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An interview with somebody who wrote a book about how homework is bad. So, what else is new?
Building a hate for learning
Is homework bad for kids? Author Nancy Kalish tells Salon why she believes it inhibits learning, strains familes and stunts social development.
Rebecca Traister
Sep. 05, 2006 | Homework. For many of us, the word still sounds like a drag. Nights spent hunched over algebra books, memorizing vocab lists and filling out graph-paper lab reports while the smell of burning fall leaves and a cool October breeze teased just outside our bedroom window. Homework was spinach: We did it because it was good for us, because it made us smarter, because it taught us how to study, because it prepared us for college, and because if we didn't do it we'd get detention.
But this fall, as students across the country load their JanSports with textbooks and start down the road to lower-back pain, a group of parents and educators are desperately trying to send a message that maybe nights spent cuddling the periodic table aren't so fortifying after all. This month, two books about homework and its discontents are on shelves: "The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It" by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish and "The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing" by Alfie Kohn.
To hear these homework protesters tell it, recent years have seen an almost comical inflation of the work kids are bringing home from school. Kindergartners and first graders, those squirmy squirts who can barely make it through "Blues Clues," are being asked to do 30 minutes to an hour of studying a night, while middle and high schoolers are forced to slog through four and five and six hours of the stuff. And some of the assignments sound like something out of a Fellini movie: translating arithmetic problems into alphanumeric code and plotting them on a graph to look like Abraham Lincoln, building popsicle-stick replicas of the Pentagon and baking cakes in the shape of Roman ruins.
Salon recently spoke by phone to Nancy Kalish, coauthor of "The Case Against Homework." This Brooklyn, N.Y., journalist and mother of one said her eyes were opened to the scourge of homework when her daughter hit middle school. Kalish teamed with former legal aid attorney and mother of two Sara Bennett to research and write the book, which argues that homework is actually diminishing children's educational experience, turning kids off learning, putting strains on families, turning students into "homework potatoes" and stunting cognitive and social development.
Is this the kind of book that the left and the right are likely to respond to differently?
Well, Time magazine ran a story about this issue last week and it was positive; the New York Post reviewed the book and it was negative. Homework has gone through ups and downs throughout history. In the early 1900s it was banned for a period because it was thought to be bad for kids' health to make them stay inside. The most recent step-up came in 1983, when there was a study called "A Nation at Risk" that specifically called for more homework. It was the first time that kids' achievement in school had been linked to the state of the global economy. Now, it has been proven that there is zero correlation between kids' academic achievement and the economy. At Penn State there are two guys [David Baker and Gerald LeTendre] who did research and discovered many countries that give lots of homework and do worse. The Japanese actually do less homework than we do. It's B.S. that there's a connection. But the belief continues to be put forth by business people and politicians, and of course by our lovely president, that basically it's all the kids' fault and we're not as competitive as countries who give kids more homework; that's why people think homework is such a necessary thing, that if we don't give homework, we're undermining our entire country.
If that's the socioeconomic angle, how does it play out in family attitudes?
It filters down to the parents, along with how hypercompetitive and tough it is to get our kids into college. In New York City and other places it's tough to get them into preschool, so there is an attitude that more is better. Parents mistakenly assume that a lot of homework shows that a school is rigorous, and if the school is rigorous it's going to give their kids an edge. I was one of those parents.
What changed your mind?
Well, I was very lucky. Because now they start overloading kids in kindergarten, dealing with an hour's work each night. My daughter didn't get overloaded until middle school, but then suddenly she was doing four hours a night, which really was excessive.
What were the ill effects?
Her love of learning started to plummet. Her grades didn't dip, but her enjoyment of the whole process went downhill. At the time, I was doing assignments for parenting magazines about how to get your kids to knuckle down and do homework. I just assumed it was a good thing, and assumed schools knew what they were doing or they wouldn't put us through it. Then I met Sara Bennett, my coauthor, and I started to research it and found out the research doesn't back this up at all. All my assumptions were challenged. We've been going along with it because we assume homework is good for our kids. It turns out that it's not.
Do you believe there is no correlation between academic success and homework?
I had an eye-opening interview with Harris Cooper at Duke University. He looked at 180 studies on homework and found that there was only a very tiny correlation between homework and achievement in elementary school, measured either in grades or on achievement tests; a minor correlation in middle school; and still only a moderate correlation in high school. And after kids started doing more than two hours a night, [even the moderate correlation] plummeted. It's very counterintuitive. It's hard to get parents and teachers to accept; you think more has to be better. Not true.
The other thing Harris Cooper told me is that teachers are not trained in homework. They're winging it. I interviewed [Baker and LeTendre] and we interviewed people from Stanford and Harvard. No one has a course specifically on homework. We surveyed hundreds and hundreds of teachers, and only one claimed ever to have taken a course on homework. They are taught general "purposes" of homework: that it reinforces lessons, builds study skills. But teachers are not taught how to make assignments. We learned that only 35 percent of schools have written homework policies. Teachers are trying their very best. They want what's best for the kids, but they really don't have the tools that they need.
What other tools are they missing?
