because teachers have two general types of homework. useful homework and garbage homework.

Useful homework involves doing work to cement what you learned in school. i.e., the kid that's learning algebra does algebra homework to cement the algebra that the teacher told him about that day.

Garbage homework involves BS that won't cement anything. I got really ticked my freshman year of college when my "advanced" world history prof had us color a map for our homework. I'm sorry, but messing with crayons is NOT going to teach me anything about world history. And I don't want to hear any comments about how coloring a map of the world teaches you geography because if you're in an ADVANCED class you should know where Russia is already.

I highly object to the latter type of homework, but the former is useful.









> > > Assigned homework.
> > >
> > > Horrible idea. You do work at *school*, you don't just go there, sit for six hours, and then
> > > do the work at home. Many teachers forget that children have a life outside school.
> >
> > And many students forget that learning isn't something you only do at school.
> >
> > Paul
>
> NEVER MIND that the same teachers who assign you that homework spend countless hours of time they could be spending 'having a life outside of school' grading that work and making sure you're getting the concepts, not just the facts, and being prepared to learn things that will make it possible, literally, for your survival as an adult. Seriously, never mind that.
>
> Linking this to another long ago thread regarding who gets paid the big bucks and why, in The Real World (TM) (i.e., the one where you're actually responsible for feeding and housing yourself and probably your family and not just counting on someone else to do it while yet more someones supposedly prepare you to do it for yourself), "work" (here being the adult equivalent of "school") certainly doesn't last for only the eight hours you're there, especially for the ones who get the big bucks (purposely ignoring the ones who work for themselves because you'll undoubtedly come back with "they work more because they're doing what they've chosen to do and not what someone has chosen to assign them"). Do you think anyone with a solid work ethic doesn't take calls having to do with work because it's after hours, or they're on vacation? The whole reason people become important (and well paid) is because they are willing to take the responsibility on their shoulders for things that affect a whole, whole lot of other people, whether those things happen between their particular time zone's 9 to 5 or not.
>
> And people get good at what they do because they practice it and do it over and over again, whether or not they did the same thing at the office that day. I won't go into the 'what ifs' of that, and I'm not sure why this thread struck such a chord in me, but golly, I'd love to show your remarks to you right about the time, several years from now, when your wife's calling you at the office to ask why you're going to be late again, and you're thinking, for the fiftieth time, that she just doesn't get it, does she.