Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Homework

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why homework is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5Get tickets to see us LIVE at the London Podcast Festival this September: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/comedy/secretly-incredibly-fascinating/

Folks, as you know, we're doing a live episode of this podcast in London, and I can announce our special guest. Me and Katie are joined by legendary comedian and writer and passive guest Robin Ince. Please see me and Katie and Robin Ince at the London Podcast Festival. Tickets are linked in the description. See you there. Homework. Known for being graded.

Famous for being from teachers. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why homework is... secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie! Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of homework? Boo, down with homework, man.

Stupid stuff that only nerds do, am I right? Up top. Before we started rolling, Katie did tell me to eat her shorts and said cowabunga a lot. Right, man. I was very surprised by this rude behavior. Don't have a bovine, Alex.

Don't you have one? Is that an impression of Bart Simpson, but also it's you who knows a lot about biology and animals? I'm Bart Simpson. Skateboards. Cutting class. I was a good student. I always did my homework.

It makes sense to a certain extent. I think it makes sense to have homework to prolong the learning for kids to be able to sit down with concepts and stuff. I think there is a point at which the amount of homework becomes excessive and kids also need like unstructured time. And it's good to have involvement from the parents if they have time. But when it becomes too much, right, then I think that it's also making it sort of the difference in the ability of kids to succeed becomes like the gap between say a kid who has parents who have time, right, to like help them versus

parents who are working too much or have to work more. Those kinds of disparities become worse. So I think that there's a justification for some amount of homework, but I think that it can become excessive where it's like, we just don't have the funding or the time to cover all these concepts in class. So we're going to put it all at home, but then that is really bad for like disadvantaged students. So yeah, that's, that's my feeling.

Yeah. And I agree. And folks who especially maybe don't have kids or haven't been in school in a while might be surprised how charged of a topic this is. It turns out when you research it, absolutely everyone is pretty passionate about it if not angry. There's a lot to it. So it's wild. There's got to be some kind of balance, right, where we allow kids to have time to relax

or time to learn on their own. But also, I have also seen this concept of, say, like unschooling, which is different from like homeschooling. I do not have a problem necessarily with homeschooling, depending on how it's done. But like, there's an idea of like, hey, what if you just don't teach your kids and then they just learn everything by osmosis? And that I think is not good. So that, good. So you see like, well, kids aren't really meant to be in a class and to be given homework. And it's like, well, they're also not meant to wear glasses and underpants, but we still make sure they do those things. The point is like, there's no natural, none of society is natural at this point. So it's weird to pick and choose things unless you have a really good sort of science-based

justification for it. Yeah. Nothing is quote unquote natural. And homework is kind of social engineering, but in maybe a good way. Yeah, to a certain extent. I'm really glad people pick this topic because everyone's heard of it and there's a lot more to it. Thank you to Mav on the Discord, also Mo and Arcblade for supporting.

A really cool topic for the show. Kids listen up. On every episode our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. And this week that's in a segment called, I think those stats are numbers right to the core from all the sums that are passed down from all the numbers before but but but but I split the numbers down symmetrical lines and what I find is kind of statsy makes me just want to drive wow that was good thank you the end was right in that cracking almost falsetto zone but, but it's okay. We're fine. No, no, we're good.

And you did it all in one breath. So that's really what counts. Thank you. I was dancing to, let's say, they don't know. They have no idea. Let's say it was a really cool dance. I didn't know elbows could do that, but I guess they can. You know, in like movies or TV shows like Emily in Paris, when they just look at

their phone and say something's gone viral. Right. Yeah, this just went viral. Whoa. It's just gone viral. It's Emily in Paris, Alex. That does make the title make more sense. Yeah, because it rhymes.

But yeah, and these first numbers fit in with, I think, my main childhood opinion of homework, which is that it could be kind of stressful. Because the first number is January 2019. That's not too long ago. 2019. Oh, wait, that was right before the panino. Yeah, that's unrelated. 2019 is when a 911 dispatcher, the emergency number in the United States, got a call from

a student who felt overwhelmed by their math homework. Oh, poor baby. That's true. Oh, no. And according to NBC News, dispatcher Antonia Bundy of the Lafayette, Indiana police department did not have another 911 call waiting. And so she was able to help the child with their math problem. And then they said they felt better and the child apologized and said, quote, I'm sorry for calling you, but I really needed help.

Oh, this poor baby. How old was this kid? It's not clear from NBC News, and I think it's partly for like the anonymity of a kid. That makes sense. But definitely young. It was some kind of math problem involving fractions. So a young kid. Oh, no fractions.

I'd call 911 too. Oh, baby. Yeah, and they also made the call from a cell phone that is built for young kids and is only designed to call 911. It has no other functions. So it's partly the system, you know?

I find that adorable and sad. I feel like that means that we do need like an emergency homework hotline, right? Like of trained responders who are there to help with homework. Like, why not? That would be nice, actually. Right? Sure. Right? Why not? You can basically teach kids the skills to call 911 without calling 911. Right. Because they'll learn it from dialing whatever number we give.

