Homework For Your Child

[jairadballerina]

Except taken from interesting article (http://greensboro.rhinotimes.com/story.html?id=1708):

Homework Rules

Here are the homework rules that ought to be the target in every school district in America.

1. No homework before middle school. Ever. Period. Childhood is too precious to waste.

2. No homework over vacations, holidays or weekends. Children need more time to rest and recuperate than adults, not less.

3. No tests on Monday or the day after a holiday or vacation. See above.

4. No empty homework. All assignments have to have a specific, immediate educational purpose within the subject matter of the class.

5. No assignments for parents. All assignments should be fully within the capability of all the children in the class, without parental involvement of any kind except to cooperate in scheduling time.

6. No excess repetition. Five examples should be sufficient to identify any problems a child might be having. Three are usually enough.

7. No makeup homework for sick days. The kid is still recuperating. Don’t double his load.

Good article here but will this line of thinking make our kids too lazy? I remember the days of multi-hour homework but I still had plenty of time for football and other typical childhood activities. Has this increased that much over the past 20 years and became such a problem?

[bojendyk]

I have a better idea: no (or almost no) television for children.

No homework over weekends? Please.

[Lizzie Bee]

I was given loads of homework and finished it all with plenty (PLENTY!) of time for playing with friends and rotting my brain with hours of television.

Teaching good study habits equates to teaching a good work ethic and a very basic system of rewards for work done... lessons no child can go without in a capitalist society, in my opinion.

[Boundzy]

Teaching good study habits equates to teaching a good work ethic and a very basic system of rewards for work done... lessons no child can go without in a capitalist society, in my opinion.

Agreed. However, there is a point at which it becomes too much. I was speaking with a friend who has an 11 year-old son. His son, who is brighter than average, consistently has 4 hours of homework each night. To me, that's too much.

[Lizzie Bee]

Agreed, four hours is too much. Also, I imagine teachers have to take account of the fact that some people (regardless of IQ) take longer than others to finish assignments.

[Sachin]

Rule 4 should be mandatory.

[Metros Striker10]

Agreed. However, there is a point at which it becomes too much. I was speaking with a friend who has an 11 year-old son. His son, who is brighter than average, consistently has 4 hours of homework each night. To me, that's too much.

Very true. School ends at 3. You get home at 3:30, 4:00 if theres many bus stops before you. If you have a bed time of 10, that's 7 hours of free time. Four four homework and about two for dinner and personal time. That leaves about an hour of lesiure time.

[bojendyk]

Rule 4 should be mandatory.

True, but *every* kid considers *all* homework to be empty.

Teachers have no interest in assigning empty homework. After all, that means more work for the teachers themselves.

[bungadiri]

I found my kids' middle school homework assignments to be excessive--frequently in the range of 4 hours. This was in part due to the poor coordination among teachers and in part due to the newness of it all for the homework doers. HS, they maybe don't get enough homework.

To echo bojendyk, it's not just the homework that's causing the time burden. You factor in the connectivity of school children today, including ipods/other music sources, TV, gaming, instant messaging and the time that used to be at least theoretically isolated for homework and subject to control of parents is now thoroughly invaded by childrens' entertainment and (more important) social networks. Because of the constant distractions, it not only telescopes the amount of time it takes to complete the work significantly, it lessens the quality and efficacy of the work done.

[bigredfutbol]

I really think most homework before middle school is a waste of time. My son's school really stresses parental involvement, even calling us in to tell us what we should be doing every night to reinforce what they kids have been learning.

I'm sorry, but they've had my child for damn near 8 hours. I don't want an adversarial relationship with his school, but I don't appreciate the assumption that school education is the be-all and end-all of childhood.

Admittedly, so far my objections are more theoretical than actual--very rarely has my son's homework been an excessive time burden (he's just starting third grade, though), and the very few times when he's had a project I needed to be involved in it wasn't a big deal. Keep in mind that he's being raised in a house full of books, by two parents who love to read--one of whom (yours truly) is a librarian. And our son is pretty bright, likes to read on his own, and is way ahead of his peers in history, geography, and math. So one objection to homework is that he's already mostly bored at school, and the homework he's given seems to be more busy-work for the sake of repitition. Maybe for other kids it might be useful. But kids need unstructured playtime, they need time with family, they need time with friends. They also need time to engage in other activities outside of school--for him its soccer, piano lessons, more soccer, and for awhile chess club. Education is important, and schools need the support of the community, but I can't help it--I resent being told what to do with my child every night. I hate the presumption that a child should be lugging home an hour or more of homework at the age of 8.

Rant over.

[Twenty26Six]

What is the kid doing at school for 8 hours if he needs 4 hours of study time at home everyday? That makes no sense.

No teacher [HS, MS, or college]is doing 4 hours of prep-work every night. Why should a kid between 10yo and 15yo be doing it?

