I Didn 39;t Do My Homework Because Book
Tanesha Prately
Some 15% of U.S. households with school-age children do not have a high-speed internet connection at home, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of 2015 U.S. Census Bureau data. New survey findings from the Center also show that some teens are more likely to face digital hurdles when trying to complete their homework.
At its most extreme, the homework gap can mean that teens have trouble even finishing their homework. Overall, 17% of teens say they are often or sometimes unable to complete homework assignments because they do not have reliable access to a computer or internet connection.
This is even more common among black teens. One-quarter of black teens say they are at least sometimes unable to complete their homework due to a lack of digital access, including 13% who say this happens to them often. Just 4% of white teens and 6% of Hispanic teens say this often happens to them. (There were not enough Asian respondents in this survey sample to be broken out into a separate analysis.)
Teens also differ by income level when it comes to completing assignments: 24% of teens whose annual family income is less than $30,000 say the lack of a dependable computer or internet connection often or sometimes prohibits them from finishing their homework, but that share drops to 9% among teens who live in households earning $75,000 or more a year.
Other times, teens who lack reliable internet service at home say they seek out other locations to complete their schoolwork: 12% of teens say they at least sometimes use public Wi-Fi to complete assignments because they do not have an internet connection at home. Again, this problem is more prevalent for black or less affluent teens. Roughly one-in-five black teens (21%) report having to at least sometimes use public Wi-Fi for this reason, including 10% who say they often do so. And teens whose family income is below $30,000 a year are far more likely than those whose annual household income is $30,000 or higher to say that they do this (21% vs. 9%).
Lastly, 35% of teens say they often or sometimes have to do their homework on their cellphone. Although it is not uncommon for young people in all circumstances to complete assignments in this way, it is especially prevalent among lower-income teens. Indeed, 45% of teens who live in households earning less than $30,000 a year say they at least sometimes rely on their cellphone to finish their homework.
It used to be that students were the only ones complaining about the practice of assigning homework. For years, teachers and parents thought that homework was a necessary tool when educating children. But studies about the effectiveness of homework have been conflicting and inconclusive, leading some adults to argue that homework should become a thing of the past.
According to Duke professor Harris Cooper, it's important that students have homework. His meta-analysis of homework studies showed a correlation between completing homework and academic success, at least in older grades. He recommends following a "10 minute rule": students should receive 10 minutes of homework per day in first grade, and 10 additional minutes each subsequent year, so that by twelfth grade they are completing 120 minutes of homework daily.
But his analysis didn't prove that students did better because they did homework; it simply showed a correlation. This could simply mean that kids who do homework are more committed to doing well in school. Cooper also found that some research showed that homework caused physical and emotional stress, and created negative attitudes about learning. He suggested that more research needed to be done on homework's effect on kids.
Some researchers say that the question isn't whether kids should have homework. It's more about what kind of homework students have and how much. To be effective, homework has to meet students' needs. For example, some middle school teachers have found success with online math homework that's adapted to each student's level of understanding. But when middle school students were assigned more than an hour and a half of homework, their math and science test scores went down.
Researchers at Indiana University discovered that math and science homework may improve standardized test grades, but they found no difference in course grades between students who did homework and those who didn't. These researchers theorize that homework doesn't result in more content mastery, but in greater familiarity with the kinds of questions that appear on standardized tests. According to Professor Adam Maltese, one of the study's authors, "Our results hint that maybe homework is not being used as well as it could be."
In an article in Education Week Teacher, teacher Samantha Hulsman said she's frequently heard parents complain that a 30-minute homework assignment turns into a three-hour battle with their kids. Now, she's facing the same problem with her own kids, which has her rethinking her former beliefs about homework. "I think parents expect their children to have homework nightly, and teachers assign daily homework because it's what we've always done," she explained. Today, Hulsman said, it's more important to know how to collaborate and solve problems than it is to know specific facts.
Child psychologist Kenneth Barish wrote in Psychology Today that battles over homework rarely result in a child's improvement in school. Children who don't do their homework are not lazy, he said, but they may be frustrated, discouraged, or anxious. And for kids with learning disabilities, homework is like "running with a sprained ankle. It's doable, but painful."
Last year, the public schools in Marion County, Florida, decided on a no-homework policy for all of their elementary students. Instead, kids read nightly for 20 minutes. Superintendent Heidi Maier said the decision was based on Cooper's research showing that elementary students gain little from homework, but a lot from reading.
Orchard Elementary School in South Burlington, Vermont, followed the same path, substituting reading for homework. The homework policy has four parts: read nightly, go outside and play, have dinner with your family, and get a good night's sleep. Principal Mark Trifilio says that his staff and parents support the idea.
But while many elementary schools are considering no-homework policies, middle schools and high schools have been reluctant to abandon homework. Schools say parents support homework and teachers know it can be helpful when it is specific and follows certain guidelines. For example, practicing solving word problems can be helpful, but there's no reason to assign 50 problems when 10 will do. Recognizing that not all kids have the time, space, and home support to do homework is important, so it shouldn't be counted as part of a student's grade.
Should you ban homework in your classroom? If you teach lower grades, it's possible. If you teach middle or high school, probably not. But all teachers should think carefully about their homework policies. By limiting the amount of homework and improving the quality of assignments, you can improve learning outcomes for your students.
Now, as a native English speaker, I know that this is wrong. I'm even college educated and actually trained in ESL (which included grammar classes)... and yet, I have no idea WHY this is wrong. It SEEMS to fit the form our textbook was teaching ("I did my homework. I was tired." -> "I was tired to do my homework.") and yet I know it's wrong.
Out of all those sentences, the only one that actually made sense to me was "I was eager to help you", because it's just one of those common expressions. Similar to how "I was happy to help you" is a familiar phrase. But this doesn't mean that words such as sad and mad can not be used in the form "subject verb adjective infinitive phrase". For we can still say something such as
I believe that these sentences are all grammatically correct, but we only associate meanings with particular phrases. It may be possible that "I was tired to help you" and even the three sentences above all have legitimate meanings. However, I am not familiar with them because I have not heard these phrases used often.
Now in this case, being "too tired" has some common meaning associated to it. It means that I could not help you because I was tired at the time you required my assistance. We can add this word to our previous sentences to completely change their meaning
What does it mean "to be tired to help someone"? Can we replace tired with a synonym to get a similar sounding sentence that is more commonplace? Exhausted, weary, and fatigued don't seem to work either, or do they? Looking at the sentence, "I was happy to help you", I tried to decipher what it meant. It simply means that I wanted to help you because it gave me satisfaction. Could it be possible that "I was tired to help you" has a meaning that we are not fully aware of? I only asked this because users were arguing about the meaning of phrases with questionable adjectives like "I was annoyed to see her" and "I was mad to see her". It may very well have to do with why "I was not there to help you" works but "I was absent to help you" doesn't. All of the examples could be grammatically correct but we don't know what they all indicate.
The reason "I was too tired to do my homework." works is the to-infinitive indicates purpose (or result). In other words, the sentence means "In order to do my homework I was too tired and that's why I couldn't do it" or "I was very tired and as a result I couldn't do my homework."
"I was happy to (do my homework/see her/find $10 in the street)" is an idiom. The grammatical way to express the same idea is "I felt happy when I (did my homework/saw her/found a tenner in the street)"
"I felt tired when I (did my homework/saw her/found a tenner in the street)" is also grammatical, if not in the case of the tenner very sensible. But you can't back-patch to get the idiom because an idiom doesn't exist for "tired to" the way it does for "happy to".
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