Luke Schroeder Source 4

Documentation

Could the administration help initiate change? What could they do that will bring solutions to homework?

Works Cited

Goldberg, Kenneth. "Why Principals Should Be Wary Of Homework." District Administration 50.4 (2014): 82. Professional Development Collection. Web. 8 Oct. 2015.

Exploration

Part 1

In this article, the author stresses on changing homework structure for students success.

• Principals potential influence on homework change
• Students learning versus homework performance
• Study habits for completing homework on time.
• Penalties and consequences of not doing homework assignments

Part 2

Homework and Spanking are related. When its done poorly, if we forget to do it, or simply don’t do it we are punished. Punished so brutally we suffer for something that is not important. Take a spanking. I feel from stories (I was not spanked) we hear that spanking could come from as severe of wrongdoing as hurting someone to as simple as forgetting to do something. None the less we would be punished spanked, brutally hurt to “remind us” what to do. People though that worked. Now with undone homework we suffer a zero. It may count as much as 40% of the grade, even though it, in the hypocritical words of the teacher, should not take much of your time after school. Where am I going with this? Penalties do not motivate children who consistently skip homework to do their work. Like spanking a child, this is a misunderstanding where we think we’re teaching time management and good study habits when, in fact, we are teaching them to dislike school.

If the child has trouble in class, parents will just assume we need to try harder. This makes us unnecessarily distressed and thus doesn’t help with our learning. After a night of homework hell, we come back to school not refreshed and refueled for the day. So is there a way to change how we formulate homework policy? Refusal to do homework usually an issue of pace rather than motivation. Students who complete their homework usually do so in a reasonable amount of time. But when they don’t understand or are distressed or beat from other homework, they perform poorly and it becomes a reoccurring thing until it becomes exponentially worse. Children who work slowly spend large amounts of time, for, at best, mediocre grades. I am one of them when I am truly distressed. I feel it loses the value in it all, where eventually people lose moral and settle for less. As homework expectations increase each year, some children will give up. So when we have a pace to achieve high grades and actually take time to learn and reflect on homework we do well and we feel good about our work and are motivated to learn more.

So here’s to the administration to possibly take over. Perhaps administration takes into account how everything works on the home front to work with parents to find a solution for reasonable homework assignments and structure. As I read the previous sentence, structure change does seem to make sense. If a way to reduce and or restructure homework that appeals to the student in a way that inspires the student to take action themselves, then perhaps it will inspire better work. So we must ask “how do we do that?” How can we structure homework differently? Perhaps its tempo of assignments, perhaps it’s the heavy work load, perhaps it’s the exhausting number of problems. Test all of these theories by trying the opposite and I see it could become successful.

Part 3

               For Journal 1, I wanted to know if frequency was the truly fundamental question that needed to be addressed. In Journal 3, from A Nation at risk, I learned how students seem to maintain good grades despite less homework—indirectly saying that the homework is irrelevant to our success in the classroom. But perhaps frequency isn’t the problem perhaps it’s the structure of homework, the way in which it can be designed to better teach the students beyond the classroom. Our first thoughts about homework have been to abolish it because we get too much of it. Well here I think we are brought the other solution giving another bright spot in the reform of homework. These three articles work in tandem because they show how the homework issue has much reform needed but can come from either side.

Part 4

                How does the components of students’ homework affect the students’ use of homework? Is homework even a key component to student success?  Who administratively decides the components? What do these components do for students?