Calgary dad wins no-homework lawsuit for his kids

[fourier jr]

wouldn't it be apocalyptic if this idea catches on & spreads across the country? everybody (on this site anyway) knows this guy is mental right? he said a lot of homework is "busy-work," especially what he said about math. according to him, once someone does the first few problems & gets the idea there's no point in doing 20 or 50 or 100 more. i was reminded of an instructor I had who brought a 3-ring binder to class one day, opened it up to show us what was inside & it was page after page of solved problems, just to show us what he had to do in order to get good at the stuff. & he said there were a dozen more binders like it in his office (which there was, in a cardboard box beneath his chalkboard). altogether they must have made a wad of paper a foot thick... yeah... "busywork." I can imagine physics or engineering are similar.

A Calgary family concerned about their children's homework load has signed a contract with their school to eliminate the problem altogether.

Tom and Shelli Milley have signed a formal "no homework" contract with their children's school.

"With two children in school there was just an inordinate amount of homework coming home and a lot of it was busy work," said Tom Milley.

The family has signed what is called a differentiated homework plan with their children's Catholic school. Their daughter, Brittany, and son, Spencer — now in grades five and seven — won't have to bring work home. Instead, they'll be marked only on work they do in the classroom.

The homework load kept his children from improving their weak areas, said Milley. He also questioned the value of the homework.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/calgary/story/2009/11/18/calgary-homework-school-students.html

 

[lisab]

Hmmm...have to take exception here. Might be controversial. Before you comment...state whether you're a parent or not.

I was a stay-home mom until my daughter was 9. So I spent a lot of time volunteering in her classes. I knew exactly what they were doing in class, and I absolutely hated the homework she brought home. Because, I knew most of the work sent home was review, not new stuff!

Old stuff, over and over and over. All this teaches a kid: school sucks, it's boring.

Meanwhile, I was trying to teach her the other very important things in life: Be honest. Be kind. Share. How to swim. Listen. How to cook. How to have a conversation. How to ride a bike. Delayed gratification (a *big* one). How to throw a baseball. Care for animals. How to skip a stone across a lake. I could go on and on...she's 17 and I'm still not done teaching these things!

You know, teachers have our kids for, what, 6 or 7 hours a day? A working parent gets them for only 3 or 4 hours, and there's a lot to teach in that time. I *hate* that my parenting time was infringed upon teachers, who wanted my daughter to do silly busy work. A parent has valuable lessons to teach too! We shouldn't be asked to do their job, we have a big enough job as it is.

I was very close and involved to my daughter's early education, I saw no value in massive homework assignments. Just my observation.

 

[rootX]

Hmmm...have to take exception here. Might be controversial. Before you comment...state whether you're a parent or not.

I was a stay-home mom until my daughter was 9. So I spent a lot of time volunteering in her classes. I knew exactly what they were doing in class, and I absolutely hated the homework she brought home. Because, I knew most of the work sent home was review, not new stuff!

Old stuff, over and over and over. All this teaches a kid: school sucks, it's boring.

Meanwhile, I was trying to teach her the other very important things in life: Be honest. Be kind. Share. How to swim. Listen. How to cook. How to have a conversation. How to ride a bike. Delayed gratification (a *big* one). How to throw a baseball. Care for animals. How to skip a stone across a lake. I could go on and on...she's 17 and I'm still not done teaching these things!

Sucking up is one of the most important lessons too I haven't observed a case where someone becomes competent by working at the problem only once. Nether, I have a seen a place where you don't require to repeat things over and over again at all.

Children at 9 learn some of the very important things (arithmetic calculations grammar) which they will be using through out their lives. It's important that they learn it very well.

When I was a kid, I would continue doing same thing over and over again continuously until I become competent in it (sometimes which was like more than 50 times).

 

[Pengwuino]

he said a lot of homework is "busy-work," especially what he said about math. according to him, once someone does the first few problems & gets the idea there's no point in doing 20 or 50 or 100 more.

Where does he say this? A different website?

I agree though in some sense. Sometimes teachers do just give out busy work... however, math would be one of the last places "busy work" should really be a complaint. You don't need to practice history or practice social studies, but things like mathematics and art need practice! I can't imagine someone doing well in their educational careers if they just learn then slightly try to actually do it. I never got good at calculus just by reading the textbook and doing 3 problems and calling it finished.

