I disagree (at least university level).
Surely too much homework is bad, or doing homework without understanding the basics is counter-productive, but I do think that practice is the only way you truly learn.
I see homework and practice as two different activities. Practice needs intentionality and dedication, and you need a short feedback loop to decide if you're doing it well or not, with repetition until you get it right.
I rarely see homework going along these line.
Interestingly, there's practice books for exams, which can help a lot if you do them under your own control.
> you need a short feedback loop to decide if you're doing it well or not
This is crucial. Without a short feedback loop you're not practicing, you're just doing take home quizzes.
The best teachers that I had would assign only odd-numbered problems as homework so you could check your work in the back of the book. In classes where they didn't do that, I usually "cheated" by plugging the problem into Wolfram Alpha or similar, because I knew that learning what I did wrong after we'd already moved on to the next unit would be pointless.
For feedback loops, I found study groups to be very very useful in university. Reflecting on high school it seems weird they weren’t used more often.
After trying a problem on your own, taking your results and collaborating with peers is a one of the best ways to learn. Sometimes you have to assume the role of teacher and share your idea, which requires you to really understand it.
I know the fact that you meet essentially every kind of person in school is a good thing, but I never fit the mould of learning the way school taught, so providing more diverse ways of learning I think could be a big boon to education.
I agree with you both. It would be one thing if the article stated that time at school would be for doing homework, but it wasn’t said. I do think that there is a lot of ineffective homework and lessons.
Also, in the article they stated:
> Still others believe—incorrectly—that more time spent on a task produces better results, or that because practice is required to be a good athlete or musician, it’s also at the heart of intellectual growth. It isn’t. You can’t “reinforce” understanding the way you can reinforce a behavior. In my experience, people with the least sophisticated understanding of how children learn, or the least amount of concern about children’s attitudes toward learning, tend to be the most enthusiastic supporters of homework.
That depends on how smart you are. If you are relatively smart for the level you are at then you are fine without homework, otherwise you need it. Lots of people can learn well without homework in middle school, fewer can in high school and very few can at college.
So homework is important at all stages of education, just for different people. For you that happened at college. For someone else it might have been very important in middle school to understand percent, without that work they would have been much worse off in life.
I rarely see homework going along these line.
Interestingly, there's practice books for exams, which can help a lot if you do them under your own control.