I'm getting this printed out to display at school:

I've seen that poster before, and it most certainly wasn't about practicing!

I think schools should teach time management skills before they pile on the homework. Kids are really busy nowadays, and most of them don't know how to juggle their schedules very well. Heck, their parents don't know how to juggle schedules, either.

I've been seeing what my students are doing for homework. It's really not that much different than what I experienced 20 years ago. In fact, I'd say they're doing slightly less work, with time-savers like the Internet. They're just challenged with more distractions like computer games and texting...

Here's another:

I am sure the school will be abashed/flabbergasted yet in agreement.

There's substantial evidence that homework is of little value, particularly because most homework is busy-work rather than creative. Practice, on the other hand......

Careful now, you are effectively saying well executed practice is better than poorly executed homework. Point is both are important and useful if done properly just as both can be abused and used to waste time and result in little advancement. AAMOF, it wouldn't surprise me at all, given the amount of kvetching that occurs on this forum about poor (piano) student habits, that the percentage of "useful" practice is roughly equiv to the amount of "useful" homework in the general population

Properly designed and planned homework and practice assignment, following proper teaching, preceded by proper planning without compromise to outside agendas. Only then can you talk about proper homework habits, and proper practicing habits. Otherwise a student is most successful by ignoring what he's been told to do, and finding something that works. (which is a somewhat hit and miss affair)

Homework is only of little value because most kids don't do it.

Assuming you live in The Land Of The Free (as long as you can afford it), are your customers going to be relaxed about their children being compared to Young Pioneers in front of a map of Russia? It's a long time since I visited the US, but remember being surprised by the phobia against Communism, rather than the reasoned opinion I was used to home in the UK :-)

Offensive yet genius?

I could probably reshape the map to the US.

I doubt that the majority of US citizens could identify either a map of Russia or one of the Soviet Unior and even fewer could articulate the difference between the two.

keyboardklutz, it's all HILARIOUS!

Regarding homework there is a range of research supporting a finding of homework being useless.

The first element is the quality of the homework being assigned. Mostly homework is assigned for the sake of assigning homework, not for genuine educational outcomes. So that's a big fail.

The second element is the uniform learning experience represented by most homework assignments, usually not utilising creative thinking or lateral thinking. This singular kind of learning experience, irrespective of discipline, creates a limited learning framework for the student.

Then there is the aspect of parents ending up completely assignments (or even doing them in toto) to remove the pressure from the children.

Related to this is evidence that teenagers need more sleep, and extensive homework assignments can only be completed at the cost of much needed sleep which will aid emotional balance as well as physical health.

And so forth. The evidence is clear that hours of homework done do not have a causal correlation with achievement in the classroom, or in real life subsequent to the school years.

Don't underestimate the impact the school curriculum (rarely skill-based, instead mostly focussed on various kinds of enculturation) has in these studies: if the lessons being taught in schools were skill-based then home 'practice' would see a direct and positive result.

I have heard about the geographical disinterest of many US citizens, but still, this is a very funny thought.

Too true! Yes, you're right there Elissa - a pupil told me last week that research found homework next to useless.

I've changed the second one so it's not quite so white:

What cha think?

Send the kids to Amy Chua's school. They will learn how to practice in a short time.

The interesting thing is the posters just may work. The little darlings will know nothing of the provenance and they should do the job on their little subconsciousness's! If I could just think up a new name for Uncle Joe...

"Sam" is a nice name :-)

What about Uncle Dave? It's a shame - shave the moustache off and you'd have Gordon Brown!

I was a young pioneer in East Germany (GDR). It was about the lamest thing you could be... well apart from the fact that everybody in my class (except for one kid with religious parents) was a young pioneer.

We used to wear that scarf thingy as a mask to play pretend cowboy bandits - for doing this one earned detention with a stern teacher that was the school's head of the pioneers.

Those were the days...
I'm glad they're gone.

