A chapter from Alfie Kohn’s book The Homework Myth is available online and I devoured it yesterday and today. In it, he asserts that practice homework (especially in maths) is, at best, useless, and at worst, damaging to students. For students who understood how to do a procedure they were taught in class, he argues, practicing the same thing at home twenty or 40 times is boring and useless. For students who didn’t understand in class, Kohn lists at least four reasons why practicing at home is damaging: it reinforces their mistakes (40 times), reminds them they don’t get it, makes them want to cheat or pretend they understand when they don’t, and makes them think they are not meant to understand maths, just do it mindlessly.
I was reading some of the article today while sitting at a table of year 11s during their lesson. The three of them were doing matrix multiplication and I was sitting on the fourth chair and piping up with hints and tips whenever they looked my way. As other students around the room were asking for help, I was in and out of the seat, visiting other tables. Near the end of the lesson, the boy I was sitting next to asked, impishly, “So, Mrs A, I see you are reading about homework…. Are we getting any today?”
I paused. Great question. I find myself won over by many of Kohn’s arguments. I agree that rote practice at home doesn’t create understanding for students, and may, in fact, discourage them. Kohn opines that rote practice is damaging in the classroom, too. Take, for example, this statement, “Terrific teachers generally refrain from showing their classes how to solve problems.” I agree with this, to a certain extent. Students need to explore, discuss, and discover for themselves. But I often provide technical explanations when students are ready to formalise their mathematical ideas. And I explicitly teach things like matrix multiplication.
I asked the other year 11s sitting with us what they thought. “Do you think practising at home is worthwhile, or worthless?”
“When I have an idea how to start, then the practise is useful,” a girl offered.
“I can teach myself how to do the harder questions,” added another student.
“But it can get a bit boring if the questions are all the same.”
I think these students do gain from the homework I set them. I allow them to skip repetitious questions (both in class and at home). Furthermore, I want them to be exposed to as many types of matrix questions as possible, so I assigned work for them at the end of the lesson. But if they left the room with a faulty understanding, then the homework won’t likely do much good.
What do you think? Do you assign practice homework?
I think practice homework is important, but it should be differentiated to meet students needs and should be minimal. Why 40 problems? Why not 15?
Even 15 is a lot if they are doing it wrong every time. Or if they are bored. But, I’ll be honest, I am nervous about the idea of quitting giving homework. What will the parents or my colleagues think? Or my head of department?
Ask students what things they feel they should practice at home.
We practice lots of skills at home, not just math, so students shouldn’t find self-motivated practice unusual.
Students might react well to a tennis coach saying: Fred, you need to practice your backhand” but how would they react to a math teachers saying: “Sally, you need to practice using the quadratic formula”?
Sally is likely to ask: “Why?”
Personally, I give no homework now. Student homework is working on their projects, posting their work on WordPress blogs.
I stopped giving homework, for all the reasons Alfie Kohn lists.