from Hacker News

The Case Against Homework

by shsachdev on 3/10/24, 10:42 PM with 115 comments

by Aurornis on 3/11/24, 12:42 AM
I have several teacher friends who started their careers when the hot topic was all about replacing old methods line rote memorization with new methods like creative engagement. They would be measured on things like how much their lessons fostered engagement and they were encouraged to let the kids lead the learning direction. At the time, they presented it like the obvious better solution and looked down on the old ways of lecturing and homework.
It’s interesting to see how pessimistic they’ve become about the push for engagement and downplaying of lecturing. I sense a growing backlash and a sense that maybe the old ways weren’t as bad as everyone assumed at the time. A common topic at gatherings is how they’re frustrated that some times rote learning and challenging homework are the only way to really get into subjects, but their school district is making it hard to do that without risk of impacting their evaluations. Then at the end of the school year they’re confused about how teachers are nailing their marks and following the best practices but students aren’t doing well.
For what it’s worth, this isn’t an isolated viewpoint. Browse /r/teachers on Reddit and you’ll find no shortage of similar complaints and teachers who are tired of administrators pushing unrealistic idealistic ideas like Bloom’s hierarchy on teachers who are being asked to get students to learn a lot of material without being pushed to, well, learn it.
by twarge on 3/11/24, 12:33 AM
It's generally unacceptable to demand that workers take assignments home to complete when they're exhausted. Perhaps it would be better to treat school more like work?
by brigadier132 on 3/11/24, 12:45 AM
Homework is practice, practice works. You can tell me how you've found a thousand published articles that practice doesn't work and all it would do is confirm my prior that the vast majority of research is not well done or fabricated
by makeitdouble on 3/11/24, 12:44 AM
The premise here is that education's primary purpose is expanding knowledge. I think it's so naive of a take it could be on purpose ?
> One mother told me it permanently damaged her relationship with her son because it forced her to be an enforcer rather than a mom.
This is by design, or at least an accepted byproduct. Having parents rolled in and being on the same page as the school is part of the process. This might not be explicited, the school might not even be thinking about it a lot, but it's a no downside proposition for the school, and parents will be more willing to pay, volunteer their tine, not make waves etc. if they're acting as an extension of school at home.
When your kids doesn't do homework it's you, the parent that gets summoned.
The basic purpose of schooling is to preprare a kid for society, and what society wants is not just bright kids, but citizen pushing themselves and following the common line. When they'll be adults they'll have deadline and meaningless overtime instead of homeworks. As pointed in the article, behaviors can reinforced, and that's what homeworks do.
by sega_sai on 3/11/24, 12:42 AM
I disagree (at least university level). Surely too much homework is bad, or doing homework without understanding the basics is counter-productive, but I do think that practice is the only way you truly learn.
by BigParm on 3/11/24, 1:34 AM
Everything you learn will be forgotten. You keep with you ideas to look up and refresh on later.
A lecture won’t make you proficient. Doing (homework) makes you proficient.
Is lecture all you need to remember which ideas to look up in future? I think you’ll develop a better understanding of whether you need an idea if you understood it in the first place. For this reason we need to develop proficiency through practice.
And then you need proficiency to achieve success in grading. Grading is feedback that lets you know where you stand relative to other students. And that’s what we use for admissions.
Nobody is becoming proficient from lectures. Students must be proficient.