[Lizzie Bee]

My four-year-old has homework and he's not even in kindergarten yet.

Okay, okay, so it's for his Speech Therapy and it's totally appropriate and it takes less than a minute every day. But ... still ... I'm sure I should be totally indignant!

[bojendyk]

What is the kid doing at school for 8 hours if he needs 4 hours of study time at home everyday? That makes no sense.

No teacher [HS, MS, or college]is doing 4 hours of prep-work every night. Why should a kid between 10yo and 15yo be doing it?

I taught a few years of rhetoric (really, speech and writing) as a TA/adjunct prof. Some days, I had only an hour or two of prep work. On others, I worked nearly nonstop from the moment I woke up until the moment I went to bed.

[Lizzie Bee]

Rhetoric, eh? The art of "persuasion" perhaps? The art of forming other's opinions into whatever you want without them knowing it's happened? That was one of my favorite classes in college. Bwahaha...

I'm going to keep my eye on you, sir.

[Twenty26Six]

I taught a few years of rhetoric (really, speech and writing) as a TA/adjunct prof. Some days, I had only an hour or two of prep work. On others, I worked nearly nonstop from the moment I woke up until the moment I went to bed.

...and that isn't normal public high school [or middle school] teaching curriculum.

IMO, I don't think homework is as evil as it is made out to be. But I'm afraid many teachers don't grasp the concept that these kids are 13 and they have more than just one or two classes.

To put it plainly, I've learned more in 2 years [so far] of college as a unconventional 25yo student than I did my last two years of high school in advanced placement classes. And the workload _NOW_ is considerably less.

I'm sure kids can do exceptional things, but that isn't the normal/average early teenage student.

[Demosthenes]

As a teacher, I would much rather not assign homework at all. Unfortunately that's not an option. When I taught 3rd and 5th grade, I would frequently get memos from my Assistant Principal insisting that the teachers assign more homework. Apparently parents were complaining to the school that the students weren't getting enough. Now that I teach 6th grade, I'm beginning to get complaints from parents directly.

Here are my feelings about homework.

1. I never did it as a child. I learned what I needed to know in class and did fine on tests. On the other hand, I was supposedly gifted. Regardless, I always thought homework was a waste of time, and as a teacher I feel bad imposing it on children.

2. I hate dealing with it as a teacher. It takes up a ridiculous amount of time to grade. It adds a whole new element to my classroom management responsibilities, because I have to call parents of students who aren't doing their work. It also requires advanced planning on my part, and it takes up precious minutes of class time to give the children their assignments. Now, I have it all down to a science - the students have the same assignment from me every night, so I never have to do any planning nor waste time writing it on the board. I collect it once a week to grade it. Still, dealing with homework takes up at least 5 hours of my week. And I only teach one subject, unlike elementary school teachers who have to plan, prepare and grade homework for every subject!

3. I don't quite see the usefulness of homework. When I taught elementary school, I found that students who did well on their homework had their parents helping them or even doing it for them. More than half of the students simply didn't do it at all. Those were the ones whose parents worked odd hours or just weren't supportive, and of course they were the ones who needed the extra practice and reinforcement the most. Yet there is little or no time during the school day to go over homework. So it becomes totally meaningless as reinforcement of the day's lessons. Rather than being a worthwhile part of the curriculum, homework was an opportunity which I offered to the more invovled parents to help their kids at home. And it only took me about 10 hours a week to provide that for them. Seemed a little inefficient to me.

I do believe that students need to learn good work habits. They certainly need to learn how to follow instructions and how to study. Homework requires students to be independent learners to some extent. They have to take responsibility. That is clearly important. But frankly, as a teacher, I'd be much happier without it.

Lastly - to Twenty26Six - you're full of it. Teachers regularly spend 4+ hours per day preparing. I guarantee they do more work than their students do.

[Sachin]

Gregg Easterbrook, author of the "The Progress Paradox" and fellow at the Brookings Institution had this to say about homework in his ESPN Column Tuesday Morning Quarterback (http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/061003).

The Homework Conspiracy: Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post reported that new studies by Duke University's Program on Education conclude, "Elementary school students receive no benefit from homework." The new book "The Homework Myth" by Alfie Kohn comes to the same conclusion, adding that in middle school more than 90 minutes of homework per night, and in high school more than two hours per night, backfire by reducing grades and test scores. The reasons are plain as the nose on your face -- too much homework leaves kids tired in the morning and makes them sick of education, while denying the time they need to goof off and be kids. Yet despite research showing large amounts of homework actively injurious to education, homework requirements have been rising steadily in public schools. Tuesday Morning Quarterback thinks he knows why: Teachers are using homework to exact vengeance on parents.

