by Karl Taro Greenfeld | The Atlantic | http://bit.ly/18jHzJ7
October 2013
:: Memorization, not
rationalization. That is the advice of my 13-year-old daughter, Esmee, as I
struggle to make sense of a paragraph of notes for an upcoming Earth Science
test on minerals. “Minerals have crystal systems which are defined by the # of
axis and the length of the axis that intersect the crystal faces.” That’s how
the notes start, and they only get murkier after that. When I ask Esmee what
this actually means, she gives me her homework credo.
Esmee is in the eighth grade at the NYC Lab Middle School
for Collaborative Studies, a selective public school in the Chelsea
neighborhood of Manhattan. My wife and I have noticed since she started there
in February of last year that she has a lot of homework. We moved from Pacific
Palisades, California, where Esmee also had a great deal of homework at Paul
Revere Charter Middle School in Brentwood. I have found, at both schools, that
whenever I bring up the homework issue with teachers or administrators, their
response is that they are required by the state to cover a certain amount of
material. There are standardized tests, and everyone—students, teachers,
schools—is being evaluated on those tests. I’m not interested in the debates
over teaching to the test or No Child Left Behind. What I am interested in is
what my daughter is doing during those nightly hours between 8 o’clock and
midnight, when she finally gets to bed. During the school week, she averages
three to four hours of homework a night and six and a half hours of sleep.
Some evenings, when we force her to go to bed, she will
pretend to go to sleep and then get back up and continue to do homework for
another hour. The following mornings are awful, my daughter teary-eyed and
exhausted but still trudging to school.
I wonder: What is the exact nature of the work that is
turning her into a sleep-deprived teen zombie so many mornings?
I decide to do my daughter’s homework for one typical
week.
MONDAY
By late afternoon, I am tired after filing a magazine
article on deadline. I’m not looking forward to homework. When I arrive home, a
few minutes ahead of Esmee, I consider delaying my week of homework, but then I
realize that Esmee can never put off her week of homework.
So I am relieved when she tells me she doesn’t have much
tonight. We have 11 algebra equations. (Esmee’s algebra class is doing a
section on polynomials, a word I haven’t heard in decades.) We also have to
read 79 pages of Angela’s Ashes and find “three important and powerful quotes
from the section with 1–2 sentence analyses of its [sic] significance.” There
is also the Earth Science test tomorrow on minerals.
I am surprised by the amount of reading. Reading and
writing is what I do for a living, but in my middle age, I’ve slowed down. So a
good day of reading for me, assuming I like the book and I’m not looking for
quotable passages, is between 50 and 100 pages. Seventy-nine pages while
scanning for usable material—for a magazine essay or for homework—seems like at
least two hours of reading.
But the math is easier than I thought. We are simplifying
equations, which involves reducing (–18m2n)2 × (–(1/6)mn2) to –54m5n4, which I
get the hang of again after Esmee’s good instructions. I breeze through those
11 equations in about 40 minutes and even correct Esmee when she gets one
wrong. (I think. I may be overconfident.)
I then start reading Angela’s Ashes while Esmee studies
for Earth Science. We have only one copy of the book, so we decide it will be
more efficient to stagger our work. I’ve never read Angela’s Ashes, and it’s
easy to see the appeal. Frank McCourt, whom I once saw give a beautiful tribute
to Peter Matthiessen at a Paris Review Revel, is engaging and funny. But after
30 minutes I am only about 16 pages in, and Esmee has finished studying for
Earth Science and needs the book.
So we switch. It is now time for me to struggle with
Earth Science. The textbook Esmee’s class is using is simply called Earth
Science and was written by Edward J. Tarbuck and Frederick K. Lutgens. “The
term synergistic applies to the combined efforts of Tarbuck and Lutgens,” says
the biographical note at the beginning. “Early in their careers, they shared
frustrations with the limited availability of textbooks designed for
non-majors.” So they rolled up their sleeves and wrote their own textbook,
which reads exactly like every other textbook. “If you look again at Table 1,”
begins the section on silicates, “you can see that the two most abundant
elements in Earth’s crust are silicon and oxygen.” I spend the next five
minutes looking for Table 1, which is 12 pages earlier in the book.