The homework hotline. Right. Exactly. Exactly. That would be really good. That kind of reminds me of a related story. And in Italy, during the panino, there was a because, guys, panini is just plural panino. I don't know if you know Italian, but during the pandemic there was a- I sincerely did not know that, that's great.

There was this old lady who called the police because she didn't know, like this was, it was kind of serious cause like she didn't know like how to go out to get food, right? Cause there were all these restrictions, all this lockdown. She's like, I don't have any food. I don't know if I'm allowed to go out. And this will be the only cute carabinieri story you ever hear in your life.

But they did go to her house and cook her spaghetti. Oh, my gosh. Most of the time you hear a carabinieri story. It's not cute. It's kind of scary. But this time was pretty cute. I think it was also like a really tiny town. So. Right.

It's like a wonderful children's fable. It's like a like a strega carabinieri. Like thank you, strega carabinieri. For the pasta. Yeah, strega nona. But yeah, I have nothing but empathy for this child who called the police or called 911 for help with the homework. I know how stressful homework can be.

It is a little unfair, right? Like if you're a kid and say, if your parents, you know, maybe even not through your, any fault of your parents, but like they have to work too much or they're, you know, and they can't really help or they don't know how to help or something like, then who do you call? Right? And where do you get that help? Yeah. And especially later in the show, we'll get into the systemic things that people are thinking about homework because it is a thing. And the next number here is a whole other issue with the practice. The number is two days. That is how long an entire Virginia school district closed down after one teacher assigned one piece of homework about Islam and there was a community freakout. Oh my God.

One worksheet about the basics of understanding Islam within a unit about world religions. Okay. Well, all right, guys. Because it's a popular religion. Millions and millions and millions of people who follow Islam. If you're doing a course on world religion and you're like, and then there's a million people that do this, another religion, but we're not going to talk about that. Like, what?

Excuse me. Right. Yeah. And according to Palisade editor, Libby Nelson of Vox.com, this was also a high school class, high school geography. Oh, for God's sakes, guys, calm the hell down, right? Right. Like, they're grownups, almost.

Yeah, they're grownups. Also, like, kids can learn about other religions. It's not going to hurt them. If you have, like, activities in your hurt them. If you have like activities in your school or you're making like Christmas ornaments or something, I think you can teach kids about the existence of other religions without their brains like exploding. I think it's okay. Yeah. And like the specific elements of the worksheet apparently are how a few parents

and then the local newspaper blew this out of proportion. Oh dear. You know, one element of just Islam as a concept is the five pillars of Islam. They're just five important tenets. One of them is the Shahadah, which is the statement that there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah. And the worksheet had students copy that down, partly to learn it and partly to learn how difficult it is to do Arabic calligraphy text. But apparently some families took that to mean,

my students are like being conditioned or forced to do an Islamic prayer and Sharia law is upon us and so on. Yeah, man, I wish people would just calm down a little bit. You know what I mean? Imagine if there was a homework assignment where it was like, hey, here's a word problem about eating burgers. And then a vegetarian parent was like, how dare you give this to my child? People would be like, wow, look at how sensitive vegetarians are. Right. But then when it's anything where it's like, oh, how dare you teach them about the existence

of other religions? It's like, guys, come on, it's okay. Yeah. You know, I just love the idea that it's like a Bart Simpson at the chalkboard. Like I will practice Islam. I will practice Islam. This is what they are imagining is happening in schools. Oh no, it's on TV now.

Oh no, oh no. The media is doing it now. Yeah, and this was in school district in Augusta County, Virginia. They received a wave of calls and emails, including some threats. So they shut down school for December 17th and 18th and canceled events the following weekend as well. In order to protect our children, we are going to threaten the school. Right. I am extremely smart and caring about children.

Exactly. And I find this story revelatory about homework because I think it's a perfect example of homework being one way that some parents understand the entire school system that their kid is in. Like it's an element of the school that is brought home. And so parents saw the worksheet and extrapolated that like the high school was some kind of mosque and they needed to freak out. Not that you need to freak out if there's a mosque in your area, it's just that on the cursive episode,

we talked about common core standards and some other things angering parents. And it seems like most of the reason is that a piece of homework came home that the parents either couldn't do or didn't understand or was worried about. And the homework becomes a presumed tip of the iceberg of something. The next number here is a whole nother element of homework.

The number is 51%. 51%. It's a fraction. I know that. Oh no, I'm calling the hotline. Beep boop boop, 911. Someone just did a four action at me. And 51% is one survey's finding for how many teachers use chat GPT to help them plan lessons.

