About twenty years ago I started a blog called the US Government Teachers blog. It was an attempt in the early age of technology to get the government teachers in my K-12 school district to start using online resources to help their teaching. Along the way it morphed into a blog about not just content, but also pedagogy and finally the use of technology in the classroom. It also grew to the US, World (which is still active) and Econ teachers blogs, became viral (up to 60,000 hits a month) and finally into a book on 1:1 education (Deeper Learning Through Technology) that is still selling a decade after its publication.
But then I took an administrative role leading a virtual school and needed a new skill set. That venture has seen a 450% growth in students and a 110% growth in the number of courses we offer.
Then in November 2022 Artificial Intelligence happened.
Now I am looking to my roots and have set up a Substack account which you can sign up for here to get weekly updates on AI. Click on the title of the article and then you will see the subscribe button. Each Monday at 1O am a new post will appear and be emailed to you.
I could tell you about my growth as an administrator because of AI, but that will come later. First to homework. One of the first things I signed up for as an administrator was to help refine homework in our district. As a teacher, I had ended my career believing that homework should be quick so all of my classes (at the time, AP Econ, AP Govt/Comparative) had a 10 minute video to watch and a quiz when you came to class where you could use your notes. My World History I students never had homework unless they ran out of time in class. That’s it. I had come to believe that the kids should only have quick homework and none that necessitated a teacher to understand.
The problem with homework is two fold. One it is often problem sets such as in math where there is no way to understand what is going on. Sites like Photomath, Symbolab, Mathway, Microsoft Math Solver, and QuickMath help showing students how to solve so then it becomes the job of the student to understand the steps but without a teacher. Hence the flipped method of teaching became so popular in that that could be done at home and the problems in class.
But in the social sciences, reading was always the crutch homework especially in history where a typical class has 1000 pages a year. Along with this came the usual “define, use in a sentence these 30 vocab works (and don’t forget any of these 900 new words while you are taking six completely unrelated courses). I once asked (told) my AP US teachers to cut the work and their scores went up 10 and 15% respectively on the AP exam - go figure. This is why I did the blasphemous with my classes by cutting out the reading. I was told that I was inhibiting my students' ability to read as if anyone curls up with a textbook covering thousands of years of history. My students wanted my classes and still did stunningly well on standardized tests. I also figured out my college classes only had 15 classes a semester of 3 hours each = 45 hours. A standard high school class has 135 hours a year. Even if kids do 45 hours of homework in a college class that is still far fewer that a college course which begs the question…
Why do schools assign homework? AI (Gemini) says the answer is to help students reinforce and practice concepts learned in class, develop independent learning skills, improve time management, and provide teachers with insight into how well students are understanding the material, essentially allowing for further practice and consolidation of knowledge outside of the classroom. All of these, of course, can be done during the class day. I might cede you reading a novel but beyond that not much beyond the 10-15 minutes per class every other day and not the 2-4 hours kids in the US suffer through and do so quietly (as do their parents) to not upset the apple cart and get into “great” colleges.
I think the real answer homework is assigned is three fold. 1) It has always been done 2) It is a big risk to try something new and 3) it takes time to reinvent the wheel and rethink classroom time. Let’s go with the risk. I get it. When I introduced e-textbooks to my department I felt on edge all year until we got our standardized scores back (all higher than the previous year and in a school that had 40 nationalities). Ditto when I flipped the classroom. The time element is helped tremendously by AI (Gemini, Perplexity, CoPilot, ChatGPT - more on them in later posts) and educational tools more specifically such as SchoolAI, Magic School and Khanmigo where you can ask them to create multi day lesson plans complete with exactly what to do in class. Collaborative Learning Teams also help with time efficiency. Nothing other than practice helps with the risk. Students who don’t understand the material won’t get it because you give them more math problems and won’t retain the content because they have more of it. This is why Amsco textbooks are so popular with teachers, but not parents because they get to the heart of the topic and are more digestible.
Conversely why don’t students do homework: ChapGPT say that students lack motivation, have time management issues, can’t understand the material, home environment is not conducive. Of course now students are using AI to help with their homework but not understanding how to use it well (more on that later but it comes out to needing to protect students).
The bottom line is that education changes slowly. Think about it. My grandfather taught in a one room school house. I taught 25 years in a one room school house nestled to many other one room school houses (now called a high school!) where we taught subjects in a silo (unlike my grandfather who taught every subject). AI is letting us make changes in a big way. Let’s start by admitting that the evidence does not support homework in its traditional way. Short is effective as long, lower income students benefit less, must be linked to having a clear purpose, etc.
The bottom line is that we as educators are giving too much homework and need to rethink its purpose.
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