What happens in typical teacher's day, especially with ever-shrinking budgets, is that they have cafeteria duty, bus duty, after-school programs. They don't have any planning periods left. As a result they can't give homework assignments a lot of thought; they just use what's there. They still have these mimeographed worksheets that kids can't even read anymore. And a lot of these teachers are not parents. So they really don't know what it's like to make a first grader do homework, what havoc it's wreaking in households across the country. And competitive parents are afraid to admit it's a problem. They don't want to admit it to other parents, don't want to admit it to teachers, because they feel like they'll be saying, "My kid can't hack it." But teachers can't solve the problem if they don't know about it. Go in and tell the teacher what it's like in your house every night. Usually, if you say, "My kid is starting to hate school because she's overwhelmed; she has no time to come to the dinner table or have play dates with her friends," the teacher makes changes.
I have to press you on the point that teachers who aren't parents don't know what it's like to wrestle a 6-year-old into doing work -- don't they wrestle them into doing work all day?
That's true, but one second-grade teacher told us, "Of course the kids are wiped when they're made to work all day, but I didn't realize what it was like when they got home and were made to do it all over again." She didn't know how much more tired they were going to be when they got home.
What about the tough-noogies argument: Too bad if they're tired and don't like it, they've got to suck it up and do it?
They stop loving learning. For instance, in first grade, a typical assignment is the reading log, where you have to write down what you read: the author and illustrator and the publisher and how many pages. Sounds really innocent, great idea, right? I can't tell you how many parents told us how many kids didn't want to read anymore because it was so tedious to write all that stuff down afterwards. It takes longer often for a first grader to write that information out than to have another book read to him. So maybe it should just be "Read with your child." Learning all this was like a light bulb illuminating things that on the surface seem responsibility building, study-skill building but, when you start to examine under the surface, aren't great. The sense that it builds independence -- when a kid can't face doing his homework without his mother by his side, that's not building independence!
But maybe parents are overinvested in the work their kids should be doing on their own?
Absolutely there are overinvolved parents who could be less involved with their kids' homework and don't know when to back off. But from our surveys we learned that parents don't feel like they have a choice. The quantity is so overwhelming that kids are not able to face it on their own without parental involvement. You have to ask your kids every single day, "How much homework do you have?" Homework is controlling their night. As a mother you're thinking, "Will we have time to have dinner together? Will we have time to go to the concert that little sister is in?" Homework is dictating everything. There's also an expectation that parents will teach kids skills. In San Diego there is a teacher who gives a math class for parents every Monday night to teach them the math that their kids are learning so that they can help.
That actually sounds good to me.
Sure. At first. But no parent should be in the position of having to teach their kids math. There is also this idea that homework is such a great way to get involved in the kids' education. But then you hear about some of these huge projects -- my favorite was the one where they had to bake a cake in the shape of a Roman aqueduct ...
Or the kid who had to build a reproduction of San Francisco's Mission out of penne ...
Exactly. And this is where some overinvolved competitiveness comes out and you end up with a project that could be in Architectural Digest, not something a kid could do on his own. These projects should be done at school, where the parent doesn't have the ability to take over, a teacher has to accept what a 10-year-old can actually do, and the 10-year-old can be proud of his project because he did it himself. A mother from Westchester [N.Y.] actually told me she wouldn't let her kid bring in a project he had done on his own because it would shame him. It would be ego threatening. What have we come to that we can't accept what a third grader can actually do?
How does homework relate to class? The fear that a kid would be ego threatened sounds like a middle-class concern, as does the idea that evenings should be used to do enriching things besides homework. In poorer communities where there might not be as many healthy and enriching evening activities to take advantage of, mightn't homework offer a constructive activity for kids?
We talked to a lot of lower-income parents, for instance, kids in charter schools where they really pile on homework, and they are suffering in exactly the same ways as wealthier families. For any kid, no matter what the income level, there is a point where homework is positive and keeps them occupied, and then there's the point where it's too much work. A solution would be after-school programs that include not only homework but other things like play. There are neighborhoods that are so dangerous that when kids get home from school, parents say, "You can't go outside to play," and so they sit inside and watch television or do homework, neither of which is good for them. There should be good after-school programs supervised by teachers that have other things that kids are missing out on, like exercise, which ironically is so important to cognitive development.
And homework is hampering children's playing life?
The play dates that kids have these days are not running outside and playing games and learning to share and cooperate. The only play dates that they can fit in are ones where they sit and study side by side. There's not a whole lot of value in that. It's really sad. The kids are really suffering. [We found that] 9-year-olds are saying, "I wish I were dead"; they're developing facial tics, scratching themselves, gaining weight, which is a huge hidden result of homework. As adults, we're constantly telling ourselves to take time for ourselves, to balance, not to take work home from the office, and yet we're doing this stuff to our kids and they're not up to it; it's too much for them.
So what is the ideal amount of homework?
Some people will not want their kids to do any homework at all after reading this book. But we think that it would be great if schools were made to stick to 10 minutes per grade level per night total. So 10 minutes total for first grade, 20 minutes for second grade. When you got to higher grades, multiple teachers would have to coordinate. But that's a good thing because so much homework is of extremely poor quality, like spelling mazes and 40 math problems and the reading logs. If teachers knew that they had a total of 10 minutes per night per grade level, they'd think: What do I most want my students to learn tonight? What would be the most valuable way of teaching them that in a short amount of time? For parents, the message is that they don't know you're suffering until you tell them. Teachers are trying to do what's best for kids. You need to tell them what it's doing to your child's love of learning; no teacher wants kids to start to hate school.
