Text 7929, 114 rader
Skriven 2006-09-08 22:16:00 av Robert E Starr JR (8398.babylon5)
Ärende: Re: Orion CEV...Apollo St
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<45004e23@news.cadence.com><t8GdnWA5IbgsIZ3YnZ2dnUVZ_umdnZ2d@comcast.com><45019a8d$1@news.cadence.com>

>> On Fri, 8 Sep 2006 12:30:05 -0400, Charlie Edmondson wrote
(in article <45019a8d$1@news.cadence.com>):

> Carl wrote:
> 
>> "Charlie Edmondson" <edmondson@ieee.org> wrote in message 
>> news:45004e23@news.cadence.com...
>> 
>>> Carl wrote:
>>> 
>>>> My daughter goes to a school where every teacher is given a school 
>>>> supplied cell phone and every teacher is reachable to any student until 
>>>> 10 PM.  The kids are expected to have every single assignment done ON 
>>>> TIME.  If they're having difficulty with a problem they can call the 
>>>> teacher and either go through the problem with the teacher then or make 
>>>> arrangements to spend some time outside of class to go over the problem 
>>>> after class.  No homework, no credit.  My daughter missed one assignment 
>>>> her first year.  Her grade dropped form an A to a C because of one missed 
>>>> assignment and she had to work like crazy to get her A back.  She hasn't 
>>>> missed another assignment. The teachers almost always pass back the 
>>>> graded assignments the next day.
>>>> 
>>>> If a student is in any extracurricular activity, they are expected to 
>>>> maintain a B average or better.   If their grades drop, they must stop 
>>>> the activity.  Every kid is expected to take a foreign language.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> Ah, yes, as a student this would be my idea of hell... ;-)
>>> 
>>> I was a very different student than the 'typical' student.  I hated 
>>> homework, and thought it the stupidest thing on the planet. "If you 
>>> couldn't learn it during the school day, what will doing 50 identical 
>>> problems help?"  And, since I typically got it the first time, I was just 
>>> spinning my wheels doing all that 'stuff', so I didn't do it!  I still got 
>>> A's on all my tests, so why should the teacher care?  I personally see all 
>>> this present emphasis on homework as more of a "Make the parent think we 
>>> are doing something" effort, than a teach the kids something effort.
>>> 
>>> And, if I had been required to take a foreign language, we would have had 
>>> a Columbine in the '70s!
>> 
>> 
>> I have to confess that I hated homework and found school pretty easy too. 
>> That was part of the problem; the school could have pushed me harder and 
>> given me something challenging enough that I couldn't breeze through it.  I 
>> took AP courses... but those were voluntary and I oculd just as easily not 
>> bothered if I wanted to.
>> 
>> For most kids it's not just the actual homework; the discipling of doing it 
>> that also has benefit.  It's easy to breeze through HS, but I knew a lot of 
>> freshmen in college that suddenly had to learn new study habits.  Some 
>> didn't.
>> 
>> Homework also allows a teacher the opportunity to judge how much a student 
>> is struggling much earlier.
>> 
>> I'd much rather annoy bright kids with a little extra work than just let 
>> kids do as much as they feel like doing and risk letting them fail.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
> Ah, but instead of annoy the bright kids, what you do is p-o them, so 
> that they refuse to study, they become depressed, and you get columbine, 
> or any of several other problems as these kids decide to focus their 
> energy elsewhere.  I didn't get a choice as to whether I took AP 
> classes, they either assigned me to them, or they didn't.  I was happy 
> that I DIDN'T get the AP geometry class, as the teacher there was in the 
> 'reams of homework' division, which would have flunked me.  I was glad 
> to be in all the AP English classes, where they at least got a chance to 
> teach me something I didn't already know (I was reading at a 12th grade 
> level in 3rd grade...)  I spent my time in AP chemistry correcting the 
> teacher when she mis-spoke, and generally drove her crazy.
> 
> But, I also had ROTC, Chorus, and Speech to keep me occupied, so no 
> fireworks errupted! <<

To attribute the events of Columbine to smart kids being forced to do dumb 
homework is a gross simplification, at best.  I was a smart kid, tested 
outside the bounds of everybody else's IQ in the school repeatedly, reading 
at an insanely young age, etc. etc., and hated doing homework.  And often 
_didn't_ do it.  And was smart enough to make up plausible excuses (the 
difference between the smart kids and the rest is that the smart kids can cut 
class and not do homework and _not_ have it cause them to flunk out).  But 
because of the structure of the school system at the time, I didn't have a 
choice: homework was part of the curriculum, so it still was assigned to me, 
no matter how much testing proved I didn't need it.

But -- and here's the important part -- I didn't come into school with guns 
and kill my classmates and teachers.

If a child is getting their emotional and intellectual needs met elsewhere -- 
home, the library, the internet -- and is generally healthy and well 
adjusted, doing homework meant for "the IQ 100s" isn't going to make them 
freak out and embark on a killing spree.

I ignored that the first time you suggested it, Charlie, even though I found 
it offensive and not very funny.  But the fact that you repeated it tells me 
that you seem to think there's a real point there.  I'll have to respectfully 
disagree with you on that.

Amy
                                                                             
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