullshit you can't unsee it, so when twats like you whose curriculum is to half ass the hour assigned to you and then pile on the work they have to do at home they get angry, tell you to fuck yourself, and drop out.

[Civil War Man]

"I give him extra work, though. I go to Barnes & Nobles and give him my own homework."

Holy shit. One of them is getting it right. Take you son to a bookstore or library. Pick out a couple books, read and discuss. Even better if Mom or Dad join in.

I wouldn't be too quick to pat that guy on the back. The way it's worded doesn't sound like some sort of family book club, where they pick out a book together, read it, and discuss it afterwards. It's not "I bring my son to Barnes & Nobles and we pick out some books to read", it's "I go to Barnes & Nobles and give him my own homework." Which implies that he goes to the bookstore alone, selects based on what he thinks his son should read instead of what he thinks will get his son interested in reading, and basically forces his son to read it. More often than not, that's probably going to make his kid dread reading, not enjoy it.

This is kind of my point.

We've got a barrage of people here who are upset that their teachers required them to exercise their minds outside of the classroom, while simultaneously talking up how well and effectively they exercised their own minds on their own.

When I hear this, I find it a lot easier to believe "this guy had a hyperactive sense of I'm-being-cheated-out-of-my-free-time as a kid" than to believe "essentially every teacher this guy ever had was a drooling sub-moron who assigned homework just for the power trip."

Which is more likely, that dozens of adults were on average that incompetent? Or that one teenager had an exaggerated sense of grievance? You know, like the one virtually every teenager in the developed world seems to have?

The thing is, from the article in the OP, the school apparently reviewed studies of the effectiveness of homework in elementary grades, and decided that continuing to assign homework at that grade level would force both students and teachers to expend a lot of effort for little appreciable gain.

Also note that the school in question is Pre-K through Grade 5, and the principal said that they were specifically looking at studies that examined the effect for that age group, so talking about teenagers is a red herring.

[Purple]

If you want teachers to control the attitudes and behavior of all of the children in the classroom at all times, perhaps you should be willing to pay teachers a salary commensurate with babysitting 24-30 children and teaching them, too. As a (fairly young) college professor, I make between $60-$80 per class-hour just to teach, with no babysitting whatsoever: if a student's behavior is inappropriate, I simply tell them to leave the classroom. Now, that's college-level teaching, and Simon teaches secondary school, so maybe there's a bit of a pay-cut there, so we'll figure what, $45/hr?

Then let's see, that's 27 (mean) children times $10/hour per kid (average baby-sitting wage) makes $270 + $45 for teaching them stuff and Simon would get $315/hr. 6 hour school day, 180 school days per year. $315*6*180, making for a gross yearly income of $340,200 per year. That's...about 6 times what the average high school teacher makes in the US.

I guarantee that if you offer teachers $350k/year salaries, you will get plenty of people with boundless energy and enthusiasm for preventing bullying. Until and unless you're willing to spend that kind of cash, no, it's not the teachers' jobs to make students not act like little sociopaths. That's parents' jobs.

So basically your solution for workers who do not perform their work properly is to reward them with money and hope they feel gracious enough to improve as opposed to firing them and hiring someone else for the position? Well, I must say that in a different world where there are more jobs than people and the unemployed are in high demand I imagine that would be our only recourse. Thankfully we do not live in such a world. And we can just keep firing them until we run into one for whom not starving is motivation enough.

I have absolutely no respect for anyone who for what ever reason feels unmotivated to do his job. It's your job. Your duty. Your responsibility. You took it upon your self to devote your working hours to it. And there are people who depend on you doing it right. And if that means nothing to you, than you are a very rotten person. And it does not matter how bad it sucks, because life sucks by definition. It sucks for all of us. And it will suck for ever more. So that is not an excuse.

[Simon_Jester]

If you want teachers to control the attitudes and behavior of all of the children in the classroom at all times, perhaps you should be willing to pay teachers a salary commensurate with babysitting 24-30 children and teaching them, too. As a (fairly young) college professor, I make between $60-$80 per class-hour just to teach, with no babysitting whatsoever: if a student's behavior is inappropriate, I simply tell them to leave the classroom. Now, that's college-level teaching, and Simon teaches secondary school, so maybe there's a bit of a pay-cut there, so we'll figure what, $45/hr?

