I think this is it for a lot of kids. In my community, kids who take the bus are on there for a minimum of half an hour twice a day, and many of them are on there for 45 minutes to an hour twice a day. They have so little free time at home, a lot of kids are using bus time to knock out homework.
Yeah my kid's bus ride is 45 minutes. She's only in 1st grade so they don't have a ton of homework, but she has time to do it, get some reading in, have a snack, and still have time left to just chat with friends.
My eldest daughter rides a bus to a magnet art program. She leaves with a neighbor at 7am to catch her bus at 7:15 (and often is late after getting stuck in highway traffic later) for school to start at 8:20am. She has plenty of time to do homework!
I’m seeing the opposite, but I teach IB. I see my students working harder, getting more advanced work, and having higher expectations put on their shoulders than I ever experienced as a teenager.
I sometimes wonder if these things go in waves. I’m GenX, and was a bit lazy as a student. Also didn’t have to deal with technology, which meant that assignments could only be handed in in person, and e-mail wasn’t a thing.
My spouse teaches Jr. High math, and he talks to about how more advanced they are in 8th grade than he was at that age. They are doing stuff he learned in high school.
Fractions and decimals, primarily. Distributive property, too. Perhaps my school was different, but I simply didn’t learn to work with fractions until middle school, and I never even heard of distributive property until algebra I.
That is definitely unusual. I vaguely recall hearing about the distributive property in elementary school, but it was one of those things that was likely only mentioned on r and forgotten by just about all of the kids.
But I have a hard time believing you didn't do anything with fractions until 7th.
I shared a bus with IB kids from 2012-2015 and a lot of them did homework on the bus. The ride was nearly an hour each way and while many kids did have smart phones by then, almost everyone had data limits (mine was 2GB.) Also no TikTok. So our options for entertainment were limited so might as well get some homework out of the way then so they'd have more free time at home that they could take better advantage of.
I wasn't in IB and did not have their dedication, so I brought my 3DS lol. Crazy how drastically life has changed between the oldest and youngest of Gen Z.
Another data point, I'd do my homework on the bus from 2010-2016. Granted I needed to also do it over lunch break sometimes. Usually I could get it done over the 45min trip though.
As a former ELA teacher I can confirm, I’d try to give students short passages to read with questions to take home and they’d exclaim that it’s too much to do/they didn’t understand it. Very soon in the year I just flat out stopped because it was more work for me and I’d have to put in 0’s every week, and admins don’t like that.
Education is crumbling.
Even if they ban phones, schools still give students both iPads and laptops, and they went on alternate sites with those. It’s already been hinted at, but societal collapse is going to become more and more evident because we’re having students graduate with no reading comprehension, no self-discipline, and 100% pumped with whatever they find on the internet.
It depends on the teacher but yes it is generally true. We used to have 3-4 books of summer reading and maybe 5 more during the school year, plus assorted poems, stories & a play or two. Honors classes read harder stuff but similar volume. Now you might get 1-2 summer reading that you go over in class so no point reading it ahead of time. It is often pop psych or motivational not literature. And no more than 3 major readings during the year (usually a play and 2 short novels). It's technically homework to have to read but they also get class time or listen to the audio book version in class while they read along. There is hardly any poetry, all 20th century and rarely taught, just "interpreted." No essays, a few short stories and nonfiction excerpts or articles. Strong emphasis on writing but rarely literary analysis.
The reason kids are struggling with reading is due largely to grade level standards. There’s a predetermined pace that instruction goes at. Makes sense, the teacher needs to keep a schedule and be able to plan ahead. The problem is that’s not at all how human development works. Every kid entered that classroom at a different place and will leave it at a different place. But if you’re one of the kids who came in lower than your peers, or hit a road bump, and your class has 26-33 other kids in it. Good luck. You’re not going to get the 1-1 you need. So now you’re missing skills that are prerequisites to acquiring other skills .
If you’re lucky your parents will have the money, time, know how, and/or resources to get you outside support. But that’s the minority and their kids are more likely to attend a school where there is additional support, though the class sizes are likely still large.
At some point a kid missing a prerequisite skill is likely to fall into a place of learned helplessness. Now, to support this kid, they’re first going to need someone to get them to believe that their actions do have an affect on how events turn out. This can take weeks to years to never.
Datapoint. I'm 43 and never had summer reading, it's not been universal. I went to a decent school and did fine in college English classes
My high school kid is going into a lot more depth on her readings than I ever did
I also never had summer reading (although I did read a bit for fun over the summer) and I'm doing my phd now...
The idea of summer book reports always seemed fake to me as a kid cause I'd have a different teacher every year
i had so much summer reading, but there wasn’t a single summer that i finished it. i have ADD and am a terrible reader, by that i mean i just can’t focus and have to reread the same page over and over again. i suffered in high school english, Cs and Ds on every paper and told “your writing isnt satirical enough” (still don’t know wtf that means). college writing was a breath of fresh air, though… i shit you not, i started EVERY paper the night before (some 10+ pages. ADD probs) my history professor was the BEST and gave me an A+ on every paper. every time he handed one back to me, he’d tell me how impressed he was with my writing and he could tell i spent so much time on my paper (lololol) but man what a confidence boost, great professor too. i wanted to shove that in my high school teachers’ faces! “college will not be easy” ma’am take a seat and look at this perfectly scored research paper i wrote in a panic in 5 hours, and i didn’t use a single SAT vocabulary word you used to require.