Okay, interesting. This is an interesting finding because there's a Walton Family Foundation survey. interesting finding because there's a Walton Family Foundation survey. They found that the kids they talked to ages 12 to 17, those teenagers, 33%, have used chat GPT to help them do a homework assignment. Either aid them or just fully do the entire assignment. And ever since AI models have started to become more of a thing, there's been think pieces and worries about, oh, are kids just going to use that to knock out their homework? Whether that's going out or not, the same survey found a higher percentage of the teachers using chat GPT to help plan a lesson or even plausibly plan the whole thing. And so we have just, we have just armed the, the most contrarian student ever to go to class and be like, oh, you're

upset at me for using chat GPT? Well, listen to this, teach. Yeah. Wow. Don't be weird again, folks. Yet again, this is my refrain. But in general, as a society, we're figuring out whether chat GPT type stuff is a helpful tool like a calculator or stopping students from learning or in between.

Homework is kind of the main place where this gets debated because you bring it home and you can do it however you want privately at home. You're not like sitting at a desk in a test situation. So homework is probably where we'll litigate it, figure it out. There is an argument to be made for like, once our technology improves, it can reduce the amount of like work that one needs to do, say busy work or something.

I'm not, not to say that arithmetic is necessarily busy work only and that it's not a good thing to learn, but with chat GPT, I think that the whole element of using it to replace, say, like thinking up ideas and like being able to write and communicate those ideas is concerning for me because that seems, those seem like pretty important skills to be able to do on your own and to like struggle through it and learn that process. Yeah, I think that makes sense. That is also

probably gonna influence all in-classroom activities because that might be the space where a teacher can like block or box out AI and be like okay I'm looking at you I can see whether you're using that or not and yes you need to prove that you did enough learning to be able to do stuff without it or they might say this is all around us why act like it's not? Let's see what you can do with it. Like whole sessions of just we sit at a desk and do work is maybe the next thing. And sort of related to that, the next number is 25%. Another fraction.

Yeah, an easier one. I don't need the hotline this time. That reduces to one out of four. I just have emergency services on Hot Dial now because there are so many infractions in this episode. The service team is a bunch of math teachers and then one guy with the paddles to electrocute you, just because.

I don't know what that's for in this context. What? That's for an infarction. There we go. Fractions, infarctions, fractions. Okay, got it, got it. Great. Right, right, different.

So 25% in a recent survey, 25% of lower income US kids had difficulty completing homework because they could not access a computer when they needed to. Yeah, yeah. I didn't mention that earlier, but yeah, that's another sort of like issue, I guess, with homework is that if you do not have the same resources as other students, it is made more difficult for you. Pretty solid survey sources. Pew Research in 2021, Pretty solid survey sources. Pew Research in 2021, the number for high-income kids was 2%. Had some situation where the computer was occupied or unavailable and that prevented them from doing homework. And there were some advocates of homework reform who say that it's basically the most unequal component of education.

Right. Yeah, that makes sense. When the class are all sitting in the same classroom, they're in the same situation. And then when they go home, it might be loud or under-resourced or there might not be dinner where at school they had a subsidized lunch or a free breakfast. You know, like, like, homework is in some ways the most unequal part of education. The flip side is maybe a kid can outwork other kids in a homework context. They can put more hours into it.

So it's difficult to gauge whether it's good or bad. Counterpoint, maybe kids should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and become the CEO of a homework company. There we go. Right? Right. The solution to all social problems is that everyone starts a business. Somehow no one is an employee in that plan either.

Just everyone starts a business and there's magically employees. Right. We all need to quit our jobs and start our own business. And if everyone has their own business, we all win. That's right. Everyone will manage 1,000 people and no one is one of the people being managed somehow. I don't get it. Somehow.

But it's fine. Yes. Fractions. And there's apparently been more attention to the idea that homework happens in an unequal situation ever since the panini, the panino. there's apparently been more attention to the idea that homework happens in an unequal situation ever since the panini, the panino, because everyone was at home all the time and schools said, oh, right, I'm noticing that the homes are different. And so districts in Sacramento, Los Angeles, San Diego, also Clark County, Nevada, that's a few examples of districts that reduced

or eliminated some types of homework since the pandemic started. And that might be more of a trend. Interesting. Yeah. As long as the learning that would have been managed by the homework is then replaced with something, right? You know, like more in-classroom instruction or something so that there can be more work done at school and more teaching and learning and one-on-one, right? More teachers per student, that kind of thing. And that would make it easier to reduce the burden of homework versus if we just don't do homework at all, but then we're not replacing it with more learning. That's the perfect question.

This episode will often stay very high level and broad over huge areas because one tricky thing about homework is that it varies at every level from the entire country to teacher to teacher. The approach to homework varies as you walk past each door in a hallway in a school. And so it's very hard to define like, what is classwork? What is homework? What is in between? And that's amazing. It's a really varied thing. The next number here is three pounds, which is over 1.3 kilograms, three pounds. That is the legal weight limit for student backpacks in grades one and two in the country

of India. What does that, so like that is the amount of homework you can give them or the amount of books you're required that they carry? It's kind of both. Yeah. Folks have noticed for decades in India and in other countries where kids' backpacks just get heavier and heavier as there's more homework and more books to carry. The American Academy of Pediatrics says the weight of a school bag shouldn't be more than 20% of a

child's weight and ideally closer to 10% or lower. But in 2016, a trade association in India surveyed students ages 7 to 13, and they're not a research facility or whatever, but this trade survey found that 88% of the kids were carrying backpacks that weighed nearly half their body weight. Nearly half their body weight in a bag on their back or in their arms. Well then why don't these students just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and start a company that creates homework carrying robots? Yeah and if anything the heavy bags making them stronger you know they can pull a boot strap a lot more. They can like power lift, deadlift a bootstrap you know in a

little singlet. This is the jock nerd singularity where jocks be like nerds become jocks. So it's like what? You don't want to do homework? Nerd. I can carry all my books. Nerd. I'm taking AP calculus just for the sick gains on the lifts, nerd.

