Weird News

[footfootfoot]

I guess they take their golf pretty seriously in Japan.

[Griff]

F3 everybody! How about a hand folks? He'll be here all week. Try the blow fish, we're all doctors here.

[BigV]

Homework to be made illegal in France.

Talk about courting the youth vote. French President François Hollande has proposed banning homework as part of a series of policies designed to reform the French educational system.

“Education is priority,” Hollande said in a speech at Paris’s Sorbonne University. “An education program is, by definition, a societal program. Work should be done at school, rather than at home.”

The justification for this proposed ban? Inequality. According to a statement from an official at the French Embassy, “When it comes to homework, the President said it should be done during school hours rather than at home, in order to establish equal opportunities.” Homework favors the wealthy, Hollande argues, because they are more likely to have a good working environment at home, including parents with the time and energy to help them with their work.

[Chocolatl]

Really interesting idea. I rarely assigned homework and some teachers thought I was nuts. I knew the kid weren't going to do it, anyway. Veteran teachers chalked this up to laziness, but the truth was most of my students were heading home to a house where they had to cook, clean, and care for younger siblings because their parents were working two jobs to make rent. Many of them had jobs of their own. One student attended school from 7:30 am to 3:00 pm, went home to maintain the household and squeeze in her virtual night classes, then worked a shift at the gas station from midnight to 6 am. She lived with a very sick grandmother who was bedridden and needed constant care. How in my right mind could I have assigned her busy work to take home?

[DanaC]

It makes sense. The only 'even playing field' in education is the one that can be created within the school environs. Once the children leave the school they go into highly differentiated homelives. The more of their formal education that takes place outside of the school itself, the more their experience of education diverges along socio-economic lines.

In Britain, we often find that the period directly following a long holiday, like the Christmas break or even more the summer holiday, children from homes where learning is likely to be supported and enabled haven't fallen back in their understanding, whereas children from more challenging backgrounds have. So a youngster who lives in a house with several siblings, a parent at work and another in poor health, who shares a bedroom and has no private space, is likely to have to spend the first week or two of a new term playing catchup.

By the time they get to secondary school (junior high I think) the gap has usually widened enough to become measurable.

[glatt]

As a parent, I can't stand homework that is busy work and doesn't teach anything other than how to suck it up and do crap work when you have to. I would guess that about a third of homework falls into this category.

[Clodfobble]

Homework is also one way that the schools can tell themselves they're "prioritizing" academics while still cutting back on budgets. In some districts/schools, it's not uncommon for kids to come home with hours and hours of homework each night.

To me, if 7 hours a day isn't enough to learn the material, then there's something wrong with the teacher.

[glatt]

Yeah. Our school board requires a certain amount of homework each night. Even if the teachers think it's not necessary, they have to assign some every night.

[footfootfoot]

According to a number of homeschooling wonks or boffins there have been no studies that showed homework is effective at improving grades.

From these boffins:

Does homework affect student learning?

Myth 1: Homework increases academic achievement.
What researchers say: Cooper (1989a) argues that reviews on the link between homework and achievement often directly contradict one another and are so different in design that the findings of one study cannot be evaluated fairly against the findings of others.

Myth 2: Without excessive homework, students’ test scores will not be internationally competitive.
What researchers say: Information from international assessments shows little relationship between the amount of homework students do and test scores. Students in Japan and Finland, for example, are assigned less homework but still outperform U.S. students on tests (Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development 2004). Other studies find a positive relationship in math, but not in reading (Fuchs et al. 2004).

Myth 3: Those who question homework want to weaken curriculum and pander to students' laziness.
What researchers say: Kralovec and Buell (2001) note that homework critics rarely question the work assigned but rather the fact that the work is so often performed at home without adult supervision to aid the learning process.

[infinite monkey]

Homework gets a bad rap. Of course, I could knock out my homework in about 20 minutes. Sometimes I did it on the bus. Yes, I got good grades.

A little homework is good. Maybe an hour's worth. I hear about parents sitting with their kids for hours working on maf. My parents never had to help me with homework, I wouldn't have even thought about asking them. I thought the purpose was (in a general sense) to teach the kids a bit of autonomy. Read a few pages, write a small paper, do a couple geometry problems.

Over-homeworked makes no sense. As Clod said, in different words, there's something wrong with the classroom experience if kids are spending hours and hours and needing a helper. Though I would attribute a bit of the helper to tiger parenting and some sort of crazed competitiveness over how successful their kid is at whatever.

[glatt]

Last week, the 10 year old boy was going over his spelling words with Mrs glatt, and for once, I really approved of them. He's currently studying those words that many full grown adults have trouble with. The only one I remember right now is "sincere" but there were a couple others that fall into that group that I have trouble with today. Sure, spell checker helps, but what if you don't know enough to get it close enough for spell checker to suggest the correct word?

[infinite monkey]

Like the woman I used to work with who was so very sorry about the mix-up and apologized for the 'incontinence.'

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be dummmmmmmmb.

[footfootfoot]

Sincere means "without wax" From: cheap repairs to bronze castings were made by filling the voids with colored wax to match the bronze rather than the more time consuming method of filling them with bronze.

[Happy Monkey]

I tried to get my homework done before the school day was over, so I'd have more time to play computer games. Teachers weren't always appreciative of my dedication.

[glatt]

Originally Posted by footfootfoot

Sincere means "without wax" From: cheap repairs to bronze castings were made by filling the voids with colored wax to match the bronze rather than the more time consuming method of filling them with bronze.

I thought you were pulling out legs, footfootfoot, So I looked it up, and you're probably right. cool!