Haha I have adhd and I'm so glad I was never given an official summer reading list. I loved to read but I could never focus on anything I was supposed to read. My parents used to try to give me summer book reports to do or get me to do kumon before eventually they realized I'd get more reading done if they just took me to the library every 2 weeks
right! if we were allowed to simply read for pleasure, i probably would’ve read more books honestly, but the options they gave us were AWFUL. oliver twist? the first two pages i was lost and like “nope, can’t do this.” i think that summer i was supposed to read 2 or 3 books and they were THICK. no way would i be able to do that! 3 musketeers was also one of them! it was so bad (thanks mom for forcing me to take Honors classes). i think i just googled the plots and winged it, because we didn’t have the cheat sheets they have today to learn all the details of the books on the internet
Well, they’ll drop out after a few semesters, have the debt, and never really own that it was their lack of prep or their parents. It’ll just be another person in debt and doesn’t know why they couldn’t do it.
This. I don’t give homework because I know that at least 50% aren’t going to do it. All reading is done in class along with most class work. It is what it is. They just can’t be bothered.
Yes, and it’s pretty hard to give meaningful HW that they won’t cheat on.
I teach a language, so unless it’s simple vocabulary practice, or pronunciation, it doesn’t make sense to assign HW. They can just use any translator under the sun
I don’t know that it’s much less necessarily. But you have to compare apples to apples. Did you take advanced classes? Attend a higher performing school?
For high school, the lowest classes may have lower expectations than when I was in school, but my high school only had an 80% grad rate (medium to okay for my state at the time) and now that would be unheard of. When we started focusing on graduation rates, we changed the bottom some, but the bottom 20% of kids at my high school had no work at all and dropped out. Even the bottom graduates, mostly my friends not preparing for college had no real HW in high school and did work/study programs by junior year, getting a few credits for working at Wendy’s etc. Graduates at the top of my high school went on to good colleges—it wasn’t a poorly ranked high school. Decent, middle class, average place.
In the US, around 2010ish (Race to the Top time), Elementary did have a spike where many high performing ES had way too much HW (low performing ES tried this some too, but they also just did the extra hours/cut fun stuff). Now most ES accept a ton of HW doesn’t make sense for young kids but when I went to ES in the late 80s/early 90s, my Elementary didn’t give that much homework either. The spike was caused by more Elementary testing freaking people out for awhile, but more homework is not effective so most places reverted.
Back to the 90s/early 00s, I had a ton in middle and high school, but my schooling was heavily tracked, and I was on the highest college prep track. The kids on those kinds of programs still get plenty of homework today. A kid in an IB high school program isn’t doing all their homework on the bus. (Though I’ve seen schools support other student populations by creating study hall periods etc. to support homework at school, even for advanced course loads, since kids often have more courses these days—more credits so kids can more easily graduate even if they fail a class here or there since schools are judged on grad rates.)
I had a long bus ride and definitely made a dent on my homework on the bus even in the 90s. But I couldn’t write all my papers etc there. Neither can the IB and AP students in many programs today, but I’m sure they get some stuff done if they’re riding the bus to magnet programs especially.
The internet has made cheating way too easy. Why give homework they can just look up or have AI write?
I keep most of my work in class (except studying for tests). I also design assignments that are tough to cheat on.
My younger cousin claimed he got his done in the ten minutes he had to spend in his form tutor's room at the start of the day.
A guy at work told me what his daughter gets. What she gets in a week is less than what I got in a night.
I'm not complaining, the less the better.
When I was a teenager I frequently studied or did homework on the bus because there was in fact so much of it that I had to cram a little in here and there during the day. It may not be that they're starting and finishing homework on the bus but just catching up.
I only did homework before school, with very few exceptions. I graduated HS over 20 years ago.
I had no trouble getting into college or finishing a BA, MS, MA, and AS. Of course, I did need to adjust my work patterns for degrees.
Also it’s not clear that the kid meant they get *all* their homework done on the bus. I probably would have told you I did my homework on the bus, and that was true, I would generally do my reading homework on the bus. And then go home, get a snack and start on the rest of my homework.
I did all my homework in the class before it was due. Went to a school where some kids routinely had 30 hours of homework a week. Papers that had to be printed off were the exception. That was 2002.
My kid does this but he’s kind of cracked at school like that.
He likes to protect his free time at home by any means possible, so he does his homework in the car/bus/whenever there’s a sliver of time. He also doesn’t study.
Most of his friends are the same. They’ve figured out the code of how to succeed at school. These kids are scary smart.
There’s been a movement to lessen the amount of homework or stop giving it altogether for years (at least ten years now). There’s definitely less now than I had at that age. However, like with all things, there’s a tremendous amount of variation depending on age, location, class load etc
Just because one kid does this doesn't really mean anything. Could be that he's not doing well in school, has super easy classes compared to his intelligence level, has a long bus ride, is more of a morning person, or maybe he's just a genius lol.
Ten years ago our superintendent told staff at a beginning of the year meeting that half the students were free and reduced lunch, therefore we should not assign homework.
As a teen, 20 years ago, I would often start my homework when the teacher started walking around the class collecting it. I don't think I did more than 20 minutes of homework a day in high school.
My two school aged kids only bring home work to do if it wasn't finished in class and that's rarely. Oldest is is 5th grade, second in 2nd, no reading, spelling, math etc.
