Dear me everyone knows this. Education is pure drudgery. Teachers are proctors. The coursework is barely organized or connected to anything and chidlren are rewarded for blindly following directions even when the directions are wrong. I have watched otherwise bright students for years slog through the obligatory brute force hours long assignments every night until they eventually either give up or implode. Again, everyone knows this. But the real question is why? It's certainly not to learn or even to learn to learn. It's to weed out, to cull the herd.

An article heavy on anecdotes, light on any sort of statistics or real facts.

Just how many schools are giving four hours of homework a night in first grade? When 20 of the sudents do the work in 30 minutes, but two do it on four hours, does that mean there is too much homework?

"Parents should never have to teach math." Why not. Are teachers the only folks who should teach? That is absurd.

Swimming in generalities really makes me think the book the author wrote is hardly worth reading.

I taught high school in Japan, and let me tell you, anyone who says that "the Japanese actually get less homework than we do" either a) didn't do thier research or get thier facts straight before speaking b) is trying to excuse the fact that it's more fun to be lazy than work hard or c) both.

after I read that I dismissed the rest of what she had to say, because she clearly doesn't know what she's talking about.

oh, and I've taught high school in the US too. kids doing too much homework was not a problem. ever.

...is precisely what is killing public education. Parents, school boards, government agencies, all constantly demand 'accountability', and yet the only people ever held 'accountable' are the classroom teachers. There is no punishment for the parents who never bother to involve themselves in their children's lives or school; none for the principals and superintendents who would rather run their teachers into the ground than see test scores stay static instead of going up, up, up; none for the state and federal level policy makers, the vast majority of whom have never seen the inside of a public school classroom; and none for the students, who bring their attitudes and issues with them every day, with the teachers expected to play parent for 8 hours without having the right to DO anything to ensure order. Everything is data driven, with schools being run like a corporate drone factory, cranking out 'product' by using 'processes' and 'feedback'. What do we do with all this data? Praise the administrators if it is good, flay the teachers if it is bad. Just like the business world.

Why do we lag behind other countries? The reasons are legion, but one of the biggest is our continual worries about the 'self-esteem' of our children. If you have a student who loves working on cars, who is GOOD at working on cars, and who works on cars every day after school in his dad's or cousin's auto shop, why is he FORCED to sit through 4 years of high school? I'm sorry, but he has no interest in Chaucer, or the Moghul Empire in India, or trigonometry, and he will be bored, disruptive, and disengaged when having it crammed down his throat. Going to a 'vocational school' will hurt his self-esteem? How, exactly? Does it not hurt his self-esteem MORE to struggle and struggle through coursework beyond his ability, with all of his peers watching the struggle? We have stigmatized working for a living in this country, and our schools are filled with the results. I have seen students who knew what they wanted to do, and already knew how to do it, being held back for a year or even two years, just to satisfy the myth of the 'well-rounded' high school graduate. Four years of high school will benefit the aspiring accountant, but ask that accountant to reproduce the Shakespeare sonnet they memorized in 10th grade and you will get the same answer as you would get from the guy fixing your transmission.

I am a math tutor - I run my own tutoring agency, and have had hundreds of students pass through my hands. I see all kinds of homework; heck, I even assign some. If a kid has just learned to solve equations, it's probably good for them to do some equations at home, just for practice. Sure, they can do the equations in front of me, but then the parents will be paying me $40/hour to sit by the kid and not do anything - and why do that?

But some of the homework assignments I see are not designed to promote learning - they're meaningless, mindless busywork. And that's the problem - not the fact that the kid is getting homework, but the fact that it's such mindless busywork. There was the kid whose teacher gave her 84 pages of homework to do in a week - yes, 84 pages of math homework, it's not a typo. And the homework was all over the place - about 30 different topics that had nothing to do with each other. Why did the teacher do that? She took over the class in mid-year, and she "wanted to know what the kids knew".

Then, there was the 10th grade kid whose geometry teacher assigned them the project of making a Platonic solid - basically a crafts project that had nothing to do with geometry. And then, she told the kids that they couldn't keep their work after it was graded - she would just throw them away. She gave some kind of rationale for it, but I forget what it was. Think about how much disrespect of the kids' time and effort this expresses; it took my student hours to get this project done, and it was going straight into the wastebasket?

Reasonable homework is a good idea. Mindless busywork and pointless torture is not.

I'm 9th grade science teacher at a inner city school of sorts, and I would do a dance every day if more than 3 or 4 students actually completed the 10 minutes of homework I assign each night. Teachers don't need to take classes on how to develop a homework curriculum... homework either sets up the next day's lesson, or reinforces what they have already learned.

Nancy Kalish should try teaching for a few months before she starts making expert claims on pedagogy and the art of assigning homework.