How will kids be prepared to do independent academic work in college if they don't have experience doing homework?
Kids get into independent learning on their own. Everyone is afraid that the first thing they're going to do if they don't have homework is sit in front of the TV for hours. I'm sure that for a few kids, that will happen. But often what happens is they use the time to get into their own thing, into their music, into photography. They learn independently and apply themselves to things they're really interested in. So I absolutely believe they'll be prepared. I don't subscribe to the theory that we need to toughen them up because the world is so tough. Because when you follow that, they're toughening up kindergartners. I spoke to a kindergarten teacher in a small town outside of Orlando [Fla.] where they have eliminated nap time and snack time, and she assigns homework and by lunchtime the kids are crying. In the past two years, there have been more 3- and 4-year-olds and kindergartners expelled than ever before. It's so developmentally inappropriate to expect kids to sit still all day and then come home and do it again. They're acting out like crazy and getting expelled.
But aren't some kinds of homework necessary? Maybe not the kindergarten homework or penne architectural replicas, but reading ahead to prepare for class discussion?
Reading is absolutely valuable. The problem is, as my daughter would tell you, when you have a bunch of questions at the end of the chapter, kids read [the book] only for answers to the questions, so they're not getting so much out of it. Types of assignments really do make a difference. One assignment teachers give all the time is tons of math problems. First of all, five problems is enough. If a child knows how to do five problems of a particular type, doing 40 of them is very tedious and a turnoff. If a child doesn't know how to do it and does it incorrectly 40 times, he will have cemented the incorrect method into his head. If you have 30 kids in class doing 50 math problems, then that's 1,500 math problems that the teacher has to correct. No teacher gets to those 1,500 math problems. When kids fall behind, it's precisely because they're given so much to do and they are practicing incorrectly. As soon as you think about it, it all makes perfect sense, but nobody ever goes there. I think that's what we want to accomplish -- to get people to think about it and to not accept that it's just this God-given rule that kids have to do so much homework.
On Chinese au pairs
To Give Children an Edge, Au Pairs From China
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
In a conference room at a Holiday Inn motel last week in Connecticut, 167 young women from 22 countries received a tutorial in catering to the needs of the affluent American child. (Lesson 1: Turn off the television set.)
Many of the young women were German. But two drew particular attention, Kunyi Li, 23, and Man Zhang, 24, among the first au pairs from China.
Their services are in great demand, in part because so many Americans have adopted baby girls from China. Driving the need more aggressively is the desire among ambitious parents to ensure their children’s worldliness, as such parents assume that Mandaran will be the sophisticates’ language decades hence.
“Our clientele is middle and upper middle class,” said William L. Gertz, chairman of the American Institute for Foreign Study, which oversees Au Pair in America. “They see something really happening, and they don’t want to be left behind.”
The last two years have seen an astonishing increase in the number of American parents wishing to employ Mandarin-speaking caregivers, especially those from China.
Au Pair in America, the 20-year-old agency that sponsored the two young women in Connecticut, had received no requests for Chinese au pairs until 2004, said Ruth Ferry, the program director.
Since then, it has had 1,400.
The agency said it expected to bring 200 additional au pairs to this country before Dec. 31, 2007, and other companies in the business are beginning to recruit in China, all taking advantage of relaxed standards for cultural-exchange visas for Chinese.
Hongbin Yu, 23, of Harbin, north of Beijing, who like many other Chinese college students studying English gave herself an Anglophone name, Cecilia, was the first Chinese au pair to land in the United States.
She arrived in March through Go Au Pair, one of the 11 such agencies sanctioned by the Office of Exchange Coordination and Designation at the State Department.
Her employer is Joan Friend, a former president of a technology company in northern California who had been having her two children, Jim, 5, and Paris, 6, tutored in Mandarin for several years.
“The tutors just played with them,” Ms. Friend said from her house in Carmel Valley, Calif. “They thought I was crazy, because the children were so young.”
After her son and daughter began to learn the sounds of Mandarin, Ms. Friend sought more intensive training and repeatedly asked Go Au Pair for a Mandarin speaker to live with the family. But visa problems and a lack of contacts in China left the agency unable to place anyone with her.
Ultimately, Ms. Friend found Ms. Yu on her own, through an acquaintance in China, and Go Au Pair handled the paperwork.
“I’ve never been to China,” said Ms. Friend, a single mother who is retired.
She added that she considered China central to the future of global economics, saying, “I think China will rule the banking world in my children’s lifetime, and I want them to be able to participate in that if they want to.”
Like Ms. Friend, Jean Lucas, who lives outside Tampa, Fla., had been frustrated in finding a Chinese au pair for her four children. She is now obtaining one through Au Pair in America who will arrive in a few weeks.
Ms. Lucas said her husband, Sky, a hedge-fund manager, initiated the search because he did not want to raise culturally narcissistic monolingual children.
“My husband had been following China for some time,’’ Ms. Lucas said, “and he simply believes that it would be better for international relations if we all put some time and effort into learning Chinese. I’m not expecting this girl to come in and lecture. My children wouldn’t put up with that. But I want them to have an introduction, and I want it to be fun.”
Since she has been with the Friends, Ms. Yu, who studied English and tourism in college in China, has been reading to the children in Mandarin and teaching them how to count. In turn, Ms. Friend, in addition to providing a weekly stipend, has taken her on trips to Arizona, San Francisco, and farther down the California coast to Newport Beach.