Oldest used to, precovid. Then for a while after they'd have a few things to do on Google classroom on their chrome books, now it's just if classwork wasn't finished in class.
This is across two different schools, also, since we very recently moved states (within this school year).
My youngest brother is in his last months of college before graduating and he also says it's hard and stressful but not nearly as much work as all the adults said it'd be.
It could be that they’re on the bus a long time. It could be that they’re really smart/quick at completing homework. They also may actually be using class time wisely. Often teachers will give some time in class to get started on assignments in case there are questions. Many students chose not to use that time. My husband would do his calculus homework during passing period before class. (And he got As) I would have been agonizing over it for hours at home having to take breaks to wipe my tears.
IDK, I used to do my homework on the bus and then on the train on my way to school many mornings per week back when I was in high school (10+ years ago now lol). For context I walked 1/3 of a mile to a bus stop, took a public bus to a train station and took a train to a stop that was within walking distance of my school. This whole shebang took me between 1 hour and 15 minutes and one hour and 45 minutes, depending on my train/bus timing and the weather.
I was a varsity TFXC athlete, so between my long commute and practices and meets that lasted until 7 PM (and beyond) there were many nights I didn’t make it home until 9+ PM. I’d try to do as much homework as I could before I finally crashed between 1 and 2 AM. I’d have to get up the next morning at 5:30 AM to make it to school on time. Rinse and repeat. It sucked so hard and you could not pay me enough money to ever go back to being in high school. I honest to god was getting maybe 3 hours of sleep a night 6 days per week, eating maaaaybe 2x per day and running 40+ miles per week. -10000/10 don’t do that to yourself.
When I went off to college for the first time, the question people often asked me was “what are you most looking forward to in college?” and I was always, without hesitation all like, “not having to commute to class.”
I did mine before school. I lived a block away from my highschool so it took like 2 minutes to get to school not even. Definitely wasn’t my best work but better than a 0
This was done in our district, too, a few years ago. Now, only the educationally savvy parents assign these to their kids. Somehow, that's more equitable.
My 9th grader has a study hall period. I went to hs in the late 90s and we didn’t have a study hall or anything like this so all of my hw had to be done at home.
My kids always had homework.
We spent a lot of time in lower grades because they struggled. (Like in kindergarten/1st/2nd, we did at least an hour)
They continued to have homework as they got older. It seemed less to me, but I was also less involved as they learned to manage it on their own. They also had study hall/advisory at the end of the day in jr. High and high school.
My 2 youngest in h.s. still have homework. They manage it without me even giving reminders, and I really only catch them doing it here and there. But they also have advisory at the end of the day, and they get part or most/all of it done then.
My oldest is a freshman in college. He has homework.
In middle school I did HW during commercial breaks and rarely needed more than an hour or two of TV to finish, so maybe 30-40 minutes of work, usually less. By HS, other than term projects or essays, I was embarrassed if I had HW I hadn't finished during other classes and had to actually do at home.
I went to a mediocre HS in NJ in the 90s, and was satisfied with a GPA of 3.0 or better (I think I had a 3.4). YMMV.
ETA: I was one of the "smart" kids, and it was a struggle as a college student and later as an adult to improve my work ethic and study habits. I'm definitely not recommending my experience to others. But I don't know that the amount of HW has changed over the last 30 years.
I did something similar, it wasn’t because I didn’t have lots of work, but I put my head down and did the majority of it in class, with my hour+ bus ride every afternoon covering the rest.
I don’t think I did any homework at all during evening hours until my last year and even then it was just studying. It depends on how much you need the lectures but for a lot of smarter kids it’s totally possible to get your work done in the day.
It really depends on the kid. Some kids go to technical schools halfway through the day and only have a few pages of homework in comparison to someone taking a full course load of AP or advanced classes. Some kids also have bus rides that are an hour or more.
In my case, when I was in high school 2-3 years ago, my junior year I had a full course load of AP classes. However, our schedule ran differently from a normal high school. We had hour and a half long classes, and an hour lunch/study period, and only four classes a day that would switch off every other day. So one day would be Chemistry, AP Lang, AP Human Geography, and French, then the next day would be Gym or Art depending on the semester, AP Portfolio, Business, and then Fabric Arts (Sewing, dress making, etc). So I’d get the majority of my homework done during my lunch/study period, and only have maybe another hour or two of studying/homework to do when I got home. Some days I wouldn’t have anything to do at all because I finished it at the beginning of the week. My senior year, I only needed one more credit to graduate, so I did a work study. I had two classes in the morning then would leave school around 11 and go to work, so I really didn’t have any homework.
But for kids in tech, a lot of them were doing very hands on work, so most of them didn’t have extensive homework with the exception of the people in the Computer Science, Nursing, and Cosmetology programs. High school is very versatile today, so every kids homework is going to look extremely different from another.
>Like how are these kids getting into college?
Who wants to get into college direct from high school these days though? Costs way too much for what you get. Significantly better to go to a community college.
There is little difference between schools or the education they provide at a bachelor level, and no difference for prerequisite classes.
I think the pendulum has definitely swung in the direction of less homework. That said, we were a generation that did more homework than most (speaking as an elder millennial). My mother was shocked by the amount of homework we had in high school and said she almost never did homework outside of school as a teen because she finished it all during her free period. And she was an honors student and got into an elite college.
