Pardon a personal rant: I have been well-known (at least around my own house, and among my own children) as a dedicated hater of homework. It wasn’t simply the fact that a kid of seven or eight had to spend all day in a classroom, and then bring home work designed specifically to extend school hours into the evening - though I have a few ideological issues with that, too. Rather, my problem is with the nature of the work, which is all too often not a review of ideas and lessons gone over during regular class-time, but rather entirely new lessons, meaning that parents get to play teacher to children already worn out and sick of listening to people trying to teach them. Also, the lessons being taught are often based on some nu-education model, meaning that kids are encouraged to “discover” the underlying lesson themselves, rather than being given a few tools they can then practise using. Math is the worst for this. I have occasionally spent five minutes explaining some nifty trick of addition or multiplication or whathaveyou that my son was being asked to work out himself and then sum up in two sentences. Usually, I just skip the “discovery” part, tell him what he needs to do, and then get him to repeat it a few dozen in times until it he can do it without thinking. Repetition and memorization gets a bad name.

So I could only feel a familiar rising of blood pressure when I came across this post at BoingBoing.net, which offers an example of some first grade math homework, and then asks commenters to figure it out. I only sorta could, and I was not alone: teachers and college-level math tutors confessed to being baffled by the assignment, too. (I challenge DRIVENmag.com readers to try it, too.)

My favourite comment, the one that hit all-too close to home, was this one: “Teach in class, homework is reinforcement.”

Amen. So endeth the rant.

(Top image by H McKenna used under a Creative Commons license.)