Then come carbonates, oxides, the sulfates and sulfides,
halides, and—I am asleep after about 20 minutes.
When I wake up, I go out to find Esmee in the living
room, where she is buried in Angela’s Ashes. I struggle with Earth Science for
another half hour, attempting to memorize rather than understand, before I give
up and decide I have to get my reading done. Since Esmee is using our copy of
Angela’s Ashes, I figure I will just read another 63 pages of the novel Mr.
Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, which I started yesterday. I don’t make it. I’m
asleep for good after about 15 pages.
Esmee stays up until a little after midnight to finish
her reading.
Total time: 3–5 hours
I don’t remember how much homework was assigned to me in
eighth grade. I do know that I didn’t do very much of it and that what little I
did, I did badly. My study habits were atrocious. After school I often went to
friends’ houses, where I sometimes smoked marijuana, and then I returned home
for dinner; after lying to my parents about not having homework that night, I
might have caught an hour or two of television. In Southern California in the
late ’70s, it was totally plausible that an eighth grader would have no
homework at all.
If my daughter came home and said she had no homework, I
would know she was lying. It is inconceivable that her teachers wouldn’t assign
any.
What has changed? It seems that while there has been
widespread panic about American students’ falling behind their peers in
Singapore, Shanghai, Helsinki, and everywhere else in science and mathematics,
the length of the school day is about the same. The school year hasn’t been
extended. Student-teacher ratios don’t seem to have changed much. No, our
children are going to catch up with those East Asian kids on their own damn
time.
Every parent I know in New York City comments on how much
homework their children have. These lamentations are a ritual whenever we are
gathered around kitchen islands talking about our kids’ schools.
Is it too much?
Well, imagine if after putting in a full day at the
office—and school is pretty much what our children do for a job—you had to come
home and do another four or so hours of office work. Monday through Friday.
Plus Esmee gets homework every weekend. If your job required that kind of work
after work, how long would you last?
TUESDAY
My younger daughter, Lola, 11, is a little jealous that I
am spending my evenings doing homework with her sister. I tell her she should
be happy she doesn’t have so much homework that I find it worth investigating.
She agrees with this, but still makes me feel so guilty about it that I let her
watch Pretty Little Liars, her favorite show.
The co-op board meets—and over my objections makes me
secretary—before I can start on Esmee’s homework.
Tonight we have 12 more algebra equations, 45 more pages
of Angela’s Ashes, and a Humanities project for which we have to write one to
two pages in the style of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, the
young-adult novel by Sherman Alexie. There is also a Spanish test tomorrow on
irregular verbs.
The algebra is fast becoming my favorite part of this
project. I may have picked an easy week, but something about combining like
terms, inverting negative exponents, and then simplifying equations causes a
tingle in a part of my brain that is usually dormant. Also, the work is finite:
just 12 equations.
The Spanish, however, presents a completely different
challenge. Here, Esmee shows me that we have to memorize the conjugations of
the future tense of regular and irregular verbs, and she slides me a sheet with
tener, tendré, tendrás, tendrá, tendremos, etc., multiplied by dozens of verbs.
My daughter has done a commendable job memorizing the conjugations. But when I
ask her what the verb tener means (“to have,” if I recall), she repeats,
“Memorization, not rationalization.”
She doesn’t know what the words mean.
I spend a few minutes looking over the material,
attempting to memorize the list of verbs and conjugations. Then it takes me
about half an hour to memorize the three most common conjugation patterns. I
decide to skip the irregular verbs.
Esmee already worked on her Spanish this afternoon, so
she goes right to the Humanities project, which she has been looking forward
to. She calls her project “The Ten Secrets to Being the Only Sane Person in
Your Family.”
No. 6: Don’t Listen to Anything Your Father Says.
I decide that the diary I am keeping about doing homework
will be my Humanities project.
Soon it’s 11 p.m., and I start bugging Esmee to go to
bed. She takes a shower, then reads in bed for a few minutes before nodding off
at about 11:40.