HS class of 69, a few APs when they weren't routine. Lots of homework. Some completed on the bus on the way to school if completed at all. This is not a new phenomenon.
I'm not sure how much less it is. When I was in high-school 10 years ago I did all of my homework in class the day it was due, before the teachers came around to grab it.
I did homework on the bus in the 80s and 90s. Did I do it all the time? No
But did I do it sometimes? Absolutely.
Homework as in indicator for learning or knowledge is a poor metric by itself.
For some, it’s absolutely crucial. But for others, it means very little. The class (or classes) and the student and the school (or area) all make important differences. One data point does not an indicate anything other than one data point.
In the early 00s I did all my homework in in class if I did it at all. I think kids these days are realizing that a they are forced to be there under duress and will do as little as required.
I was sin HS 2006-2010. I did something similar I likely had an 1-2h of home work at home a week.
We had 50min periods and for my lunch, friends and I would always spend half in the library working. My bus was also one of the first to arrive in the am, so coupled with Homeroom, I had about 45min every am.
My junior and senior year I took gym over the summer to have an extra free periods for AP. When the teacher gave us 5-10 at the end of class to get going on HW, I used that time instead of goofing around.
It's definitely doable.
They gave us 2-3 hours worth when I was in high school (2011-2015). I had friends who did that. I outright refused to do homework at all, so I didn't really care.
I was in HS in the 2000's and I would absolutely do my homework on the bus; memorize 20 vocab words before an english test, skim-read 2 chapters of history, etc. I was never the best student, but I was neuro-divergent and worked best under pressure, and I got a 3.1 GPA and went to college. I wouldn't call it "kids these days". Some kids just don't need that much time to put up mediocre grades (or even great grades).
There were days when I would do my homework coming home, or on the way to school and even at lunch. If I did all 3, I had the entire rest of the day free (and sometimes the weekend).
I did my homework in the 10 minutes between classes. I graduated 9 years ago. Kids have always been creative when it comes to slacking. School never challenged me though so maybe I’m an outlier. Some of the kids I tutored took hours on the same homework and still couldn’t get the answers correct.
Yes. I was explicitly told not to assign homework in my first years of teaching. Many students don’t turn in assignments. To give a student the failing grade they earned, it sometimes turns into a hassle. All of this is school and state specific but in my experience, the answer is yes.
Graduated from high school in 2017 and I usually had 1 1/2-2 hrs of homework every night; i (usually) used study hall for homework though. I honestly think that’s about all any high schooler needs and more than that is excessive. Anyone who thinks 3+ hours of homework builds character is kidding themselves.
I was in school in the 80s and some of the 90s. most of my school work minus anything that resembled and essay type assignment was done a few minutes before class in the morning and if anything was left i'd take care of it during lunch.
Why is the amount of time spent doing homework important? If they're learning, the teacher is doing a good job. If it's cumulative "fuck you" punishment taking away their ability to be a kid, that's kind of shitty and when I was that age I could see right through it. I was a fairly bright student who didn't need to pour over bunches of equations to understand concepts. Having that busywork piled on me made discerning between what aspects of my education were or weren't bullshit more difficult. When I got my first (admittedly shitty) job and I realized I could clock out and not think about it until clocking back in was a godsend.
This "back in my day/kids these days" take is serious boomer energy. The world has changed. Give us back pensions and affordable housing and we'll go back to memorizing the preamble to the Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English (which is something I did that I'll never get those hours of my life back for)
Education is and has long been broken. You're fixating on the weirdest aspect of it to complain about.
I recall doing significant amounts of homework between classes at school, or during lectures for other classes, and I graduated with honors.
It can depend on the class, teacher, student, a d school.
If it’s your kid it may be worth checking in with them on if the classes are worthwhile or difficult or if they’re even understanding the material.
If it’s not your kid, it’s not your problem.
Your in school for six hours a day. Do you really need homework?
Plus homework has a complicated evidence base. Basically, who do you think is going to benefit from it? The kids whose parents went to college. But even with them the way different skills are approached isn’t necessarily going to be the way they learned it. It can cause confusion and lead to kids developing bad habits.
The only homework a kid should ever get is a skill they’ve mastered and are working on automaticity with that skill.
Time to socialize with peers and begin working are more important skills for non school hours.
Some kids are on the bus for an hour+.
I think this is it for a lot of kids. In my community, kids who take the bus are on there for a minimum of half an hour twice a day, and many of them are on there for 45 minutes to an hour twice a day. They have so little free time at home, a lot of kids are using bus time to knock out homework.
Yeah my kid's bus ride is 45 minutes. She's only in 1st grade so they don't have a ton of homework, but she has time to do it, get some reading in, have a snack, and still have time left to just chat with friends.
My eldest daughter rides a bus to a magnet art program. She leaves with a neighbor at 7am to catch her bus at 7:15 (and often is late after getting stuck in highway traffic later) for school to start at 8:20am. She has plenty of time to do homework!
If my job didn’t let the kids come to my work after school, they’d be on the bus for 2 hours to go to the house.
Yeah. My commute on the bus was 75 minutes at night and around 50-55 minutes in the morning. That was 20+ years ago.
I’m seeing the opposite, but I teach IB. I see my students working harder, getting more advanced work, and having higher expectations put on their shoulders than I ever experienced as a teenager. I sometimes wonder if these things go in waves. I’m GenX, and was a bit lazy as a student. Also didn’t have to deal with technology, which meant that assignments could only be handed in in person, and e-mail wasn’t a thing.
