The WaPo’s Valerie Strauss reported last Tuesday which made the front page of Sunday’s Post & Courier that studies by Duke University’s Harris Cooper find that homework assignments are not as beneficial to students as expected. Cooper found that elementary students receive no academic benefit from homework other than basic reading skills and middle-school and high-school students receive no educational benefit after more than 2 hours of study. Cooper’s concluded there are no direct correlations between homework and academic achievement in the elementary schools (but hey coloring within the lines and getting a gold-star sticker can really make your day, or at least help decorate the refrigerator) but reading was necessary for the development of individual learning. The purpose, design and amount of homework is a huge dilemma facing today’s educators and those in Academia studying the effect extra-curricular studying has on a child’s learning.
The Bushido is in limbo on this topic because the problem we have in education is there are so many variables involved with a child’s learning capacity and environment leaving “no-child behind” from a Federal standard is ridiculous. Americans don’t even share the same dialect in different regions of this country, why are we expected to learn the same thing nationwide? Something has to be done and something has to be changed, because our country spends twice as much as other countries with half of the results. Whatever (legal) measures it takes to spark a student’s interests and their minds should be used, even if it is not recommended by some bureaucratic council in Washington.
In closing, I agree with Cohen’s Groupwork design or role-playing for groups. Group work gives students a chance to shine, interact with one another and demonstrate leadership abilities. One of the Bushido’s most memorable moments was as the lead attorney in Mrs. McKelvey’s Senior Government class mock-trial. Having my opposing counsel, Duane Mabry, thrown from Courtroom on Contempt charges that I found in Ohio Code was fantastic. Sorry, Duane, but I still delight in that memory. I digress; the thing is we shouldn’t force the same brand of education down our children’s throats just because we had it that way-“tradition”-because then we’ve missed the key point about learning: that knowledge is a power built on progression.
(Feel free to leave your thoughts on the matter in the comments section)
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