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Comment by tominous | Hacker News Reader

There are three key arguments in the article: homework saps intrinsic motivation to learn, harms relationships at home, and has an opportunity cost in sleep, rest and play.

It all makes a lot of sense to me, but I have one thought. In many activities I find I need an initial period of tedious repetition before the fun part kicks in. Things like playing an instrument, learning a language, and some parts of mathematics. And nothing saps motivation at school more than being behind the class from the start and completely lost.

So is there a role to play for homework in pushing through the hard part at the beginning?

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   is there a role to play for homework 
   in pushing through the hard part

Yep, you got it exactly right.

A N Whitehead has said it better than I can, so let's quote him: "Many think we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

Homework helps with repetition even for extrinsically motivated students, which leads to the ability to perform without thinking, which is the basis of mastery and enjoyment.

Sure there is a place for repetitive reinforcement based learning, but kids already spend 7 hours a day at school. There's no reason we can't cut out an hour of instruction and replace it with guided homework time.

Sure, but do schools do this? Moreover, some people cannot focus well in the presence of others (see also the complains about open-plan offices), and for them repetitive reinforcement just works better at home.

No schools in the US don't do this, but we are talking about ways to improve school. I realize that some people work better at home, but forcing everyone to spend 7 hours at school and then 1-2+ hours practicing at home isn't the best option.

Many countries with very high performing schools have a much shorter school day than we do, and I think asking kids to devote 10+ hours a day to school (including bus time and homework), is a bit ridiculous.

I strongly agree with you. School shouldn't take up too much time. The drive towards longer hours in schooling has little to do with improving learning, but more with (1) enabling (forcing) women to work and (2) equality, because the more learning is done at home, the more pronounced the difference in ability between children becomes. That's because some parents focus on educating their children well, while others don't.

My kid gets elementary homework. It's nearly all bullshit coloring in / drawing stuff related to what they should be learing. A total waste of time.

I can agree with this for math homework or word puzzles etc but much of what he gets is not useful.

To cap it all off, often I find they have a day doing very little. How about they master maths during school time and not for parents to educate their kids after school!

Maybe mastery, but enjoyment?

Einstein is quoted as "Never memorize what you can look up in a book."

In my experience it's impossible to enter "flow" in a task unless I've practised to a certain level of automaticity. After that it becomes effortless and very rewarding.

It's not so much about memorising facts for recall (boring!) but training the mind for automatic action. Like offloading the grunt work to a subconscious co-processor and letting you focus on the bigger picture.

In my experience, I just find things enjoyable. I stumble through them. Then, because it's enjoyable, memorization of common tasks is just a byproduct of me partaking in something that I enjoy.

Why would entering "flow" be a criteria for something to be enjoyable?

If indeed he said this, Einstein was wrong, he didn't understand, or think about computational complexity. To see how wrong, just consider the special case of guitar playing. In this instance what Einstein amounts to is: "never memorize chords when you can look up how to play them in a book".

You should memorize if the memorization cost divided by the number of uses over the lifetime of the memorization is less than the information retrieval cost for a single use (e.g. multiplication tables). You should also memorize if the retrieval latency is too high for your needs (e.g. guitar chords).

But I think Einstein would be a fan of web searches for a lot of memorizable information, as am I.

Of course there is a lot of repetition in the beginning, because you only have so much to work with, so the iterations are shorter and plentiful.

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