Begun in 1986, the State Department Au Pair program requires that young caregivers work no more than 45 hours a week and return to their home countries after one year. Host families have to provide their charges with a window into the American experience. It is only in the last few years that au pairs have been actively recruited outside Western Europe.
Among Chinese-Americans, it is difficult to come upon young women interested in child-care careers, nanny agency representatives say.
“This is not a field they evolve into,” Amy Hardison, founder of Nanny on the Net, said. “We just have a very hard time finding Chinese nannies.”
In China’s new culturally progressive climate, biases against such domestic work prevail. Ms. Zhang, one of the au pairs who arrived last week and moved in with a family in New Hampshire, said her parents had initially disapproved of her decision, especially because she was then working in customer service for Continental Airlines in Beijing.
“There are prejudices about being a baby sitter,” she remarked. “They said: ‘You have a great job coming out of college. Why would you want to go to America to take care of children?’ ”
It is Ms. Zhang’s hope to open a nursery school in China. And she would like to immerse herself more deeply in American culture, she said, beyond the knowledge she has acquired of it from watching “Friends.”
As for American cooking, she foresees as a challenge.
“I don’t hate it but I don’t like it,” she offered. “I had pizza yesterday. It’s better at home.”
On learning something from TV when you're a kid
When Toddlers Turn on the TV and Actually Learn
By LISA GUERNSEY
Yelling at the television used to be the domain of adults watching “Jeopardy!” But young children have become the real pros.
Sit down with a 3-year-old to watch “Blue’s Clues” or “Dora the Explorer,” and see the shouting erupt. Whenever a character faces the camera and asks a question, children out there in TV land are usually answering it.
Active engagement with television has been an antidote to criticism that the tube creates zombies. “Blue’s Clues,” which celebrated its 10th anniversary last month, has been credited with helping young children learn from the screen. Academic research has shown that viewers ages 3 to 5 score better on tests of problem solving than those who haven’t watched the show.
But what happens with children younger than 3? Should babies and toddlers be exposed to television at all? Is there any chance that they could actually learn from the screen? While debates rage among parents, pediatricians and critics of baby videos (think “Baby Einstein”), developmental psychologists are trying to apply some science to the question.
Experiments conducted at Vanderbilt University, described in the May/June issue of Child Development, offer some hints about toddlers. They showed that 24-month-olds are more apt to use information relayed by video if they consider the person on the screen to be someone they can talk to. Without that, the children seemed unable to act on what they had seen and heard.
The experiments compared two video experiences: One was based on a videotape. Watching it was similar to watching “Blue’s Clues”; the actor onscreen paused to simulate a conversation, but back-and-forth interaction with the viewer was impossible. A different group of children experienced two-way live video. It worked like a Web cam, with each side responding in real time.
Georgene L. Troseth and Megan M. Saylor, psychologists at Vanderbilt, and Allison H. Archer, an undergraduate student there, designed the study to find out if toddlers would learn from video if they considered the onscreen actors to be, as they put it, “social partners.”
The test hinged on a hiding game. First the 2-year-olds watched the video — either the tape or the live version. The screen showed a person hiding a stuffed animal, Piglet, in a nearby room, often under a table or behind a couch. When the video ended, the children were asked to retrieve Piglet. Those who saw the recorded video had some trouble. They found him only 35 percent of the time. Children in the other group succeeded about 69 percent of the time, a rate similar to face-to-face interaction.
Does this mean that TV programs that simulate interaction are doing nothing for kids? Not necessarily, the researchers say. A few of the children in the recorded video group were especially responsive to the games and pauses, and they were the few children in that group who retrieved the toy.
“We found that if children gave evidence of treating the video as a social partner,” Dr. Troseth said, “they will use the information.”
Their article referred specifically to “Blue’s Clues,” saying the show appeared to be “on the right track” — a point that, not surprisingly, thrilled creators of the program. Alice Wilder, the show’s director of research, said each script was tested in live settings with children to make sure that the show’s hosts — a young man named Steve in the early seasons and the current one, Joe — appear to be having realistic, child-centered conversations with viewers.
Developmental psychologists say the Vanderbilt research offers an intriguing clue to a phenomenon called the “video deficit.” Toddlers who have no trouble understanding a task demonstrated in real life often stumble when the same task is shown onscreen. They need repeated viewings to figure it out. This deficit got its name in a 2005 article by Daniel R. Anderson and Tiffany A. Pempek, psychologists at the University of Massachusetts, who reviewed literature on young children and television.
Child-development experts say the deficit confirms the age-old wisdom that real-life interactions are best for babies. Parents can be assured, they say, that their presence trumps the tube.
But psychologists still want to get to the bottom of what might explain the difference. Is it the two-dimensionality of the screen? Do young children have some innate difficulty in remembering information transmitted as symbols? “It’s definitely still a puzzle, and we’re trying to figure out the different components to it,” said Rachel Barr, a psychologist at Georgetown University who specializes in infant memory. She and Harlene Hayne at the University of Otago in New Zealand published some early evidence of the video deficit in 1999.
The Vanderbilt research offers the possibility that the more socially engaging a video is, the more likely the deficit will disappear. But Dr. Troseth and other psychologists stress that in-person connections with parents are by far a child’s best teacher. No word yet on whether that includes those moments when harried parents are so distracted that TV characters are more responsive than they are.