I sneak in and grab her copy of Angela’s Ashes and catch
up on my reading, getting all the way to page 120. The hardship of too much
homework pales in comparison with the McCourt family’s travails. Still, because
we are sharing our copy of Angela’s Ashes, I end up going to bed an hour after
Esmee.
Total time: 3 hours
One evening when Esmee was in sixth grade, I walked into
her room at 1:30 a.m. to find her red-eyed, exhausted, and starting on her
third hour of math. This was partially her fault, as she had let a couple of
days’ worth of worksheets pile up, but it was also the nature of the work
itself. One assignment had her calculating the area and perimeter of a series
of shapes so complex that my wife, who trained as an architect in the
Netherlands, spent half an hour on it before coming up with the right answers.
The problem was not the complexity of the work, it was the amount of
calculating required. The measurements included numbers like 78 13/64, and all
this multiplying and dividing was to be done without a calculator. Another
exercise required Esmee to find the distance from Sacramento—we were living in
California—to every other state capital in America, in miles and kilometers.
This last one caused me to question the value of the homework.
What possible purpose could this serve?, I asked her
teacher in a meeting.
She explained that this sort of cross-disciplinary
learning—state capitals in a math class—was now popular. She added that by now,
Esmee should know all her state capitals. She went on to say that in class,
when the students had been asked to name the capital of Texas, Esmee answered
Texas City.
But this is a math class, I said. I don’t even know the
state capitals.
The teacher was unmoved, saying that she felt the
homework load was reasonable. If Esmee was struggling with the work, then
perhaps she should be moved to a remedial class.
That night, in an e-mail chain started by the class
parent to seek chaperones for a field trip, I removed the teacher’s name,
changed the subject line, and then asked the other parents in the class whether
their children found the homework load onerous.
After a few minutes, replies started coming in from
parents along the lines of “Thank God, we thought we were the only ones,” “Our
son has been up until 2 a.m. crying,” and so forth. Half the class’s parents
responded that they thought too much homework was an issue.
Since then, I’ve been wary of Esmee’s workload, and I’ve
often suspected that teachers don’t have any idea about the cumulative amount
of homework the kids are assigned when they are taking five academic classes.
There is little to no coordination among teachers in most schools when it comes
to assignments and test dates.
WEDNESDAY
This morning, we attended Lola’s class “celebration” of
the Revolutionary War. The class had prepared dioramas of the role women played
in the Revolution, the Boston Massacre, the Battle of Yorktown, and other
signal events of the period. In hand-drawn murals explaining the causes of the
conflict, the main theme was that excessive and unfair taxation had caused the
colonies to rebel. The British had run up massive debts in the French and
Indian War and wanted the colonists to repay them. The colonies also wanted,
several children added, freedom. When pressed as to what that meant, they
seemed unsure, until one boy came up with “Freedom to do what they want!”
I came home and took a nap.
My older daughter’s homework load this evening is just
seven algebra equations, studying for a Humanities test on industrialization,
and more Earth Science.
This algebra unit, on polynomials, seems to be a matter
of remembering a few tricks. Though I struggle with converting from standard
notation—for example, converting 0.00009621 to scientific notation is tricky
(it’s 9.621 × 10−5, which makes no intuitive sense to me)—it is pleasing that
at some point I arrive at an answer, right or wrong, and my work is done and
the teacher will give me credit for doing my homework.
Earth Science is something else. I’ve been dreading
returning to Tarbuck and Lutgens since our first meeting. And tonight, the
chapter starts in the familiar dispiriting monotone. “Rocks are any solid mass
of mineral or mineral-like matter occurring naturally as part of our planet.”
But I am pleasantly surprised when T&L take a turn into the rock cycle,
laying out the differences between igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rock
in terms that are easy to understand and visualize. The accompanying charts are
helpful, and as I keep reading into the chapter on igneous rocks, the
differences between intrusive and extrusive igneous rocks make clear sense.
The upcoming test in Humanities will focus on John D.
Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, monopolies and trusts, laissez-faire capitalism,
the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the foundation of labor unions, the
imposition of factory safety standards, and the populist response to the grim
conditions of the working man during the Industrial Revolution. My daughter has
a study guide she is ready to print out. But our printer has just broken.
