Infinite Monkeys

An open letter to Cory D.—

As a kid of teachers, I’m surprised you’d so swimmingly pitch tent with the StopHomework camp. Full disclosure; I am a teacher. Not a Trotskyite, but an anarchist-atheist English teacher who –gasp—gives homework. Some say a lot of homework. In fact, I give homework precisely because I want to interrupt my students’ lives as much as possible.

Why?

It is every teacher’s duty to erase the distinction between play and work, between learning and doing, between daydreaming and wakeful endeavor. Homework is an archaic term, and it occurs to me that you may have been befuddled by it. Let me clarify something by example. I ask my students to do three kinds of assignments.

(1) Read. While your argument (that kids need "a childhood's measure of doing nothing, daydreaming and thinking") sounds righteous, you need to weigh some facts that Bennett’s statistics don’t consider. It’s, like, hella easy to watch TV or play Wii. I’ve got a 7 year old, and I’ve watched him like a zoologist. He will invariably follow the path of least resistance. Yes, I did worry that it was just him. For about 4 seconds. Conversations with other parents (and more… um… “field time” with other 7 year olds) bore out my theory: Kids slack. Kids cannot be left to simply daydream, since commercial forces have a bigger impact than a socialist Canadian born in the ‘70s might realize. If you don’t force a kid to daydream, someone else will, because they get paid shitloads to do it. My thesis advisor in college – a chicken-farming poet named Robert Creeley – taught me that those who suckle the nurturing teat of literature ought never be ashamed to push books on kids, and that has been my guiding principle as a teacher. If my students aren’t forced to read David Berman poems, they’re totally gonna watch American Idol. Daydream? Pfft. More like get subsumed by hegemonic Capitalism. But you can call it “daydreaming” if it makes you sleep better. Me? No.

(2) Question people. At the dinner table, ask you family __(insert thought experiment here)___. This is a common assignment. I chuckle to myself when I picture 128 kids toying with a fork-full of brussel sprouts and asking their parents “Is the universe friendly?” Or, “let’s cut our pizza like a pie chart of how long the Greeks, the Romans, and the United States claimed themselves to be the world’s superpower… but before we do, which piece of pie would you want?”

(3) Make something better. This assignment has a million permutations, but in general, the idea is that no project is complete. Ever. That essay on Mankind’s civilizing impulse as illustrated by T. C. Boyle’s “Jubilation” and The Epic of Gilgamesh? Find another story/song/picture that completes the triptych. That mimicry of Thoreau you wrote? Make it a satire. Your Dadaist treehouse? Work it!

I oppose the Bennett/Kalish movement for two reasons, neither one of which is as radical as you might think. First, the teachers I know are pro-intellectual, anti-NCLB educators for whom standardized testing is a non-issue. They do not give test prep homework because they teach far beyond a standardized test’s parameters. Maybe that isn’t true elsewhere, but it ought to be, and I assume it is only Bennett’s cultural superiority complex that keeps her from waging that war. Second, I oppose any political group dictating curriculum and pedagogy to teachers. By joining their crusade, Mr Doctorow, you cast a very wide net of officious legislating that (seriously!) seems very out of character for someone who tends to champion intellectual freedom. For you to decide what I may teach seems unnecessarily autocratic. And egomaniacal.

I teach in a public school. If I am hired by my community to teach its students, then I will teach them according to my lights, which the community better have investigated and determined to be bright and beneficent. If my lights are dim – and here I’d entreat you to break ranks with the company you’ve chosen and resist the tenure argument – if they prove too dim to teach, then freaking fire me. Yes, it can be done, and no union will support a dumb teacher.

Please reconsider. I don’t care what you do – become a teacher, campaign for higher wages for teachers, assert that Capital has no authority over children, whatev – but please don’t unthinkingly wage war on teachers. There are a million things wrong with education, starting obviously with heavy-handed micromanagement from unfunded mandates like NCLB. These Republican tactics sound good to simple-minded fokes, but don’t be one of them.

Sincerely,
Chandler Lewis
Suffern, New York

Damn straight, Chandler.

I don't know what schools are like in Suffern, New York, but here in Phoenix, where I grew up, homework was an astounding waste of time. Busy-work to reinforce information I'd already absorbed.

Example: I always did extremely well on my math tests, all through grade school and high school. It was rare for me to get less than an A on a quiz or test. Yet my grades were mediocre-to-poor, because I rarely did my homework.

Example 2: When I was young, I LOVED to read. It was hard to pry me away from my books. Enter school: As soon as I started getting lengthy reading assignments that I was to complete ON MY OWN TIME, I almost stopped reading altogether. It took years for me to fall in love with books again.

