Rachel Bennett, 12, loves playing soccer, spending time with her grandparents and making jewelry with beads. But since she entered a magnet middle school in the fall — and began receiving two to four hours of homework a night — those activities have fallen by the wayside.
“She’s only a kid for so long,” said her father, Alex Bennett, of Silverado Canyon. “There’s been tears and frustration and family arguments. Everyone gets burned out and tired.”
my kindergarten son has homework, and I really think it’s nuts. I think it’s attributable to teachers’ inability (either competency or time demands or some of both) to teach during school hours as they spend much of that time disciplining kids….
It’s about time! When I was teaching, I absolutely hated the homework requirements we had foisted upon us by the administrators. I did assign reading, of course, but only so we could launch right into discussion the next day and spend our valuable class time on analysis. Busywork frustrates both students and teachers alike.
The school day here in Texas is long — our high school classes began at 8 a.m. and ended at 4 p.m. It was unrealistic to demand that the kids do 3-4 hours of homework each night.
I don’t think any child likes homework, but I have to say that a lot of my childhood learning was cemented in the work I had to do at home, from geometry projects and algebra problems to (gasp) diagramming sentences and reading assignments. The homework was often more instructive, as well as more engaging, that the classroom.
In ‘”the old days” children’s childhood was taken from them for factory work. Then child labor laws were passed, and mandatory schooling was instituted. Now a child’s childhood is taken away from them with tons of after school home work.
Add to that the new mandatory ‘volunteer’ hours the Government is further forcing down our throats, and when can ‘a kid be a kid’???
I absolutely cannot believe how heavy my son’s backpack is when he carries it home from school. Shoot after 8 years of carrying this, backpacking the AT will be a breeze, since only 30 lbs of gear is taken there!
There is much to be said for letting kids be kids, to a certain point, and yet – #3 is mistaken, I almost always liked doing my homework, which was substantial from the upper grades of primary school onward. This discussion seems to demonstrate the reality that even juvenile humans already display widely differing capacities, and these need to be identified and nurtured. Some children with great proprioception and ‘gross motor coordination’ excel early at sports and games and like to be physically active a lot of the time, and should be. They need to develop playing skills and learn game rules, however, if they are to get beyond just knocking around on a playground. I liked homework, because I learned even more as I did it, it made me anticipate the next day at school when I could show what I accomplished, and it gave my parents and me common ground for talking about our world, from basic Colonial American history to ways of solving math problems. (I do however remember diagramming sentences in about 8th grade, and I never really figured out what was up with that!). From high school I was aware of a distinction between fads and fashions in teaching, and teaching basics; if something in math was not familiar or transparent to my dad, a mathematical physicist, I could be pretty sure it was not core material. I thus learned to appeal to other professional adults for similar ‘evaluation’ of their subject areas.
It’s distressing to find that so many Americans nowadays don’t grasp that the real reason for study (or for rigorous sport) is to be enabled to be a life-long learner. That is, the essential skills learned in school are those that you practise to learn content well. The content needs to be accurate and significant and useful too, but it’s the ‘learning how to learn’ that will give a life-long capability in many areas. One isn’t easily bored, isn’t stymied by changing life circumstances, is able to read and get the meaning, and is even able to help others learn which is a particularly rewarding experience, if one learned how to learn while at school. The greatest failure of the American public system is in the extent to which it hasn’t taught this.
I’m curious – those of you who are so against homework, how much did you have when you were in school? I had to carry my books home every night – I expected to do so, and had homework for every class from grade school up. (No backpacks either – they weren’t cool till I got to college and then they were Army Surplus from Normaltown or they weren’t cool.) Homework reinforced what I learned in class, gave me a chance to apply it on my own, encouraged me to dig deeper into whatever subject, and also showed me where I didn’t “get it.” I didn’t particularly like homework except in my favorite subjects, but it’s value to my education can’t be overestimated.
Oh, I can assure you I had TONS of homework, and my parents were unprepared to help much. This was the era when “new Math” was coming in and no one, not even the teachers, understood it very well. I would labor from after school to dinner and even after dinner with homework in just about every subject. And it fostered in me a deep hatred of school. I dreaded going in the morning, and I dreaded coming home to more of the same. I didn’t get over this until GRADUATE SCHOOL!