We end up borrowing our neighbor’s printer. The logistics
of picking up the printer, bringing it over to our apartment, downloading the
software, and then printing take about half an hour.
The study guide covers a wide range of topics, from how
Rockefeller gained control of the oil industry, to the rise of monopolies and
trusts, to the Sherman Antitrust Act, to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Esmee
and I have a pretty long talk about the causes of the tragedy—the locked doors
that prevented the young girls from taking breaks, stealing merchandise, or
escaping the flames; the flammable waste material that had been allowed to
accumulate—that leads to a discussion about trade unionism and then about
capitalism in general. This is, I realize, a logical continuation of the
conversation in my younger daughter’s class this morning, which started with
unwieldy dioramas and implausible impersonations of King George. Freedom, in
the form of unfettered capitalism, also has its downside. I tell her my view:
laborers have to organize into unions, because otherwise those who control the
capital have all the power.
“That’s why it’s called capitalism,” Esmee says, “not
laborism.”
She falls asleep reading Angela’s Ashes.
Total time: 3 hours
My daughter has the misfortune of living through a period
of peak homework.
It turns out that there is no correlation between
homework and achievement. According to a 2005 study by the Penn State
professors Gerald K. LeTendre and David P. Baker, some of the countries that score
higher than the U.S. on testing in the Trends in International Mathematics and
Science Study—Japan and Denmark, for example—give less homework, while some of
those scoring lower, including Thailand and Greece, assign more. Why pile on
the homework if it doesn’t make even a testable difference, and in fact may be
harmful?
“It’s a response to this whole globalized, competitive
process,” says Richard Walker, a co-author of the book Reforming Homework. “You
get parents demanding their children get more homework because their children
are competing against the whole world.”
The irony is that some countries where the school systems
are held up as models for our schools have been going in the opposite direction
of the U.S., giving less homework and implementing narrower curricula built to
encourage deeper understanding rather than broader coverage.
In the U.S., or at least in the schools my daughters have
attended, there has been no sign of teachers’ letting up on homework. According
to a University of Michigan study, the average time spent weekly on homework
increased from two hours and 38 minutes in 1981 to three hours and 58 minutes
in 2004. Data from a 2007 National Center for Education Statistics survey
showed American students between grades nine and 12 doing an average of 6.8
hours of homework a week—which sounds pretty reasonable compared with what my
daughter is assigned—and 42 percent of students saying they have homework five
or more days a week. Esmee has hours of homework every night. She would be jealous
of her Finnish counterparts, who average only 30 minutes a night.
Attitudes toward homework swing in cycles of roughly 30
years, according to Harris Cooper, a professor of education at Duke University
and the author of The Battle Over Homework. We went from piling on the homework
because of fears of a science gap brought on by Sputnik in the late 1950s, to
backing off in the Woodstock generation of the ’70s amid worries about
overstressing kids, to the ’90s fears of falling behind East Asian students.
The current backlash against homework has been under way so long—expressed in
books like 2006’s The Case Against Homework, by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish,
and in the 2009 documentary film Race to Nowhere—that we may now be living
through a backlash against the backlash, at least in elite schools. “We’re in a
heavy-homework part of the cycle,” Cooper says. “The increasing competition for
elite high schools and colleges has parents demanding more homework.”
Back in California, when I raised the issue of too much
homework on that e‑mail chain, about half the parents were pleased that
someone had brought this up, and many had already spoken to the math teacher
about it. Others were eager to approach school officials. But at least one
parent didn’t agree, and forwarded the whole
exchange to the teacher in question.
As the person who instigated the conversation, I was
called in to the vice principal’s office and accused of cyberbullying. I
suggested that parents’ meeting to discuss their children’s education was
generally a positive thing; we merely chose to have our meeting in cyberspace
instead of the school cafeteria.
He disagreed, saying the teacher felt threatened. And he
added that students weren’t allowed to cyberbully, so parents should be held to
the same standard.
I explained that we never intended for the teacher to
read those notes. This was a forum where we were airing our concerns.
