Thanks for replying, Antrax. I'm going to be on my phone later so I won't be able to respond point-by-point like this to any future discussion, so please forgive me if my future replies are much shorter and more broad. I appreciate your perspective, though, and I just hope you can appreciate where I'm coming from too.
Not super possible with lots of subjects. With math in particular, it builds on itself. That means that when I reach Cal 1, it's essential that I cover it all so they can take Cal 2. If I don't, I've failed those students.
I don't know, we didn't have a problem covering what needed to be covered in order to prepare us for the next level. That's anecdotal though, but again I was asked about my specific case which is why I'm even posting here.
Most class sizes aren't this lol. And even if they are, in an hour, that means each student has 2 minutes to demonstrate to me that they individually understand what we're doing (assuming zero instruction time, which is also not possible).
This is why I said I was sorry you had to deal with class sizes like that. It wasn't the norm for me at all, and maybe that's a reason we were able to excel without needing hours of work at night. It also sounds like we had a group of kids who were forthright about when they needed help. The teacher didn't need to go to us one by one and have us prove that we knew the material. The students who weren't getting it raised their hand and either the teacher went to them, or the person sitting next to them helped. This was actually really valuable, being the person doing the helping, because that tended to solidify the knowledge more than an extra few practice problems.
That's pretty fair? In college, it's every other night for most classes, but we follow the rules of "an hour outside of class for each hour inside." Average college class time is 3 hours per class per week, about 4-6 classes. So max, 36 hours a week of work for a full-time student.
Again, I didn't do the extra homework in high school and still aced the classes, which is why I said that for me, that type of work at home wasn't useful. In college, for my math classes, we had the three lectures like you have, but we also had two labs during the week with a TA and a quarter the amount of students, where we did these kinds of practice and problems and got one on one help if needed. That did a ton to take care of the "one hour on, one hour off" type of work for us all while fitting nicely in a non-stressful daily schedule. Maybe that's something you'd be able to lobby your administration for? As a student, it was incredibly valuable.
Aside from that though, don't you think it's weird that college math has a rule of thumb of around 6 hours of work per week (3 lecture, 3 independent), while high school math using the same rule of thumb comes out to 9 or 10 hours of work per week (4-5 lecture, 5 independent)?
Again, it doesn't have to be some conspiracy. Some kids are shy. Some kids think they got it, but I'm right there to guide them if they get a bit stuck. I won't be doing that on the exam! No hints, no notes, nothing.
Homework is an easy way to assess this. Failed the homework? You need to some help. Aced the homework? You're ready for an exam.
Again, something that I guess my smaller class sizes mitigated. If we didn't get something, we could get attention from either the teacher or one of our friends on the spot. We didn't need to try to brute force 30 problems at home that night, foregoing other homework/studying, only to show up the next day, get a horrible grade, and
then get someone to sit down and work with us on it. We had the answers up on the board as we were working, so we could see if we were getting them right or wrong on the spot. Keep getting it wrong? Ask your neighbor for help or raise your hand. That's how it generally went. And yeah, if you only finally started to get it as the bell was ringing, it would be valuable to have some problems to do at home to make sure you are comfortable with it. But it was annoying to still have to spend however much time on those problems when you didn't feel that you needed it (and it again was borne out that it wasn't needed personally with me via test results).
And one of the Montessori staples is a huge block of time (like 2-3 hours) to do homework. Basically a guaranteed study hall. I'm fine with kids doing this practice on school grounds, but it's still time they have to spend to learn the material.
I'd have loved this in high school. Instead of mandatory PE, art, music, even foreign language, to have time to study or do work in the middle of the day would have been amazing. It's what I did in college, with the much more relaxed scheduling and big gaps in between classes.
It's standard in college. That's my perspective on this topic. "How should homework be done so that students can handle college?" Believe me, I can tell which students never had to learn how to budget their time outside of class for things. Way too many of them in my wife's classes (she teaches literature) having to write entire papers in a night, when The paper was assigned weeks ago. In my classes, they just have blank assignments.