Homework is only part of the problem, of course. Public schools are death camps for the soul. Homework is just one of their methods of torture.

Part of what Robb describes is a probalem that all smart kids suffer. To escape the trap, one wouldd have to virtually be privately tutored. (Pause for the sound of Robb's brain to gear up for a pro-homeschool response.)

But really, let's just take the practical side of the homework argument. Class time is for teaching. TEACHing. The time that students have, particularly in Jr. high and above, with the instructor of a given subject is limited. It should not be spent with the teacher sitting quietly while the students spend class time completing exercises or reading. That's just a waste of precious time that could be used actually teaching, answering, explaining, expounding, encouraging, etc.

Having the kids do the practice, the legwork, the time consuming reading, outside of the classroom allows the time that the teacher actually has with the students to be spent interacting with them. That's what good teachers are supposed to be doing; asking questions, guiding discussions, explaining concepts new ways, asking what parts most had trouble with, etc.

Furthermore, having younger children work on reinforcing some of what they are learning at school at home for about 20 minutes most nights is one of the only effective means by which the school can get parents actively and regularly involved in what their kids are learning. And that's not too much time. Slower kids may need more time, but by having the process be continuous, parents are already up to speed with the material and methods when their child's need for more help surfaces. It makes the communication between parents and teachers much more effective and meaningful too.

And it does force middleschool kids to begin to make their own decisions about rudimentary time management and short/middle/long term prioritizing. The students who don't need opportunities to learn from mistakes in those areas are few and far between.

Lastly, as is particularly true with language learning, short sessions of study, repeated throughout the overall day, are far more effective at creating mastery than trying to "get it" from just a 50 minute session once a day. You can suggest it, but it's almost never going to happen without there being a specific assignment that requires a student to spend time using those skills sometime outside of class. Since you can't schedule those seeions during other classes, or during lunch, the hours "at home" are the only practical option.

I seem to remember that a year or two ago, the big book was one about how overscheduled our kids are today: soccer, yoga, scouts, band, cheer, junior achievement, horse riding, space camp, whatever. It's multiplied by multi-child families. Limiting that stuff makes a lot more sense to me. When you add it to the cornucopia of tv, computer, game console time, and jobs that teens have to fund their "wants" rather than needs, (that must be allowed for so many of the kids based on the conversations overheard at schools), the argument that the amount of homework is the problem falls flat.

Well, you know where I stand on homeschooling, so I won't bother to extol its virtues in this context. I will attempt to argue from a perspective that assumes formal education. But I am going to take a "market-based" approach to the problem.

The point of formal education should not be to construct an environment that is most accomodating to the teachers. Rather, it should be to construct an "educational product" that is consumed efficiently and effectively at a reasonable cost. If the market were permitted to act unfettered by compulsory education rules, government-mandated standards, public schools, and so on, I believe market forces would shape this product in a way that was less hindered by institutional inertia.

These days, kids are at school 30-40 hours per week, not counting extra-curricular activities. That is more than enough time for indoctrination AND practice. I'm no fan of cramming an eight-year-old's schedule with sports and such, but after six hours of lectures and tests, I am inclined to believe that encouraging older kids' involvement in many of the activities you listed will be much better for their body, mind, spirit, and future than a bunch of homework. I certainly got a lot more out of scouting, for example, than I would have likely gained spending those 2-3 hours per week buried in books. Ditto piano, church, and working at the computer store. In fact, just typing those four items out makes me think about how profoundly my adult life was shaped by them, and how trivial and even detrimental my simultaneous public school activities were.

Kids learn differently, of course, and I don't expect everyone else to learn in the same way I do. Also, I should clarify that the specific "homework" of which I am most critical is the graded "reinforcement" homework so common in primary and secondary schools. When you take math in college, you get homework assignments to reinforce the principles you learned in class, but you're not required to turn it in, and are certainly not graded on it. Why should high schoolers be graded on their math homework, when they can just as easily be graded on their tests and quizzes? This would make the teachers' jobs easier, as they would only have to review the homework of students who do it, which automatically focuses their attention on students who both need the practice and desire to learn enough to complete the work. I still think there is enough time "in school" for it to be structured to allow most students to complete all of their work while they are there, but some types of homework are more justified than others.

One last thing - if the homework only took "about 20 minutes most nights" I don't think anyone would really be complaining, not even me. But I would venture to guess that most students consider themselves lucky if the homework from a single class only takes 20 minutes, much less the whole school day.

I hope you don't think my paradigm was designed for the benefit of teachers. My emphasis on allowing teachers to teach, rather than watch the kids do their exercises, is 100% student oriented. Clearly, it would be much easier on the teachers to grind the whole process down by allowing for so much schoolwork in class. What was left out of my previous comment was how much more material can be covered through the use of homework. Poo-poo that as you will, but it's meaningful to the parents in the private school market.