Right. It's amazing for my traps on what is calculus. I have no idea. I've just been carrying it around. Yeah, and so according to NPR's goats and soda blog, which is an amazing section about the world and its systems. Yeah, no goats and soda. I understand. Yeah. You already said what it is, Alex. I mean, more goats and soda. Just makes a lot of sense.

India's government has been mulling a legal national limit on book bag weights going back to the 1980s. And especially because of the way many Indian schools are set up, there are often not lockers for kids. So that just means they carry everything all the time. Right. It's just like backbreaking books on these little kids. Right.

It's just a lot. A lot of US kids put it in a locker and that changes things for a part of your day. In 2017, the large state of Maharashtra, which contains cities like Mumbai, they tried a percentage limit of 10% of the child's weight for bag weights. And that paved the way for a 2019 national law setting a three pound limit for first and second grade bags. Then 6.6 pound limit for third and fourth grade keeps going up all the way to an 11 pound limit. Linearly, right? So by the time you're in like 12th grade, you're carrying like 200

pounds of books. Every textbook you've ever used, you can't get rid of any of them. You just keep Katamari Dhammasi-ing all your school history. By the time you're 50, you're carrying a small city block of books on your back. But yeah, this was mainly an attempt to improve the musculoskeletal situation of growing humans. Seems important. But it's baked into limiting a homework overload too. You don't want kids to be just physically lugging too much homework all of the time. And that's not just a problem in India. We have one last set of numbers before the takeaways

starting with November 2016. That is when tens of thousands of families in Spain organized a strike against weekend homework. Interesting. Interesting. I've heard things where like kids get a lot of homework, say, during vacations or during weekends, and it does make me wonder, well, what if you want to do stuff as a family, right? That's what they wondered. Yeah. It's very difficult. Makes sense. And it turns out that there is a very, very organized national system of parents' associations for Spanish public schools.

Whoa, really interesting. So not just like little PTAs, little feckless PTAs. Truly. There is an acronym CEAPA, Confederación Española de Asociaciones de Padres y Madres de Alumnado. CEAPA represents parents groups across about 12,000 Spanish public school systems and even more schools. So it's like just the parent side of a PTA and nationally organized. Interesting.

Which is really cool for this specific thing. Did they have sort of a thing like, hey, you got to stop giving homework on the weekends because we need to spend time with our kids? What was the complaint? Yeah, it was stress on kids and secondarily that they're not getting to live and be young. Apparently the key information they used was a World Health Organization study that found that lots of kids in the world feel pressured by schoolwork. That was the survey question, are you pressured by schoolwork? In the US, it was about 56% of students felt that way, but they found higher numbers in Spain, a little over 60% of 15-year-olds and also about a third of

11-year-olds felt pressured by schoolwork. That seems pretty young. Right. It's a lot of kids and young. And so November 2016, the many, many CEAPA families declared that they were going on strike against homework assignments for the weekends in November. They said that if teachers assigned anything, the parents would just send their kids back to school

with a note saying why they didn't do it, and it's part of the strike. And I couldn't find objective numbers about participation. The organization says about half of families participated. Well. Also, some teachers were supportive and did not assign a week on homework. And other teachers said that they felt targeted by this strike and felt like it was just picking

on their homework and instruction rather than broader systemic issues in Spanish education. Yeah, I could see that being a problem. If you're a teacher trying to meet requirements and the only way for you to do that is through a lot of homework. But yeah, I guess I don't know the situation well enough, right? Like I do have a lot of sympathy for teachers, especially when they're working in an underfunded system and they don't, you know, they're doing their best. And that systemic stuff leads us into take away number one. It is difficult to measure the impact of homework or define what homework is.

I mean, I would, the definition seems like work that you do. Wait for it at home. There we go. And that's been murky with pandemic school, of course, but the gist here is that there's a lot of research on education, but it has all sorts of different findings about whether homework is helpful, whether it's stressful. And also, a lot of activities that get assigned as homework could also be something that started in class or could just be adapted into classwork. And it's like a little tricky to define tasks as being homework other than you brought it home. Like how much of that is just an increase in the hours of education and how much of that is different? Yeah. I've heard this complaint from Italian parents where they feel like sometimes teachers are just kind of giving a lot of homework to almost just keep kids sort of

busy. I don't know how true that is, right? Like, I don't know what the situation is exactly. How much of it is sort of philosophical of like how much time should kids be doing work versus just having free time? Yeah, and it's tricky with parents too because They I think often feel like they are an expert on schools because they went to school And that is both true and not true. Like I know more about how schools work than most other institutions in society Like, I know more about how schools work than most other institutions in society. Right. Like, I haven't been a doctor or a fireman or whatever, but at the same time, I'm not an expert.