Building a hate for learning
Is homework bad for kids? Author Nancy Kalish tells Salon why she believes it inhibits learning, strains familes and stunts social development.
Rebecca Traister
Sep. 05, 2006 | Homework. For many of us, the word still sounds like a drag. Nights spent hunched over algebra books, memorizing vocab lists and filling out graph-paper lab reports while the smell of burning fall leaves and a cool October breeze teased just outside our bedroom window. Homework was spinach: We did it because it was good for us, because it made us smarter, because it taught us how to study, because it prepared us for college, and because if we didn't do it we'd get detention.
But this fall, as students across the country load their JanSports with textbooks and start down the road to lower-back pain, a group of parents and educators are desperately trying to send a message that maybe nights spent cuddling the periodic table aren't so fortifying after all. This month, two books about homework and its discontents are on shelves: "The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It" by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish and "The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing" by Alfie Kohn.
To hear these homework protesters tell it, recent years have seen an almost comical inflation of the work kids are bringing home from school. Kindergartners and first graders, those squirmy squirts who can barely make it through "Blues Clues," are being asked to do 30 minutes to an hour of studying a night, while middle and high schoolers are forced to slog through four and five and six hours of the stuff. And some of the assignments sound like something out of a Fellini movie: translating arithmetic problems into alphanumeric code and plotting them on a graph to look like Abraham Lincoln, building popsicle-stick replicas of the Pentagon and baking cakes in the shape of Roman ruins.
Salon recently spoke by phone to Nancy Kalish, coauthor of "The Case Against Homework." This Brooklyn, N.Y., journalist and mother of one said her eyes were opened to the scourge of homework when her daughter hit middle school. Kalish teamed with former legal aid attorney and mother of two Sara Bennett to research and write the book, which argues that homework is actually diminishing children's educational experience, turning kids off learning, putting strains on families, turning students into "homework potatoes" and stunting cognitive and social development.
Is this the kind of book that the left and the right are likely to respond to differently?
Well, Time magazine ran a story about this issue last week and it was positive; the New York Post reviewed the book and it was negative. Homework has gone through ups and downs throughout history. In the early 1900s it was banned for a period because it was thought to be bad for kids' health to make them stay inside. The most recent step-up came in 1983, when there was a study called "A Nation at Risk" that specifically called for more homework. It was the first time that kids' achievement in school had been linked to the state of the global economy. Now, it has been proven that there is zero correlation between kids' academic achievement and the economy. At Penn State there are two guys [David Baker and Gerald LeTendre] who did research and discovered many countries that give lots of homework and do worse. The Japanese actually do less homework than we do. It's B.S. that there's a connection. But the belief continues to be put forth by business people and politicians, and of course by our lovely president, that basically it's all the kids' fault and we're not as competitive as countries who give kids more homework; that's why people think homework is such a necessary thing, that if we don't give homework, we're undermining our entire country.
If that's the socioeconomic angle, how does it play out in family attitudes?
It filters down to the parents, along with how hypercompetitive and tough it is to get our kids into college. In New York City and other places it's tough to get them into preschool, so there is an attitude that more is better. Parents mistakenly assume that a lot of homework shows that a school is rigorous, and if the school is rigorous it's going to give their kids an edge. I was one of those parents.
What changed your mind?
Well, I was very lucky. Because now they start overloading kids in kindergarten, dealing with an hour's work each night. My daughter didn't get overloaded until middle school, but then suddenly she was doing four hours a night, which really was excessive.
What were the ill effects?
Her love of learning started to plummet. Her grades didn't dip, but her enjoyment of the whole process went downhill. At the time, I was doing assignments for parenting magazines about how to get your kids to knuckle down and do homework. I just assumed it was a good thing, and assumed schools knew what they were doing or they wouldn't put us through it. Then I met Sara Bennett, my coauthor, and I started to research it and found out the research doesn't back this up at all. All my assumptions were challenged. We've been going along with it because we assume homework is good for our kids. It turns out that it's not.
Do you believe there is no correlation between academic success and homework?
I had an eye-opening interview with Harris Cooper at Duke University. He looked at 180 studies on homework and found that there was only a very tiny correlation between homework and achievement in elementary school, measured either in grades or on achievement tests; a minor correlation in middle school; and still only a moderate correlation in high school. And after kids started doing more than two hours a night, [even the moderate correlation] plummeted. It's very counterintuitive. It's hard to get parents and teachers to accept; you think more has to be better. Not true.
The other thing Harris Cooper told me is that teachers are not trained in homework. They're winging it. I interviewed [Baker and LeTendre] and we interviewed people from Stanford and Harvard. No one has a course specifically on homework. We surveyed hundreds and hundreds of teachers, and only one claimed ever to have taken a course on homework. They are taught general "purposes" of homework: that it reinforces lessons, builds study skills. But teachers are not taught how to make assignments. We learned that only 35 percent of schools have written homework policies. Teachers are trying their very best. They want what's best for the kids, but they really don't have the tools that they need.
What other tools are they missing?
