Good morning everyone, and thank you for joining me. As an adult, and not two 10-year-olds sitting on each others shoulders and wearing a trenchcoat, I would like to present to you my research on homework and its effects on the nonacademic lives of students. After years of research, it is my academic opinion that homework is the stinky pits.
Students who did more hours of homework experienced greater behavioral engagement in school but also more academic stress, physical health problems, and lack of balance in their lives. . . .In these competitive school climates, learning has become a secondary goal. Instead, students’ hard work and the stress it creates are accepted as necessary to obtain the credentials needed to succeed in a competitive climate.
As always I apologize for any rustling or murmuring that may emanate from my midsection. May we continue? I. Me. As I was saying, students often sacrifice personal health and well-being in order to complete hours upon hours of homework, when often very little knowledge is actually retained. These are hours the student could use for other important activities, like…say, video games.
Also, did you know that some normal games are good for learning? It’s why you should buy them that Wii so they can play Super Mario 3D World. Excuse me? No, I don’t know what a Math Blaster is. Moving on.
This research indicates a weak relation, if any, between homework and achievement in elementary school. . . .Beyond 2 hr, homework may have detrimental achievement effects, leading Cooper to suggest somewhere between 90 min and 2.5 hr per night as optimal in high school.
Hmm, what’s that? You saw me consult with what is most likely my bellybutton regarding the content of the lecture? I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about. Anyway, also suggested is letting your child watch as many Yu-Gi-Oh! reruns as they want while they work! It totally helps. There was a study.
Thank you for your time, and now that we all agree that homework blows, I trust you will begin setting your curricula accordingly.
*falls in clothes heap*
Tags: homework, jaya saxena, not two kids sitting on each others shoulders in a trenchcoat, studies
A + + +
Sheer poetry!
I know my 9 year old’s homework is really cutting into our watching re-runs of Gilligan’s Island and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. How is she going to learn how to survive shipwrecked on an island?
MATH BLASTER. I remember very little of it and the fact that I still occasionally have to use my hands to double-check my addition says that it probably didn’t help me much, but I recall having a good Math Blasting time.
My dad would print out my Math Blaster scores on our printer that still had the perforated sides with the holes and hang them on my wall above my desk. I have no idea why.
New DAD NIGHTMARE: His daughter has achieved the all-time North American high score in Math Blaster. DAD attempts to print the score, but the printer is out of ink jets or whatever they put in printers these days.
Does anyone remember Treasure Mountain, Treasure MathStorm, and Treasure Cove (or whatever it was called—the underwater one)? I was an undeniably dorky kid, but I still have fond memories of those learning games.
TREASURE MATH STORM. I would pay money to play that game today, I have great memories of it. I don’t think I ever did either of the others, but I definitely remember the winter one.
(What is happening here? Is Protagonist bagging an elf? Beating an elf? Running an elf away from his/her/its pile of snowballs? This is why we need to replay this thing.)
Looks to me like a too-early swipe for the sentient, malevolent snowball in center frame. Now the little shit will paste the protagonist in the face. I used to get pretty mad at those things, as I recall.
Treasure Mountain was a great game. I don’t remember any learning. Did someone trick me into learning?
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
It was a good-to-great game (heaven knows I logged enough hours on it), and I do vaguely remember it being somewhat educational (all my PC games were such, which is how I literally OWNED Oregon Trail).
But for the life of me, I can’t remember what I was supposedly learning. Were… words involved somehow? The concept of big versus small, I think?
Basic reading, adding/subtracting, and phonics basically.
Normally you have to catch Elves and answer their riddles correctly (usually a simple arithmetic or phonics question) to get the three keywords that get you treasure and the key to the next level (so you also need to be able to read the keywords).
In practice catching elves and throwing coins randomly around works remarkably well so you could probably get away with not learning much…
Oregon Trail besties ! 🙂 I had Oregon Trail II, there’s one I haven’t played in forever and probably should try and dig up…
SO many memories of Treasure Mountain! Specifically when you would get to the final boss guy and have to…climb a tower to get to the treasure I think? I recall him actually being kind of scary!
Speaking of dorky kid memories, did anybody else play Logical Journey of the Zoombinis?
YES. Did it make me into who I am today? YES.
Bubblewonder Abyss haunts me to this very day.
I can hear the sound effects even now.
Man, I stressed out a lot about those poor little critters.
I loved the Learning Company games so much! I found myself wishing in college that the Learning Company had made a math or logic game with college-level difficulty.
Then recently I found out they DID. Robot Odyssey is just as wonderful and crazy and mind-bending as the article describes. (Though it was made in the 80’s, not the 90’s, so the graphics are decidedly old-school.)
If you’re interested in playing it… the Learning Company no longer exists, and Robot Odyssey is abandonware, so you probably don’t have to feel shady about downloading it. I have a copy in my Dropbox that’s patched to remove the game-breaking copy protection. You’ll need a DOS emulator like DOSBox to play it. (If this kind of thing breaks the rules of the Toast, I’ll remove that link, or someone can remove it for me.)
This is amazing! I pondered the exact same question a few years ago but didn’t think to actually look.
Robot Odyssey = downloaded. Now to find the time…
THERE WAS ALSO A SPACE ONE I remember a space game
Treasure Galaxy! You zip around in a little spaceship and dodge Disasteroids.
If I didn’t already have a username, I would be jumping all over Disasteroid
I loved Treasure Mountain so much I trawled the dark worlds of abandonware and DOS emulators to get it for the kids in a preschool I was working at. It was very much a hit.
I then spent an embarrassing-not-embarrassing amount of time driving my score up in Outnumbered!.
Math Blaster also has plenty of good memories in it. I remember being really confused by the “Launch Pad” because what it did had nothing to do with a midday meal.