I'm not trained in any of this, you know? Yeah. Yeah, there's like a lot of work that goes into teaching kids. They're not just like babysitting your kids for, what is it, six hours a day, and then giving them homework and then sending them home, right? It is, there is a lot involved. Yeah, and they've thought it through and you only know parts of it.

And so, yeah, this is a very, like we said at the top, charged topic for a lot of people. Yeah, I mean, it seems like it would be good to come from the position that both parties are coming in from good faith, right? Teachers aren't trying to like indoctrinate your kids, right? Boo, reasonable. Boo, stop it.

And parents in general love their kids and want what's best for them. So it would be good to, you know, do that. Yeah. With our podcast, I like to bring in as much research as we possibly can. And homework is so surprisingly difficult to research. My favorite example is vox.com points out that you find different responses from educational researchers about how much research we have done about homework. Like they don't even agree if we're researching this a lot or not.

I see. So we need more research on how much research we have actually researched on homework. Yes. Cool. It does not sound complicated at all. They quote Professor Kathleen Budge at Boise State University who told Vox that homework quote has been greatly researched. And then they talked to Denise Pope, who's a Stanford lecturer and

an education nonprofit leader who says, quote, it's not a highly researched area because of some of the methodological problems. Yeah. And they're kind of both right, it seems like, because it's very hard to get a control group of students when you have to educate them. You can't just over homework them or un-homework them to see what happens. It sounds like the disagreement is there could be a lot of research done, but is that research good? So you could have a research thing where students are surveyed about whether homework is helpful or not. And then you conclude from that, well, they all said boo, so homework must not be helping them.

So, you know, I mean, that's not that it's probably not that there's methodological problems are things like sample size, having controls or not having controls. And it is difficult, right? Because you can't just do whatever you whatever like whatever like wacky, like we will put kids in a windowless cube for a year and then eliminate other confounds. They cannot contact their family so we can see the impact of homework.

That's, it is tough. And then they come out like weird bat people because they haven't seen the sun. Like, well, this was worth it. Homework turns children into bat boys. Right. Yeah, and even the most basic questions because of methodological problems or the difficulties of students tracking themselves,

it's just hard to get basic answers. Right. For one thing, we don't know how much time students spend doing homework in general. There's a reputable Pew Research survey from 2019 that found teens do a lot more homework now. Another survey from the OECD, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, they found US students have been doing less homework from 2003 to 2012. Either could be true in various parts

of the US. It's messy. We don't know. Right. Yeah. I mean, okay. It also seems like the school system, especially in the US, is not very even, right? It is not like a very standard school system because there are some schools that have a lot more resources, schools that have less resources. There's private schools, there's public schools, there's the charter schools. But the good news is a wise man implemented something called No Child Left Behind. And since then, no child has been left behind. And the way we do that is we take funding away from schools

when their test scores drop. I have noticed whenever I check my six, you know, look behind me, no kids is great. No kids? I'm not being followed by kids like before. Right. When I like, I think I've dropped something and I look behind me, it's usually

like a penny or something. It's never a child. It's not an entire child. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, I feel like I forgot something on this vacation. Oh, it was toothpaste. I'm not like, oh no, it's a child. And that folks is the plot to Home Alone. George W. Bush prevented a Home Alone 4 with yet another kid. Yeah. Cool. George W. Bush watched Home Alone. He's like, well, this isn't right. Can't have this.

I mean, in his defense, I've seen Home Alone 3. Terrible. We didn't need a fourth one. Come on. Was that even a Macaulay Culkin? No, it's a different kid. That's the big problem. Oh, well then you can't.

Exactly. Come on. It was the Macaulay Culkin magic. George L.B. Bush was right, like we always say. So yeah, there's also a lot of research on how much homework students should do. And that somewhat has a few findings that seem pretty consistent. There's one principle that a lot of US schools do called the 10-minute

rule, where you start with 10 minutes of homework per night, lowest grade, and then increase that by 10 minutes each year with benefits from every increase is the idea. And you do that linearly. So by the time you're 50, you're doing 200 hours of homework every day. Right. Big, long beard, all the books you've ever had. Yeah, yeah. All genders, big beard. Right.

Big beard. That's what happens. Like the effects of books, if you carry them a lot, you just grow a big long white beard. Doesn't matter who you are. That's the way it works. Yeah. That's how it works. And then there's another principle from, this was a big Spanish university study.

They say that 60 to 70 minutes per night is the best amount across most older grades. And they also found that the performance starts to decline once you approach around 100 minutes. Like then you're just wearing yourself out and too tired to succeed. Yeah, that makes sense. Kids got to have some relaxation time with Bluey and stuff. I don't know what our high schoolers into these days. Is it Bluey? You carry all the books you've ever had and you watch all the shows you've ever watched.

