Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Homework is Boring!

I was recently perusing the Sun blog site and found a link to a fellow parent that was wondering if Homework is boring so I sent him a comment on his article.

Homework especially the kind given to most kindergarden and first grade students is worthless busy work which reinforces two things: one, that school is tedious and boring; two, very seldomly the lessons learned during the day. The publishers have a very vested interest in pushing this message because they sell more books. You can even see this in the number of testing publishers www.ctb.com, www.ncspearson.com and www.riverside.com that are promoting earlier and earlier testing. Some of this is driven by the US falling test scores internationally and that some nations, UK start agressive education at age 4. My son would have been attending full day school at age 4-5 in UK and expected to read a whole year earlier than in the US. The system there as well still targets the best and brightest and syphons them off into narrow one subject centered education programs by age 16. There university participation rates still fall well behind the US in that they only send 16% to University when only a decade ago it was 8%. The numbers increase is mainly driven by the older members of their society realizing what they missed going back to school at a poly technic or to get that degree they missed

Having said all that……I am not sure you have your daughter boycott the homework. Just welcome her to the machine and find ways to stimulate the creative thinking necessary to be successful in the participation age.

Good luck……
The Eduwonk

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