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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It merely penalizes poor kids whose parents work odd hours or don't have it together. It's profoundly immoral because it immediately creates an academic self-image of failure for poor kids. [/quote]

+1  When I was in college, I tutored kids in a somewhat rural area.  There was one girl who was definitely bright, but she was failing.  She had already been held back a year.  Her teacher had given up on her.  But it didn't take long for me to realize what the problem was: her mother didn't know long division and couldn't help her with her homework.  I even spoke to her mother, who was very involved with her child.  It wasn't that woman's fault that her education had been limited.

What had been happening is that the teacher didn't spend enough time each day on the material covered in the homework.  She relied on parents to fill in for that.  But that put certain children at a disadvantage.

Part of the problem is that they were packing the day too tightly (or it was in this instance -- I have no idea what goes on nowadays).  The education paradigm of the day was group work, having the kids work in groups.  They spent a lot of time during the day on "projects," but they didn't spend enough time on actual instruction accompanied by time having the children work on problems on their own during the day (so that the teacher could walk around and assist individually).

I was minoring in education at the time, and a lot of the student teachers spent an enormous amount of time planning projects and crafts.  They liked doing that because it was fun -- for them and the children.

I actually think that the paradigm needs to shift back to the old-school approach of focusing on instruction, drills, and having kids work independently in school on problems, so that they are able to ask the teacher if they don't understand something.  It's one thing to show a classroom of kids how to do long division.  But it isn't until they start doing problems on their own that they get confused and need to ask questions.

I also agree with the PP that at that age social studies, music, and art doesn't need to be every day.  It's important -- but it shouldn't be daily.  There isn't enough time.

As for being competitive with the rest of the world, most of the places we're trying to compete with have a much longer school year (if not year round).  Most will go 11 months with one month off.  That's a better approach than having kids do 4 hours of homework after a full day of school.  They need time to decompress, to learn other household chores (and, yes, all kids should be learning life skills at home), and spending time with family and friends.

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I teach graduate finance and my students struggle with this.  About 5 years ago, I went back to the old school approach where I would lecture and demonstrate problems and concepts for the first half of class and then I would hand out a a set of homework problems for them to work on for the rest of class.  Now this is grad school so my students have the option of staying to do the homework or leaving.  I tell them that if they stay, I will be walking around the class answering each students individual questions.

There is no homework credit or requirement.  They get nothing towards their grade for staying and doing the work with me.  Many of them get up and walk out--they say they understand the material.  But somehow when the midterm grades come back, they can't solve the problems.  The ones that do stay, they are the ones that pass the class.  A lot of times it comes back to explaining old concepts that they may have forgotten.  Learning in school does not occur in a 75 min vacuum.  Or they find that when they have to actually execute the thinking and logic behind the problem, they just don't even no where to start.  The most common comment I get is It looks so easy when you do it.[/quote]

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