You either need homework, or teachers can stop wasting everyone’s time yapping and just be there to answer questions for half the class duration.
by aronhegedus on 3/11/24, 12:48 AM
Some good points. I always saw homework as practicing what was taught. The maths teaxher explains how to do fraction addition say and the hour of the class is taken up with explaining and some examples. Then homework is just using the fact that solving problems in silence seems like a waste of being in a classroom with a teacher
If it’s just busywork then sure, it has no point besides drilling in some sense of “you will have to organise your time and do this or else”
by jimbob45 on 3/11/24, 12:24 AM
The problem with homework is the total lack of coordination between teachers. They’ll all pile on on one day and wonder why students half-assed everything. Even if they do coordinate, it only takes one teacher overassigning to ruin it for everyone.
by conorh on 3/11/24, 1:14 AM
My kids attend a school that gives a very large amount of homework, constantly tests and expects large amounts of memorization - the school is well known for this Asian type model. They are currently in middle school and the amount of time their homework and studying takes is detrimental to everything else in their life. They definitely are leaning how to study, how to do well on tests and how to be more disciplined and organized - I can see you that happening in real time, but whether this level of stress at this age is setting them up for success later is very hard to know, I'm not surprised there is little evidence for it and I think it VERY much depends on the kid. One of my kids thrives on the repetitious math every night, it helps them learn the concepts, the other kid learns nothing from it, and just suffers through it bored by the repetition.
by the__alchemist on 3/11/24, 12:37 AM
I think there is some conflation going on. Independent problem solving is critical to learning many skills; especially math and science ones. I think a more useful system may be this, at least for middle school and higher:
- Assign students top-quality lectures to watch and problem sets. Think Khan, MitX etc or similar. (But could be specially formulated)
- In class (Which would be shorter), the teacher[s] go over where the student struggled, had questions etc, and give personal attention where needed based on the previous day's lectures and problem sets.
The conflation here is active learning with respecting people's time and attention-span. Active learning critical, but the article's concerns about the latter are valid.
by 1letterunixname on 3/11/24, 2:16 AM
While keeping kids busy and curious about things is important, I'm fine with less "unpaid overtime" if the Finnish model was followed closely.
I think it's a good idea™ to give them hard work to solve in-class and with a good dose of semi-structured study groups to work on hard problems with pencil and paper and/or whiteboards. What I have a problem with is spoon-feeding, rote memorization of formulas, low standards. The exercise and gradual transmutation of fluid intelligence into crystalized needs to be through rigorous and challenging work, or there is untold loss of developed potential and a backsliding of academic achievement.
by albert_e on 3/11/24, 12:50 AM
> Still others believe—incorrectly—that more time spent on a task produces better results, or that because practice is required to be a good athlete or musician, it’s also at the heart of intellectual growth. It isn’t. You can’t “reinforce” understanding the way you can reinforce a behavior.
Really? The claim here is that if I do not fully understand a passage or a lecture on first pass, a second or third exposure to the same ideas do NOT contribute to any better understanding whatsoever?
This is stated as a universal and scientific fact.
All my life experience says otherwise. Can't take this article seriously past this.
---
> In my experience, people with the least sophisticated understanding of how children learn, or the least amount of concern about children’s attitudes toward learning, tend to be the most enthusiastic supporters of homework.
There has to be some term to describe this style of writing.
"If you don't agree with what I am saying, you are too ignorant of the subject and your opinion is not worth much."
by sakex on 3/11/24, 12:37 AM
Growing up I always managed to avoid doing my homework. Also I always passed with the minimum grade required. My parents and everyone around me kept saying that I would become a failure.
Well, today I'm a Machine Learning Engineer at a FAANG company and I have no regrets not wasting my youth on some stupid assignments that everyone forgot about as soon as it was graded.
by graycat on 3/11/24, 1:22 AM
Class time vs homework?
For me, in 10th grade plane geometry, I did REALLY well -- loved the subject, hated the teacher (with some reason). Sooo, I learned the subject 90+% from "homework"! For each lesson, glanced at the text and then started on the exercises. Started with the hardest ones and worked until they became too easy. Then solved all the harder supplementary exercises in the back of the book!
Net, on the state achievement test, came in second in the class of ~30.
One day, great fun: One of the exercises in the back of the book was harder than usual, and I started on it on Friday and didn't get it until Sunday evening. In class on Monday, the teacher had the class work on an easy exercise but with the same figure as the hard one. So, for the only time, I spoke up in class:
"There's another exercise in the back with the same figure."
