Do Kids Need Homework Text

Closely related to the mostly false notion that more time yields more learning is the belief, widely held by both parents and teachers, that homework is useful because it affords an opportunity for students to practice the skills they’ve been taught.  this, of course, is a defense of a certain kind of assignment – namely, the kind that involves practice. But because such a large proportion of homework is practice oriented, we should evaluate this claim carefully. There’s obviously some truth to the idea that practice is connected to proficiency.  people who do something a lot often get better at doing it.  but once again we find ourselves with a proposition that turns out to be true in a far more limited sense, with more qualifications and caveats attached, than may have seemed to be the case.

The assumption that the two activities are analogous is an outgrowth of a doctrine known as behaviorism, widely associated with john b. In fact, if arithmetic becomes meaningful, it becomes so in spite of drill. Not only educational theorists but virtually all cognitive researchers today sub scribe to this constructive view of learning and knowledge. 2 the kind of teaching most consistent with it treats students as meaning makers and offers carefully calibrated challenges that help them to develop increasingly sophisticated theories.  the point is for them to understand ideas from the inside out.

Theres a sharp contrast between math defined principally in terms of skills and math defined principally in terms of understanding.  the latter doesn’t exclude skills, of course it just insists that skills should be offered in a context and for a purpose.   but even a classroom centered on understanding may not be enough.  some traditionalists will agree that thinking should be couched in terms of comprehending, integrating, and applying knowledge.   but in their classrooms, the student’s job is comprehending how the teacher has integrated or applied the ideas. 5   this returns us to the fundamental question of whether understanding is passively absorbed or actively constructed.  the best classrooms not only are characterized by more thinking than remembering they also have students doing much of the thinking.   she generally recommends steering clear of homework, partly because what kids do at school is enough, and repetition is neither necessary nor desirable, and partly because when parents try to help their children with math assignments they tend to teach them what they’ve been told are the correct ways to solve problems.  again, this shuts down children’s thinking.

Euthanasia Should Be Made Legal Essay

Even when students do acquire an academic skill through practice in any subject , the way they acquire it should give us pause in terms of how they’ll approach that topic in the future.  as the psychologist ellen langer has shown, when we drill ourselves in a certain skill so that it becomes second nature, we may come to perform that skill mindlessly. 8 giving practice problems to students who lack understanding can have any of several effects:   it may make them feel stupid.  over and over again, they’re reminded of what they can’t do.   it may get them accustomed to doing things the wrong way, because what’s really reinforced are mistaken assumptions. 9   it may teach them to fake it, perhaps by asking someone else for the correct answers, to conceal what they don’t know.

Argumentative Essay Over The Death Penalty

  finally, the whole exercise subtly teaches that math – or whatever subject they’re doing is something people aren’t expected to understand. This is exactly why a new york math teacher, who has at various times taught students from second to eighth grade, told me that she has never found homework helpful. Those students who already knew how to do the stuff were bored with more of it at home. Those students who didn’t understand it made up their own ways to do things which were often wrong and repeated the practice, making it that much harder to get them to see it another way in class.

  the writer george leonard once defined lecturing as the best way to get information from teacher’s notebook to student’s notebook without touching the student’s mind. There’s a good case to be made that if class time is limited, most of those hours are better spent having students read and write, discuss and reflect. Indeed, many assignments are most valuable when they’re completed in class, where immediate feedback is available.  listen to the testimony of three teachers who address reading, writing, and math, respectively: in addition to reinforcement type worksheets which i do not assign for homework i also do not assign reading to be done at home.

 instead, i begin each day with an article 1 2 pages tops that relates to the topics were studying.  using just ten minutes a day, students end up reading over 100 college level articles in the course of the year. Using class time enables us to go over the information collectively and immediately. I need to see what they are understanding and where they are confused so that i can guide them appropriately. Even if practice homework really did help some students to acquire a skill, any such benefit would have to be balanced against the effect it has on their interest in learning.  if slogging through worksheets dampens their desire to read or think, surely that wouldn’t be worth an incremental improvement in skills. But let’s take this a step further.  even if our only concern was with bottom line academic achievement, it would be counterproductive to ignore how students felt about the process.  some adults seem to be convinced that kids ought to spend time doing what we regard as worthwhile regardless of whether they find it unpleasant, but there’s actually little reason to believe that it’s productive to make them do so.

That fact makes perfect sense in light of a fundamental insight that has emerged from the work of psychological theorists and researchers who have transcended behaviorism:  what matters most is not a child’s action it’s what underlies the action   her needs, goals, and attitudes. full citations appear in the book’s bibliography. some endnotes in the book have been omitted here. In so doing, it also invites them to think critically about those ideas.  by contrast, as the brazilian educator paolo freire pointed out, the more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them a pretty good summary of most homework the less they develop a critical consciousness p. 54.  this raises the interesting possibility that while a reluctance to ask provocative questions may help to perpetuate the institution of homework, the institution of homework may also discourage students from asking provocative questions.