The Underworked American Child

Re:The Underworked American Child by Locke1689 on Saturday June 13, 2009 @11:53PM (#656787)

"On top of that, American children do only about an hour’s-worth of homework a day,"

Haha what??

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Re:The Underworked American Child by pyr3 on Sunday June 14, 2009 @01:19AM (#656843)

That average has no meaning. Are they averaging the homework loads of grades K-12? Obviously kids in higher grades will have higher workloads, while kids in kindergarten will have little to no homework.

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Re:The Underworked American Child by jazzyb on Sunday June 14, 2009 @10:54AM (#657128)

Right. Between sixth and twelfth grades I averaged about 4-5 hours of homework per school night. A lot of those numbers in the article aren't reflective of my experience.

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Re:The Underworked American Child by tokenadult on Sunday June 14, 2009 @12:21PM (#657223)

Between sixth and twelfth grades I averaged about 4-5 hours of homework per school night.

What kinds of subjects were you studying, in what kind of school? What kind of university education were you aiming for with those studies in grades 6 through 12?

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Re:The Underworked American Child by jazzyb on Sunday June 14, 2009 @04:11PM (#657502)

It was a normal American public school in the south. I was in a group of advanced students in my junior high school (we took classes like algebra and Spanish two years before our peers), and I took a few AP classes in high school, so I suppose I wasn't the average high school student.

The explanation of why there was so much homework: In K-5 I had only one teacher each year who taught all the subjects (math, English, history, etc.), and I received just 1 or 2 hours of homework a night. When I entered sixth grade, I suddenly had a different teacher for each subject, each of whom sent me home with an hour or so of homework for each subject.

Keep in mind that I'm trying to average the number of hours I spent per school night. I might have had one night a week where I had very little homework, but once I was in high school, I would spend two or three nights a week up till 1 or 2 in the morning finishing an English essay or work for some other subject.

I think I can honestly say that I wasn't aiming for any university education in sixth grade ;-) I never had any ambition to go to a prestigious university; I only applied to one state school my senior year which I wound up attending.

I guess I just had a lot of tough teachers.

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Re:The Underworked American Child by ShabbyDoo on Sunday June 14, 2009 @11:36AM (#657177)

In the US? Wow.

In retrospect, do you think this workload was helpful or harmful?

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Re:The Underworked American Child by jazzyb on Sunday June 14, 2009 @03:45PM (#657466)

Looking back on it, I think it was neither; it was just superfluous. Take calculus for example: why would a teacher assign 60 or so integrals to calculate when 20 would have been enough? Maybe it prepared me better for college -- I can't say.

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