So still bluey. Yeah. And yeah, and I don't wanna paraphrase all of educational research too much, but there's varied findings about homework for young children. Giving kindergartners homework seems to be not the plan, but once kids are starting to get into second grade, third grade, do we start giving them homework? And again, I'm paraphrasing a lot

of studies that have ever happened. The one general agreement seems to be that older grades see some benefit from some homework. I see. Even then, what time of day do you do it? What kind of homework is it? There's all sorts of different ways Well, the more time spent doing homework the less time they're out there grinding on their skateboards Yeah, that's with that thing of they'll be out all night Some parts of the world's kind of schedule their day different ways. And apparently part of that homework strike in Spain related to Spanish people typically having dinner really late at night. They really do. They start at like 9 p.m. earliest, guys. It is wild.

Yeah. And yeah, and so like for the principles of say, should a high school student be doing homework after dinner and for how long in the US, that's one kind of question. And in Spain, if you start doing your homework one second after dinner ended, you might be doing homework at like midnight, right? And so it's very like it's the same human bodies and a very different question. And it's just so hard to study this thing. It's fascinating how murky it is. Yeah, different cultures, different family styles, even like down really granular, like different kids might benefit from certain styles or certain amounts or lack of homework.

But it's really hard to implement a system that works for everybody. And yet you kind of have to figure out a way where you do accommodate as many kids as you can because you do need some kind of standardized system of schooling to make sure that, you know, kids all get the same opportunities for education. Yeah. And that goes back to us not being able to have a control group of weird bat children who we tested. Which I think is wrong. Why can't we have a weird control group of bat children?

No joke. We are going to take a quick break, but then we're going to come back with a takeaway about one country that has become the most looked at and curious example of a different approach to homework in the whole world. They kind of did the experiment. Transylvania? Uh, no. No. Have you been looking for a new podcast all about nerdy pop culture? Well, I have just the thing for you.

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That's cool too. Subscribe to TV Chef Fantasy League on MaximumFun.org or wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back and we're back with takeaway number two. The world's educators and governments are fascinated by homework in Finland. The country of Finland. Finland, so dolphin children. We're just going to doctor Moreau this somehow. We will turn children into animal hybrids. We will do it.

With all of the powers of a dolphin and all the capacity to learn and grow of a child. That actually sounds like a very powerful being. I'm pretty into it. Yes. It actually just kind of sounds like a dolphin. Like a straight up dolphin. What if a dolphin could communicate and was good at jumping? Well, that's... What if a dolphin loved fish and horsing around.

So yeah, in the last few decades, Finland has become a fixation of all kinds of education and homework reform movements. Everyone wants to know what Finland's secret is. What is Finland? Well, don't leave me hanging. What is Finland's secret? What are they hiding? What are those jerks hiding from us?

It's fun because we still don't totally know. We just have like several theories. And this also could be kind of a statistical blip because most of it is based on the results of one kind of standardized test. Who's the best at being a Finnish child? Legitimately, that could be a flaw. Hmm. Who's the best at being a Finnish child? Legitimately, that could be a flaw. Like people are curious if the test is too tilted toward Finnish culture. Sort of the way that like an American SAT might be too white, you know?

Like that might be the thing. But it also, it also could be good Finnish education principles. I see. Impossible to know. Kind of, but yeah, the key sources here include a Washington Post piece by education reporter Valerie Strauss and a BBC News piece by education correspondent Sean Coughlin. And starting in the early 2000s, Finland has been impressing the world. Everybody's been like, what's Finland got that is amazing? has been impressing the world. Everybody's been like, what's Finland got that is amazing? What do they have that we don't have? There's this organization, the OECD, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. They've been running a standardized test called the PISA

that they do in a bunch of countries to try to get like a sense of which national systems work well. to get like a sense of which national systems work well. Finland has been perceived to be kind of breaking the model because they assign a low amount of homework compared to the rest of the world and get very high scores compared to the rest of the world. Cheating. That's how they do it. Juicing. They're juicing their kids.

It would be great if it's some kind of Finnish scam. I really don't see the Finnish as scammers, but that would be thrilling if this is how we find out. That's the best kind of scammer, right? That's true. They got me. They're looking at the Bellagio fountain while I wonder where my test scores are. Yeah, in Finland schools there's a lengthy summer break of 10 weeks or more. And when they are in school, students get nothing but creative tasks until the age of seven, and then limited amounts of homework compared to the rest of the world, especially in earlier grades. Interesting.

They have done very well on these tests. There's also a few countries that assign a lot of homework, in particular Hong Kong taken on its own, even though it's part of China, that also saw high scores, but from high homework. And then several countries, including the United States and Canada have seen an overall negative relationship between increased homework time and test scores on this test. Interesting. Like when they increased the homework time, the scores went down a little bit. I guess the problem with that is there could be an increase in homework time if you have

less resources for the school to be completing these objectives in school. So then sure, your test scores are lower, but it could also just be because the school has less funding or is in a poorer area. Yes. And Finland, for one thing, this effect has been mischaracterized as a myth on a lot of the internet, claiming that Finland has no homework. But that's not true. There's homework in Finland. But one big possible reason for this might be that Finland's schools are very well

funded. Right. And so they just get a lot done with long and well resourced classroom time. And so then there's not that much homework. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it'd be interesting to see, because like if you have, if you could somehow control for these kinds of differences, right? Like you have a school that is, it's the same school, same funding, and they just do a trial of doing more or less homework. But yeah, it's hard to do human trials on children. Yeah, it really hurts.

