Homework Tonight? You Bet!
There
will be times when your student comes home from school and tells you that they
do not have any homework that day. This is a misconception on their part that
arises from thinking of homework as something assigned by a teacher that must
be written or read. In actuality, any day that your student is in school there
will be homework...
The
Misconception
There will be times when your student comes home from school and tells you that
they do not have any homework that day. This is a misconception on their part
that arises from thinking of homework as something assigned by a teacher that
must be written or read. In actuality, any day that your student is in school
there will be homework.
Here at Holy Cross High School we normally require our students to spend at least two (2) hours each day on homework. Allow me to offer you an explanation for why we recommend this time and why we say that every day in school will result in homework for the student.
Short Term
vs. Long Term Memory
Simply put, we all have two kinds of memory in our brain. We have a Short Term
memory and a Long Term memory. Short Term memory is called such because we only
retain anything in Short Term memory for a brief duration. In order to move
information into Long Term memory we must do something with it. Repetition is
important if we are to move information into Long Term memory. Let me give you
an example. Say we are in school together and we become friends and I give you
my telephone number to call me in the evening so we can talk about class that
day or maybe our homework. When you decide to call me later in the evening, you
will have to look at my telephone number that I wrote down for you. If my phone
is busy and you decide to call later, you are going to have to look at my
number on the piece of paper again before you dial me. That is because the
information (my telephone number) was in Short Term memory and our brain does
not like to clutter up memory with information that isn’t important. If you
then call me every evening, after a few days you will not need to have that
piece of paper with my telephone number on it since you will have moved my
number to Long Term memory and can recall it from there. The same holds true
for information learned in class. Even if the student understands everything
that the teacher said that day in class, that information is placed in Short
Term memory and if it isn’t repeated or looked at again, it will be erased from
Short Term memory. Then when it’s time for a test, the student is going to have
to relearn all the information that was presented in class. Trying to learn an
entire week’s worth of information in one night will be nearly impossible, and
the student’s grade will reflect this. By reviewing what was covered in class
each day, the student helps move the information into Long Term memory so that
rather than having to relearn all the material the student will simply have to
review the material and the grades should be higher. Thus, any day that a
student is in class means that the student has homework.
Improvements
in Test Scores
Learning to study and review each day and moving what the student learns into
Long Term memory also helps to increase scores on standardized tests like the
Terra Nova, PSAT, and SAT tests. These tests examine Long Term memory and, as
mentioned above, reviewing and repeating what was learned in class places what
was learned into Long Term memory. Many times we in the Guidance Department
hear about how a student with a very high GPA usually scores low on
standardized tests. This is not because the student can’t take tests. He or she
took tests to establish a high GPA. The problem is that the student is
operating on Short Term memory throughout high school and cramming before tests
and doing well on them, but not studying effectively to place the learned
material into Long Term memory, which the standardized tests examine.
Here is an example of a good homework/study program:
Monday – Review the notes given in class that day.
Tuesday – Review the notes from Monday and the notes taken on Tuesday
Wednesday – Review the notes from Monday, Tuesday and those taken on Wednesday
Thursday – If I can repeat the notes from Monday just by looking at the key words, I have moved that information into Long Term memory and no longer have to review them for homework. I would then review the notes from Tuesday, Wednesday and those taken on Thursday.
This procedure is repeated each day for every class. As the information is placed into Long Term memory, preparing for a subject test becomes a review; not a cramming session trying to relearn all the subject material.
So, the next time you hear “I don’t have any homework tonight,” or “I did my homework in study,” you’ll know it was not true since a review of the material in each class that day is part of homework and a forty-five minute study is not enough time to complete all the homework each day.
written by John Lukasik,
Guidance Counselor, Holy Cross HS
posted 12/17/09