1.) The first story comes to us from Galloway, New Jersey where the school board will vote later this summer on whether or not to limit homework to 10 minutes per night per grade level as well as whether or not to ban homework on school vacations, weekends, and holidays. While homework can certainly be taxing on young students and is sometimes not helpful to the learning process, placing limits on homework of this variety is akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Some homework, after all, is helpful. I'm also puzzled as to why the school board thinks it should have such oversight over teachers.
Further befuddling is how the time limits will be measured. It's no secret that it will take different students different amounts of time to complete the same assignment, so is the limit measured by the slowest student in the class, the fastest student in the class, or an average? Before you suggest that I'm being pedantic, what if the parents of the slowest student in the class complain because he is having to do 35 minutes of homework a night in 2nd grade? Almost all the other students in the class get their assignments done in 20 minutes, but it takes this guy a bit longer. Will the teacher be forced to reduce the homework for everyone to ensure that the slowest guy doesn't exceed the limit? The teacher may fear retribution from the school board if she doesn't.
At a time when American education keeps losing ground on the rest of the developed world, it seems the absolutely wrong decision to reduce the amount of work we expect of our children. Rather than limits, we should have minimums. Everyone should be expected to do at least 'x' amount of homework each night. A limit on homework addresses a symptom (useless and too many assignments) of the larger problem that the education system is broken. We need homework and lots of it, but we need it to be the right type of homework. We need homework reform, not homework repeal.
2.) The funniest of the three absurd stories today comes from the lovely state of Pennsylvania, where a panel of judges hearing an appeal have ruled that a woman who pierced cats and bound their tails to give them a gothic look is guilty of cruel treatment of animals. While I think many would agree that binding the tail of a cat is probably cruel, the piercings represent a bit of a gray area. Is this just another area in which we insist upon more "humane" treatment for animals than for humans (as with euthanasia)?
In her defense, the defendant argued that the statutes were vague, and that such veterinary procedures as declawing cats or cutting a dog's vocal cords could also be reasonably seen to fit the criteria of "acts that maim, mutilate, torture, or disfigure the animal." So you can give your daughter a piercing at the age of five, but if you try and do it to your cat, you'll be convicted of a crime. Somebody has to explain this one to me.
The best thing about this bit of news is that I get to reference one of the greatest historical articles ever written - "The Great Cat Massacre." I've posted a link to the chapter in a book available through Google Books, and I highly recommend having a look. The long and short of it is that a few apprentices is 18th century France, fed up with their masters' cats who received better treatment than the apprentices themselves, staged a mock trial and execution of a couple dozen cats. Imagine what the reaction to such a scene would have been today!
3.) On a more serious note, the NY Times published a piece today about a black woman and her son who may have been denied entry to a church that was being used a shelter during a tornado in Cordova, Alabama. The son survived; the mother did not.
The amazing thing is that the son who survived was told by a number of people not to tell his story. He was told that it would give Cordova a bad name. The people of the town know what happened was wrong. I'm sure almost none of them would have turned away anyone asking to come inside. Unfortunately one person made that lethal decision. The town has brought the disrepute on itself by not confronting the issue head on, by not demanding that the truth come out and that the person who denied them entry be investigated.
The sad story from Cordova serves as a parable for the country as a whole. The sooner we start acknowledging the problems that plague our society - racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Antisemitism, income inequality, climate change, etc. - the sooner we can begin to fix them. When we live in the dark, constantly pretending that the problems don't exist, they will continue ad infinitum.
the homework thing was depressing to me at first, because there are probably somewhere between a billion and a zillion studies that show that effective homework is key to committing things to long term memory. But then I thought back on my school experience... I'm not sure those limits will change much in how work gets assigned. Rarely in high school did i have a full 90 minutes of homework, much less 100, 110, 120.
ReplyDeleteNow for lower level students, maybe this wasn't the case and their work took them considerably longer. If so, that amount of work per night, after an 8 hour school day, can be very daunting for a student who struggles academically. By limiting it, students for whom homework might be a problem (presumably, these are the students the law was created for) will perhaps find some respite in this law. Indeed, many students who struggle do so as a result of problematic home lives; many go straight from school to a part time job to help support their families. This law could ease that situation as well.
I agree that the need to control teachers at a state level is misguided, but this law is actually reasonable, as long as the work assigned is effective.
Last story is just sad.