 

[fourier jr]

Where does he say this? A different website?

on the tv segment on the story. there are two clips on the website; one .ram & one not. the .ram clip might have that part in it but it won't work for me.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Where is the part about the lawsuit?

 

[russ_watters]

I actually don't see a problem here. This seems to me to be a great social experiment. If the kids fail (and I fully expect them to), then the theory of homework is affirmed and the issue dies, right?

 

[Pengwuino]

I actually don't see a problem here. This seems to me to be a great social experiment. If the kids fail (and I fully expect them to), then the theory of homework is affirmed and the issue dies, right?

Yah this theory really fails epically when I see college students try it.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

Homework overload is actually a serious issue. One of the reasons children do not do their homework or do poorly at it are probably that they have to spend several hours at school each day and then go home and spend several more hours doing homework. When I was in high school I had this issue in most of my classes. In math we would be given 20-30 problems to do which had to be finished, I usually could not finish during class, and then we would be given another 50+ problems to do at home. That was a good hour or two worth of homework for me right there not considering the homework I was given in all of my other classes. I rarely finished my algebra home work and was nearly failing the class because of it so they scheduled me for remedial math for my next semester. I took the final exam and passed my algebra class with a 'B' and probably would have had an 'A' if it had not been for marks off for not doing all of that homework. And I never asked to be moved back to algebra because I did not want to have to deal with hours upon hours of homework every night.

 

[JasonRox]

I'm against homework. It's rare I meet a professor or teacher who knows how to properly choose questions.

I'm marking for an instructor who gives 60 question assignments. I have to force him to cutback because I'm refusing to mark them.

Volume is good but if the teacher gives all the volume, this give NO opportunity at all for the student to choose his or her own questions to do, or learn using their own method because you're busy doing so many questions the teacher assigned.

Also, the culture regarding school also has changed. School is a means to get a job. No longer a means to get an education. (Education to me is to gain knowledge for the sake of.)

 

[erok81]

This sounds like something that would happen in America. :)

I must not be nearly as smart as these two. If I only did the examples in class, there is absolutely no way I'd be passing any of my classes. I don't see how it is possible to pass something like math with no homework.

But then again, these kids aren't too far along with their studies. On that note, I'd love to see how they fare later in life when they have no studying skills at all because they've never been required to do work outside of the classroom.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

This sounds like something that would happen in America. :)

I must not be nearly as smart as these two. If I only did the examples in class, there is absolutely no way I'd be passing any of my classes. I don't see how it is possible to pass something like math with no homework.

But then again, these kids aren't too far along with their studies. On that note, I'd love to see how they fare later in life when they have no studying skills at all because they've never been required to do work outside of the classroom.

I was terrible for not doing homework when I was in school. I also passed on high test marks in every class that did not grade mostly on homework.

Today I love to read and spend my time learning. I think I have learned quite a bit since I left school and I never even went to college.

I am also dyslexic, so that may have something to do with it. Homework always took so much time and effort that it drained me before I was even halfway through. When I nearly failed out of high school because of a class that I could not test through I went to adult school and finished the class on my own in half the alloted time. No home work there since we were not even permitted to take the materials out of the class room. I even took an extra class while I was there just for fun.

 

[fourier jr]

Where is the part about the lawsuit?

the guardian called it a legal battle
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/18/canada-homework-milley

 

[Moonbear]

If the homework was indeed poorly selected "busy work," I don't think the solution was to have NO homework. Rather, more carefully selected, challenging, reasonable assignments to reinforce the material taught during that day's class would be appropriate.

Some teachers do assign busy work, but also many parents don't appreciate the need to practice problems on one's own to really grasp the concepts appropriately. Though, in grade school, there's no need to be assigning 20 or 30 or 50 math problems for homework. A set of 10 problems representative of the day's work should be sufficient, and perhaps have an additional set available if a parent requests that their kid needs more practice on a certain type of problem, or if the teacher identifies that a student is weak in an area.

 

[Moonbear]

I am also dyslexic, so that may have something to do with it. Homework always took so much time and effort that it drained me before I was even halfway through.

That's another important point. If a kid is REALLY slow doing their homework, it is worth seeing how much they really are being assigned and if it should take that long. If they are taking much longer than expected, evaluation for a learning disability might be appropriate, or if that's not the issue, perhaps some remediation of some incompletely learned basic concepts that are slowing their progress.

