by Alfie Kohn
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| List Price: | $24.00 |
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| Lowest New Price: | $1.47 |
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Product Description
Death and taxes come later; what seems inevitable for children is the idea that, after spending the day at school, they must then complete more academic assignments at home. The predictable results: stress and conflict, frustration and exhaustion. Parents respond by reassuring themselves that at least the benefits outweigh the costs. But what if they don't? In The Homework Myth, nationally known educator and parenting expert Alfie Kohn systematically examines the usual defenses of homework--that it promotes higher achievement, "reinforces" learning, and teaches study skills and responsibility. None of these assumptions, he shows, actually passes the test of research, logic, or experience. So why do we continue to administer this modern cod liver oil--or even demand a larger dose? Kohn's incisive analysis reveals how a mistrust of children, a set of misconceptions about learning, and a misguided focus on competitiveness have all left our kids with less free time and our families with more conflict. Pointing to parents who have fought back--and schools that have proved educational excellence is possible without homework--Kohn shows how we can rethink what happens during and after school in order to rescue our families and our children's love of learning.
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Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Simply amazing, 2008-07-04
I couldn't put this book down once I started reading it. The author takes a wrecking-ball to establishment views about homework, revealing the shoddy and sometimes deliberately deceptive "research" used to justify massive quantities of homework. Hence it is also a good case study in how ideological partisans fudge the facts in order to sell an idea to the public, and a lesson in revealing false claims. Always go to the primary source!
Homework as it is portrayed in this book is child abuse. It is part of a larger scheme to program children so that they will function more efficiently in the "New Economy" - the low-wage, service sector economy, where the most highly valued employee asset is the ability to obey orders without question and submit to mind-numbing and repetitive tasks on a daily basis. The schools want children to "get used to it now", since it is what most of them will end up doing anyway.
Why is endless work and toil glorified? Why is it deemed good to turn human beings in to "good workers"? We have technology now that requires far less labor to create the basic goods and luxuries of life in much shorter periods of time! We're at work creating wealth and profit so that a few people can amass billions in personal fortunes. We don't need this system. This system does however need us, and we can break it by withdrawing our support. Burning homework assignments would be a good place to start.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
There is NO research to support the use of homework., 2008-06-19
This is one those books that can be hard to swallow because the message doesn't just question accepted thinking on the importance of homework, it shows that the use of homework does not increase achievement. The use of homework is amazingly a negative in the lower grades - some measures of achievement in the presence of homework were actually worse than not having any homework.
I loved this book, because I want to be right and do the best for my students.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Excellent Analysis of Why Homework Doesn't Work, 2008-04-13
For the most part, all of us have grown up doing homework while going to school. However, has doing hours of homework made any of us better students or more knowledgeable in the subjects we are learning? That, in essence, is the question being posed by the author of this book. And, his answer is a resounding no, especially when dealing with children who are younger than high school age.
I have watched my daughter do homework from the time she was in kindergarten and wondered at the point of it all. Most of the time it was worksheets that seemed to be little more than an attempt to pound information through her head. However, as a gifted student, she already understood the material and only ended up frustrated at having to spend more and more of her spare time doing work she already knew. She went from being a student who loved to go to school to one who cringes at the thought and I suspect homework is one main reason.
The studies presented in the book by the author that show homework is of little value validate what I have been saying for years. I found it very interesting that there is no correlation between increased homework and better grades or improved test scores on standardized tests. However, as we move to a more "test" driven world, class time becomes much more valuable and increases in homework become the norm, to the point where many students end up having no life left after school and homework.
My daughter, although still in high school, is taking a college course at a local community college. It was fascinating to read the policies of the college. One states that to get an A in a three credit course, the student is expected to do 7 ½ hours of homework a week. When multiplied by 6 courses, which is what my daughter takes at high school, the amount of homework expected for a top grade is 45 hours. When class time is included, that makes a total of about 60 hours a week. Yet at the high school, she is in class for 35 hours a week and has about 30 hours of homework assigned each week. So, she is doing more work in high school than would be expected in college. Something is very wrong with this picture.
All parents should read this book and understand the contents. If you don't read it and complain now, your child will lose more and more of their free time as they get older. It won't make them better students; just bitter at the experience.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
The homework myth disspelled or how we're teaching children not to love learning examined in exceptional book, 2008-03-23
We live in an achievement driven culture that is so obsessed with success we often don't question the value of those things we do to reach them. Alife Kohn's book The Homework Myth takes us down the rabbit hole showing us the flawed assumptions and conlcusions of numberous studies and how they shape school policy teaaching children not to love learning but to hate it. We categorize, grade and put our children into slots using homework, "standardized testing" and other devices that often are meaningless measures of true intelligence or success. As Kohn quotes one writer, grades are "an inadquate report of an inaccurate judgment by a biased and variable judge of the extent to which a student has attained an undefined mastery of anunknown proportion of an indefinite amount of material". Got that? In other words, grades are as subjective and uninformative as can be. The same can be said for homework and how it adds to our children's understanding of the material. Kohn takes apart multiple studies that have been done to support the concept of homework and discovers that these flawed studies were designed to prove their point rather than find out the true meaning and understanding of homework in our children's ability to learn.
