nice post. i agree...for instance, i remember having a teacher tell me my freshman year, the periodic table of elements..think of it as a tool. its in your planner, which it was, so use it when you need to. 2 yrs later in chemistry my teacher has us taking quizzes over the elements, ie: just naming them...i feel that is kind of worthless.
Before I read anything let me say, No. They should just go ahead and give me only one day to do anything, because i'm going to wait the day of or maybe day before to do it. That might just be me, lazy.
Took me a while to get back to this thread. This is similar to how I approached homework, and school overall. If No-Homework policies were in effect when I went to school my grades would have benefitted greatly. Top 10-20% with in-class work - Probably bottom .005% in homework, every year. One time in 5th grade, no joke, the principal on the loudspeaker to the whole school actually ended the morning announcement with "And thank you {my name} for doing your homework"the one time I did do it.....I'm guessing it was supposed to be complimentary and encouraging, but I got BIG time teased about it from my friends and my sister who went to the same school. Thinking about it now, maybe it was set up by the teacher to back hand compliment me, cuz she was frustrated giving me all the free ice cream prizes from whooping up on everybody in flash cards and spelling bees while at the same time wiping my butt with her homework assignments...Also thinking back, weeks later that same principal/teacher unit or whoever somehow got my addresss outed me for living out of district, forcing me to go to another school, hmm... But basically yeah, I agree each student is different. And homework whether its necessary or not, its obviously surely important.
I have a co-worker, who's gonna be an elementary teacher in a few months, that says similar things. How he doesnt want to overload his students but doesnt think occassional homework would fry their young minds either... For grades 8 and lower, I think like in most everything, parental upbringing, environment and involvement plays a big part. A students performance can be a reflection of the kind of support they're given. Nothing the schools can do about it, but if a kid's parents never check his report card, if kid's parents don't care much if he does homework or not, why will the kid care? No-homework would mean a kid isnt graded by their at-home enviroment. Which that by itself can flunk alot of students. Life's never fair though. The idea that homework is to be supervised in schools by those "that already get paid to teach", to me its not like the work that kids do at home would evaporate and go away. It would only mean more school hours in a day to accomodate some of the time students would normally spend at home, and lessen the summers. So they'd have to expand and lengthen the school year and add more staff. And possibly add tax dollars, since school budgets are being scaled back already in a lot of places. Definitely here in California they're cutting back on school budgets. But Jimmy and Suzie can work overtime on their jobs to help pay for the kid's college that the kid wont be prepared for cuz they wont spent enough time helping develop his studies, maybe its worth it.