When I was in school, most of my friends got their homework done during lunch or between other classes. That just didn't work for me, so I always had more actual take-home homework than they did, but then when I got home, it also took longer because I'd watch after-school cartoons while doing my homework, so wasn't paying 100% attention to the work. I was allowed to do that as long as the homework got done.

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

I agree with the parents. Mindless drill should be confined to the classroom while homework is restricted to learning the subject matter that the teacher is incapable of understanding. That way the child can ask the parents to help out, thus exposing the parents to potential ridicule. If the purpose of homework is to extend the number of hours that the child is exposed to learning, then you could keep the schools open longer hours or during the summer. Therefore, I conclude that the purpose of homework is something else. It has no analog in anything I have encountered in my work life. Perhaps it is meant to teach the children in no uncertain terms that their betters can walk all over them to the point of depriving them of play time, the true occupation of a child. Is there anyone here who has taken a course in elementary education and can tell us the real purpose of homework?

 

[Sorry!]

I never did my homework if I didn't have to and I did well in school... The only work I would do was stuff like labs/assignments/essays. None of this 'practice until you run out of pencils' type of stuff, had better things to do and I already understood the process so why bother? Yeah I probably could have continued to practice it until I could probably do it extremely quickly in my head but what difference does it make? I'm not going to school to become a mathmatician I'm going to school to learn the concepts and be able to use them. (This is mostly just at russ's post about how he expects the kid to fail)

As for not giving the kid homework I don't know it's kind of a hard situation for us to judge since we don't know the kid. Like after I was taught something in math I automatically understood it. When the teacher would continually try to drill it into the classes head it just bored me and made me hate being in school (even though she was doing it for the rest of the class to understand it). So maybe some students need homework more so than others and this child might be one of the lucky few who does not need homework.

This is actually why homework is not allowed to be graded for completion in Ontario. Same with notebooks etc. (Some students take 2 word jot notes and some write 5 pages how do you grade who's notebook is best? Some students don't even have notebooks lol)

 

[drankin]

Who needs homework? We need more lazy kids with no character in our society. Work ethic? That's for the illegal aliens and jobs that go overseas. All our kids need to do is just enough to get by. Be glad they show up for class once in awhile and allow our schools go collect tax dollars and keep our teachers in a job as our babysitters while we work, or look for work, or whatever we do nowadays.

 

[hypatia]

When my Son was in grade 4, the teacher sent homework that took hours to do, almost daily. School, homework, dinner, homework and then bedtime. It was just a few months of this, then my child began acting out of line. He was so stressed that even sleeping became difficult. His work became sloppy, and much of it was wrong. He no longer cared, as long as he had the papers to turn in.

I did complain that it was unhealthy for a child not to be able to play and interact with friends. While the principle agreed it was too much work, he did nothing to help. So everyday, I sorted his work, picked about 1 hours worth {which seems reasonable}, then I checked it and if it all was good quality, he was free to spend the rest of his time playing.

His grades suffered, but I really did not care.

 

[Borek]

Is there anyone here who has taken a course in elementary education and can tell us the real purpose of homework?

Consolidation of knowledge. Teacher should introduce new ideas, HW should help to digest them.

Not that I have a course in elementary education, but I am dealing on the daily basis with people who do.

 

[Chi Meson]

I have noticed that we are in a society where there are simultaneous complaints of "too much homework" and "not enough homework."

This kind of goes with the simultaneous argument tha "American teachers are not good enough" and "teachers get paid too much." (as in "if we pay teachers less, we will get better teachers.")

Some "researchers" claim that there is no evidence that homework improves knowledge (sort of like the claim that there is no evidence that batting practice improves your hitting average). These researchers never came to my Honors Physics class where I could show them that those students who scored low on their homework grade (which is graded on effort, not correctness) also score low on quizzes, tests, and other assessments.

I plan my assignments to take, on average, 1 hour to complete (that's high school Honors Physics). Every now and then I get the student who says "I spent over three hours on that homework last night." I say, "let me see what you did." If they actually can show me anything, I find aimless scribbles and half-hearted attempts. My next question would be something like "What were you watching?"

 

[Chi Meson]

When my Son was in grade 4, the teacher sent homework that took hours to do, almost daily. School, homework, dinner, homework and then bedtime. It was just a few months of this, then my child began acting out of line. He was so stressed that even sleeping became difficult. His work became sloppy, and much of it was wrong. He no longer cared, as long as he had the papers to turn in.

"Hours of homework" for a 4th grader on a daily basis is too much, and I think every decent school district knows that.

