what about leaving time in school for students to be responsible? I think schools should be more about learning how to work for yourself instead of
just learning facts and never learning how to apply what is learned.
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Homework in general is good, because it serves as practice. Some students like me need to practice things in order to learn, but maybe that is not
your case. HOWEVER, all the way from elementary school to high school, most of the assignments are useless. I'll list some examples I can recall:
- Making a comic obout the history of our country (Mexico in my case),
- Science fair (I learned nothing).
- Cultural fair (Dancing and singing).
- Anything having to do with ethics and 'human development'.
- A diary with ridiculous questions the teacher made every class.
- Creative dress, food, hairdo.
- History tunnel.
- Entrepreneurship project (In that class they only teach you about values like leadership and that #, what kind of project do you expect from a high
school student if they didn't teach anything useful like actually starting a business?).
- Countless pages of sentence writing in Spanish class (ok, maybe could benefit some people).
- Making your own game (again, they didn't teach anything useful to actually make a game, like programming).
- Presentation about who you admire.
- Reading useless ethics essays and having to make reports.
- Presentation about the 'World Charter', about sustainable enterprises and things like that, which may sound useful, but it was not.
- Any activity in elementary school, truly any.
- Any report about a movie we saw in class.
- Anything in English class. This is sad because instead of teaching grammar, vocabulary and fluent conversation which is needed to properly use a
foreign language, we only did stupid activities like improvisation and Thanksgiving.
- Dozens of math problems when only a significant few are needed. A homework of 10-15 problems for each chapter is enough to mastering math.
- And one of the worst: Algorithm Flowcharts!! They didn't teach any real programming in middle school but they made us draw countless useless
flowcharts.
These are only a few examples of useless activities I had to do. If they don't want to teach something real, then at least give us that free time for
ourselves. I don't complain however for all homework, some few activities were worth the while.
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Ok, here's the opposition to this theory.
If homework were "outlawed" there would be some studious kids who would do it anyway to get ahead. They would become far smarter than the
lazy-asses who went home and played their Wii and listened to their iPods all night.
Then these smart kids would end up getting into the best colleges and getting the best jobs, and basically getting ahead in life. This would lead to
the whiny kids who didn't do homework growing up and whining about how the smart kids have the big houses and all the money and how that isn't fair.
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reply to post by chissler
I'm sure glad I read your response first. You said it better than I could have. School is training for real life. Training comes in stages,
where we learn to either reject the system and forage out on our own, or embrace the system and learn to take responsibility for our actions. I have
actually had the pleasure of being in both places at one time or another. As my Dad said, "It doesn't matter, Son, so much HOW you get your
education, as that you get it somewhere. Until you decide where to get it, I suggest you try college. Oh, By the Way, you'll have to work your
butt off to pay for it, same as I did."
And I did. 'Course, I augmented my income from a low-paid honorable job by running booze from Idaho to Utah. It was a living.
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reply to post by 7Ayreon
I understand what your saying, its been many many years since i was at school, and to be honest looking back they were some of the best years of my
life.
however i sometimes felt that teachers gave excessive amounts of homework, id have 6 subjects a day at school, all subjects gave homework except Phys
ed (2 subjects of that a week) on any given day id have to do 5-6 subjects of homework, each subject would take about an hour to complete PROPERLY
(lol) plus you add assignments on top of that.
it seemed to me that it was the teachers way of compensating for a lack of teaching ability on their part. now if someone was taught something and
didnt understand what was being taught they would go home and do an hours homework wrong, then get frustrated and start to resent school even more.
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