Since the National Commission on Education declared (http://www.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html), in 1983, that "educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people," parents have been complaining nonstop about schools. Set aside that the declaration of the National Commission on Education contains a grammatical error -- "nation" is not a proper noun and in this usage should not be capitalized. The 1983 report put school performance into the headlines. The media now stereotype public schoolteachers as muttonheads who oppose high standards and are more concerned with union politics and political correctness than teaching the basics and classics. (In my experience, teachers spend most of their time on basic subjects and classic texts.) The annoyingly large subset of "helicopter parents" now constantly second-guesses teachers. Meanwhile salaries of doctors, lawyers and other professionals keep accelerating toward the asteroid belt, while teachers are expected to work for love rather than money. The teachers' revenge? Assign loads of homework. Assigning loads of work is a great CYA tactic against complaints about standards. More important, teachers know too much homework renders home life unhappy during the evening when exhausted moms and dads are trying to relax. In those glistening suburban houses with the flat-panel TVs and granite countertops, kids are crying about homework and parents are stressed about homework -- take that, helicopter parents! Plus, teachers know that many moms and dads not only help kids with their homework, but end up doing the homework. Assigning extra homework makes affluent parents miserable, exacting the public teachers' vengeance.

As an aside, TMQ is the best read on football out there, IMHO. MLS could use something like that.



Sachin

[bigredfutbol]

As a teacher, I would much rather not assign homework at all. Unfortunately that's not an option. When I taught 3rd and 5th grade, I would frequently get memos from my Assistant Principal insisting that the teachers assign more homework. Apparently parents were complaining to the school that the students weren't getting enough. Now that I teach 6th grade, I'm beginning to get complaints from parents directly.

Here are my feelings about homework.

1. I never did it as a child. I learned what I needed to know in class and did fine on tests. On the other hand, I was supposedly gifted. Regardless, I always thought homework was a waste of time, and as a teacher I feel bad imposing it on children.

2. I hate dealing with it as a teacher. It takes up a ridiculous amount of time to grade. It adds a whole new element to my classroom management responsibilities, because I have to call parents of students who aren't doing their work. It also requires advanced planning on my part, and it takes up precious minutes of class time to give the children their assignments. Now, I have it all down to a science - the students have the same assignment from me every night, so I never have to do any planning nor waste time writing it on the board. I collect it once a week to grade it. Still, dealing with homework takes up at least 5 hours of my week. And I only teach one subject, unlike elementary school teachers who have to plan, prepare and grade homework for every subject!

3. I don't quite see the usefulness of homework. When I taught elementary school, I found that students who did well on their homework had their parents helping them or even doing it for them. More than half of the students simply didn't do it at all. Those were the ones whose parents worked odd hours or just weren't supportive, and of course they were the ones who needed the extra practice and reinforcement the most. Yet there is little or no time during the school day to go over homework. So it becomes totally meaningless as reinforcement of the day's lessons. Rather than being a worthwhile part of the curriculum, homework was an opportunity which I offered to the more invovled parents to help their kids at home. And it only took me about 10 hours a week to provide that for them. Seemed a little inefficient to me.

I do believe that students need to learn good work habits. They certainly need to learn how to follow instructions and how to study. Homework requires students to be independent learners to some extent. They have to take responsibility. That is clearly important. But frankly, as a teacher, I'd be much happier without it.

Lastly - to Twenty26Six - you're full of it. Teachers regularly spend 4+ hours per day preparing. I guarantee they do more work than their students do.


I'm glad to get your perspective. I sometimes hesitate to speak out on this subject around my neighbors and in my community, because I don't want to set up a parents-against-educators dynamic.

[Twenty26Six]

Lastly - to Twenty26Six - you're full of it. Teachers regularly spend 4+ hours per day preparing. I guarantee they do more work than their students do.

Then the teachers I know must be lazy. Because the teachers that I know personally [that have been teaching for a few years] do not do 4+ hours a day of work.

[bungadiri]

Then the teachers I know must be lazy. Because the teachers that I know personally [that have been teaching for a few years] do not do 4+ hours a day of work.
The teachers I know (and I'm married to one) come close. Not only that, they never stop talking shop even when they're not actually working. I can't count the number of party/dinner conversations I've spent silently consuming beer and onion dip while listening to rehashes of IEPs, best practices, student toilet disasters. No doubt there are teachers that turn off the job at the same moment they turn off the lights in their classrooms at the end of any given day, but in my opinion it's equally without doubt they're in the minority.

The amount of time spent working outside of class can vary dramatically, depending on how long one's been teaching a given subject. Since you mentioned college teaching: my first semester teaching I spent a minimum of 9 hours prep for every hour lecturing in front of students. That length of time reduced tremendously (thank God) the second semester, since I was repeating a course and I'd improved my ability to write lectures and prep for seminars, but it never went below 3 to 1, on average. I'd like to say this was motivated by dedication to my students' knowledge and future well-being and to be fair it partly was, but a lot of it was simply fear of looking stupid in front of 550 18-22 year olds prone to criticism.