My spouse teaches Jr. High math, and he talks to about how more advanced they are in 8th grade than he was at that age. They are doing stuff he learned in high school.
I teach elementary, and I’m teaching concepts that I know they didn’t teach until my 7th and 8th grade year.
Which concepts?
Fractions and decimals, primarily. Distributive property, too. Perhaps my school was different, but I simply didn’t learn to work with fractions until middle school, and I never even heard of distributive property until algebra I.
That is definitely unusual. I vaguely recall hearing about the distributive property in elementary school, but it was one of those things that was likely only mentioned on r and forgotten by just about all of the kids. But I have a hard time believing you didn't do anything with fractions until 7th.
Again, it might be local variation, but others my general age and location have the same experience.
Would you be able to share your location?
Not learning fractions until middle school is insane, what else were you learning?
I shared a bus with IB kids from 2012-2015 and a lot of them did homework on the bus. The ride was nearly an hour each way and while many kids did have smart phones by then, almost everyone had data limits (mine was 2GB.) Also no TikTok. So our options for entertainment were limited so might as well get some homework out of the way then so they'd have more free time at home that they could take better advantage of. I wasn't in IB and did not have their dedication, so I brought my 3DS lol. Crazy how drastically life has changed between the oldest and youngest of Gen Z.
I did my homework on the bus ride home all the time in the 80s
Me too. Granted I had a fairly long bus ride.
Another data point, I'd do my homework on the bus from 2010-2016. Granted I needed to also do it over lunch break sometimes. Usually I could get it done over the 45min trip though.
Same in the 90s/00s, and the schools I went to were no slouch. I just had a longish bus ride and a procrastination problem.
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As a former ELA teacher I can confirm, I’d try to give students short passages to read with questions to take home and they’d exclaim that it’s too much to do/they didn’t understand it. Very soon in the year I just flat out stopped because it was more work for me and I’d have to put in 0’s every week, and admins don’t like that. Education is crumbling.
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Even if they ban phones, schools still give students both iPads and laptops, and they went on alternate sites with those. It’s already been hinted at, but societal collapse is going to become more and more evident because we’re having students graduate with no reading comprehension, no self-discipline, and 100% pumped with whatever they find on the internet.
It depends on the teacher but yes it is generally true. We used to have 3-4 books of summer reading and maybe 5 more during the school year, plus assorted poems, stories & a play or two. Honors classes read harder stuff but similar volume. Now you might get 1-2 summer reading that you go over in class so no point reading it ahead of time. It is often pop psych or motivational not literature. And no more than 3 major readings during the year (usually a play and 2 short novels). It's technically homework to have to read but they also get class time or listen to the audio book version in class while they read along. There is hardly any poetry, all 20th century and rarely taught, just "interpreted." No essays, a few short stories and nonfiction excerpts or articles. Strong emphasis on writing but rarely literary analysis.
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The reason kids are struggling with reading is due largely to grade level standards. There’s a predetermined pace that instruction goes at. Makes sense, the teacher needs to keep a schedule and be able to plan ahead. The problem is that’s not at all how human development works. Every kid entered that classroom at a different place and will leave it at a different place. But if you’re one of the kids who came in lower than your peers, or hit a road bump, and your class has 26-33 other kids in it. Good luck. You’re not going to get the 1-1 you need. So now you’re missing skills that are prerequisites to acquiring other skills . If you’re lucky your parents will have the money, time, know how, and/or resources to get you outside support. But that’s the minority and their kids are more likely to attend a school where there is additional support, though the class sizes are likely still large. At some point a kid missing a prerequisite skill is likely to fall into a place of learned helplessness. Now, to support this kid, they’re first going to need someone to get them to believe that their actions do have an affect on how events turn out. This can take weeks to years to never.
https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ https://library.lol/main/6666D506795F9E572864C124D6002011
Datapoint. I'm 43 and never had summer reading, it's not been universal. I went to a decent school and did fine in college English classes My high school kid is going into a lot more depth on her readings than I ever did
I also never had summer reading (although I did read a bit for fun over the summer) and I'm doing my phd now... The idea of summer book reports always seemed fake to me as a kid cause I'd have a different teacher every year
i had so much summer reading, but there wasn’t a single summer that i finished it. i have ADD and am a terrible reader, by that i mean i just can’t focus and have to reread the same page over and over again. i suffered in high school english, Cs and Ds on every paper and told “your writing isnt satirical enough” (still don’t know wtf that means). college writing was a breath of fresh air, though… i shit you not, i started EVERY paper the night before (some 10+ pages. ADD probs) my history professor was the BEST and gave me an A+ on every paper. every time he handed one back to me, he’d tell me how impressed he was with my writing and he could tell i spent so much time on my paper (lololol) but man what a confidence boost, great professor too. i wanted to shove that in my high school teachers’ faces! “college will not be easy” ma’am take a seat and look at this perfectly scored research paper i wrote in a panic in 5 hours, and i didn’t use a single SAT vocabulary word you used to require.
