Surely you’re not feeling guilty over this? I hardly think two problems count as overtaxing their poor little minds.

And, why would parents need to make their minds over this? It’s TWO PROBLEMS.

Pffft. The odds have the answers in the back. Assign the evens. Everyone knows that. :-P

Love it! Some of the kids will do both (just to see if the challenge really is harder) while others will do just the practice either because they think they’re getting away with something, or they want to stay in their comfort zone. And how can any student get upset with one question of math homework every other weeknight (they only have to do one question, right?)?! As for the parents who want their kids to have more homework–perhaps they can pull out some research demonstrating the beneficial effect of large amounts of homework on learning and achievement…

I think the reps thing make sense when you are trying to perfect a task. During my first year of teaching, in Morton Grove, IL, which was a mostly middle and upper middle class community only about half the kids did their home work. Now that I teach in a lower income suburban Atlanta kids still don’t do their home work.

I finally decided that I would make them work in a more bell to bell format. I noticed many math teachers give kids time at the end of class to homework anyway. Why not give them work that they must do in class and I can help and guide.

But reps only matter if the person wants to get better. If a student is just trying to get by and they don’t care it doesn’t matter they won’t do the repetition.

To be clear, I was being facetious. Note the smiley. :)

But, I do think homework has a purpose. And I do regularly assign a small number of selected “exercises” (I don’t pay attention to whether they are even or odd :), anathema though it may be to the edublogosphere.

Civilization has helpfully developed efficient algorithms that facilitate solving more complicated problems. Yes learners need to know why the algorithms work. But they also need to be able to use them quickly and correctly. Which requires practice. Sorry, it just does.

Requiring practice away from the classroom on one’s own has a purpose. In class, it might look easy. In class, it’s stored in your short term memory. Spend 15 minutes on it outside of class. If it’s easy, great, we know we did our jobs, and 15 minutes isn’t going to kill you. If it’s too hard, great, you learned something about what you don’t know.

I am guilty! Guilty of most of the things people are talking about in the original post of HWM. I have been compliant, have had horrible classroom management, and have had students copy things off the board just to make it seem like we are doing work, thus learning (to name a few that come to mind).

My first year I was just happy to survive. Then I saw my shortcomings and have been trying ever since to “fix” them. It has felt like such a slow process for me.

Last year I assigned homework for the first half of the year, then I stopped. I stopped mostly because it was easier for me to do so. I was being complaint. Less than half the students were doing the homework. I was, and still am a person who believes if you assign homework, you better be going over it the next day… otherwise what a pointless act. I felt like I was wasting time, about 8-10 minutes out of a 43 minute class going over homework very few people did.

What I learned from stopping homework, although for the wrong reasons, was I had so much more time to have students practice in front of me. We had so much more class time to do practice!! WOW.

We don’t start school until Thursday, but I have changed my mind about HW. I will be assigning it, but have been inspired by the form above. I like fact you give students a choice. I will most likely be modifying this practice to choose two from the following method.

As for classroom management, I’m glad someone else had heard about ENVOY. I only went to a one day conference by Michael Grinder and would love to go again. Funny thing, I came across this book just the other day before reading it in one of your posts. heh.

I do have a question however. How do you factor homework into your grading system? How much is it worth.

Currently I am doing a 25% HW, 25% QUIZ, 50% TESTS breakdown. I am iffy on these percentages and am looking for some other breakdowns.

I will be coming back to the numerous blogs here for a long time I’m sure. Thanks for all the conversations you’ve started and I can read/participate in.

Too bad homework can’t be for the people who need it. The brightest kids will do the homework whether they need it or not just because you assigned it. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could do something that would make them think? The kids that need more problems, more review many times don’t do the homework. What to do? what to do? If I taught in a classroom I don’t know what I would do but I think I would lean toward no grades for homework and work at home that would benefit everybody.

I like Dan’s differentated option with the same score for either effort. I also like the idea of discussing something with parent or sibling as homework, and maybe jotting down a few notes, I like journaling (even in math) for homework, I like looking at a few websites (URLs given by me) and reflecting on what they saw, did, explored, learned.

Parents could be made aware of these homework options. Several kids could share what they found out each day with the class. If the kid doesn’t do the assignment–their loss. There is virtually no added daily work for you. All you have to do is come up with some exciting expections—monday website, tuesday discuss with somebody, wed journal, thursday design your own math problem to share with class, etc.
Finished with my ramblings–you guys are going to be glad when I retire.

For my Algebra 2 class, I do something similar. I assign between 3 and 8 problems. The range is because sometimes the section has 4 different kinds of problems!

One problem is always a word problem, because the final exam is district written, and is 80% word problems.

These problems are the required problems, and are always the hard problems. They can work any number of problems in the book, but I will only require the few I assign. Most learners will have to work some others to get to the hard ones, but only they will know how many, and only they get to DECIDE how many!

Ryan — Reading a great book. Still the best way to lose a few hours without even noticing.

I see that you are using the KeyMath curriculum at your school. Cool.

I am interested in your opinion on IMP (http://mathimp.org/), which is also published by Key Press. I did a search to see if I could find your opinions about it, but I couldn’t find anything. Have you talked about IMP somewhere in the blog? If so, where?