Thoughts on homework article.

A response to:

http://grade12precalculus0910.blogspot.com/2009/11/to-homework-or-not-that-is-question.html

Would you like a no-homework agreement?

No. My reasons for this is explained below.

Would you benefit from a no-homework agreement?

No. Someone with a part time job will, but I think that it wouldn't really benefit me. I'd like to study certain things that I am interested in, but I have some catching up to do.

Would you learn enough with no homework?

That depends. For the most part, I don't get much class time to complete the assignments. Assignments reinforce the material, so they are necessary.

Do you have enough time in school to both learn and practice?

During the class, no. The instructor time / assignment time is too unbalanced.

Is the subject area a consideration when discussing such agreements?

Math and English comes to mind. Science also comes to mind as well. Those are subjects that generally require a great amount of practice in order to master. Social studies can take up a lot of time as well.

Here are my thoughts on the subject. If you do not want to do your work, too bad. Let's take a look at our situation: given the material that we have to go through, we need to spend some extra time on our work. As far as I am concerned, this guy just doesn't want to spend some extra time after school doing his work (assuming his schedule is similar to ours). As for the instruction quality, I'm not going to gripe about our school -- I think it's been great this semseter. It's either the classroom or correspondence.

Yes, there are cases where the school assigns and inordinate amount of work. However, in those cases, completely getting rid of homework is not the answer: one should reduce the workload to something more reasonable. Another thing: we can't take a black and white perspective on a situation like this (or any situation, for the world is not a black and white place; it's more like many subtle shades of grey with many nuances.)

Tthe workload should also depend on the given subject that you're trying to learn. Math is a subject that certainly merits more practice then many other school subjects, because, let's face it: math is cognitively intensive and requires the student to hone their problem solving skills. Some people are better at math than others, but you are never ever going to pick up on a subject by looking at one example. Even the best artists had to go through years of study and practice. You might have the occasional Murry Gell-mann or John Von Neumann, but it will be painfully obvious to the teacher if a student is truly that exceptional: in those cases, you give them special instruction. So bringing examples like that up is moot.

In summary, some subjects will require a fair amount of study, and given the breadth of subjects studied in school, one can expect to do homework. I believe that homework should be reduced to be as little as possible, and students who need extra work should be given the material to better understand the subject.

Those are my thoughts on the subject. Take it from someone who is insanely behind on his work: one can turn the leaf and finish the work, and I intend to get this credit. There are those cases where they will assign too much work, but for the most part, I don't think it's much of a problem for me at SVRSS.

Bonus material (though a lot of this stuff is common sense):

http://myfishbowl.ca/high-school/303-how-to-stay-awake-in-class
http://myfishbowl.ca/high-school/297-top-5-time-management-tips