Then let's see, that's 27 (mean) children times $10/hour per kid (average baby-sitting wage) makes $270 + $45 for teaching them stuff and Simon would get $315/hr. 6 hour school day, 180 school days per year. $315*6*180, making for a gross yearly income of $340,200 per year. That's...about 6 times what the average high school teacher makes in the US.

I guarantee that if you offer teachers $350k/year salaries, you will get plenty of people with boundless energy and enthusiasm for preventing bullying. Until and unless you're willing to spend that kind of cash, no, it's not the teachers' jobs to make students not act like little sociopaths. That's parents' jobs.

So basically your solution for workers who do not perform their work properly is to reward them with money and hope they feel gracious enough to improve as opposed to firing them and hiring someone else for the position?

What you don't seem to understand is that firing the existing people and replacing them won't reliably result in improved quality.

If you target horrible abusive clowns and idiots (like the teachers Flagg references specifically), fire and replace them, sure you can get some average improvement. Those teachers are below average; replacing them with more people drawn from the same labor pool will make things less bad.

But the average teacher has five years or so of experience and is seriously trying (with variable success) to do their job correctly. Some of them aren't very competent, but if they lack motivation it's usually because they're being catastrophically mismanaged.

If you try to replace them, who the hell do you intend to replace them WITH? It's not like there's an army of unemployed super-teachers just waiting in the wings for you to hire them to replace the current crop of teachers.

Well, I must say that in a different world where there are more jobs than people and the unemployed are in high demand I imagine that would be our only recourse. Thankfully we do not live in such a world. And we can just keep firing them until we run into one for whom not starving is motivation enough.

It turns out that effective teachers require several years' work experience to become effective. What you're proposing is idiotic because it turns teaching into a revolving door, where people are fired for underperforming before they ever have time to get good at their jobs. Or where they quit in disgust because you're asking them to do the impossible on minimal resources, with the same result.

The amount of labor one human can do is limited, Purple. That's a cold hard reality. You cannot make teachers work twice as hard by threatening to fire all the ones who don't, because there aren't enough hours in the week for that to happen. All that will truly happen is that the ones with enough experience to be good, and to be able to mentor new incoming teachers, will quit in disgust.

I have absolutely no respect for anyone who for what ever reason feels unmotivated to do his job. It's your job. Your duty. Your responsibility. You took it upon your self to devote your working hours to it. And there are people who depend on you doing it right. And if that means nothing to you, than you are a very rotten person. And it does not matter how bad it sucks, because life sucks by definition. It sucks for all of us. And it will suck for ever more. So that is not an excuse.

When you hire a common laborer to pick up and carry things for you, do you expect that laborer to single-handedly lift a truck? Do you threaten to fire them for failing to do so, complaining that they are "unmotivated to do their jobs?"

Please understand, the reason people are disagreeing with you here is that you are not setting realistic standards. It is not a question of motivation. It is a question of physical possibility. One person cannot do everything you expect that one person to do, unless that one person is a rare super-teacher. And there are not enough super-teachers to go around, and if super-teacher skills were easy for normal teachers to learn, they'd have already learned them.

Sure, there would be some bad teachers. But not many.

---

This is kind of my point.

We've got a barrage of people here who are upset that their teachers required them to exercise their minds outside of the classroom, while simultaneously talking up how well and effectively they exercised their own minds on their own.

When I hear this, I find it a lot easier to believe "this guy had a hyperactive sense of I'm-being-cheated-out-of-my-free-time as a kid" than to believe "essentially every teacher this guy ever had was a drooling sub-moron who assigned homework just for the power trip."

Which is more likely, that dozens of adults were on average that incompetent? Or that one teenager had an exaggerated sense of grievance? You know, like the one virtually every teenager in the developed world seems to have?

The thing is, from the article in the OP, the school apparently reviewed studies of the effectiveness of homework in elementary grades, and decided that continuing to assign homework at that grade level would force both students and teachers to expend a lot of effort for little appreciable gain.

Also note that the school in question is Pre-K through Grade 5, and the principal said that they were specifically looking at studies that examined the effect for that age group, so talking about teenagers is a red herring.

Note that I was speaking about posters on this thread who were themselves speaking about their teen experiences.

