John W. <worthj1970@gmail.com> wrote:
> My wife and I got into a 'disagreement' about elementary school
> homework in Japan versus the US. So I thought I'd go to a panel of
> experts on the matter. That required too much work so I'll ask the
> majority childless bunch of folks here.

> Last night my son (10; 4th grade) had about 3-4 hours of homework; it
> wasn't hard, just a lot. He had 540 blocks, divided unequally into 10
> colors. He had to write out fractions (for some reason) of the
> groupings of these colors: each color plus 1, each color plus 2, each
> color plus 3. Simple math, but writing that out by hand really took a
> while. My wife said that in Japan school kids always have that much
> homework; I said that I didn't think that was necessariy true because
> it was a single subject (and it irked my son that he was the only one
> in class with that much work; all of the others had to count small
> packs of M&Ms, but since he's allergic to peanut he couldn't use those
> so she gave him the blocks. So most kids had maybe 50 or so units to
> count among various colors. Note that I don't object to him having
> that much work: I'm not sappy about those things and when I was a kid
> I always had work to do at nights from living on a small farm in the
> country.

> So the question is: does the average Japanese elementary school kid
> routinely (her word) have that amount of homework in a single subject
> (or even altogether)?

Judging by the Monbusho curriculum, they shouldn't.

Mike