Kohn suggests that a placebo like effect is seen in studies designed to evaluate the effectiveness of homework and he has a valid point. He points out the flawed thinking of teachers and school districts believing that homework correlates to academic benefit. There's no clear cut evidence of this. He also looks at the detrimental effect that homework has on family life, social interaction and questions the nonacademic benefits of the homework "system". He shows why homework persists based on miconceptions about how people learn, competitiveness and an essential distrust of children and how they spent their time (something you'll also find in the business world which is why "busy work" is assgined as well despite the fact that it burns out employees and makes them not enjoy the work they do. In a sense, I suppose you could argue that homework prepares children for the pointlessness of the work world--i.e., "better get used to it" as Kohn refers to the pointless tasks we'll be asked to do later in life).
Kohn also takes on the myths of testing (since homework often is preparation for testing particularly to make sure that children do well on standardized testing).
We find out nothing about whether a child's learning has improved or deepened but instead how well a child can memorize by rote. Every hour spent making sure that children do well on standardized testing is time taken away from true learning (you're teaching them to take the test well not to develop critical thinking skills).
For example, he looks at standarized testing and discovers that
1) Timed tests put a premuium not on thoughtfulness but on speed.
2) Tests that focus on "basic skills" are geared towards cramming facts that are useless without the connection to comprehension and ideas.
3) Most children under the ages of eight or nine are tripped up by the format because they don't understand its purpose and, as a result, don't do well.
4) "norm-referenced" studies are designed not to measure knowledge but, instead, to artifically rank students focusing on the competition not on comprehension. In other words, some children are better at taking these tests than others but it doesn't give us a sense of their depth or understanding of the materials and is useless.
This book should be required reading for school administrators, teachers and**yes**parents. It's a thoughtful look at how we are destroying the desire to learn with often untested or assumptions that we make about human behavior. I highly recommend this book for any school age parent simply because it will help you understand the system and its flaws.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Is Homework the Answer to School Success?, 2007-12-07
Alfie Kohn is a nationally known educator and author of several books about the learning experience. Many things about the homework puzzle seem to frustrate Kohn and others like him: The fact that there is no study that shows a positive link between homework and achievement; that society seems to accept homework as a given, without question and without criticism, even though there is no proof that it works; and that homework isn't more readily challenged. These issues are addressed in this book, along with possible alternatives to the conventional wisdom that homework is necessary and essential for learning.
I have been involved in the education field myself, but my involvement has been strictly on an adult level. Still, I read this book with an active interest because I was curious to see if Kohn would offer any research or general advice on giving out homework to people of different ages. While this book is intended as an examination of homework for grade school age children and high school age, there is one small correlation that Kohn has found, through his and others' research, about homework: It seems to slightly improve the performance of older kids (high school age), while having no positive effect at all on younger children. The older people get, the more valuable homework seems to be. However, the correlation between homework and learning is still very slight- even for high school age students- and Kohn believes that the entire system of giving out homework needs to be revamped.
Besides just talk directly about homework, I like the fact that Kohn discusses some of the human psychology behind homework and the tendency of people and society in general to accept things the way they are instead of demanding change, or at least insisting on a consideration of change. In regards to homework (and other facts of life), most people seem to believe that homework is good because, well, everyone in the past has done homework so today's young people should be expected to do the same. "I had to suffer when I was young, so you should suffer too" seems to be the attitude of many parents. What is also interesting is the homework relationship to declining school performance and the reaction by most educators and parents. Because it is assumed that homework is good and necessary for learning, when schools fail to make the grade, the reaction is usually met by- what else- more homework! In other words, very few people step back and consider that maybe excessive homework is the cause of school failure. The assumption is that homework is good, and therefore the reaction is to increase the homework load still further.
Alfie Kohn presents an intelligent discussion of homework in this book and among the many things I like about his writing is the fact that he is not only respectful of dissenters, he is also completely open to considering future research that confirms the effectiveness of homework. But until someone can show him a study that confirms the effectiveness of homework, Kohn is going to stick with his position that homework isn't the cure- all that people think it is, especially for grade school- age children.
Overall, The Homework Myth is an effective book by a renowned educator and writer. It is full of statistics and facts to back its case, and it offers some good, sensible discussion on why people think the way they do about homework and how parents, educators, and students can work together to lessen the homework load, improve the learning process through other means, and enhance both education and family life. It is a good book to read for anyone who is involved in the teaching or general education fields.
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