More generally, I think there's a logical threshold somewhere in elementary school where homework starts making sense reliably. Below the line, it only makes sense if it's something that you would logically want a child to get help from a parent working on- say, a drawing of a family tree, or a big packet of handwriting practice, or something like that. It would not be something that should routinely be assigned or collected on short notice.

Once the students advance from the most rudimentary skills into slightly higher-order thinking and needing to practice highly specific skill sets that require extensive repetition (like, say, adding fractions, which current best practices in the US say should be done in the fifth grade or so)...

At that point, homework starts to make more sense.

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Annecdotal personal evidence is even more useless than usual when talking about education. Your memory of your personal school experience is highly subjective, self-edited and (typically) distorted. Parents watching their children go through school are a bit more rational but obviously still biased and looking at a very small sample.

This is like the single most cogent statement I've seen on this thread. If we had an upvote mechanism I would upvote it.

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If you want teachers to control the attitudes and behavior of all of the children in the classroom at all times, perhaps you should be willing to pay teachers a salary commensurate with babysitting 24-30 children and teaching them, too. As a (fairly young) college professor, I make between $60-$80 per class-hour just to teach, with no babysitting whatsoever: if a student's behavior is inappropriate, I simply tell them to leave the classroom. Now, that's college-level teaching, and Simon teaches secondary school, so maybe there's a bit of a pay-cut there, so we'll figure what, $45/hr?

Then let's see, that's 27 (mean) children times $10/hour per kid (average baby-sitting wage) makes $270 + $45 for teaching them stuff and Simon would get $315/hr. 6 hour school day, 180 school days per year. $315*6*180, making for a gross yearly income of $340,200 per year. That's...about 6 times what the average high school teacher makes in the US.

I guarantee that if you offer teachers $350k/year salaries, you will get plenty of people with boundless energy and enthusiasm for preventing bullying. Until and unless you're willing to spend that kind of cash, no, it's not the teachers' jobs to make students not act like little sociopaths. That's parents' jobs.

More realistically, instead of paying one person six times as much, pay six people the same amount.

I assure you that if you took my 27-kid section and split it into three 9-kid sections each of which had two full time teachers making the same $XY000/year* salary I do, you would get amazing results. Probably a lot better than if you had the same section being taught by one person making $(6*XY)000/year*.

But I don't mean to detract from the fact that you've basically identified the problem perfectly.

Teachers are too numerous to be paid much more than the median salary. If you pay the median salary, you will attract humans with, on average, roughly median levels of aptitude and motivation. As such, most of them won't actively be incompetent... but they will still have limits. You cannot build up your entire school system out of teachers who are genius-level experts in their subject areas and have brilliant social skills for controlling classrooms and have no actual family life or hobbies so that they can work eighty-hour weeks and this and that.

No, you have to settle for real human beings, not fantasy ones.
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*Before taxes.

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If you're actually being given four or six hours of homework a day, you have grounds to complain- but that is pretty sharply at odds with what I see from most US (and Western-in-general) schools. This is why I asked Purple where he went to school, not that he ever bothered to answer.

I wonder why anyone would refuse to answer personal questions that might lead to his identity and location online.

Well, if you're not going to talk about where you went to school, then I hope you'll forgive me if I don't believe your claims.

You claim that you attended school during the late 1990s and early 2000s and yet were taught bizarre drunken-caveman curriculum in which your schools taught nothing of any value for a five year period between the 4th and 8th grades.

It seems far more likely that you are selectively ignoring valuable lessons you learned during those years, or that you are selectively editing out the fact that you didn't learn them in a timely manner and paid for it later by having to work harder to accomplish the same amount.

This said, reading your posts here and in other teaching related threads I must say that if I were a parent you would be the last person I'd want teaching my children. It's nothing personal but your attitude is some times just WTF. A lot of times your basic approach is to lift your hands up in the air and go: "Well this system sucks/works but that's the system we have."

Since you persistently fail to suggest a better one, yes that is my basic approach. If all you're doing is complaining about how things ought to be 'better' when you have literally no concept of how the job is done or what would be involved in improving the situation... you really don't have much of an argument.

It's like if you were whining about how the scientists need to hurry up and invent a faster-than-light drive. If you don't know anything about physics that might seem easy... but it really is not. And all you do by pretending the scientists could do "if only they tried" is waste valuable time.

