Is homework necessary?

Well, it's either homework or longer schooldays.

 

It prepares children for the unfairness, misery, and drudgery of adult life.

 

It depends on how well structured the homework or school work in general is.

Some homework might well be useless, while some might be giving you necessary experience to better understand the subject, or helping others who didn't quite understand what was taught in class run through it in their own time.

Whatever your homework is, it's obviously necessary in your teacher's view, however. Remember; they had to spend their own time organising it, so they aren't doing it just to inconvenience you.

 

I will tell you this much; I've been out of school for ten years, and in all that time, I have not ONCE used Algebra.

 

I feel I should argue with Ridley on this, but I can't remember any time I used algebra in a functional context either...

 

That would be dependent on what field you've gone into it, I've never had to write a short story or 2000 word essay since school either.

 

But you can write properly constructed sentences with appropriate grammar, punctuation, and correct spelling.

English lit and lang (and the equivalent in other languages, I suppose,) are two of the subjects most people will draw from in their daily lives, to some degree. It's important for clear communication, and for putting your meaning or opinion across effectively.

 

Yeah, homework can be a struggle for me too. I understand the same thing too. Seriously though, you wake up at 5AM and get home from school at like 6PM!? Geez, that's a long time. Takes a lot of time out of the day for you.

As for myself, I wake up around 7AM or so and return home around 4PM, though. I do my homework right away once I come back just to get it over with. Then, I eat some food, wash myself, etc. It's one of the reasons I'm not online very often. Which is okay because it's one of the least important things I need to do at the moment. And of course sleep as well.

 

And I didn't learn that from writing essays or short stories. Essays is not all of English Lit as algebra is not all of math, though they are obviously heavily entwined into the classes. They teach you what you need to know before the assignment, then the essay, test or whatever is you demonstrating what you've already learned from the class putting it into practice.

 

I use some math when I want to figure out how much something cost with sales tax, or a how much a person want on Gas, but yeah Alerbra should probably be saved for college and those going into a field where it's necessary.

 

I wouldn't argue against any homework at the High School level or below; at least at that level, in America, it seems there's a more apparent lack of preparedness and comprehensive education whose gaps we are attempting to fill. I don't think cutting out homework altogether really accomplishes that end.

Once you move into higher education -- assuming you choose to attend a college -- some assignments start to feel more arbitrary. Did I need to do those pages of analysis last night on Hamlet? Yeah, probably, considering I purposefully enrolled in a Shakespeare class to do exactly that kind of thing. Was it absolutely necessary, last semester, for my Creative Writing teacher to assign that constant stream of literary analysis essays and required readings? My heart tells me no, it wasn't, since I signed up for a Creative Writing: Fiction class to write fiction. As a writer, I understand the need for writers to read and understand literature; it was incredibly tedious, however, to receive an excess of twenty short essay assignments of literary analysis and only two fiction assignments that whole semester (while also, I might add, being enrolled in two actual literature courses). Teachers that reach into their back pocket for busy work to give their students are the bane of my existence these days.

 

I get the impression Dilly is talking from experience here.

 

If you argue that way you can easily argue that algebra is just as important:

• It prepares your brain for more logical thinkinging
• it helps you with those "little calculations", just kind of approximating how much you will pay at the store without adding up the exact numbers

I use it all the time, then again i'm studying physics in university, so yeah

 

That member is right.