Stupid morals and ethics. And that's part of why people are obsessed with Finland is that at a national scale, countries do different things from each other. And so we're like, is this the closest we can get to the Bat Boy Dolphin Boy experiment is the different education system. But yeah, I mean, again, it's a problem because Finland is not going to be the same as a Midwest town in the US, both in terms of culture, in terms of funding, et cetera. Right. Yeah. And that's why there's so many confounding reasons. We don't know

if there's anything here. This could be a OECD test that is tilted towards something about Finnish culture. We also could be getting inaccurate reports of time spent on homework, because again, it's hard to measure that. We have conflicting information just about the US, about homework time, many other countries. But there also could be like solid Finnish principles that other countries could imitate. One could be an early focus on creativity in educational training. Rather than specific subjects or rote learning, apparently until the age of seven, they do nothing but creativity and play and social things in preschool and the earliest grades. And maybe that's a springboard to like effective learning

in all subjects for the rest of life. They only do creativity in school period or that they only get like creative homework? There's not really homework and the school day is all like creative stuff, play, art, and being social with other kids. I guess it also depends on what you consider to be creative, right? Because for a lot of people, like math is creative. There is a bit of an arbitrary distinction between what is creative. Art could be creative, but learning geometry could also be creative. Do you know exactly how they define creativity?

No, and that's yet another big hole in our homework research. Yeah, exactly what you said. Math is so creative and interesting, but a lot of us coordinate off as some kind of stem thing that's totally different from, let's say, music, even though most of music is math. It's all ratios of chords and pitches. So yeah. And like if you're practicing an instrument at home, is that homework or is that extracurricular? Or does it matter whether you have a music class that it's related to? Like all of this stuff is poorly measured, partly because it's a nebulous concept. Like there's just a lot of different things going on at once.

Like having this distinction between like fun creative work and like, okay, now we've got to do the boring stuff. You know, is it serious? I mean, a lot of biology is looking at weird little blobs bumping into each other. That's kind of, that's kind of silly. It's fun. Yeah. And then you walk into music class

and it's the movie Whiplash, just total torture. And then biology, look at the boop-ba-doop-ba-doo. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it seems like there is, but there is definitely something to like making sure that kids are not seeing learning as this awful chore, but something like fun and

interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And that's another possible positive reason Finland is winning here is that teachers might be facilitating that more than other countries because apparently teaching is a relatively high status profession in Finland and with competitive pay. And so maybe it's just luring more effective adults than other teaching professions in other countries. And then that teacher can add magic that we're not measuring. It could also be like if they're being paid more and they have a higher quality of life, they could have more energy and be more effective, right? Like you could have someone, could have like two teachers, both equally talented.

And if one is like barely earning enough to like make a living and they're stressing out and they're trying to like buy supplies for their school kids because they're not being provided that by the school versus a teacher who is getting, you know, being able to afford a nice vacation every so often, has a pretty nice quality of life, doesn't have to like take money out of their own pocket to like

pay for kids supplies. Like they're going to have very different experiences with teaching. In addition to like if they have a lot more funding, right? Like being able to give individualized attention without burning out. Yeah. Yeah, that's all dead on. And the other possible reason here is the student side of that. Like Finland is hugely committed to supporting child care and caring and feeding children

as human beings. Their government subsidizes- Sounds a little bit like a nanny state. Oh, you're a little baby. You want to be fed milk by your nanny state? Yes, I am a literal baby. I am an infant and I do need milk. And my parents are at work.

I require a literal nanny, please. I actually do need a nanny given that my parents are at work right now. Yeah, Finland's government subsidizes five day, 40 hour week childcare and considers it a right for every child. Fees are a maximum of 290 euros a month. They're waived for low income families. Wow. And so as much as people are saying, what's going on with the specific homework or education, if this is a real effect, it also might simply be caring for human beings. It might have very little to do with the size of the worksheet pile going home.

Yeah, it does seem like if your society in general is funding children more, in general is like funding children more, you might see some improvements in the whole child sector. Yeah, it might be ultimately silly to be like staring at the homework tree in the forest, you know, like, like why look at the look at the big picture, but but homework performers are like, what does Finland do? Personally, I think it is Finnish food, googling Finnish food. I personally think it is cardamom bread that is why they are successful. Setting Finland aside for a very last mini takeaway of this main show, mini takeaway number three.

