In a scene not too uncommon in today’s world, local dad Alan Devlin reassured his high school son, Keith, with an enthusiastic “You got this!” to cover for having absolutely no idea how to help him with his Algebra homework.
Keith, a sophomore at Quadratic High, initially welcomed his dad’s encouragement. “At first, I thought he was just trying to boost my confidence,” Keith said. "But then I realized he had absolutely no clue what he was talking about when he started using phrases like “x equals whatever you want it to be” and “Try dividing by zero.”
Read the rest of the satire news article here on TattletaleTimes.com
Homework is idiotic. If it can’t be covered during regular school hours, it shouldn’t be required.
I’m really happy to have recently learned that some schools are just entirely doing away with it.
I had a college teacher that did homework right. It was a math class. You know how some math textbooks have the answers to the odd number problems in the back of the book? She would “assign” those as homework, and every morning at the beginning of class she would ask if anyone had any questions on the homework. “Yeah could we work number 15 on the board?”
She never took up “homework” for a grade, it was our opportunity to practice on our own time. This was optional, if you were keeping up you weren’t required to waste your time.
I’m also 100% fine with reading assignments for homework. “Read chapter 7 of the textbook before our next class.” As a flight instructor I NEVER had trouble getting students to read their textbooks. There was a bit of an eyes glazing over issue with the FARs because a lot of it is written, well, like federal laws. So we’d start going over Part 91 in class, we’d get about a page in before we hit the rule about jettisoning objects from an aircraft in flight, have about 5 minutes of fun talking about when and where you can just randomly chuck a brick out of the window, and from then on I could trust their ability to read the FARs.
Oh man I wish I had you as an instructor. FAR/AIM was such a boring part of my training
It can be pretty dry to study but I sometimes found my own nuggets of fun in there and started to dig further, enough to get a sense of the structure and what’s where.
For much of it, it’s useful to just read the headings and maybe skim the actual paragraph. The ones that are relevant to your interests will naturally catch your eye, and the rest of it will stick in your brain as “wait, there’s a law about that.”
When Khan Academy was a big thing, there was talk of flipping teaching - having the homework be watching instructional videos (when you can pause, rewind and rewatch without embarrassment) and doing homework in school hours. It sounded quite good (at least for motivated kids (wasn’t me)), but I guess it died on the vine.