It is alarming how many parents I speak with that have the homework fight every night with their child. Do they have homework? Is it done? Is it done correctly? By the time the work is done and the bickering is over, it’s time for their child to go to bed. Parents are losing valuable time with their children over homework, and homework may not even be that valuable.
For most children, homework is one of two things. Practice of skills learned in class, such as math sheets, or preparation for the next class, such as reading assignments. It doesn’t tend to be family activities or hands on learning. It also doesn’t seem to take into consideration that so many children have things like band, soccer, dance, and swim after school. In my school district, the rule is that every child gets 10 minutes of homework per grade, so 10 minutes in first, 30 in third, and 60 in sixth. Of course, that’s if teachers stick to these guidelines. Is the homework even helping?
Homework is typically a one size fits all model, meaning that all the children in a class are doing the same exact homework, regardless of skill level. So the children who cannot do the math problem have to try 30 times and not understand any better because they already don’t know how to do it. Then the children who have pretty well mastered the work still have to do the same math problems 30 times, even though it is already easy and thus essentially a waste of their time. Then there is the very small percentage of children in the middle who benefit from the practice as they work on clarifying a concept and mastering it.
Now let’s look at the reading assignment that your child has to complete for class tomorrow. The idea is that it prepares the class to have a discussion as a whole, and everyone needs to have read the chapters in order for the teacher’s lesson to be successful. Except no teacher ever is going to get an entire class to read the chapters. There are always going to be students who couldn’t or wouldn’t do the assignment. So the teacher then has to spend the class catching the non-readers up or leave them behind completely.
Of course, many of us already know that schooling can take the joy out of learning, but homework can also take the joy out of other passions as well. Too much homework means that instead of doing well and diving deeply into any one thing, a minimum is done across the board. Your student does their minimum and no more, regardless of how interested in a subject they might be. The same goes for all types of assignments. Your little reader, who you used to have to remind to eat is now setting the timer, picking the easiest books, and stopping as soon as the timer goes off. Your writer is so busy filling in essays and writing what the teacher wants that they don’t have any time to write about what they find interesting anymore. Now our children are actually learning less than they would have if they had been left alone.
Now we all know that teachers simply aren’t afforded enough time in any given day to teach all the material they have to offer. I hear that we tend to be an academics first society. But honestly, we are already so busy, where do children have time to be children? Between meals, bedtime, soccer, dance, band, and everything else going on, adding homework to the mix can take away the last 10 minutes of free time a child has in a day. What is worse, when we are pushing our adult agenda on children, they stop truly exploring the things in the world that are interesting to them. Instead, they learn what they need to pass the test and nothing more.
I doubt I’m going to convince anyone to do away with homework completely, and even I’m not sure that I feel that is the right step. The base problem is that it is the default to give homework. What if we change our thinking to homework being the exception? Giving thoughtful homework only on an as needed basis, with intention and thought put in advance. Then keeping the homework diverse, instead of rote learning make sure there are creative and open ended options as well. Let’s think about how we teach our students to think deeply and ask questions that matter. Constantly giving them busy work distracts them from truly exploring.
Of course, parents, aren’t the ones assigning their children homework. So what can you do if you are a parent? I believe the number one responsibility is to hold the schools accountable. If your school’s policy is 10 minutes per grade and your 3rd grader is spending an hour on homework, they clearly aren’t meeting the standard that was set. Advocate on behalf of your child. Even adults hate the homework that is assigned.
