Some of the comments were predictable: "bad parent, spoiled kid, back in my day, arf arf arf ...", "I did everything right as a parent and my kids are perfect!" But there were some comments that asked the questions that the reporter should have asked: what is this homework, is it worth doing, and why is it beyond the organizing capacity of many kids?
I excerpt some of my favorite comments below.
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As a school administrator ... I see ridiculous and superfluous homework assignments given to students. Students know it is waste of their time.
... I am sure this young man is experiencing the death by homework routine, He knows that is is worthless and is failing to engage ... Some parents give no support some give too much. Many times what gets graded are the efforts of the parent.
So, will homework make students smarter and brighter..NO.
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It seems like the purpose of school is to assign homework. This is another failure, not only in teaching, but in the concept of education. Why go to school? Why not just stay home and do homework? This is a facet of the greater problem of designing schools around tests instead of learning.
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If Benji can't focus on his homework on his own, he probably has too much of it, as is all too common these days. He should be outside doing sports or seeing his friends after school, not extending his school-day ... Kids need downtime, not to mention sleep, so their brains can absorb what they learned earlier in the day from short-term to long-term memory.
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I look at the avalanche of homework my child has, and cringe at how much is pure busywork. The teachers never hand it back, there is no opportunity to learn from mistakes. It's a very poor system. We spend ALL of our free time after school and many hours on the weekend on useless assignments. It is a waste of everyone's time. I home schooled one of our children last year. We spent a fraction of the time, and accomplished so much more, fantastic test scores also. I think the tyranny of homework is a cop out on the school system's part.
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... schools lay on the homework beginning in kindergarten. This inevitable stack of work sheets - torn from some publication - is supposed to make us (parents) believe that the school is really serious about educating our kids. This pile of annoying, boring, stultifying busy work is absurd and an abdication of responsibility by the teacher - or at the least, an admission that he or she cannot get the work done during the school day - which are now longer and more numerous. And still, after this onslaught of drills and projects, American kids still fall well down the charts for literacy and numeracy. And parents and kids are now moving up the charts for neurotic behavior. Let's keep THIS up.
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At the parent-teacher conference, the teacher sadly reported that although my child demonstrated her mastery of the curriculum well on tests and in-class assignments, she was doing poorly on assessment because she didn't complete her homework. So why, I asked, did she need homework if she'd mastered the curriculum and demonstrated it already? No satisfactory answer was ever forthcoming - just a lot of twaddle about personal responsibility, time management and organisational skills, parental involvement, "fairness" to the other kids who do do their worksheet, blah blah blah. Nothing about actual learning.
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This whole homework nonsense is an invasion of a family's personal space. I taught for 30 years in elem and high schools and was embarrassed to assign homework. School is school and home is home. Let's allow kids and parents to interact in their own creative ways and banish this homework thing that makes so much trouble.
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Maybe we ought to stop assigning so much homework?
Kids are already at school for 6-8 hours a day easily, the busywork from X-number of subjects can quickly pile on into 8-12 hours when it's "Crunch time", approximately every 3 months.
This is insanity. Most adult jobs aren't that long, and they involve getting paid and not having homework. Let kids be kids. As an adult, I certainly don't want homework without any form of renumeration, and I think the attitude among kids is pretty much the same.
Kids are already at school for 6-8 hours a day easily, the busywork from X-number of subjects can quickly pile on into 8-12 hours when it's "Crunch time", approximately every 3 months.
This is insanity. Most adult jobs aren't that long, and they involve getting paid and not having homework. Let kids be kids. As an adult, I certainly don't want homework without any form of renumeration, and I think the attitude among kids is pretty much the same.
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StopHomework, we need you!
PsychMom says:
ReplyDeleteWe certainly need something. I'm beginning to think though, that the issues about homework are just a symptom of a much bigger problem and that that's why not much headway gets made in abolishing this archaic practice of giving homework.
The problem is that nobody knows or understands what education is for anymore. The people that run things are still focused on raising another generation of factory workers or Harvard types, and don't have a clue what to do about unemployment.
As long as we still link education to jobs, we'll have homework, and lots of it. If we would pause, and recognize the true value of education, homework would disappear overnight.