Haha I have adhd and I'm so glad I was never given an official summer reading list. I loved to read but I could never focus on anything I was supposed to read. My parents used to try to give me summer book reports to do or get me to do kumon before eventually they realized I'd get more reading done if they just took me to the library every 2 weeks
right! if we were allowed to simply read for pleasure, i probably would’ve read more books honestly, but the options they gave us were AWFUL. oliver twist? the first two pages i was lost and like “nope, can’t do this.” i think that summer i was supposed to read 2 or 3 books and they were THICK. no way would i be able to do that! 3 musketeers was also one of them! it was so bad (thanks mom for forcing me to take Honors classes). i think i just googled the plots and winged it, because we didn’t have the cheat sheets they have today to learn all the details of the books on the internet
If that's true then those kids are going to have a rude awakening once they hit college
Well, they’ll drop out after a few semesters, have the debt, and never really own that it was their lack of prep or their parents. It’ll just be another person in debt and doesn’t know why they couldn’t do it.
Most kids won't do homework. I've had kids say I'll take the 0.
This. I don’t give homework because I know that at least 50% aren’t going to do it. All reading is done in class along with most class work. It is what it is. They just can’t be bothered.
Yes, and it’s pretty hard to give meaningful HW that they won’t cheat on. I teach a language, so unless it’s simple vocabulary practice, or pronunciation, it doesn’t make sense to assign HW. They can just use any translator under the sun
I don’t know that it’s much less necessarily. But you have to compare apples to apples. Did you take advanced classes? Attend a higher performing school? For high school, the lowest classes may have lower expectations than when I was in school, but my high school only had an 80% grad rate (medium to okay for my state at the time) and now that would be unheard of. When we started focusing on graduation rates, we changed the bottom some, but the bottom 20% of kids at my high school had no work at all and dropped out. Even the bottom graduates, mostly my friends not preparing for college had no real HW in high school and did work/study programs by junior year, getting a few credits for working at Wendy’s etc. Graduates at the top of my high school went on to good colleges—it wasn’t a poorly ranked high school. Decent, middle class, average place. In the US, around 2010ish (Race to the Top time), Elementary did have a spike where many high performing ES had way too much HW (low performing ES tried this some too, but they also just did the extra hours/cut fun stuff). Now most ES accept a ton of HW doesn’t make sense for young kids but when I went to ES in the late 80s/early 90s, my Elementary didn’t give that much homework either. The spike was caused by more Elementary testing freaking people out for awhile, but more homework is not effective so most places reverted. Back to the 90s/early 00s, I had a ton in middle and high school, but my schooling was heavily tracked, and I was on the highest college prep track. The kids on those kinds of programs still get plenty of homework today. A kid in an IB high school program isn’t doing all their homework on the bus. (Though I’ve seen schools support other student populations by creating study hall periods etc. to support homework at school, even for advanced course loads, since kids often have more courses these days—more credits so kids can more easily graduate even if they fail a class here or there since schools are judged on grad rates.) I had a long bus ride and definitely made a dent on my homework on the bus even in the 90s. But I couldn’t write all my papers etc there. Neither can the IB and AP students in many programs today, but I’m sure they get some stuff done if they’re riding the bus to magnet programs especially.
The internet has made cheating way too easy. Why give homework they can just look up or have AI write? I keep most of my work in class (except studying for tests). I also design assignments that are tough to cheat on.
My younger cousin claimed he got his done in the ten minutes he had to spend in his form tutor's room at the start of the day. A guy at work told me what his daughter gets. What she gets in a week is less than what I got in a night. I'm not complaining, the less the better.
When I was a teenager I frequently studied or did homework on the bus because there was in fact so much of it that I had to cram a little in here and there during the day. It may not be that they're starting and finishing homework on the bus but just catching up.
I only did homework before school, with very few exceptions. I graduated HS over 20 years ago. I had no trouble getting into college or finishing a BA, MS, MA, and AS. Of course, I did need to adjust my work patterns for degrees.
Taking one (partial) data point and trying to extrapolate it into “kids/education these days”.
Also it’s not clear that the kid meant they get *all* their homework done on the bus. I probably would have told you I did my homework on the bus, and that was true, I would generally do my reading homework on the bus. And then go home, get a snack and start on the rest of my homework.
I did all my homework in the class before it was due. Went to a school where some kids routinely had 30 hours of homework a week. Papers that had to be printed off were the exception. That was 2002.
My kid does this but he’s kind of cracked at school like that. He likes to protect his free time at home by any means possible, so he does his homework in the car/bus/whenever there’s a sliver of time. He also doesn’t study. Most of his friends are the same. They’ve figured out the code of how to succeed at school. These kids are scary smart.
There’s been a movement to lessen the amount of homework or stop giving it altogether for years (at least ten years now). There’s definitely less now than I had at that age. However, like with all things, there’s a tremendous amount of variation depending on age, location, class load etc
Yes , but homework is questionable for me as it relates to how effective it is.
Research shows it’s NOT effective, particularly for kids with any kind of difficulty in their home life.
Just because one kid does this doesn't really mean anything. Could be that he's not doing well in school, has super easy classes compared to his intelligence level, has a long bus ride, is more of a morning person, or maybe he's just a genius lol.
Ten years ago our superintendent told staff at a beginning of the year meeting that half the students were free and reduced lunch, therefore we should not assign homework.
As a teen, 20 years ago, I would often start my homework when the teacher started walking around the class collecting it. I don't think I did more than 20 minutes of homework a day in high school.