What happens in typical teacher's day, especially with ever-shrinking budgets, is that they have cafeteria duty, bus duty, after-school programs. They don't have any planning periods left. As a result they can't give homework assignments a lot of thought; they just use what's there. They still have these mimeographed worksheets that kids can't even read anymore. And a lot of these teachers are not parents. So they really don't know what it's like to make a first grader do homework, what havoc it's wreaking in households across the country. And competitive parents are afraid to admit it's a problem. They don't want to admit it to other parents, don't want to admit it to teachers, because they feel like they'll be saying, "My kid can't hack it." But teachers can't solve the problem if they don't know about it. Go in and tell the teacher what it's like in your house every night. Usually, if you say, "My kid is starting to hate school because she's overwhelmed; she has no time to come to the dinner table or have play dates with her friends," the teacher makes changes.
I have to press you on the point that teachers who aren't parents don't know what it's like to wrestle a 6-year-old into doing work -- don't they wrestle them into doing work all day?
That's true, but one second-grade teacher told us, "Of course the kids are wiped when they're made to work all day, but I didn't realize what it was like when they got home and were made to do it all over again." She didn't know how much more tired they were going to be when they got home.
What about the tough-noogies argument: Too bad if they're tired and don't like it, they've got to suck it up and do it?
They stop loving learning. For instance, in first grade, a typical assignment is the reading log, where you have to write down what you read: the author and illustrator and the publisher and how many pages. Sounds really innocent, great idea, right? I can't tell you how many parents told us how many kids didn't want to read anymore because it was so tedious to write all that stuff down afterwards. It takes longer often for a first grader to write that information out than to have another book read to him. So maybe it should just be "Read with your child." Learning all this was like a light bulb illuminating things that on the surface seem responsibility building, study-skill building but, when you start to examine under the surface, aren't great. The sense that it builds independence -- when a kid can't face doing his homework without his mother by his side, that's not building independence!
But maybe parents are overinvested in the work their kids should be doing on their own?
Absolutely there are overinvolved parents who could be less involved with their kids' homework and don't know when to back off. But from our surveys we learned that parents don't feel like they have a choice. The quantity is so overwhelming that kids are not able to face it on their own without parental involvement. You have to ask your kids every single day, "How much homework do you have?" Homework is controlling their night. As a mother you're thinking, "Will we have time to have dinner together? Will we have time to go to the concert that little sister is in?" Homework is dictating everything. There's also an expectation that parents will teach kids skills. In San Diego there is a teacher who gives a math class for parents every Monday night to teach them the math that their kids are learning so that they can help.
That actually sounds good to me.
Sure. At first. But no parent should be in the position of having to teach their kids math. There is also this idea that homework is such a great way to get involved in the kids' education. But then you hear about some of these huge projects -- my favorite was the one where they had to bake a cake in the shape of a Roman aqueduct ...
Or the kid who had to build a reproduction of San Francisco's Mission out of penne ...
Exactly. And this is where some overinvolved competitiveness comes out and you end up with a project that could be in Architectural Digest, not something a kid could do on his own. These projects should be done at school, where the parent doesn't have the ability to take over, a teacher has to accept what a 10-year-old can actually do, and the 10-year-old can be proud of his project because he did it himself. A mother from Westchester [N.Y.] actually told me she wouldn't let her kid bring in a project he had done on his own because it would shame him. It would be ego threatening. What have we come to that we can't accept what a third grader can actually do?
How does homework relate to class? The fear that a kid would be ego threatened sounds like a middle-class concern, as does the idea that evenings should be used to do enriching things besides homework. In poorer communities where there might not be as many healthy and enriching evening activities to take advantage of, mightn't homework offer a constructive activity for kids?
We talked to a lot of lower-income parents, for instance, kids in charter schools where they really pile on homework, and they are suffering in exactly the same ways as wealthier families. For any kid, no matter what the income level, there is a point where homework is positive and keeps them occupied, and then there's the point where it's too much work. A solution would be after-school programs that include not only homework but other things like play. There are neighborhoods that are so dangerous that when kids get home from school, parents say, "You can't go outside to play," and so they sit inside and watch television or do homework, neither of which is good for them. There should be good after-school programs supervised by teachers that have other things that kids are missing out on, like exercise, which ironically is so important to cognitive development.
And homework is hampering children's playing life?
The play dates that kids have these days are not running outside and playing games and learning to share and cooperate. The only play dates that they can fit in are ones where they sit and study side by side. There's not a whole lot of value in that. It's really sad. The kids are really suffering. [We found that] 9-year-olds are saying, "I wish I were dead"; they're developing facial tics, scratching themselves, gaining weight, which is a huge hidden result of homework. As adults, we're constantly telling ourselves to take time for ourselves, to balance, not to take work home from the office, and yet we're doing this stuff to our kids and they're not up to it; it's too much for them.
So what is the ideal amount of homework?
Some people will not want their kids to do any homework at all after reading this book. But we think that it would be great if schools were made to stick to 10 minutes per grade level per night total. So 10 minutes total for first grade, 20 minutes for second grade. When you got to higher grades, multiple teachers would have to coordinate. But that's a good thing because so much homework is of extremely poor quality, like spelling mazes and 40 math problems and the reading logs. If teachers knew that they had a total of 10 minutes per night per grade level, they'd think: What do I most want my students to learn tonight? What would be the most valuable way of teaching them that in a short amount of time? For parents, the message is that they don't know you're suffering until you tell them. Teachers are trying to do what's best for kids. You need to tell them what it's doing to your child's love of learning; no teacher wants kids to start to hate school.
How will kids be prepared to do independent academic work in college if they don't have experience doing homework?