Speaking of which, your idea of grading the kids on their quizzes and tests in math just doesn't fly with the parents I've worked with, who have kids in middle and high school. Most kids are not ready for that kind of system at that age, and parents today want much more incremental feedback on how their children are doing. Online password-protected gradebooks are all the rage with parents.

But it doesn't have to be a 100% thing. Not all homework HAS to be graded. In grading Latin translations, for example, I can't correct every student's every noun ending. It's the classroom discussion and active teaching that I have time for precisely because I have the kids do much of that stuff outside of class that makes the class effective. As with so many things, this argument's solution rests in moderation. Knowing that the assignment MIGHT be graded is not a bad thought for the kids to have. In my HS sophomore math classes, we usually only had to show that it was done. Then we talked about it. That's the model I'm particularly in favor of.

But as someone who has built school schedules, I have to say that the "30-40 hour" thing is just too oversimplified. With seven 50 minute periods a day, plus lunch, devotions, weekly chapel, recess for some grades, etc., time flies. What we do provide, though, is at least one "study hall" per grade per day. We get very few complaints about homework at my school, and when we do, I immediately ask the moderator of that student's study hall if they were making good use of their time. Usually, it turns out that said student had no good excuse for even having anything to take home that night.

Sometimes, however, there are "perfect storms" of assignments that can happen. They can add up to a few hours' worth of work, but they are rare. Quite often, these situations happen during holiday-shortened weeks, since we usually avoid homework due on Mondays, and Thursdays (to allow for Sabbath observance and typical midweek church activities).

I'm sorry to be arging from such a micro perspective. I know you're talking much more macro. But I believe that a position of enlightened (if you will) moderation, like I try to put into practice, is a reasonable macro position.

Too tired. To. Keep. Type. Ing.

Must. Sleep.

Quick comments:

1. I think daily "study hall" is an excellent moderate approach, and I wish it had been part of my own schooling.

2. Another thing of which I'm quite jealous is the new self-paced and computer based alternative schooling options increasingly available in the area where I grew up. If I could have plowed through my classes on a computer rather than sitting through inane lectures, I'm quite confident my grades would have been much better.

More later. Gotta work...

Crying about homeowrk? Good lord we are becoming a nation of candy-assed pansies.

My guess is Monkey Brad nailed it: overscheduling. Back in the day (god I hate that phrase) there was time for homework. Now with a myriad of activities, cable or satellite TV, computers, computer games, etc., there is just too much other shit. Yes, when I grew up in LA we just had 5 TV channels and I had to walk school uphill, both ways.

PS: I remember during my two years of taking Latin in High School that whenever I stumbled over translating a Latin phrase I would just write "the cow jumped over the moon." Wrote that a lot.

I don't remember homework as ever being particularly challenging or thought-provoking. It was just pure tedium; mostly rote rehearsal of concepts instead of something that might help explain the concepts themselves. I don't recall the amount of homework as ever being overwhelming, but I do remember it being extremely dull and unpleasant. It certainly dimmed any excitement I might have otherwise had for learning.

In fact, I would say that the main two things I got out of homework were a tendency to procrastinate, and the ability to bullshit effectively. By the time I reached high school and finally started encountering those rare teachers who taught because they loved to educate, and not because they had no other marketable skills, it was too late.

I recall a particular U.S. History assignment, in which I was expected to interview a couple of senior citizens about their life experiences, then contrast their reminiscinces with our own learning. I put it off until the night before it was due, then made up two interviews out of whole cloth. I received an A+ from one of the sharpest teachers in the school, and was pretty pleased with myself. In retrospect, I sort of regret not doing what was actually a pretty interesting assignment, and I definitely regret not learning more U.S. History. But by then, homework was so anathema to me that I had perfected my avoidance techniques, and could see no reason not to use them.

What children most need for their education is engaged parents. When mine reach the homework age, I expect my participation to be twofold. I'll be spending half of my time combating the liberal propaganda they will no doubt be unwittingly stuffed with -- my three-year old has already been recruited by her preschool to sell shirts in order to save the rain forests. Once that's done, I'll administer a quick quiz to determine whether they know how to do their homework. If they do, and if I deem their workload to be pointless and overlarge, I'll do it for them.

As for their free time, if they want to spend it just farting around on the computer or playing video games, that's fine with me. That's what I spent most of my time on while blowing off my homework, and in spite of the fact that we had almost no computer training in school -- perhaps because of that fact -- that "wasted time" eventually translated into a rewarding and lucrative career.

My experience was almost identical to Poochucker's, so, "What he said."