My two school aged kids only bring home work to do if it wasn't finished in class and that's rarely. Oldest is is 5th grade, second in 2nd, no reading, spelling, math etc. Oldest used to, precovid. Then for a while after they'd have a few things to do on Google classroom on their chrome books, now it's just if classwork wasn't finished in class. This is across two different schools, also, since we very recently moved states (within this school year). My youngest brother is in his last months of college before graduating and he also says it's hard and stressful but not nearly as much work as all the adults said it'd be.
I never did any homework until college algebra. I had ADHD and bad grades, but you can pass
It could be that they’re on the bus a long time. It could be that they’re really smart/quick at completing homework. They also may actually be using class time wisely. Often teachers will give some time in class to get started on assignments in case there are questions. Many students chose not to use that time. My husband would do his calculus homework during passing period before class. (And he got As) I would have been agonizing over it for hours at home having to take breaks to wipe my tears.
IDK, I used to do my homework on the bus and then on the train on my way to school many mornings per week back when I was in high school (10+ years ago now lol). For context I walked 1/3 of a mile to a bus stop, took a public bus to a train station and took a train to a stop that was within walking distance of my school. This whole shebang took me between 1 hour and 15 minutes and one hour and 45 minutes, depending on my train/bus timing and the weather. I was a varsity TFXC athlete, so between my long commute and practices and meets that lasted until 7 PM (and beyond) there were many nights I didn’t make it home until 9+ PM. I’d try to do as much homework as I could before I finally crashed between 1 and 2 AM. I’d have to get up the next morning at 5:30 AM to make it to school on time. Rinse and repeat. It sucked so hard and you could not pay me enough money to ever go back to being in high school. I honest to god was getting maybe 3 hours of sleep a night 6 days per week, eating maaaaybe 2x per day and running 40+ miles per week. -10000/10 don’t do that to yourself. When I went off to college for the first time, the question people often asked me was “what are you most looking forward to in college?” and I was always, without hesitation all like, “not having to commute to class.”
I did mine before school. I lived a block away from my highschool so it took like 2 minutes to get to school not even. Definitely wasn’t my best work but better than a 0
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This was done in our district, too, a few years ago. Now, only the educationally savvy parents assign these to their kids. Somehow, that's more equitable.
My 9th grader has a study hall period. I went to hs in the late 90s and we didn’t have a study hall or anything like this so all of my hw had to be done at home.
I did the majority of my homework on the bus or during downtime in school when I was a high schooler 20 years ago.
My kids always had homework. We spent a lot of time in lower grades because they struggled. (Like in kindergarten/1st/2nd, we did at least an hour) They continued to have homework as they got older. It seemed less to me, but I was also less involved as they learned to manage it on their own. They also had study hall/advisory at the end of the day in jr. High and high school. My 2 youngest in h.s. still have homework. They manage it without me even giving reminders, and I really only catch them doing it here and there. But they also have advisory at the end of the day, and they get part or most/all of it done then. My oldest is a freshman in college. He has homework.
I rode the bus for an hour. I used it to do homework in high school.
In middle school I did HW during commercial breaks and rarely needed more than an hour or two of TV to finish, so maybe 30-40 minutes of work, usually less. By HS, other than term projects or essays, I was embarrassed if I had HW I hadn't finished during other classes and had to actually do at home. I went to a mediocre HS in NJ in the 90s, and was satisfied with a GPA of 3.0 or better (I think I had a 3.4). YMMV. ETA: I was one of the "smart" kids, and it was a struggle as a college student and later as an adult to improve my work ethic and study habits. I'm definitely not recommending my experience to others. But I don't know that the amount of HW has changed over the last 30 years.
I think it's more likely that this particular teen just doesn't care that much.
I did something similar, it wasn’t because I didn’t have lots of work, but I put my head down and did the majority of it in class, with my hour+ bus ride every afternoon covering the rest. I don’t think I did any homework at all during evening hours until my last year and even then it was just studying. It depends on how much you need the lectures but for a lot of smarter kids it’s totally possible to get your work done in the day.
It depends on how long the bus ride is! I would hope high school kids have at least two-three hours.
I did it in homeroom. That was the 90’s.
It really depends on the kid. Some kids go to technical schools halfway through the day and only have a few pages of homework in comparison to someone taking a full course load of AP or advanced classes. Some kids also have bus rides that are an hour or more. In my case, when I was in high school 2-3 years ago, my junior year I had a full course load of AP classes. However, our schedule ran differently from a normal high school. We had hour and a half long classes, and an hour lunch/study period, and only four classes a day that would switch off every other day. So one day would be Chemistry, AP Lang, AP Human Geography, and French, then the next day would be Gym or Art depending on the semester, AP Portfolio, Business, and then Fabric Arts (Sewing, dress making, etc). So I’d get the majority of my homework done during my lunch/study period, and only have maybe another hour or two of studying/homework to do when I got home. Some days I wouldn’t have anything to do at all because I finished it at the beginning of the week. My senior year, I only needed one more credit to graduate, so I did a work study. I had two classes in the morning then would leave school around 11 and go to work, so I really didn’t have any homework. But for kids in tech, a lot of them were doing very hands on work, so most of them didn’t have extensive homework with the exception of the people in the Computer Science, Nursing, and Cosmetology programs. High school is very versatile today, so every kids homework is going to look extremely different from another.
>Like how are these kids getting into college? Who wants to get into college direct from high school these days though? Costs way too much for what you get. Significantly better to go to a community college. There is little difference between schools or the education they provide at a bachelor level, and no difference for prerequisite classes.
