I'm back in school and back in society. This means we're gonna have some interesting insights on the blog!!! I wonder if this will mean I will post more or less or just the same. I'm curious to find out.
But first, our favorite new part of the blog: patch notes! I added a new section: Miscellaneous. You'll never guess what's in it. I intend to finally fulfill the purpose of this repository: put my shit somewhere. This means that there's some bad stuff in there. Unpolished, unfinished, whatever. I also changed the contact section to be an “about” section, which is a bit more useful. Did that require me changing literally every single page on the website because there's no way to transclude a header using HTML? Well obviously it did or else I wouldn't be asking the question. I also changed the highlight color. That's about it.
Now I have a pet peeve. Some of my professors insist on saying that we cannot email them during the weekend. Now this is understandable to some level, like I'm all for work-life balance. But I think if you're gonna use the argument that those aren't your working hours, you need to acknowledge that your students don't have working hours. Well actually, it's more accurate to say that they don't have break hours. All hours are working hours. Students are expected to work 24/7. There's a reason why students email during the weekends, because they have to work on the weekends.
There's this notion that because, many claim, being a student is a voluntary commitment, students don't deserve benefits. Firstly, saying it's voluntary is bullshit, because you need a job and to get a job, you need education — whether that's a bachelors, associates, masters, doctorate, trade certificate, or high school diploma. I guess you could work at McDonald's without education, but that usually doesn't give you enough to live on, ignoring the whole life (dis)satisfaction aspect. So you need a job. You need education. It's not a choice.
But it's true that you don't have to go to college, or that specific college, and because you knew that there were no protections going in, you have no right to complain because you signed up for it. Ignoring the fact that there is no alternative that offers standards of work, couldn't we say the same thing about any worker — and namely, professors? They signed up to be a professor, are they not entitled to any benefits? I mean you could argue that people wouldn't sign up to be a professor without benefits, but at least for some of them, that's not their motivation for entering the profession. Hell, people already sign up to be professors without good pay. The argument I'm making is that people deserve a high quality of life, and that requires work benefits. Just because people sign up to do something absent those benefits (again, ignoring the fact that there is no real alternative), doesn't mean that they don't deserve those benefits.
But is being a student a job like a professor? Can you really say that they should have defined and limited working hours? Maybe. I do think that it's not a bad thing that (college) students have non-standard working hours in that they can work and have free time to their liking. So I think non-regulation, at least no explicit limitations of working hours, has merits. But I know very few students who voluntarily work on the weekends. I wonder if there is a way to designate weekends as an extracurricular (meaning outside school, not regarding hobbies necessarily) time.
“But what if students want to work on the weekend?” says a stupid person. Just kidding, I asked that and I'm very smart. Well I answer with another question: “What if teachers want to work on the weekend?” How about another one: “What if children want to work in the mines?” I'm sure the vast majority of students would welcome protection against working on the weekends.
I think this protection would be a welcome start. Of course, implementation and enforceability are the big problems here. I think how this would be done, while keeping flexibility of hours, is instituting a 40 hour work-week.
Now, there's no rule against working more than 40 hours a week per se; there's a rule against providing overtime pay, which has to be at least 1.5 times regular pay. Students aren't paid. What shall we do?
Well, weekends are results of labor contracts, which are results of labor movements. I can imagine that a contract could be drafted limiting each teacher to a certain number of hours of homework possibly assigned. In one of my four classes, I go to class for three hours in a week. I can get up to seven hours of homework per week.
Again, enforceability of what constitutes an hour of work assigned is difficult and I can't quite answer that for you. I would assume that papers are easy — just have a formula with the word count. Other things are more complicated, and I'm not entirely sure how it could easily be implemented or checked. But there are also problems with enforcement in the workplace too, which relieves some of my concern. Not to say that the workplace is good for workers, but it's definitely more protected than school is for students.
I feel pretty lucky to have a decent school-life balance, but many students don't have that. I definitely didn't in high school — and that's where I think it's most egregious. Currently, students have on average a seven-hour school day. That sounds ok, but this doesn't include homework, which can range from one to four hours a night.
You know I had to do a bit of research for those figures and that made me think about my homework video I made five years ago. I feel icky about that video because I did cherry pick my evidence to fit a certain point. Through making scripts over the past half decade, I've learned that if no nuance is included, if a point is entirely uncompromising or simple, then it's a good reason to be suspicious.
I don't disagree with what I say in my homework video per se, but my thinking has adapted quite a bit. The homework problem is really only in a select group of people: students who excel at school, typically those who are more advanced over their peers. (Many of these people are more wealthy, and that's because it's easier to engage in learning when you're in a culture that incentivizes and prioritizes it, allowing you resources and support.) I think that this disincentivizes learning.
There are analysts who say that the homework problem is not real or not that big of a deal; people like Jay Matthews of the Washington Post don't engage with evidence that is against their view, and also don't recognize that more homework is not necessarily better. What I did get correct in my video is that there is a consensus that there is such a thing as too much homework. Especially after a seven hour day, which is average, students get burnt out having more than one hour of homework a night, which Matthews calls “puny” and incorrectly describes as the consensus average (there is no real consensus on how much homework is given, besides perhaps a wide range of a half hour to four hours a day). Matthews doesn't recognize any value in leisure time or child wellbeing, education is his only aim — this makes him a bad-faith actor. He also sticks to using ancient sources (like from 2003) instead of learning from recent scholarship that does indicate a trend towards more and more homework with each passing year.
In recent years, I think there's a stronger moral argument to be made against homework — students deserve to have school-life balance. Students deserve a reasonable workweek, just as regular workers do. I think also having unsupervised learning is often unproductive, and often engrains bad habits and incorrect information. I also think homework should be reserved for preparation time — review materials for class discussion or a test, for example. Though I do acknowledge that the purely educational/productive argument — that homework can be bad for productivity — may be more persuasive to people who don't care about student wellbeing.
I also regret citing the National Education Association, a teacher's union, as the basis for the Ten Minute Rule. The NEA has their own interests that prevent them from being an objective assessor of educational practices. I gave them more credence than they deserved. The problem is that there is a drought of real scholarship on homework, and although there are a few strong sources, there are not enough sources to conclude any real consensus.
I'm not citing any sources in this blog by the way because this is a register of my thoughts. If something doesn't cite sources, you need to investigate the subject further yourself before you change your opinion.
But I will keep the video up, not only because it has 36 thousand views, but also because I think that it reflects my thinking at a certain moment in time. I endorse a solution but the video was really supposed to make people think twice about the benefits of homework. And I think I succeeded.