Kids get into independent learning on their own. Everyone is afraid that the first thing they're going to do if they don't have homework is sit in front of the TV for hours. I'm sure that for a few kids, that will happen. But often what happens is they use the time to get into their own thing, into their music, into photography. They learn independently and apply themselves to things they're really interested in. So I absolutely believe they'll be prepared. I don't subscribe to the theory that we need to toughen them up because the world is so tough. Because when you follow that, they're toughening up kindergartners. I spoke to a kindergarten teacher in a small town outside of Orlando [Fla.] where they have eliminated nap time and snack time, and she assigns homework and by lunchtime the kids are crying. In the past two years, there have been more 3- and 4-year-olds and kindergartners expelled than ever before. It's so developmentally inappropriate to expect kids to sit still all day and then come home and do it again. They're acting out like crazy and getting expelled.
But aren't some kinds of homework necessary? Maybe not the kindergarten homework or penne architectural replicas, but reading ahead to prepare for class discussion?
Reading is absolutely valuable. The problem is, as my daughter would tell you, when you have a bunch of questions at the end of the chapter, kids read [the book] only for answers to the questions, so they're not getting so much out of it. Types of assignments really do make a difference. One assignment teachers give all the time is tons of math problems. First of all, five problems is enough. If a child knows how to do five problems of a particular type, doing 40 of them is very tedious and a turnoff. If a child doesn't know how to do it and does it incorrectly 40 times, he will have cemented the incorrect method into his head. If you have 30 kids in class doing 50 math problems, then that's 1,500 math problems that the teacher has to correct. No teacher gets to those 1,500 math problems. When kids fall behind, it's precisely because they're given so much to do and they are practicing incorrectly. As soon as you think about it, it all makes perfect sense, but nobody ever goes there. I think that's what we want to accomplish -- to get people to think about it and to not accept that it's just this God-given rule that kids have to do so much homework.
On Chinese au pairs
To Give Children an Edge, Au Pairs From China
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
In a conference room at a Holiday Inn motel last week in Connecticut, 167 young women from 22 countries received a tutorial in catering to the needs of the affluent American child. (Lesson 1: Turn off the television set.)
Many of the young women were German. But two drew particular attention, Kunyi Li, 23, and Man Zhang, 24, among the first au pairs from China.
Their services are in great demand, in part because so many Americans have adopted baby girls from China. Driving the need more aggressively is the desire among ambitious parents to ensure their children’s worldliness, as such parents assume that Mandaran will be the sophisticates’ language decades hence.
“Our clientele is middle and upper middle class,” said William L. Gertz, chairman of the American Institute for Foreign Study, which oversees Au Pair in America. “They see something really happening, and they don’t want to be left behind.”
The last two years have seen an astonishing increase in the number of American parents wishing to employ Mandarin-speaking caregivers, especially those from China.
Au Pair in America, the 20-year-old agency that sponsored the two young women in Connecticut, had received no requests for Chinese au pairs until 2004, said Ruth Ferry, the program director.
Since then, it has had 1,400.
The agency said it expected to bring 200 additional au pairs to this country before Dec. 31, 2007, and other companies in the business are beginning to recruit in China, all taking advantage of relaxed standards for cultural-exchange visas for Chinese.
Hongbin Yu, 23, of Harbin, north of Beijing, who like many other Chinese college students studying English gave herself an Anglophone name, Cecilia, was the first Chinese au pair to land in the United States.
She arrived in March through Go Au Pair, one of the 11 such agencies sanctioned by the Office of Exchange Coordination and Designation at the State Department.
Her employer is Joan Friend, a former president of a technology company in northern California who had been having her two children, Jim, 5, and Paris, 6, tutored in Mandarin for several years.
“The tutors just played with them,” Ms. Friend said from her house in Carmel Valley, Calif. “They thought I was crazy, because the children were so young.”
After her son and daughter began to learn the sounds of Mandarin, Ms. Friend sought more intensive training and repeatedly asked Go Au Pair for a Mandarin speaker to live with the family. But visa problems and a lack of contacts in China left the agency unable to place anyone with her.
Ultimately, Ms. Friend found Ms. Yu on her own, through an acquaintance in China, and Go Au Pair handled the paperwork.
“I’ve never been to China,” said Ms. Friend, a single mother who is retired.
She added that she considered China central to the future of global economics, saying, “I think China will rule the banking world in my children’s lifetime, and I want them to be able to participate in that if they want to.”
Like Ms. Friend, Jean Lucas, who lives outside Tampa, Fla., had been frustrated in finding a Chinese au pair for her four children. She is now obtaining one through Au Pair in America who will arrive in a few weeks.
Ms. Lucas said her husband, Sky, a hedge-fund manager, initiated the search because he did not want to raise culturally narcissistic monolingual children.
“My husband had been following China for some time,’’ Ms. Lucas said, “and he simply believes that it would be better for international relations if we all put some time and effort into learning Chinese. I’m not expecting this girl to come in and lecture. My children wouldn’t put up with that. But I want them to have an introduction, and I want it to be fun.”
Since she has been with the Friends, Ms. Yu, who studied English and tourism in college in China, has been reading to the children in Mandarin and teaching them how to count. In turn, Ms. Friend, in addition to providing a weekly stipend, has taken her on trips to Arizona, San Francisco, and farther down the California coast to Newport Beach.
