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Instead of worksheets, elementary students will be required to read for 20 minutes each night.
One Florida school district is taking a radical stance on homework. Starting in fall 2017, the Marion County public school district has decided to replace all traditional homework with 20 minutes of mandatory reading time for its elementary school students. This goes against the current practice of sending students home with worksheets and assignments based on their daily lessons in the classroom.
The driving force behind this unusual decision is Heidi Maier, the new superintendent of the district. She told the Washington Post that she has based her decision on research that clearly shows the benefits of reading, both silently and aloud, for young children, whereas the benefits of nightly homework have yet to be backed up by legitimate studies, despite the fact that many schools and parents act as if it is.
A retro move, or a smart one?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday July 24 2017, @11:19PM (7 children)
Which leaves me reading the blurb in utter bafflement.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 25 2017, @12:01AM (6 children)
Nothing wrong with worksheets, pretty much every student needs to practice skills in order to become competent.
That said, some worksheets are really stupid and a waste of time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 25 2017, @12:18AM (5 children)
Some? The vast majority of them rely entirely on rote memorization instead of requiring that students understand the material in order to solve them. I'm also not so sure that worksheets are the best way to practice skills in a lot of cases. Practical programming assignments seem like a better way to practice mathematics skills than just having students solve boring problems on paper.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mykl on Tuesday July 25 2017, @04:36AM (4 children)
Rote Memorization is not all bad. For example, my kids are enrolled in Kumon [wikipedia.org] mathematics which, in the early stages, is rote memorisation of basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
The kids are now on to more challenging stuff now, but it's amazing how quickly they can perform that rote work to assist in more complex problems. Now they can just focus on the new concepts instead of trying to remember what 7 x 6 is. For example, my youngest in in Grade 2 (or Second Grade if you prefer) and is working through problems like 42683/72. For this example, he is able to work out how many times 72 goes into 426 just as fast as I can (noting that the questions often use edge cases such as being one short of a full multiple).
Counterpoint - my boys love to read and do really well in English because we have instilled a love of reading into them (not from any worksheets or assignments).
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday July 25 2017, @10:13AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday July 25 2017, @11:59AM (1 child)
You can't Rote memorize math problems, only formulas and tables. That's called building a foundation. The rest is learning the mechanics and applying them to problems. The memorized tables just help things go faster.
(Score: 1) by i286NiNJA on Tuesday July 25 2017, @04:10PM
Plus even very stupid people are capable of memorization which looks great!
If we could just get them to shut up about how the never needed to use the math the never understood then the system would be perfect.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 30 2017, @06:28AM
Here we go again. Whenever someone says that schools shouldn't rely entirely or almost entirely on rote memorization. someone comes along and says that you need to be able to memorize information to some degree. The problem? That is 100% obvious and no one disagrees. The problem that people are pointing out is that schools rely on rote memorization far, far too much, not that we should never memorize anything. I want to see responses like this die.