My youngest brother nearly got called “Math Blaster”! (or so I assume; I’m sure when my parents asked us how our youngest sibling should be named they took our suggestions very seriously)
Way back when I was in HS, I was invited to join the IB program at another high school. Besides an extra 2 hours on the bus (4am pickup? NOPE), the 6-8 hours of homework a night was the deal breaker. In retrospect, all of my peers that did go were offered free rides to top tier schools well before graduation. Not sure if I regret that decision, or not.
FOUR AM?
It was on the other side of the county, so yeah.
You made the right choice. Any decision you make as a teenager to get adequate sleep is the right choice. I credit my sunny disposition junior year to my not scheduling a first period and getting sleep, glorious depression-fighting, brain-renewing, ability-to-be-social-for-more-time sleep.
I had a normal schedule my senior year and plunged into, ah, being a teenager again, and then in college said “Fuck it, sleep is more important than high grades, I will sleep myself happy.” And I did. I have ever since.
I have an IB diploma. It got me…nothing. Many colleges don’t really know what it is. Waste of time, don’t have any regrets!
2 hours on the bus? 6-8 hours of homework a night? Did they at least issue free time turners?
Seriously. That’s 10 hours of non-instructional time right there, plus assume, what, eight hours of school time a day? Then you need to eat dinner, like a sucker, so that’s another hour, and that puts you at maybe five hours of sleep a night? Healthful.
And if the students dare complain about it, it’s “lazy teenagers” this and “kids today” that and “back in my day we only had typewriters” the other.
I loved the IB program although I completely understand why many people wouldn’t want to do that amount of homework (and honestly, if I had to leave the house at 4am I wouldn’t have done it).
For me though it was super worth it. I knew that my high school had a pretty established and very difficult IB program and I wanted to take advantage of any educational opportunities that were being offered to me. I liked being challenged, and I was also planning to study fashion in college and I knew that even though I wanted to study that at a typical 4 year college (so not like, FIT or something) that most schools that offer that as a major aren’t super great, and even when they are the program itself is fairly pre-professional. So I took the IB program as my last opportunity to get a really thorough education.
There were definitely some aspects that weren’t great, there was a lot of homework so I went to bed a lot of nights between 2 and 4am (I woke up at 5:30). After the first semester I got the hang of it and kept it to midnight, with the rare all nighter. Part of this was that most days I had extracurriculars that kept me in school until 5 or 6pm. But I learned a lot, and it taught me a lot of really great time management skills that I still use and so, if I had to do it over I would absolutely do the IB program again. Most of the people I know who hated it were trying to get something extra out of it (typically acceptance into an ivy league or equally prestigious university), so I think what made a huge difference for me is that I wasn’t looking for that at all (although as a side bonus I got about 20 college credits out of it).
For some clarification, most people probably don’t need to stay up as late as I did doing homework. My school had a lot of teachers with the attitude of “IB is easy and AP is even easier, lets dump extra work on them” so there would be extra assignments, extra subjects added onto the regular curriculum, more papers, etc. And I was the kind of weird kid who needed to constantly be doing something (looking back, I probably had attention/concentration issues and was heavily scheduling my time to make sure I didn’t have a moment left for my brain to wander away) so I would ask for extra projects, sign up for extra after school activities, etc.
I did IB, loved it, and got 24 college credits from doing 4 Higher Level classes. And a bunch more from doing AP classes. I think… 41 credits total? It meant I had way more freedom in picking classes from like, my second semester of college on.
But I also didn’t end up needing to spend quite that much time on homework, and I didn’t have to get up that early.
My IB graduating class was the bane of our teachers’ existence since we, as a group, had this tendency to do precisely the amount of work required to get the grades we wanted and absolutely no more. We were bracketed by two classes of extreme overachievers, so I think they had plenty of minions anyways.
I actually enjoyed my IB experience, as it got me access to excellent teachers (the AP teachers at the school I otherwise would have attended were…disappointing), and got me enough college credit to avoid taking all sorts of annoying courses in college.
I was in IB and loved it, but I was an IB “slacker”, meaning I did not make straight A’s and also didn’t do any other extracurricular activities except for Spanish club, so my homework load wasn’t terrible. I did get a free ride and 24 credit hours out of the deal, and the curriculum was awesome! I am an English teacher at the same school, so I can safely say the curriculum/reading was/is great compared to Honors/AP level courses.
However, I’m not sure if I would want my own kid to participate in IB. She would have to really, really want it. My parents didn’t force me into it, and the kids I knew whose parents did were totally miserable.
Did not learn calculus until had to use video game physics engine to deliver a critter via a catapult, then learned it very, very, very quickly. A+++ this.
I will fight to the death anyone who thinks Super Mario Bros. is anything less than one of the 20th Century’s greatest artistic achievements.
Homework sucks. I learned Probability and Statistics playing Craps and Blackjack as a child (my parents believed in real-life examples)
Your parents sound awesome.
My kid’s school is now offering them the chance to skip World Geography & go straight into World History next year, and I said, “You play a lot of Civ and Age of Empires, I’m sure you know that stuff well enough already.”
I’m imagining a generation of children raised on Civilization, blithely drawing in Moscow on the southeastern coast of a randomly-generated supercontinent. To the north lies Russia’s closest neighbor, Ethiopia.
They would at least know all the world capitals.
Well, he also plays a lot of Risk. To balance things out and all.
Thank goodness! So few kids today know the capitals of Kamchatka and Siam.
Whenever you feel regret about your "mediocre state school," think full ride, no student loan debt at least 10 times. Say it out loud, even.
I think at least 60% of the reason I was awful as a teenager was that I was SO TIRED. SO TIRED.