Homework

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

In the first year of our stay in the United States, my eldest daughter went to school for the first time. I automatically, according to Russian traditions, transferred myself to the mode of the mother of a first-grader and prepared to take knowledge by storm. The first day at school passed, and my daughter brought me a letter from the director, with a literally tearful request: “Dear parents! Our school recommends that your child do at least 20 minutes of homework after school. If you think this approach is too harsh, the administration is ready to consider options. " I was a little shocked. Stories about the "stupid American school" immediately began to pop up in my head. I went to the teacher.

At first I talked to him myself, but he clearly did not understand what I wanted from him. I began to sin on my English and the fact that I could not convey my idea to him. To make sure that there were no language and cultural barriers, I came to the teacher with my American husband, and the teacher again could not understand why I wanted the child to do additional homework. As a result, he began to suspect that I did not trust him as a professional, and I did not like the school where my child goes. The teacher said that he was ready to help us find something suitable for our daughter, because there are a wide variety of schools.

Looking at my anxiety, my husband said: “Wait six months. It is too early to say whether the school is good or bad. It will be seen there. 4 months have passed, and my child has mastered English at the level of children of his age group. She did quite well in mathematics, and in reading speed she was 2nd in the class. And all this only if you have 20-minute homework.

Homework: Effects and Consequences

I know from my sister and other friends who stayed in Russia that 20 minutes for homework is just an unprecedented luxury and freebie for a primary school student. Children sit until 2 am with lessons. And not only children, but also parents, because often the whole family does the tasks of the first grader. They are too complicated and cumbersome for the child to do it himself. And this is not an ubiquitous painful perfectionism of parents who want their child to be an excellent student in all subjects with encyclopedic knowledge (although this is also the case). These are the everyday life of the Russian school. If the child does not do this, he will really start to lag behind the other children in the class.

Do not think that there is such a disgrace in Russia, and America is the promised land in the field of education. Schools in the United States suffer from a lack of funding, they are being cut, classes are being enlarged, the curriculum is being squeezed. Each school tries to survive as soon as possible, and tries to be the best and most advanced, unlike its neighbors in the area. Not every school has a minimum homework approach. Many parents write in different publications and blogs about the same problem that Russian families face. There are too many tasks, they are too difficult even for an adult. Parents are forced to “do homework” with their child for hours.

I tried to talk with some parents about the fact that classes may be too much for the children, when at one time I consulted a children's hospital as a psychiatrist, and children with neuroses acquired in elementary school were brought to me. The conversation about "too much study" quickly ended up deadlocked. Many people believe that the more knowledge is crammed into a child, the smarter he will be, the happier his life will be. Give your child some relief at school, how to surrender positions on the front line. Many fear that if the child's head is not constantly filled with knowledge and lessons, he will immediately begin to turn into a criminal, alcoholic drug addict. So lessons are also a way to prevent future problems.

However, the amount of knowledge does not guarantee protection from the adverse factors of life. And then, it is important not how much knowledge was crammed into the child's head, but how much of it was left after school and how the child will apply it in practice. And the most important thing. The younger grades are quite favorable for parents in terms of "planting the child for books and lessons." But this will not always be the case. The adolescence is not far off, when everything can change. The child must be willing to learn and be motivated to continue education. In other words, it's not about the number of lessons, but the quality of teaching.

Fatigue, absorption and motivation

In Russia, of course, you cannot argue with the education system. There is a program - be so kind as to learn from it. There are author's programs, but as a rule, these are all the same variants of a complex one than simplifying the form of education. In the United States, it is much easier to discuss learning problems. There are different approaches to education and their advantages and disadvantages can be studied. And this is done. So we can well use American research to get an idea of how the amount of homework affects the general level of education.

Harris Cooper, a psychologist specializing in education, has done several studies on the effectiveness of homework for a student's overall academic performance and how long it should take. According to his data, homework in elementary school does not affect the student's performance as a whole. The exception is mathematics, exercises in which actually improve understanding and performance in the subject. Lessons are not useless at this age. They teach them to the regime and school order. But on average, a child at this age can effectively use 20 minutes. High school students can effectively use from 1, 5 to 2, 5 hours.