Begun in 1986, the State Department Au Pair program requires that young caregivers work no more than 45 hours a week and return to their home countries after one year. Host families have to provide their charges with a window into the American experience. It is only in the last few years that au pairs have been actively recruited outside Western Europe.
Among Chinese-Americans, it is difficult to come upon young women interested in child-care careers, nanny agency representatives say.
“This is not a field they evolve into,” Amy Hardison, founder of Nanny on the Net, said. “We just have a very hard time finding Chinese nannies.”
In China’s new culturally progressive climate, biases against such domestic work prevail. Ms. Zhang, one of the au pairs who arrived last week and moved in with a family in New Hampshire, said her parents had initially disapproved of her decision, especially because she was then working in customer service for Continental Airlines in Beijing.
“There are prejudices about being a baby sitter,” she remarked. “They said: ‘You have a great job coming out of college. Why would you want to go to America to take care of children?’ ”
It is Ms. Zhang’s hope to open a nursery school in China. And she would like to immerse herself more deeply in American culture, she said, beyond the knowledge she has acquired of it from watching “Friends.”
As for American cooking, she foresees as a challenge.
“I don’t hate it but I don’t like it,” she offered. “I had pizza yesterday. It’s better at home.”
On learning something from TV when you're a kid
When Toddlers Turn on the TV and Actually Learn
By LISA GUERNSEY
Yelling at the television used to be the domain of adults watching “Jeopardy!” But young children have become the real pros.
Sit down with a 3-year-old to watch “Blue’s Clues” or “Dora the Explorer,” and see the shouting erupt. Whenever a character faces the camera and asks a question, children out there in TV land are usually answering it.
Active engagement with television has been an antidote to criticism that the tube creates zombies. “Blue’s Clues,” which celebrated its 10th anniversary last month, has been credited with helping young children learn from the screen. Academic research has shown that viewers ages 3 to 5 score better on tests of problem solving than those who haven’t watched the show.
But what happens with children younger than 3? Should babies and toddlers be exposed to television at all? Is there any chance that they could actually learn from the screen? While debates rage among parents, pediatricians and critics of baby videos (think “Baby Einstein”), developmental psychologists are trying to apply some science to the question.
Experiments conducted at Vanderbilt University, described in the May/June issue of Child Development, offer some hints about toddlers. They showed that 24-month-olds are more apt to use information relayed by video if they consider the person on the screen to be someone they can talk to. Without that, the children seemed unable to act on what they had seen and heard.
The experiments compared two video experiences: One was based on a videotape. Watching it was similar to watching “Blue’s Clues”; the actor onscreen paused to simulate a conversation, but back-and-forth interaction with the viewer was impossible. A different group of children experienced two-way live video. It worked like a Web cam, with each side responding in real time.
Georgene L. Troseth and Megan M. Saylor, psychologists at Vanderbilt, and Allison H. Archer, an undergraduate student there, designed the study to find out if toddlers would learn from video if they considered the onscreen actors to be, as they put it, “social partners.”
The test hinged on a hiding game. First the 2-year-olds watched the video — either the tape or the live version. The screen showed a person hiding a stuffed animal, Piglet, in a nearby room, often under a table or behind a couch. When the video ended, the children were asked to retrieve Piglet. Those who saw the recorded video had some trouble. They found him only 35 percent of the time. Children in the other group succeeded about 69 percent of the time, a rate similar to face-to-face interaction.
Does this mean that TV programs that simulate interaction are doing nothing for kids? Not necessarily, the researchers say. A few of the children in the recorded video group were especially responsive to the games and pauses, and they were the few children in that group who retrieved the toy.
“We found that if children gave evidence of treating the video as a social partner,” Dr. Troseth said, “they will use the information.”
Their article referred specifically to “Blue’s Clues,” saying the show appeared to be “on the right track” — a point that, not surprisingly, thrilled creators of the program. Alice Wilder, the show’s director of research, said each script was tested in live settings with children to make sure that the show’s hosts — a young man named Steve in the early seasons and the current one, Joe — appear to be having realistic, child-centered conversations with viewers.
Developmental psychologists say the Vanderbilt research offers an intriguing clue to a phenomenon called the “video deficit.” Toddlers who have no trouble understanding a task demonstrated in real life often stumble when the same task is shown onscreen. They need repeated viewings to figure it out. This deficit got its name in a 2005 article by Daniel R. Anderson and Tiffany A. Pempek, psychologists at the University of Massachusetts, who reviewed literature on young children and television.
Child-development experts say the deficit confirms the age-old wisdom that real-life interactions are best for babies. Parents can be assured, they say, that their presence trumps the tube.
But psychologists still want to get to the bottom of what might explain the difference. Is it the two-dimensionality of the screen? Do young children have some innate difficulty in remembering information transmitted as symbols? “It’s definitely still a puzzle, and we’re trying to figure out the different components to it,” said Rachel Barr, a psychologist at Georgetown University who specializes in infant memory. She and Harlene Hayne at the University of Otago in New Zealand published some early evidence of the video deficit in 1999.
The Vanderbilt research offers the possibility that the more socially engaging a video is, the more likely the deficit will disappear. But Dr. Troseth and other psychologists stress that in-person connections with parents are by far a child’s best teacher. No word yet on whether that includes those moments when harried parents are so distracted that TV characters are more responsive than they are.