A common rule of thumb is "grade times ten-minutes" through elementary school.

 

[turbo]

I went to elementary school in a school where each teacher had two grades in her room and taught them alternately. When you weren't being taught the day's lesson, you did your assigned problems and reading. We didn't have homework because 1/2 the day was instruction and 1/2 the day was study and assigned problems. I was as good as gold during the odd-numbered grades because I would learn all my class-work, and as much of the even-numbered grade's classwork as I could without having their texts. I was a behavior problem just waiting to happen in the even-numbered grades, since I had already absorbed most of the material the previous year - especially the math and sciences. My 2nd-grade teacher tried stern discipline - that didn't make either of us too happy. My 4th-grade teacher made me do her work grading papers when I had finished my work. My 6th-grade teacher assigned me adult-level reading with required book reports. Her method worked best for me.

By the time we got to the district's junior HS, and started getting assigned homework daily, the kids from our little town's school did very well at knocking it out, since we already had good study habits developed in our elementary school. I never took home-work home in JHS or HS, since lunch break and a late-day study hall every day were enough time to complete it, unless it was a theme paper or some other larger project.

The kids that seemed to struggle most with homework in JHS and HS were often kids that had gone to the larger town's elementary school, with all-day instruction and daily homework assignments. Mrs Clark (our elementary school's principal and 5-6th grade teacher) was very proud of how "her" kids were doing in the upper grades. The structure of our days in elementary school contributed greatly to retention, IMO. Get instruction, then read and/or do assigned problems while the other grade was getting instruction. Rinse and repeat. Doing problems and answering questions immediately after being taught some new material is probably easier on the kids than cramming more material at them and then assigning a bunch of homework at the end of the day.

 

[theCandyman]

I wouldn't have minded not doing stuff like writing my spelling words 20x each, or colouring in a map of South America. My siblings are home schooled now, but a lot of what I saw they had to do when they went to school was indeed busywork, even for their educational level.

 

[Evo]

Both of my girls went to a "progressive" high school (an experiment by the public school), usually no more than 10 kids to a class, kids had to be exceptional, both of my girls had to write a paper on why they should be allowed to attend. And there was no homework. Evo Child had all Honors and AP classes, so most of her freshman courses for college were already credited which gave her a headstart. The no homework idea was brilliant. Kids learned in school where they had access to a teacher.

 

[rootX]

Both of my girls went to a "progressive" high school (an experiment by the public school), usually no more than 10 kids to a class, kids had to be exceptional, both of my girls had to write a paper on why they should be allowed to attend. And there was no homework. Evo Child had all Honors and AP classes, so most of her freshman courses for college were already credited which gave her a headstart. The no homework idea was brilliant. Kids learned in school where they had access to a teacher.

What would be the scope of that kind of experiment results?

 

[Evo]

What would be the scope of that kind of experiment results?

Do you mean have the kids benefited and graduated with overall higher GPA's? Did they score higher on national scholastic tests? Yes.

 

[Moonbear]

Do you mean have the kids benefited and graduated with overall higher GPA's? Did they score higher on national scholastic tests? Yes.

I think that had a LOT more to do with only having 10 students per teacher and selecting only the students who were already outstanding in their class than not giving homework. That's because it's very easy to build the necessary interactivity and immediate feedback and remediation into a class that only has 10 students and ensure they are all thinking and practicing the work during the school day than it is in a class of 30 or 35.

When you take a bunch of the best students in a class and do something different with them, the success of that program really doesn't mean anything about the methods being effective because those are the students who are self-motivated to do well anyway. Probably the key benefit is that it got them out of the regular classroom where they were at risk of getting bored and giving up.

 

[Sorry!]

What would be the scope of that kind of experiment results?

That just goes back to my post about how some students are better suited for these types of situations. I could have gone to a similar school as Evo's children but it was just a regular 'gifted' school which meant it was private not public and it had to be offered to you through either you teachers or based on your grade 3 standardized testing. My mom said no to that and no to me skipping 2 grades .

It would seem to me based on what Evo said that students like that need new knowledge and they will continue to learn it and as long as they have someone there to give them guidance it's all gravy. Homework will not help these students understanding of a subject in most cases because they already understand it and if they don't understand it the first day they will by the end of the week. I don't think it is really dependent on intelligence though, I think it's more of a motivation in the child to want to learn.

