Robert Switzer

A week or so back I wrote a post about scoring trends on the ACT, one of the two major aptitude tests used in the post-secondary school admissions process.

This morning I read a story in Time Magazine online via reddit.com about a couple of books, The Homework Myth (Da Capo Press; 243 pages), by Alfie Kohn and The Case Against Homework (Crown; 290 pages), by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish.

These authors are saying that children in schools are being increasingly overloaded with homework, and the sad thing is that all of this homework is doing little good. Experimental evidence shows that a moderate amount of homework can have a positive effect on standardized test scores for secondary school students. But excessive homework — more than 10 minutes per day per grade level — is counter-productive and correlates with lower scores on these same tests.

The authors also point out that much of the homework assigned is rote, pointless, and boring.

So what else is new? As a public school student, I avoided homework like the plague. I found that the penalty for not doing the work was a lesser annoyance than the drudgery of doing it.

Did blowing off homework hurt me academically? Probably, though I always did a lot of reading through school, and most of it was far more interesting and engaging than what was going on in class.

Some subjects simply require rote learning and drill to get over the initial hump and build the momentum you need to get to the next level, where the real fun is. Languages and math are like this. You have to do the drill, unless you’re stone-cold exceptional or a savant.

But other subjects, History and English for instance, suffer from an excessive rote fixation. If an instructor fixates too much on names and dates or rules and mechanics, students lose sight of the forest for the trees. I remember reading both ‘Silas Marner’ and ‘Great Expectations’ in high school English classes led by teachers who had no idea of what either was about.

But hey, this is the USA, and measurement is what we’re all about, right? I can’t count the number of times lately that I’ve heard ‘work-ethic’ used as a personal noun, as in “Jasper’s work-ethic is exceptional”. Usually I hear this coming out of the mouths of illiterate middle-managers who make Ricky Gervais’ character on the BBC version of ‘The Office’ look like fucking Einstein.

My dictionary doesn’t have an entry for work-ethic, just work and ethic seperately. I think of the term work ethic in the context of ‘the protestant work ethic’. If Wikipedia is to be believed on this, the term originated with Max Weber and refers to a Calvinist value emphasizing the necessity of constant labor in one’s calling as a sign of personal salvation. Protestants beginning with Martin Luther had reconceptualized work as a duty in the world for the benefit of the individual and society as a whole. The Catholic idea of good “works” was transformed into an obligation to work diligently as a sign of grace.

I think the operative phrase here is ‘work diligently as a sign of grace’. The key word is sign, as in something seen, something visible.

The cube-jockeying half-wits who blather about work-ethic are almost always talking about some visible manifestation of industry, real or perceived. Examples would be a willingness to stay late even if nothing is accomplished thereby, or going on endless rounds of travel to attend unproductive meetings. In the lower-level call-center scheme of things work-ethic is often short-hand for punctual, pliable, and appropriately dressed.

Almost always the term refers to something visible and measurable.

Most people are quantity-driven. Mo’bigger is better. McMansions and hypertrophied sport utility vehicles are the current markers of suburban success.

Quality is a much trickier concept to get a handle on, and often it is ambiguous and resistant to measurement and consensus.

Thus, more homework, much of it drill. It’s just too damn hard for a public school administrator to really impart, demand and enforce quality education. But it’s really fucking easy to demand X-number of pages of X-type of problem at a specified grade level. And it’s also really fucking easy for the teachers involved to count up all the right and wrong answers and boil all this down as a quantifiably correct measure of some sort of educational ‘progress’.

Carefully designed rote drill is also one of the best tools available to prep for and game standardized tests.

The driver of much of this counter-productive homework is, aside from standard Anglo-American success mythology, ‘No Child Left Behind’. And, as with many other ill-conceived initiatives by the incompetent and corrupt Bush Administration, it seems destined to produce precisely the opposite outcome to what was intended.