And you just give up. Like I remember in the bullying thread where you flat out said that teachers can't possibly control all the children. WTF? That's your job. If you can't do it, don't be a teacher.

I'm not saying things like this because I personally cannot do them.

I am saying these things to introduce you to the brutal reality that there are not enough people on the Earth who can do them.

You fantasize about teachers being able to do A, B, C, and D.

I am telling you that in reality, the teachers that physically exist, including many highly motivated ones who want nothing more than to teach effectively and do good for children, are unable to do all four things at once.

And you tell me "that's their job. If they can't do it, they shouldn't teach."

At which point I am the one going "WTF."
_________________

It's like, I've told you "people can't do that, because we don't have four arms," and you've replied "if you don't have four arms you shouldn't sign up for this job." If you wait until you have four-armed men to do a job, because only four-armed men can do it the way you want it done... You will be in for a long wait.

And if you want omnipotent super-teachers who can secure total obedience from thirty randomly selected children while teaching them advanced abstract concepts and giving them detailed, individualized instruction and feedback...

And if you want ENOUGH of those teachers to actually cover all the classrooms in your country...

You will be in for a long wait. One of two things will happen.

1) You will only hire super-teachers and there won't be enough to go around, and your class sizes skyrocket until not even super-teachers can do the job.
2) You will hire people who are not super-teachers, and then whine about how incompetent they are just because they can't do things that only 1% of the population was ever able to do in the first place.

So if you actually care about fixing schools, instead of just wanting a convenient scapegoat to blame for the problem, you need to start from a realistic picture of what one human being can and cannot do. You cannot organize any large operation to do a job efficiently if you're in denial about what your employees are capable of.

And don't give me any of that "oh but I have to pay my bills and not starve" talk. You ain't any more special than me or anyone else. And the world can do just fine with all of us here dying of starvation. It can't do without future generations getting a good education. I just had to get that one off my chest. It's been on there since the bullying thread.

THIS IS NOT ABOUT ME.

This is about your unrealistic expectations.

Only an idiot blames his tools; only an idiot blames the best teachers available for failing to be vastly better than they already are.

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Which is more likely, that dozens of adults were on average that incompetent? Or that one teenager had an exaggerated sense of grievance? You know, like the one virtually every teenager in the developed world seems to have?...

[...]

I will say this.

I genuinely do empathize with the instances of teachers lying and abusing you. I really really do. You may not believe this, but I do.

Your experiences with Bible-thumping cunts, sadists, and insensitive clowns are legitimate grievances. I do not for a moment dispute this.

I do in fact apologize for speaking as though this history of yours, which I did not know at the time, had not happened.
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Simultaneously, my experiences are also legitimate.

I speak for myself in this, but also for the other teachers I know well: I do not knowingly mislead any parent or authority about what any student has done, or what I have done towards any student. I have never claimed to be 'world's greatest teacher,' but I have that standard at least.

Every instance of students ganging up on another student I have observed, I have attempted to break up (sometimes in the literal sense of interposing myself and getting punched in the back for trying) as soon as I understood what was going on.

When kids ask to go to the nurse, I let them go. That's actually county policy so I can't take credit for it, though.

The great majority of the teachers I know are sincerely trying, and are struggling with a student body that is chronically underprepared. Some of whom really, desperately need reforms to their behavior before they can operate in a learning environment with other children.

It is a truly formidable job. I for one wish I were better at it- but there is no upper limit on the amount of skill or art that could usefully be applied to the job; we could have superteachers working 80-hour weeks and it still would not be enough for everything we'd like.

If my county employs the sort of abusive clowns and freaks you talk about, they do it somewhere out of my sight. Maybe the nation has committed to improving. Maybe my middle-of-the-road median-statistics-in-the-county semi-urban-demographic high school is just amazingly lucky. Maybe it's just because my district pays better than your district did at the time and you got the bottom of the barrel.

I'm sorry that your school experience was so singularly shitty. I'm sorry to even live in a country where such darkly self-parodic assclowns still teach. I can easily see how it set you up to essentially go on strike as a student.
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And simultaneous with that, I would like to point out that this decision to go on strike IS crippling to the average student. You won an ability lottery to get as far as you did; most people don't make honor roll as the new kid in town and don't learn without serious practice and focused effort.