What was frustrating me was that the underlying issue of
ridiculous amounts of busywork was getting buried beneath the supposed method
we had used to discuss the issue.
Even when I showed the vice principal examples of the
homework assignments, he didn’t see them as outside the usual in terms of
content or time commitment.
I left believing I hadn’t solved the problem.
Yet something did change. Over the next few months, the
math teacher assigned a more manageable workload. My daughter now went to bed
before 10 o’clock most nights.
THURSDAY
Parent-teacher conferences at the Lab School are similar
to what I imagine speed dating to be like. Each conference is three minutes,
and parents can attend an afternoon or evening session. My wife and I choose
the afternoon. The conferences are strictly first come, first served. At noon,
my wife and I sit in chairs outside each classroom waiting our turn, sometimes
for as long as 45 minutes. A student is supposed to be timing each conference,
but the students often wander off, and the teachers ignore the parents’
knocking after three minutes.
In each conference, I urge the teachers to give less
homework. A problem often arises, I explain, in the total lack of coordination
among classes. A Humanities assignment requiring the kids to render in words,
pictures, or both a scene from Angela’s Ashes, say, can take an hour or two, yet
most teachers don’t seem to consider anything creative to be homework. The
creative stuff, like drawing or writing a short story or preparing a scene from
a play, is all extra, to be completed in addition to the hours of humanities,
math, science, and Spanish.
The teachers usually respond in one of two ways. They nod
sympathetically and agree that the kids do have a lot of work, as if they have
nothing to do with the assigning of it. Or they say that time management is one
of the skills that a successful high-school student will need, and if my
daughter wants to perform in an elite high school, she had better learn that in
middle school. Both answers amount to essentially the same argument: the vast
amounts of homework are somehow handed down from on high, and mere teachers can
do nothing to tamper with the ordained quantities.
Because I happen to be in the middle of my week of
homework when this year’s parent-teacher conferences take place, I am uniquely
equipped to discuss the work Esmee is doing. And over the years, I have noticed
that the amount of homework does let up, slightly, after the conferences—if
enough parents complain. However, there is always a clique of parents who are
happy with the amount of homework. In fact, they would prefer more. I tend not
to get along with that type of parent.
At a meeting with Esmee’s Earth Science teacher, I find
out that my daughter has in fact not been giving me all the work. There is a
worksheet, for example, requiring a reinterpretation and annotation of the rock
cycle that Esmee never handed over. The teacher finds an extra copy for me. So
I have another date with Tarbuck and Lutgens.
When I get home, Esmee tells me she got a C on her math
homework from the night before because she hadn’t made an answer column. Her
correct answers were there, at the end of each neatly written-out equation, yet
they weren’t segregated into a separate column on the right side of each page.
I’m amazed that the pettiness of this doesn’t seem to bother her. School is
training her well for the inanities of adult life.
Our math homework this evening is practicing multiplying
a polynomial by a monomial, and we breeze through it in about half an hour.
Then we have to translate some song lyrics from Spanish
to English. Esmee’s Spanish teacher already told my wife and me in our
conference this afternoon that she can tell when the kids use Google
Translate—which is all the time. It’s a wonder: simply type in the lyrics, copy
down the translation, and then, in an attempt to throw off the teacher, add a
few mistakes. So Si te quedas a mi lado, si te subes en el tren, which Google
renders as “If you stay by my side, if you get on the train,” becomes “If you
stay by my side, if you go up on the train.”
Done.
And, at last, more Angela’s Ashes.
Total time: 1.5 hours
The more immersed I become in Esmee’s homework, the more
reassured I am that the teachers, principals, and school-board members who are
coming up with this curriculum are earnest about their work. They are making
difficult decisions about what to teach or not teach in the limited class time
they have. The overall education being imparted is secular, humanistic,
multicultural, and intensely quantitative. The math Esmee is doing at 13, for
example, is beyond what I was doing at that age. Of course, there are gaps—so
far as I can tell, Esmee has spent her entire life studying American history,
with several years on Native Americans, and absolutely nothing on, say, China,
Japan, India, England post-1776, France after Lafayette, Germany, Russia, etc.
