Is this abnormal for 4th grade homework?

Are you saying "Wow no" it is abnormal, or "wow, no" it's normal?

It would have been excessive in my day too!

Today's standards suck.

I think 2 1/2 hours of football practice is an awful lot for a 9-10 year old kid.
I don't think the amount of homework you said is being assigned is excessive.
I think it's really easy for you as a parent to unconsciously convey to a 9-10 year old that you think he is being unfairly treated, and I think that attitude could affect his being able to process the stuff he's got to do.

I think the concern about "inexperienced teachers" may well be misplaced - there is no reason to assume, from what I've seen, that more experience as a teacher in our public school system necessarily equates to more effective teaching.

I think the concern about "today's standards" sucking also might be a little misplaced, because as we speak, South Korean kids are starting to learn english in first grade, and our kids are exposed to Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck as fine American authors. In other words, our standards need to be raised high, held high and enforced if we don't want to get our asses kicked academically from a world standpoint.

boomerang wrote:

It's 8:30 and I finally have everyone clean and fed and we still have a half hour of reading to do so I need to get after it.

I think I'm beginning to understand why our state only has a 60% graduation rate. If the 15 minute a year thing is true that means there would be three hours of homework a night by 12th grade.

6 hours of school, plus 3 hours of homework, plus 1/2 hour of chores, plus 2 or 3 hours of extracirricular activities makes too long a day for any kid.

Add in 8 hours to sleep and you only get about 4.5 hours to yourself on any given day. No adult would do that without a fat paycheck waiting for them at the end of the week.

You are a Mom you do it everyday

If the 15 minute a year thing is true that means there would be three hours of homework a night by 12th grade.

6 hours of school, plus 3 hours of homework, plus 1/2 hour of chores, plus 2 or 3 hours of extracirricular activities makes too long a day for any kid.

you don't see kids doing 2 - 3 hours of extracurricular activity a day here. that would not be considered appropriate. most are doing a couple of hours per week - maximum - and those are generally the community volunteer hours that are required to graduate from high school.

One indisputable fact
One homework fact that educators do agree upon is that the young child today is doing more homework than ever before.

"Parents are correct in saying that they didn't get homework in the early grades and that their kids do," says Harris Cooper, professor of psychology and director of the education program at Duke University.

Gill quantifies the change this way: "There has been some increase in homework for the kids in kindergarten, first grade and second grade. But it's been an increase from zero to 20 minutes a day. So that is something that's fairly new in the last quarter century."

Homework guidelines
What's a parent to do, you ask? Fortunately, there are some sanity-saving homework guidelines.

Cooper points to "The 10-Minute Rule" formulated by the National PTA and the National Education Association, which suggests that kids should be doing about 10 minutes of homework per night per grade level. In other words, 10 minutes for first-graders, 20 for second-graders and so on.

The optimal amount
Cooper has found that the correlation between homework and achievement is generally supportive of these guidelines. "We found that for kids in elementary school there was hardly any relationship between how much homework young children did and how well they were doing in school, but in middle school the relationship is positive and increases until the kids were doing between an hour to two hours a night, which is right where the 10-minute rule says it's going to be optimal.

"After that it didn't go up anymore. Kids that reported doing more than two hours of homework a night in middle school weren't doing any better in school than kids who were doing between an hour to two hours."

International comparisons
How do American kids fare when compared to students in other countries? Professors Gerald LeTendre and David Baker of Pennsylvania State University conclude in their 2005 book, National Differences, Global Similarities: World Culture and the Future of Schooling, that American middle-schoolers do more homework than their peers in Japan, Korea or Taiwan, but less than their peers in Singapore and Hong Kong.

One of the surprising findings of their research was that more homework does not correlate with higher test scores. LeTendre notes: "That really flummoxes people because they say, 'Doesn't doing more homework mean getting better scores?' The answer quite simply is no."

One of the surprising findings of their research was that more homework does not correlate with higher test scores. LeTendre notes: "That really flummoxes people because they say, 'Doesn't doing more homework mean getting better scores?' The answer quite simply is no."

In the late 1960s, homework came to be viewed as a symptom of needless pressure on students. In the 1980s, homework came back into favor, stimulated by the oft-cited report A Nation at Risk, which suggested that homework was one defense against the rising tide of mediocrity in U.S. education.

Did you see this in my post above?

Quote:

One of the surprising findings of their research was that more homework does not correlate with higher test scores. LeTendre notes: "That really flummoxes people because they say, 'Doesn't doing more homework mean getting better scores?' The answer quite simply is no."

If you read around you'll see that there are big movements to REDUCE the amount of homework
in many countries like Japan.

• According to a 2004 national survey of 2,900 American children conducted by the University of Michigan, the amount of time spent on homework is up 51% since 1981.

• Most of that increase reflects bigger loads for little kids. An academic study found that whereas students ages 6 to 8 did an average of 52 min. of homework a week in 1981, they were toiling 128 min. weekly by 1997. And that's before No Child Left Behind kicked in. An admittedly less scientific poll of parents conducted this year for AOL and the Associated Press found that elementary school students were averaging 78 min. a night.

• The onslaught comes despite the fact that an exhaustive review by the nation's top homework scholar, Duke University's Harris Cooper, concluded that homework does not measurably improve academic achievement for kids in grade school. That's right: all the sweat and tears do not make Johnny a better reader or mathematician.

• Too much homework brings diminishing returns. Cooper's analysis of dozens of studies found that kids who do some homework in middle and high school score somewhat better on standardized tests, but doing more than 60 to 90 min. a night in middle school and more than 2 hr. in high school is associated with, gulp, lower scores.

• Teachers in many of the nations that outperform the U.S. on student achievement tests--such as Japan, Denmark and the Czech Republic--tend to assign less homework than American teachers, but instructors in low-scoring countries like Greece, Thailand and Iran tend to pile it on.

Quote:

• Teachers in many of the nations that outperform the U.S. on student achievement tests--such as Japan, Denmark and the Czech Republic--tend to assign less homework than American teachers, but instructors in low-scoring countries like Greece, Thailand and Iran tend to pile it on.

Kids in Japan and Europe spend a lot longer in school than American kids - they usually go until 4:00 or 5:00 pm, and summer vacation is usually 6 weeks as compared to 12 weeks in the U.S.