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For our journals we are to respond to a new statistic from a CNN study, that says 80% of the students in the US do 3 hours or less of homework per week, and that 40% of that 80 have to take remidial reading and math classes in college. I think this sounds very accurate. I myself end up doing more thatn 3 hours per week of homework. I took a more demandiong course load than is typical for a high school student, and I probably do 10 hours of homework per week on average. Yet, the majority of my homework is math, and i stil couldn't test into the college math class at the U of M in the cities, so I don't believe homework has that much todo with how welll students will do in college. It is good practice to have to spend time working on classes outside of class, becausze in college for you spend more time on homework than you do in class. Along the same lines, I have had virtyually no science homework tonight, and I did 18% better on my science placement exam than I did on either of the math exams. So I'd say that the problem with students in the US is a combination of laziness, because cheating on homework is more common now than not, and poor instruction. Some parts of the school system are very stong, and it varies for each school, but apparently math and english are across the board some of the weaker areas. buy I know that I've worked as hard as I can the past four years at math, and only really had to work in science during chemistry and still did best in science.
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