The teacher took the bait and had the class start on the harder one. ~20 minutes later no one had any progress, and the teacher was exhorting the class
"Class! Think of the given, class!"
Not wanting to disrupt the class, I said:
"Why don't we ..."
and the teacher interrupted and shouted:
"You knew how to do it all the time."
Yup, wouldn't have said anything otherwise!
In advanced courses, most of the learning was from study outside of class.
For the Ph.D. qualifying exams, led the class in 4 of the 5 exams, and nearly all the background learning was what I did out of class.
E.g., although took a lot of math courses, none covered Stokes theorem and had to do that on my own, from Buck, Apostol, Fleming, etc.
Beyond such courses and for Ph.D. research, challenging problems outside of school, ... there are few if any classes. For a lot of the learning for computing, there are no classes.
But for the claims of the OP here, sure, maybe only 4 days a week of school and shorter days in school, especially if the kids can make good use of the extra time out of class.
by mik1998 on 3/11/24, 12:32 AM
Frankly, I never understood the anti-homework crowd. In university, I enjoyed homework - I am too stupid to do exercises quickly/during class, and homework lets me think about things for a lot longer. Doing homework has correlated very heavily for me with actually remembering things later on.
In high school and before homework took minimal amounts of my time. I am for assigning more homework to teenagers generally, since they do not do worthwhile things in their free time, as long as the homework is reasonably complex.
by chris_wot on 3/11/24, 1:28 AM
If you go to university, if you don't do work in your own time then you'll fail. The upside of homework is that it reinforces what you have learned during the day.
by Waterluvian on 3/11/24, 1:04 AM
Dunno about others but the one skill I truly honed in high school was how to optimize doing the least amount of work possible to achieve the minimum necessary grades.
by dw_arthur on 3/11/24, 1:02 AM
I refused to do homework as a child and in high school a lot of times. I did much better in college when I only had to worry about tests and papers once a week.
by mkoubaa on 3/11/24, 12:37 AM
The only redeeming thing about it is that parents can get a reliable window into what kids are learning and an opportunity to make up for poor instruction.
by skyde on 3/11/24, 2:17 AM
Author claim " you can’t reinforce understanding.". But I can think of 2 counterexample: -A student that does't understand statistics or calculus then do a bunch of exercise at home and suddenly understand the concept.
-Or a student spend 1 hours memorizing all the geography location or date for an history class.
by emmelaich on 3/10/24, 11:07 PM
I think homework tests diligence as much as anything.
To that end it should be short and easy.
by spacecadet on 3/11/24, 12:29 AM
Signed in just to say. Everyone's insane for wasting their time on homework. I had these thoughts as a 6 year old and refused to ever do homework. Passed school by only classwork and tests. It's all joke, conditioning people for a future work culture that at its core about puritan work ethic BS. Byyyye.
by ipnon on 3/11/24, 12:49 AM
POSIWID: The inherent goal of public school isn't to maximize the intellectual development of children. It is to condition them for industrial work. They must be taught to expect and endure endless tasks that are trivial, unproductive, and unfulfilling. They should not question what benefit a task has to their own interest. They should not question what benefit a task has to the interest of society at large. They should simply stop questioning the way of things, and complete their homework on time, or else!
by AlbertCory on 3/11/24, 1:11 AM
And somehow it will be better if the kids spend more time on TikTok and Instagram? Please explain.
by ergonaught on 3/11/24, 12:44 AM
It’s essentially the same situation as a company that “wants” you to work overlong.
If they can’t educate you in the time alotted, that’s their problem to solve.
If the company’s work can’t get done with humane conditions for the resources available, that’s their problem to solve.
We keep tolerating this because we are, collectively, idiots. We buy into it and argue in favor of it for the same reason.
It’s a real shame.
by lupire on 3/11/24, 1:38 AM
He's right. Homework is useless for most people because most people are going to grow up to be unskilled or low skilled workers.