Day 70

Homework. I don’t like it. I wish I didn’t give it. I’m always looking for ways to get around it. In an AP history class, it’s to completely get rid of it. In the past few posts, I wrote on how I’m constantly debating if the positives outweigh the negatives. I know the practice of homework is not equitable. I have students who struggle to get it completed for reasons that are out of their hands. But, I wanted the students’ voice on homework.

I posted in a Schoology discussion post the following questions:

What are the benefits of having the homework for this class?

What are the drawbacks?

What is one solution you have to eliminating the drawbacks?

Do you think we could eliminate homework in this class and why?

Here are a few of their responses.

Student A

The benefits of having homework is an opportunity to see what kind of questions will be on the test and train us. Drawbacks we have a lot of checklists for this class that are very long, which takes away time from other class homework time. Making checklists shorter would help or lowering the rate of how many we have to get write cause sometimes people are like half a point off and then they have to do it all over again. I don’t think we really have much homework in this class to eliminate.

Student B

The benefits of having the checklist and homework is that this information gets drilled into our memory and since we need to get a 90 on the checklist it really gets drilled in and when the tests come I’m ready and know the info. The drawbacks are that it does take a good amount of time sometimes to get the work done and can become annoying when u mess up your seventh try and still need to get to that 90 One way we could take the drawbacks is that we make the work just a little shorter not so much in one checklist I don’t think we can eliminate homework in this class because we kinda need it to remember most of the info we learned in class but forgot the next period.

Student C

The benefits of having homework in this class are that homework helps with your grade because usually, it’s pretty easy, it also helps us better understand the information and go over it again. The drawbacks are that it takes up a lot of time and that when students don’t do it, it brings their grade down. One solution would be to make the checklists shorter. We still need to learn the information but if two checklists were a week and they were shorter and something you could do in like 15-20 minutes instead of 45 more people might do it. I think if you eliminated homework in this class, the actual class time would have to be harder and that some kids might not learn as much if they are more independent learners.

Student D

I think that the benefits to homework in this class are the fact that working outside of class with different material that isn’t discussed during the class period helps engrave the new things we have to know into our heads. A drawback that I have experienced personally and probably many other students is the format of the homework. Sometimes, when you must get it done within a certain amount of tries/time period it can be stressful, especially last minute. But this also ties back to time management and responsibility as well.

 Student E

There are benefits to having homework in this class. The way this particular class is structured is to take time to cover a lot of the content in ones own time, while analyzing and applying the content is reserved for in class. This creates a learn at home, apply in school sort of environment to encourages students to do homework to better apply the concepts in class and on tests. There are also some drawbacks to this model. Often times the way that the homework is structured can be confusing or too quick to understand for most students, and although you could go back and watch the content, it can be difficult to understand the quick videos and the content within them. This also makes the homework lack depth, where going in depth with topics can often help students understand that. Although the classroom can help take some of the homework more in depth, not everything is covered in the classroom. My proposed solution to this is by learning the content in a different way apart from a video and a quiz. I often feel it is hard to take notes or absorb content from videos, so the quizzes help. But adding some small  documents or other small optional worksheets to the checklists and homework can help improve note taking, understanding, and applying of the concept in this classroom. I feel we could eliminate homework in this class, but it would require either making the school year longer, or cutting out the applying of concepts and practice of the writing concepts so important in the physical test. Therefore, it would be very hard to make a sort of compromise without cutting things out.

Student F

What are the benefits of having the homework for this class? Some benefits is the ability to do work freely and take as many tries as I can to understand it. I can study some units while not work on others if I understand them better. What are the drawbacks? Some drawbacks are the time it takes to get it done and the motivation to get it done. While they do help me learn better and faster then other classes might have, I procrastinate and push it of till I have to do it. Also not talking about the checklists as much in school While we do activities and worksheets that are based on what we learn in the checklists, we don’t learn the checklists in school or in a lesson What is one solution you have to eliminating the drawbacks? Getting it done earlier then I need to and not pushing off till last minute. Do you think we could eliminate homework in this class and why? While I don’t like homework at all, I think that completely getting rid of it would be too hard. With the amount of time we have in class to learn things and the attention span of myself and others, cramming in a lecture or many lessons in one day could be hard and wouldn’t really be the most efficient way of getting things done.

My Response

I’m going to write my response tomorrow. There is a lot going on here and I don’t want the post to be too long.