1) What is your philosophy on homework? How long should the nightly homework take?
Actually, we would love to be able to not give homework at all. Students already have a full day of academics. A lot of mental and physical energy is demanded of 8th graders at school. Additionally, 13 and 14 year olds have many demands on their time (academic, extracurricular, family, and many others) and they don’t necessarily have a lot of discretionary time. We understand this and would love to keep their daily math work to the 50 minutes we have in class. However, we’ve found that without some follow-up practice on the day’s lesson as well as review of prior concepts, the learning process becomes much more difficult.
We try not to call our assignments homework because of the negative connotations that homework carries. Homework is often thought of as work done solely for points, grades, or just a teacher-assigned task to fulfill that is “busywork.” However, for any skill that you are trying to build, practice is a necessary step to mastery. We regard our assignments as practice, as chance to hone skills.
Time-wise, we intend for the nightly practice to take 20-25 minutes of focused work time.
At the beginning of the year, it may take a bit more time for students to understand our homework procedure and fulfill the assignment expectations of this class. However, students have generally reported that once they get accustomed to the routine, practice time takes an average of 20 minutes.
Our aim is that each assignment takes no more than 25 minutes of dedicated, distraction-free work time. If, after an initial adjustment period of a few weeks, students are still finding that the assigned problems take significantly more than our prescribed time, students should talk to their instructor to make arrangements to get the work time down to a reasonable level (25 or less minutes).