And saying "fuck this noise, I quit" is immensely toxic for the average student. I know this, because I watch people fall into it and it's goddamn heartbreaking.
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So considering the fact that aside from my health and mental issues (severe social anxiety disorder being one), some of which are likely directly due to the abuse heaped upon me by teachers and administrators... Yeah I think dozens of adults can, in fact, be that incompetent and in plenty of cases, downright abusive.

See below in the next section.

I don't know if it's the type of person the profession attracts since you're a shining example of obtuse holier than thou douchebag grade school teacher...

See above.

or if we just have a system that needs to be purged, destroyed, and rebuilt.

At any rate, your school district did. Very possibly does today.

Then again, given the corporate, douchebag politician, and scam artist PR campaign the utter failure that is the Charter School System gets I don't know that I'd trust local and state governments to handle it.

You are right to not trust them.

Frankly like many things in this rotten empire I think the entire system of government and economics needs to be purged, destroyed, and rebuilt. Unfortunately given the poor public education anyone who isn't in an upper middle class school district received things would probably end up worse.

I think what is needed is to focus on establishing, for lack of a better term, law and order in the schools. Enforceable against administration and teachers and students. Some of the things needed to make that happen are tricky and I don't have all or even most of the answers.

But the current agenda seems to be to amp up the standardized testing and come up with harder curriculums while allowing the classroom environment to actually decay by taking horribly delinquent kids and kids with severe violent or disruptive behavioral issues, and sticking them in the same classrooms as all the other 13-year-olds.

This is predictably failing to work.
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Anyway, my last section-

My original remark was on the subject of homework specifically. I can certainly believe that you had a number of abusive or stupid teachers who willfully assigned homework that was pointless or excessive. At the same time, I cannot believe that this was a uniform and universal experience of yours, and it is certainly not a universal experience of mine.

The idea of homework as such simply cannot be addressed in terms of individuals saying "homework was bullshit because that's how I felt about it as an adolescent."

At the same time, the issue of "many teachers should be fired* because I was actively abused and perjured against by teachers of that type" IS TOTALLY an issue that can be addressed. And should. I just want to make it really really explicit that I'm not for a moment saying any of that shit you went through was in any way justified. Because it so blindingly obviously was not. Even to me- I'll concede the part about being obtuse, but my obtuseness has limits.

*Out of a cannon

[TheFeniX]

So basically your solution for workers who do not perform their work properly is to reward them with money and hope they feel gracious enough to improve as opposed to firing them and hiring someone else for the position? Well, I must say that in a different world where there are more jobs than people and the unemployed are in high demand I imagine that would be our only recourse. Thankfully we do not live in such a world. And we can just keep firing them until we run into one for whom not starving is motivation enough.

What gave you the idea that babysitting or controlling students is part of a teacher's job? They aren't management, they are educators. They have employment contracts, a list of duties they are to perform as part of their job. That job is to teach students based on a curriculum and report disruptive students to administration to have them disciplined or removed. Any steps they go above and beyond that are by their personal choice and can sometimes get them into legal trouble.

My wife's been a teacher for only a year now and she's already been sexually harassed by a known trouble-maker in her AP class. He's been written up numerous times for "copping feels" on teachers and students and still dicks around in her AP class. If this were the real world, these women could respond with force. But there's been jack and shit done about it. Meanwhile, as a teacher, even she gets the "just ignore it" line of bullshit from administration. I have considered going to the principal myself if I hear more on the topic from her, then consider having charges filed with the police, but I don't want to kill my wife's career just as it gets started.

What should she do to control him? Me? I'd respond with violence. And even though, in the real world, that would be a perfectly legal response to being assaulted, I wouldn't be a teacher anymore because as long as students don't drum up the fear of school shootings by pointing breaded chicken fingers at people, they can get away with a load of shit.

I've worked in enough school districts to know that there are shitty teachers, but for the most part it's shitty students and administration that hamstrings the good ones. It's funny to see them try and push buttons on the dorky IT guy though because I don't have to deal with their bullshit and can get in their face and tell them to fuck off when they try to steal my tools. My employment contract didn't cover "dealing with unruly little shits."

If Simon_Jester can teach effectively from a curriculum, he could teach my kid all day. It's my job as a parent to make sure my kid isn't a handjob of a human-being and can sit his dumbass in a chair to learn something.