So, yes, I’m a “limited homework” advocate.
Jim E.
PS
Fortunately, both of my children are consistently on their school’s honor rolls. Unlike me, who graduated high school with a (barely) 2.8 GPA, and ‘Christmas-treed’ the SAT.
JE
My school years were 1942 – 1954. Beyond memory work for my daily religion class, and reading from my lit book in H.S., I really can’t remember ever doing homework. I do remember working hard in class and in study hall so that I would not have homework. My father had 4 years of formal education and my mother had always moved before the school year ended; she had parts of five years. My responsibility was to learn what I could so that I could bring it home to my parents; my older siblings had done the same.
When I was teaching, I tired to keep the kids engaged during class and assigned the minimum amount of homework, no more than I could actually evaluate in order to find out what concepts each child needed to have explained again one-on-one.
My kids were assigned more than enough homework (much of it busy work) and seldom bothered to do it once they saw that the teacher did not bother to evaluate their work. Their grades may have suffered, but their education did not suffer at all.
I remember when I was in high school, I would have homework Monday through Friday, but not in every subject. My father was an engineer, so my brothers I had a tutor in mathematics if we needed help…..and he did a wonderful job, because he made it interesting. Ditto for my mother, who majored in History. We had eight periods each school day from 8 AM to 4 PM……the last of which was Study Hall, when we did at least some of our homework. The result was that we had an average of two hours of homework to do once we arrived home. We didn’t necessarily have to spend two hours on Friday night doing homework, but we had better have it done by Sunday night, or we faced the consequences on Monday!
Yes, children CAN get burned out on homework, and they need to budget their time so as to have room for other things, such as family activities, but I also think that nowadays, teachers are a little too liberal with homework assignments……and yes, I know they have other things to consider, such as adequate classroom time, overcrowding, lesson preparation time, etc.
We homeschool.
All three of my boys are at least one grade above grade/age level in all subjects, and several grades ahead in math (they get that from their Mom, thank God!).
We homeschool 4 days a week, about 3 to 4 hours a day total.
Besides reading, which they enjoy, and any other exploration and research they may want to do on their own (my 12 year old is a high powered model rocketry fanatic, so he does physics and chemistry research for fun after his school work is done), there is no other ‘homework’.
Much time in class is wasted on busy-work, and teaching to the lowest common denominator level. Homework is just piling on. They do karate, baseball, lacrosse, soccer, etc. in the community, and their friends rush home from school to do homework, go to sports, and then rush home afterwards for more because that diarama (sp?) on the ecology is so important to finish….
“much time in class is wasted on busy-work” I mean in school, not homeschooling.
“I never allowed school to interfere with my education.”
— Mark Twain
We Home School, so everything is “homework”! My kids love it and they are ahead of their peers scholastically, are comfortable speaking with adults, gregarious with their peers, and enjoy a healthy social life. We are fully engaged with our Church, and our kids also participate in gymnastics, dance, and AWANA with lots of educational “field trips” thrown in.
When I was a kid, I usually did most of my homework in study hall or in “homeroomâ€. The only time I remember homework being particularly annoying was over the weeklong breaks. The homework requirements these days are a ridiculous attempt to compensate for the failure of the classroom system. Every measurable educational metric has declined since the advent of the Department of Education during the Carter years.
stjohnsrector,
I absolutely agree with you. Aside from reading, the only homework I gave was the type of assignment that gave us a springboard to the next day’s activity. For instance, I asked my students to interview their older relatives or family friends about their favorite sayings in English or Spanish when I was teaching them about aphorisms. Then, we’d discuss and analyze them. And I always had them make “tapestries” based on The Canterbury Tales so I’d have them design and assemble materials for their tapestry for homework.
I taught Junior and Senior English. I wanted them PLANNING, PONDERING, and ANALYZING, not memorizing and regurgitating. And I’m not stupid — I knew darn well that if I assigned workbook exercises or something similar for homework, a few fastidious students would do the work and the rest would copy from them. It was my job in class to engage them with the literature we were reading and it thrilled me to see them waiting for the buses, reading their books because they just HAD to see what happened next. THAT is learning.