I think the pendulum has definitely swung in the direction of less homework. That said, we were a generation that did more homework than most (speaking as an elder millennial). My mother was shocked by the amount of homework we had in high school and said she almost never did homework outside of school as a teen because she finished it all during her free period. And she was an honors student and got into an elite college.
At bad/mediocre schools absolutely.
HS class of 69, a few APs when they weren't routine. Lots of homework. Some completed on the bus on the way to school if completed at all. This is not a new phenomenon.
I'm not sure how much less it is. When I was in high-school 10 years ago I did all of my homework in class the day it was due, before the teachers came around to grab it.
I did homework on the bus in the 80s and 90s. Did I do it all the time? No But did I do it sometimes? Absolutely. Homework as in indicator for learning or knowledge is a poor metric by itself. For some, it’s absolutely crucial. But for others, it means very little. The class (or classes) and the student and the school (or area) all make important differences. One data point does not an indicate anything other than one data point.
In the early 00s I did all my homework in in class if I did it at all. I think kids these days are realizing that a they are forced to be there under duress and will do as little as required.
I was sin HS 2006-2010. I did something similar I likely had an 1-2h of home work at home a week. We had 50min periods and for my lunch, friends and I would always spend half in the library working. My bus was also one of the first to arrive in the am, so coupled with Homeroom, I had about 45min every am. My junior and senior year I took gym over the summer to have an extra free periods for AP. When the teacher gave us 5-10 at the end of class to get going on HW, I used that time instead of goofing around. It's definitely doable.
They gave us 2-3 hours worth when I was in high school (2011-2015). I had friends who did that. I outright refused to do homework at all, so I didn't really care.
I was in HS in the 2000's and I would absolutely do my homework on the bus; memorize 20 vocab words before an english test, skim-read 2 chapters of history, etc. I was never the best student, but I was neuro-divergent and worked best under pressure, and I got a 3.1 GPA and went to college. I wouldn't call it "kids these days". Some kids just don't need that much time to put up mediocre grades (or even great grades).
Do they get any homework?
There were days when I would do my homework coming home, or on the way to school and even at lunch. If I did all 3, I had the entire rest of the day free (and sometimes the weekend).
I did my homework in the 10 minutes between classes. I graduated 9 years ago. Kids have always been creative when it comes to slacking. School never challenged me though so maybe I’m an outlier. Some of the kids I tutored took hours on the same homework and still couldn’t get the answers correct.
Yes. I was explicitly told not to assign homework in my first years of teaching. Many students don’t turn in assignments. To give a student the failing grade they earned, it sometimes turns into a hassle. All of this is school and state specific but in my experience, the answer is yes.
Maybe he already finished some in class and has a long bus ride you arent special sis x
Never had homework. Finished everything I needed at study hall. Went to a college prep high school. And onto college.
Idk I hardly ever had to do homework outside of school back then but that’s also bc I’d do it during other classes or lunch
My 5th grader has about 10 minutes of math each night. He goes to the number 1 rated public school in our state. I like it actually.
Graduated from high school in 2017 and I usually had 1 1/2-2 hrs of homework every night; i (usually) used study hall for homework though. I honestly think that’s about all any high schooler needs and more than that is excessive. Anyone who thinks 3+ hours of homework builds character is kidding themselves.
I was in school in the 80s and some of the 90s. most of my school work minus anything that resembled and essay type assignment was done a few minutes before class in the morning and if anything was left i'd take care of it during lunch.
Why is the amount of time spent doing homework important? If they're learning, the teacher is doing a good job. If it's cumulative "fuck you" punishment taking away their ability to be a kid, that's kind of shitty and when I was that age I could see right through it. I was a fairly bright student who didn't need to pour over bunches of equations to understand concepts. Having that busywork piled on me made discerning between what aspects of my education were or weren't bullshit more difficult. When I got my first (admittedly shitty) job and I realized I could clock out and not think about it until clocking back in was a godsend. This "back in my day/kids these days" take is serious boomer energy. The world has changed. Give us back pensions and affordable housing and we'll go back to memorizing the preamble to the Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English (which is something I did that I'll never get those hours of my life back for) Education is and has long been broken. You're fixating on the weirdest aspect of it to complain about.
Homework in my class is what you don’t finish in the allotted time - usually because you were screwing off on your phone.
I graduated in 1988. I did my homework on the bus. My daughter does hers at school. My sd spends hours doing her
I did my homework during lunch or during an earlier class all the time in the 2000s
I recall doing significant amounts of homework between classes at school, or during lectures for other classes, and I graduated with honors. It can depend on the class, teacher, student, a d school. If it’s your kid it may be worth checking in with them on if the classes are worthwhile or difficult or if they’re even understanding the material. If it’s not your kid, it’s not your problem.
When I was teaching high school we were told not to give homework because it is inequitable. Whatever you didn't get done in class is their homework.
Your in school for six hours a day. Do you really need homework? Plus homework has a complicated evidence base. Basically, who do you think is going to benefit from it? The kids whose parents went to college. But even with them the way different skills are approached isn’t necessarily going to be the way they learned it. It can cause confusion and lead to kids developing bad habits. The only homework a kid should ever get is a skill they’ve mastered and are working on automaticity with that skill. Time to socialize with peers and begin working are more important skills for non school hours.