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Re:More parents, students saying 'no' to homework by rayiner on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @04:47PM (#10460998)
> Arguably you could cover everything again the next day but thats hardly a graceful solution and doesn't cater to that variance of time needed for homework across different children as contact hours are very limited as it is.

Repetition is important. But kids are already at school for 7-8 hours a day. If that is not enough time to engage in adequate repetition, the solution is not to shift work to home hours. It is:

1) Do less, by cutting less important subjects;

2) Do more with the time given, by cutting students who disrupt class.

Re:More parents, students saying 'no' to homework by cossatot on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @08:49PM (#10462242)
What do you view as non-essential? STEM? Arts? Social studies? Recess/PE?

And how much time do you actually think is wasted on dealing with disruptive students? 10% of the day? 35%?

To me, this sounds like a recipe for creating an upper class of uncreative, poorly-rounded conformists and a lower class of people who are undereducated and permanently pissed off at the society that fails to serve their needs.

I think it's pretty unlikely that this would be a substantial improvement in modern American society or many others.

Kids misbehave at school for a huge number of reasons (many of them socioeconomic but definitely not all), and it's not really the public school system's responsibility to fix that, but it is the school system's responsibility to give them an education so that they can properly integrate into society as an adult. Shoving the problematic students to the side exacerbates this.

Bonus points if the education system can encourage more independence of thought and action, creative and analytical problem skills, and the tenacity and wisdom that come from actually having gotten some hard things done.

A better system would be one that is more capable of demonstrating the value of education to the students (incentivizing them to learn, and making learning at any level more rewarding), as well as one that can accommodate a larger degree of student interests and learning styles. I don't really know how to do this without having more internships and so forth, which aren't necessarily feasible for younger children but may be for teens. Maybe somewhere in the world or at some point in history this has been practiced more?

Re:More parents, students saying 'no' to homework by rayiner on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @12:01AM (#10462783)
I don't think K-8 needs to teach more than writing, reading, and math. Not even science--kids don't really get it and the dumbed-down version you learn at that level probably makes it harder rather than easier to learn "real science" later on.

Misbehaving kids should get an education--they should just get it in a class with other misbehaving kids.

Re:More parents, students saying 'no' to homework by foiboitoi on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @06:17AM (#10463596)
>Misbehaving kids should get an education--they should just get it in a class with other misbehaving kids.

What specific criteria is there so that we segregate fairly, not based some delusion that normal behaviour between genders are identical?

Teachers (which are overwhelmingly female) overly punish normal behaviour from boys compared to girls. I wouldn't trust their judgment for my children of what misbehaviour is given their obvious discrimination that I've witnessed and experienced.

Re:More parents, students saying 'no' to homework by TeMPOraL on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @05:03PM (#10461116)
Exactly. School is a much better environment for repetition anyway - you can oversee students doing the chores and explain things to them individually if they get stuck. It also seems better to use the "high-grade" time (home) for learning new things and "low-grade" time (school) for repetitive chores.

If you have to assign something to them to do at home, stick to just making them read a book instead. Right now they have to do both, and there isn't enough time for that.

Re:More parents, students saying 'no' to homework by pen2l on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @08:44PM (#10462222)
> 2) Do more with the time given, by cutting students who disrupt class.

If you keep doing that for a long enough time, no more students will be left in the class. So I don't think this a practical solution that will yield better results than whatever we have going on today.

Re:More parents, students saying 'no' to homework by rayiner on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @12:06AM (#10462792)
Why do you think that? I'd wager impulsiveness and attention span are normally distributed, and there are gains to be had tracking those say more than 1 SD below the mean into classes specially equipped to handle them.