Hey, I love the cowboy thing! Aren't kids refreshing - the best laid schemes of mice and men!

Especially in higher grades, we cannot master a subject simply by having somebody tell us about it in the classroom. You master algebra by doing algebra. You understand music theory by working with it, not by being told about it. You need a time where someone is explaining, showing, correcting, answering - that's classes or lessons. And time for the doing - that's work in the classroom and homework at home. This assumes intelligently designed work which is done intelligently.

If that research concludes homework is useless, then it hasn't been thought through. What is given, how, how much, and why, are factors, as well as how it is done. There is a lot of nonsense in "the System" as well as in society's mindset which interferes. Both practicing and homework are powerful things that should be prepared carefully, yet it is often almost ignored. All the focus is on teaching, as though the learning activity came from that.

Learning is impeded everywhere. Because of the educational system, teaching is toward tests, which are used to measure schools, a lot of it set up by administrators who are far removed from any learning mind. Hours of homework are assigned to keep kids off the street and give the illusion of education. Music doesn't escape this. Teachers must teach toward exams, competitions, impressing parents and peers in recitals, rather than teaching what is needed for musicianship. When we are part of the system, we must compromise our teaching - the danger comes when we are no longer aware of it and think that getting kids to pass tests or have x hours of homework *is* the purpose of education. It isn't.

In another thread, about sight reading, part of Akira's quote from research involves the same thing. In this quote, we see some music teachers whose students do exams also compromising what they teach for the sake of the exam. They were quoted as giving tricks to give the impression of sight reading ability, rather than teaching the skill as such. True teaching cannot be measured and put on handy graphs, and the results are not as obvious or linear.

Since we are all caught in a "system", and that system is necessary because we need some source of mass education, we can at least recognize it for it is, and try to teach and learn despite that system. What I'm trying to say is that homework is part of something bigger. I don't think that music lessons are always exempt from it.

Simple issue it's not.

Just catching up on this thread...I really like this post Elissa! And it confirms what I always suspected.

Please don't take this the wrong way. I'm interested in this issue and I'm thinking out loud ...

"Busy work" homework and much of instrument practice seems at first blush to me to be about much the same thing .... drilling a habit deep into the medulla so that an idea or a technique (in the case of the music) becomes habitual. You can reproduce it without much conscious effort.

I am no fan of busywork in the schools and I have battle scars to prove it. For me, the 'busywork' of piano practice is much more valuable than the kind of busywork often encountered in the schools, but that's more about my judgment of the content.

1) I also was a Pionier in the Socialist Republic of Romania. The scarf was similar to the Soviet one, red but with Romanian flag colors (blue-yellow-red) on the border. It was quasi-universal and pretty harmless, more a sort of being generally a good guy/gal at school. One could get expelled for serious things, like organized theft in petty gangs. Right after 1989, the fall of Communism, some played pirate-scarf with the scarf; after some 10 years, some did wear it at alumni reunions as a sign of nostalgia (for our childhood/adolescence, not anything communist).
Compare with a less serious and pervasive Scouting (don't know how seriously that is taken now in the US, or the West generally, by kids, parents, general teachers and specific Scouting instructors).

2) The title of this thread... at first I thought how can music teachers eliminate imposing *their* homework to that kids already have from regular school ;-)
Seriously, have music teachers thought how to organize teaching with the best effectiveness possible around little or no home-practice ?

As a kid, I never did any homework after school. I just couldn't bring myself to focus in the afternoon, even less in the evening.

It was much easier for me, to get up an hour early in the morning to do my homework before school (our school started at 7). Then again, we didn't use to get "hours of homework". Most of it could be done quite quickly, some of it could be skipped altogether. This was something, an american exchange student noticed as particular about school in Germany - there was very little redundance in homework assignments.

Read the book. Ms Chua is nothing but a common variety stage mom using cultural differences as a cover.

I imagine that her kids get their homework done too.



Please, I'd rather read forums or mail order catalogs! Mama Chua is tedious.