In addition, it is worth remembering about the motivation of children to learn. Elementary schoolchildren are more motivated to learn, but this effectiveness persists over short distances. They enjoy doing short assignments that can be rewarded with praise from adults. Longer-term tasks are more difficult due to the fact that children at this age can not easily hold attention for a long time.

Children aged 12-13 are least motivated to study. They become more interested in communication at school and relationships with friends. But high school students again begin to show a high degree of motivation to study and begin to enjoy the long educational process. They themselves can engage in a long time with an essay, report, solve problems or read something in addition to the lesson.

And what will happen if you still increase the school load? How much better will the children do in school? Increasing homework time for children up to grade 5 does not improve academic performance. Children from 6th to 9th grade get 7% better. For tenth graders, the extra homework is really beneficial. Academic performance against her background improves by 25%.

Straight to the brain: techniques and technologies

The numbers look, as always, great, and everyone becomes happy for the children who would have free time to be just children. But what about the volume of knowledge that the student must learn? After all, every year the number of simply "basic concepts" that are necessary for mastering the basic concepts is growing. What to do and how can all this volume be put into a child's head in 20 minutes?

It's about technology and teaching methods. The child needs not only to effectively put facts into the head, but also to learn to use them, to be able to extract them from memory. Teaching methods can reduce the time it takes to complete lessons and increase efficiency. Among them are spaced repetition, mnemonics and mnemonics, Memory recovery techniques (and here), cognitive interruption.

On both sides: irresponsible teachers and nervous parents

This is not to say that there are no responsible teachers, and there are no responsible parents. It seems to me that the ratio of responsible and irresponsible is not bad in favor of the former. Parents are genuinely interested in the child's academic success, and teachers are interested in strong students who do not just fall out of the sky (and this is not talking about just good positive feedback from the teacher's work). But there is also such a phenomenon as teachers and parents pushing the problem of teaching children on top of each other. Some of the teachers believe that the child's problems are the parents' problems, and if he did not understand the material, the parents themselves should find means of extracurricular learning and push for home lessons. There are also some parents who are sure that after the child is “sent to school,” teachers and only teachers should worry about how to teach the child. As a result, a situation is created that neither the one nor the other side is interested in how the child learns, and how he copes with homework. In this case, the lessons at home turn into nonsense. Having failed to understand the material at school, the child does not make any significant leaps in knowledge at home.

Moreover, parents very often turn out to be incompetent in some matters. To be honest, much of the knowledge gained at school turns out to be unnecessary in the everyday life of an adult. So, for example, mathematics is often needed at the most elementary level, the level of basic mathematical operations. In early 2013, the British newspaper The Telegraph reported that 30% of parents are not sure that their knowledge of mathematics will allow them to help their child in completing the lessons. In general, only 1 in 20 parents successfully copes with math.

In addition, since the school years of parents, the method of education has changed, the parents try to explain it in their own way, and the child at times is confused.

Lessons also have a significant impact on family life. The child can keep his attention on the set goal only for a certain time. Then his attention is depleted. He is not moving too quickly through the list of assignments left by the teacher at home. Parents get nervous, the slow pace of the child's work begins to annoy them, they try to whip him up in various ways, including screaming and physical pressure. In families, lessons often spill over into violence of all kinds, both physical and emotional. Parents begin to quarrel among themselves. So school problems develop into family problems. While parental support and encouragement of self-study improves academic performance, the question of what to do about this is difficult to answer in Russian realities. But it is clear that children should not sit for hours at homework, especially in light of the fact that these night vigils are actually quite ineffective. And quite often they do lead to neuroses. Perhaps these facts should be considered in education reform, but perhaps it is a little naive to hope so. However, it is possible that parents and teachers who are not indifferent to the child can use this information. It is possible that the introduction of the above and other techniques will reduce the student's sitting at homework and maintain a natural interest in cognition not only during study, but also in adulthood.

The article was written for the Letidor website