Like many parents, I wish there was more emphasis on creative work, on writing
assignments that didn’t require Esmee to use eight “transition words” and seven
metaphors. This school has clearly made choices—these kids are going to get
very good at algebra and maybe a little less good at creative writing. I can’t
say I fault them in this, though I know what I would prefer to spend my days
doing.
If Esmee masters the material covered in her classes, she
will emerge as a well-rounded, socially aware citizen, a serious reader with
good reasoning capabilities and a decent knowledge of the universe she lives
in. What more can I ask of her school?
But are these many hours of homework the only way to
achieve this metamorphosis of child into virtuous citizen? According to my
daughter’s teachers, principals, and administrators, the answer is an emphatic
yes. Certainly, they have told me, all the homework does no harm. As I watch my
daughter struggle through school days on too little sleep and feel almost guilty
if she wants to watch an hour of television instead of advancing a few yards in
the trench warfare of her weekly homework routine, I have my doubts. When would
she ever have time to, say, read a book for pleasure? Or write a story or paint
a picture or play the guitar?
I can’t imagine there will be a magical reduction in
homework assignments anytime soon. But what I will continue to do at every
opportunity is remind teachers that if each is assigning an hour of homework a
night, and the average kid is taking four or five academic classes, then that
is simply an unrealistic cumulative workload. Give the kids a break. Once in a
while. I don’t expect teachers to drastically curtail their assignments, just
to occasionally lighten the load. Of course, I may just be balancing the scales
against those parents asking for extra assignments for their child.
Has this worked? Well, it did in Brentwood, even if it
took parental pressure. And though I can’t draw a causal line between my day of
speed dating—I mean, going to parent-teacher conferences—at the Lab School and
a reduction in homework assignments, it did seem to me that in the months
afterward, Esmee was able to get more sleep. At least a couple of minutes’
worth.
Esmee just started high school. She has told me she feels
that the many hours of homework in middle school have prepared her well. “There
is no way they can give me more homework,” she reasons.
I have my doubts.
As for Lola: When it came time to select a middle school,
she took the admissions test for Lab and listed it as her first choice, despite
my telling her that in my view, the school is too rigidly focused on academics
and assigns too much homework. Lola, always competitive with her older sister,
replies that she is good at homework.
She’s going to need to be. She was accepted at Lab.
FRIDAY
Lola is sleeping over at a friend’s house. Esmee hasn’t
started her weekend homework yet. Instead, she’s watching episodes of
Portlandia on her computer. The weekend homework includes another 15 algebra
equations, studying for a Spanish test on Monday, and, of course, more Angela’s
Ashes. She also has an algebra midterm on Tuesday. I tell Esmee that this seems
strange—didn’t she just have an algebra midterm? She says that in her class,
they have more than one midterm every term.
My wife and I decide to go out to dinner, and on our way
up Hudson Street, we run into another couple we are close friends with. This
couple’s oldest daughter also goes to Lab. She’s at home doing homework.
We stand on the sidewalk for a few minutes, chatting. The
husband is smoking a joint, and he hands it over. I haven’t smoked in a few
months, but it’s Friday night and I’ve been doing homework all week. I take a
few tokes. We part ways, and my wife and I go to a Japanese restaurant, where,
as soon as I am seated, I regret smoking. It’s going to be hell trying to do
algebra tonight with the head I have on right now.
Nonetheless, when I’m home, I sit at the dining table and
attempt to work my way through the polynomial worksheet. I am immediately lost
in all the 2x(–3y5+ 3x2)6s. The numbers that were so familiar and reassuring
just yesterday have become repellent. I realize, sitting there, failing to
solve my algebra homework, that I have inadvertently yet perfectly re-created
my own eighth-grade homework conditions: getting stoned, attempting math, and
failing at it.
I consider my daughter, who to my knowledge has never
smoked marijuana. That’s a good thing, I think in my hazy state. I wouldn’t
wish this condition—attempting algebra when high—on anyone.
One of the reasons I believe my daughter hasn’t yet tried
marijuana is because she simply doesn’t have the time.
I decide to give up on algebra for the night. It’s only
Friday, and I have until Monday to finish my homework.
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