I don't doubt you that there are a lot of kids like that, but are you sure that these are all students who were never assigned homework in high school? Do they tell you this? I'd attribute a lot of that to the sudden, completely newfound freedom of college. Especially among those who really burned themselves out doing hours and hours each day in HS. To use the literature paper example, getting mountains of homework every single night actually taught me to procrastinate on things like papers, because what's due tomorrow is way more urgent than what's due in two weeks. Why slightly ruin every night further by adding a half hour each day, when I can just completely ruin one night by jamming the big one in at the end, or on the weekend before the end? I got all A's in my HS English classes, a 5 on both AP English exams, and all A's in my university's special honors English/writing program so it's not like I was turning in horse shit.
In high school, the subjects are way more broken up. Algebra 1 and 2 took two years at my high school (one for each). In college? We cover both in a semester. Same for calculus (a year in high school, one semester in college).
I'm aware that there's plenty of bad assignments, but the reality of college is that you're expected to learn independently for much of your studies. Just like you would for an instrument or a foreign language (you can't speak Spanish for 3 hours a week in class and expect any fluency, for example). The divide between high school and college needs to be shortened. Not eliminated! But shortened.
This is where the scheduling in college makes this kind of thing much easier to stomach. I went into it in detail earlier in the thread, but the short version is that I would have three or four lectures/classes per day give or take, some days more, some days even just two, all with nice breaks in between them. I treated those breaks like study hall, went to the library and worked on what I felt I needed to work on, studied something I needed to brush up on, prepared for something that was going to be happening later that day, etc. The way the classes and scheduling worked, I didn't have every single class every single day back to back with no break in between, and then a pile of homework for each and every one of those classes all due 7 waking hours later. I didn't find that time management skills learned in high school applied very well to what the options were in college, to be honest.
Like the other poster mentioned replying to me, high school kids are so used to getting extra credit for bullshit, not getting F's, etc... that they do that same thing in my classes at college.
"Can I get some extra credit to pass?"
"Well, you have a 15% in the class. I don't think you've gotten higher than a 40% on anything all semester."
"Yeah, can I do like a presentation or something for some test grades?"
Happens all the time. And high school teachers these days have to say yes to that. I do not. They didn't manage their time well. They viewed the class like work; they "clocked in" for class, and they thought that meant they get to pass. But that's not how education works. That's not how you learn how to do something. I have that STEM worship got people thinking all these subjects like math work on some higher level than music, language, or art. It's all just practice. Constant practice.
This never happened with me, the extra credit grubbing and the checking out and instant-grades and all of that. Sounds pretty bad, I agree that those kids weren't nurtured properly. I just don't think dumping 4 or more hours of homework on a kid and saying "you'd better learn some time management if you're going to have this all 100% correct and ready to turn in 7 waking hours from now, I guess" is what creates kids who want to learn and who will budget their time properly at the next level. If anything, I think that is what creates this "factory" mindset.
Again, high schools can reorganize so that they're longer (either each day or more days/less long breaks) to fit the practice into the school system. But the practice must be there. For example, there's no magic bullet to getting really good at the product rule in Cal 1; you need to take dozens of derivatives with it. Often. And preferably keep doing that in future lessons. I don't care that this practice happens at home specifically, but an hour of class (where the teaching has to happen as well) a day isn't enough.
I definitely see this, which is why the whole curriculum and scheduling thing needs to be worked on. You spend an hour on AP Calc, then an hour in PE, then an hour in Photography. Huh? Why not an hour in AP Calc, then a half hour each in those two, then an hour in study hall to work on some Calc problems with a friend in the class? I spent three years taking Spanish, and every minute of that time was wasted for me (not to mention the time spent at home doing the homework). My stress levels would have been a lot different if I had study hall instead of Spanish those years.
Again, thanks for responding and please forgive me in advance if any future replies are way shorter and more broad than this one was.