We don't know exactly how the concept of A Dog Ate My Homework got going, and it probably has real origins. Okay. I mean, I have had animals literally chew up paperwork of mine. My current dog Cookie, this was not when I was a child, I got her as an adult. She literally once hovered by my printer, waited until I printed out a document, grabbed it and ran away. So I could imagine it just being a thing that happened with some frequency.

Yeah, because dogs really do eat papers some of the time. And between that and the vagueness of where this otherwise came from, it at least partly became a trope just because dogs do that. The kids aren't always lying. The dogs do sometimes do that. And it's fun that it's shorthand for a lie, because it can be true. Yeah. We only have a few germs of where it might have come from. One of them is very old. It's a legend about an Irish saint.

Yeah, in the 500s AD, Catholic monks started spreading out across Ireland and spreading Catholicism. One of them is named Saint Ciaran. And there's a legend about him being a young monk where he was taking lessons from like the master of the monastery. And he would write down the monk saint's equivalent of homework on paper, roll that in a leather strap, and then give it to a tame young fox. And then the fox would carry it to his master like a messenger.

Okay. A lot of trust in that fox not to cheat off your homework. Right. How did the fox become a monk and not me? That's just grinning and all the row. They're sneaky. Just it's like, no, no, see all this homework has, like, instead of your name, a muddy paw print on it. So clearly, the foxes did the homework. Doesn't match your paw print. So yeah.

And then the end of the legend is the fox gets bigger, gets hungry, and eats the leather strap and then the pages scatter and Kiran didn't get his homework in and they're mad at him. I see. Well, yeah, I mean, that's what happens when you don't feed your Fox Katie's premium Fox Chow now with new leather strap for carrying your homework flavor. God, I whiffed that advertisement. Oh, we'll never sell Katie's premium Fox Chow now. Oh no.

Please use code SIF. Please, please. And yeah, and there's like a few published versions of something like this too. There's a sports magazine from 1808 and the sports magazine had a set of jokes about the card game Wh Wist. So yeah, but there's a joke about a guy who was losing until his dog ate one of the cards in his hand that he did not want. And then he started winning the game of Wist.

Now that is a premium strategy. Train your dog to come with you to Vegas and start eating cards that aren't good for you. You bust in blackjack, but it eats the card, so you get to go again. Right. Teach your dog how to do card counting. Then have your dog on a headset, and it's like bark three times if I have a good hand next. times if I have a good hand next. There's also in the late 1800s, there started to be a funny story in Anglican churches about a priest who gives a sermon and then asks his clerk if the sermon was too long. And the clerk is like, honestly, you're usually very long-winded, but that was the perfect

length. How did you do that? And the priest says, ha ha, my dog ate some of the pages before. I guess it helped. Ha ha ha. That dog, Satan. Satan's good. Takeaway number four. They did say that the antichrist would appear to us in a form most beautiful. Well, that adds up. I'm no theologian, but I also am a theologian. And that's right. That's true. But yeah, apparently the Manchester Guardian newspaper described a dog eating math homework in 1929, that they described it as a trope that everyone already knows. We all know this trope.

Right. Around the turn of the century is the latest possible time that this became culture and became something everybody knew. All right. Yeah. I mean, I feel like dogs been eating stuff since we had dogs around. Yeah. It seems like most of this trope being popular is that it really happens. And

my favorite example, NPR interviewed a Massachusetts teacher in 2012. Teacher said they came home one day and left their bag full of their students' homework on the floor. They were going to grade it. And then her puppy got into it and chewed it all up. All right, so the teacher ate, wait, no, the dog's, god, the teacher's dog ate the student's homework this time. I bet that news station had fun with that, that headline. This time, the dog ate your homework. Just polite NPR checkling back and forth. Yeah.

The sweaty ball sketch. A real teacher's pet. Back to you, Nancy. Horrific murder. That's how they announce horrific murders, by the way, just horrific murders. End of story, transition music. That's it. That's it, yeah.

Folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro, with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, it's difficult to measure the impact of homework or define what homework is. Takeaway number two, the world's educators and governments are fascinated by homework in Finland. Mini takeaway number three,

we don't know exactly how the concept of a dog ate my homework started, and it's at least partly rooted in real life. And then this episode had one of our most intense and large numbers sections. Everything from 911 calls to student and family labor actions to the weights of backpacks across India and more. Those are the takeaways.

Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the surprising timelines of U.S. homework and U.S. child labor. Visit sifpod.fund for that bonus show, for a library of more than 17 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fund bonus shows.

It's special audio just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include a lot of studies and research, and also in a context where some of them conflict. Like we talked about, some of those sources include the Stanford Graduate School of Education, the Pew Research Center, and the Walton Family Foundation. We also have tons of well-researched digital writing from Libby Nelson, policy editor at Vox.com, popular science writer Stan Horacek, JSTOR Daily writer Livia Gershon, and more.

That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategoak people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free CIF discord where we are sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join that Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip

on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 176, that's about the topic of lemons. Fun fact there, the basic practice of lemon farming in Sicily kinda sorta started the Sicilian mafia. Oh well, so I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Goldin's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals,

science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Un-Shavinaven by the Boodos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to The Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.