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My friends and I were "nerds" and at the end of sixth grade, I remember my friend saying "Oh, I can't wait to have homework!" He was referring to the coming year, 7th grade. This implies that we never had homework before then. This was in the 70s.
I also have a younger relative and I talked with him after the first day of 7th grade and he said he had tons of homework, which he never said before.
Is it true that K-6 kids don't have homework? Maybe it's different today.
Homework and policies on it vary by grade level, by school, by teacher, by district, by class, by any number of things. Some programs don't incorporate homework at all...when I taught special ed, there was rarely homework, in the traditional sense, with some of my students...it didn't necessarily fit their individualized curriculum or needs.
The purpose of homework varies as well. Sometimes it is independent extra practice of a skill that is benefitted by repetition or rote memorization. Sometimes it is an auxiliary project that is designed to be completed independently for a specific reason. Sometimes it is simply in-class work that wasn't finished in a timely manner and must be completed on one's own time.
There is no one-size fits all answer to "do kids today have homework," but most students in traditional programs do at some point in elementary ed have assignments of some sort to complete at home. Whether or not it matches your experience is another story.
If your school is a good one and does it right, you don't need homework in lower grades.
I came from an international school to one of the top districts in California in the fifth grade. We never had homework at the international school.
And yet I was far beyond the kids in my 5th grade class in my (also wealthy) good school in California (where they did have homework).
If your school is a good one and does it right, you don't need homework in lower grades.
I came from an international school to one of the top districts in California in the fifth grade. We never had homework at the international school.
And yet I was far beyond the kids in my 5th grade class in my (also wealthy) good school in California (where they did have homework).
Do you suppose there were additional variables at play regarding your being ahead, or is your thought that the sole correlation is related to homework policy?
Or, is your assertion just that good schools don't need to assign homework?
It started in 5th grade for me. (Born 1981) That sounds reasonable to me. I won't quibble with people who say 4th or 6th is the best starting point. But too far outside those boundaries sounds unreasonable and/or disastrous.
This is from a school near where I grew up (not mine though). I disagree pretty strongly with this...
I had a little bit of homework in elementary school in the '70s. When I taught elementary school, it was school policy that we give homework. We typically gave work to practice what was learned or to complete work not finished in school. My kids have always had homework in elementary school, but it has varied as to how much.
Had it when I was in school and so did my kids. Not that I believe in it for younger kids. To me it turns into either a situation where the kid understands and so it's just tedium of stuff they know or the kid doesn't understand and it's repetitive frustration or doing it wrong. If you don't know something, doing it wrong a dozen times doesn't make you know it better.
Nice, easy sounding answers, but totally incorrect. We're talking book bags that weigh as much as the kid does at that age. And homework that completely consumes all the family time until bed. If you don't understand the problem, you haven't experienced it.
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