Some students might still need the homework to solidify their understanding of work through repitition... there's nothing really wrong with that.
This even happens in university there's always that student who doesn't really understand the course work they are given and spends hours and hours of time on the work. Then there's the student in the same class who goes home does the required reading/assignment and goes out for beers with friends and still manages to score higher.

 

[Borek]

Probably the key benefit is that it got them out of the regular classroom where they were at risk of getting bored and giving up.

Especially taking into account fact that school is optimized for Joe Average, so both Joe Bright and Joe Slow are PITA for the teacher and rest of the class.

That is assuming school is optimized, reading about experiences of the chemistry teachers makes me doubt it...

 

[rootX]

Do you mean have the kids benefited and graduated with overall higher GPA's? Did they score higher on national scholastic tests? Yes.

I meant performing that kind of experiments only on gifted kids does not tell anything how well it would work on regular students.

 

[turbo]

Our little 2-grades-per-classroom elementary school was a good enough example of getting good performance with minimal staff and resources. There were only a couple of children in town that were considered mentally retarded (not PC these days, but that's what it was called) enough to warrant special classes in a regional school. Every other kid from bright to dull was sitting in the same classroom. Gee, we had a 1/2-day K teacher, 3 full-time teachers, a janitor, and two part-time lunch ladies. When I drive past the K-5 elementary school in our little town, there are at least 20 cars in the parking lot every day. Somehow, I get the feeling that we are throwing money at education without regard for cost/benefit, and there are way too many teacher's aides, etc than necessary.

 

[Galteeth]

Before I did homeschooling, I attended both private and public school. The private school had shorter days, less days all together, and probably a slightly lower homework load. All in all, I learned far more at private school then I did a public school. The nature of the assignments is far more significant then the time.
For example, in eight grade science class, we had no homework for an entire semester. The trade-off was that we had to do a large project, including summary of topic, background research, summation of findings, experiment proposal, final experiment plan, execute the experiment, collect data, summarize findings, draw conclusions, and present a final paper including a critique of our own possible methodological shortcomings and comparisons to conclusions of other experiments.
Contrast this with 9th grade (public school) AP bio class, where we had to read a chapter every two days and were graded on tests of what we had memorized. While I certainly learned alot, since it was learning in the "cramming" style, I would say my retention rate was only around 50 percent. I winded up getting an A in the class, but the lesson most of the students learned was to cheat. Rather then actually read the chapters, they would work in teams, each person coming up with definitions for a few pages of terms and short summary of important concepts and sharing them with their teammates. I would work by myself, but I eventually found to keep up, I had to just review the terms and concepts, memorize, and not actually read the chapter.

As time went on, the teacher found about the team method, and actually said this was the way to do it. The whole thing winded up falling apart when we realized he didn't even bother grading the tests and just gave generic grades based on how smart he thought individual kids were (really, we did an experiment, and realized he would only actually look at the first few and last few questions.) I fondly recall a friend of mine who had answers marked correct such as "Mr. ____ will not read this", "this class is a joke", and MOO!
He was eventually fired for sexual harassment anyway. But in all honesty, he was one of the better teachers I had that year.

 

[daveg360]

I think he taught a vital lesson - who needs employees that can regurgitate reams of text from a book? versus who needs employees who can find the most efficient effective way of solving a problem and then work as a team to implement it?!

I had the same arguments with teachers when I was in school. If you actually lay the high-school curriculum out it isn't a great deal to teach in 5 years. The fact that they can't fit it into 6 hours means there's something wrong. I spent most of my school life listening to the teacher scream at naughty kids :( and then at me when I told them I was wasting my life there! Schooling needs to come up with better ways to cater for the wide range of abilities that children have. A lot of the 'naughty' kids in my school have gone on to have good, practical jobs. They tend to be plumbers and car mechanics etc - and make good money doing it. Schools should have facilities to teach more practical abilities too.

Oh and I don't remember ever handing in much homework! I even remember getting given Religous Education homework! which was a class where we spent our time cutting out cardboard Jesus's and Mohammed's (blessings and peace be upon them both) and pretending that the teacher wasn't a Christian zealot.

 

[rootX]

but the lesson most of the students learned was to cheat. Rather then actually read the chapters, they would work in teams, each person coming up with definitions for a few pages of terms and short summary of important concepts and sharing them with their teammates. I would work by myself, but I eventually found to keep up, I had to just review the terms and concepts, memorize, and not actually read the chapter.

How come that is cheating?