Impossible! you say. But is homework is a necessary evil, or necessary only because schools don’t do their jobs? If in-school teaching of new information used the principles science is revealing about the ways the human mind learns, might homework turn out to be redundant?

 

This is one of many questions John Medina explores in his book Brain Rules.

 

 

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

 

It’s a fascinating read, and one that’s full of implications for how we might significantly change the landscape of K-12 school and college. Medina explains that what most of us have known as short-term memory is now called working memory. In Chapter 6 of Brain Rules, he writes—and this is a long quote, but worth it, I hope you’ll agree—“Perhaps the best way to explain working memory is to describe it in action.

 

“I can think of no better illustration than the professional chess world’s first real rock star: Miguel Najdorf. Rarely was a man more at ease with his greatness than Najdorf. He was a short, dapper fellow gifted with a truly enormous voice, and he had an annoying tendency to poll members of his audience on how they thought he was doing. Najdorf in 1939 traveled to a competition in Buenos Aires with the national team. Two weeks later, Germany invaded Najdorf’s home country of Poland. Unable to return, Najdorf rode out the Holocaust tucked safely inside Argentina. He lost his parents, four brothers, and his wife to the concentration camps. In hopes that any remaining family might read about it and contact him, he once played 45 games of chess simultaneously, as a publicity stunt. He won 39 of these games, drew 4, and lost 2. While that is amazing in its own right, the truly phenomenal part is that he played all 45 games in all 11 hours blindfolded.

 

 

Maestro Miguel Najdorf

 

“You did not read that wrong. Najdorf never physically saw any of the chessboards or pieces; he played each game in his mind. From the verbal information he received with each move, to his visualizations of each board, several components of working memory were working simultaneously in his mind. This allowed him to function in his profession, just as they do in yours and mine (though perhaps with a slightly different efficiency).”

 

Wow, right? Najdorf clearly had an exceptional mind and working memory; but how does that relate to our minds? How does this get tied up in how we learn in the classroom—and more to today’s point, with the riddance of homework?

 

Well, one crucial thing to understand is that traditional schooling is not the ideal—it wasn’t even designed with the ideal in mind. As John Medina states in the introduction, after mentioning the many peer-reviewed and replicated studies referenced in Brain Rules,

 

“What do these studies show, as a whole? Mostly this: If you wanted to create an education environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design something like a classroom. If you wanted to create a business environment that was directly opposed to what the brain was good at doing, you probably would design somethin like a cubicle.”

 

Every one of us who came up in the school system—public, private, doesn’t matter—every one of us had that sudden moment of heinous realization, during a particularly bad General Science or Pre-Algebra or Reading Appreciation lesson, when we looked around the room, looked at the teacher, looked at ourselves, and said,

 

This is a setup, a trap. They’re trapping us here until we’ve lost our will to live.

 

And we’ve all thought the same thing again, at home, wasting away, staring blankly at our homework pages … There’s no reason for this besides blind oppression.

 

 

Down with homework! Up with hopework!

 

Scientific studies are giving us many reasons to hope for the future of education—perhaps none more promising than this:

 

“Brain Rules in the classroom. In partnership with the University of Washington and Seattle Pacific University, Medina tested [the working memory] Brain Rule in real classrooms of 3rd graders. They were asked to repeat their multiplication tables in the afternoons. The classrooms in the study did significantly better than the classrooms that did not have the repetition. If brain scientists get together with teachers and do research, we may be able to eliminate need for homework since learning would take place at school, instead of the home.”

 

These 3^rd-graders didn’t do just a little better; by repeating in the afternoon the material they first went over in the morning, they did a lot better. Repeating the material at home became unnecessary; they’d already learned it.

 

The sounds-bad-but-really-is-very-good news for online students is this: it’s all homework. The initial learning takes place at home (or wherever you happen to study). If you have a slate of new information to memorize, you can cover it, work on something else for a while, and then repeat that same info 90 minutes later, and you’ll see a significant jump in your retention levels.