School's back, and so is Big Homework. Here's what my 7th grade daughter has to do tonight:1 Math review sheet,
1 Science essay,
French vocab for possible quiz,
History reading and questionaire, and
English reading and note-taking
About two hours, give or take. This is considered a pretty light load, so as to ramp up gently. Over the next few weeks, it will get up to three hours or more.
Most of us give very little thought to this long-lived combination. School and homework seem as interconnected as cars and gasoline. Kids need homework to get smarter -- right? It's supposed to be how they pick up a good work ethic.
Only maybe it isn't. Maybe most homework is a giant waste of my daughter's time and a needless cause of family stress.
Two 2006 books make that argument: Alfie Kohn's The Homework Myth, and Sara Bennett & Nancy Kalish's The Case Against Homework.
Homework does not improve children's work habits, argues Kohn. It does not reinforce skills, and "isn't even correlated with, much less responsible for, higher achievement before high school."
Bennett and Kalish write:
There's absolutely no proof that homework helps elementary school pupils learn more or have greater academic success. In fact...when children are asked to do too much nightly work, just the opposite has been found. And study after study shows that homework is not much more beneficial in middle school either. Even in high school, where there can be benefits, they start to decline as soon as kids are overloaded.
The new thinking is that, instead of piling on onerous, rote assignments, homework, kids ought to be encouraged to use their after school time to explore their own curiosities, read books of their own choice, to play, and to get adequate sleep.
Kohn again:
Most kids hate homework. They dread it, groan about it, put off doing it as long as possible. It may be the single most reliable extinguisher of the flame of curiosity.
Any parent reading this has high expectations for his or her child. We all want not what's easiest, but what's best. If that means a lot of homework, so be it. But it seems the time has come for all parents to revisit this subject with considerable skepticism.
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Some interesting links:
• 2003 NPR report, "Homework: How Much is Too Much?"
• Sara Bennett's StopHomework.com
• Telegraph: "UK's biggest school to scrap homework"
• Letter from the principal of Grant Elementary School in Glenrock, Wyoming, explaining that her school is implementing a no homework practice
David Shenk
Interesting post. My kids like some of their homework (when its interesting and challenging) but hate it when it takes over an hour (they're very young). That drudgery promotes stress between us and I hate it.
Homework is mostly useless. It usually consists of rote work that could easily be accomplished on school time. Creative work or projects that require long-term planning and organization is understandable, but mere exercises designed to eat up time are an insult to the kids (who are robbed of personal time) and the parents (who are compelled to enforce the idiotic regime). Six hours a day in school should be quite enough!
Lots of poor arguments here. I think it'd ridiculous for anyone to write off the opportunities that homework offers. That said, I can understand why it's scoffed at by kids and parents: People (often including teachers) don't understand how to use it.
Of course homework completion doesn't correlate with success in school. It's been shown time and time again that the only real push factors in student achievement are socio-economic status and parent involvement. What homework offers is not a laundry list of isolated, tedious tasks. Homework offers parents and their kids a chance to gauge, reinforce, and support academic success through cooperation and parental guidance. Is this a lot to ask of parents today? Sure. But that responsibility is what comes with having kids.
There are plenty of arguments to be made about whether or not too much homework gets given out... but keep in mind that teachers are under incredible deadlines with regards to their curriculum. Sometimes, homework is teaching new material, and that's just an occupational hazard and a topic for another discussion. Also remember that the vast majority of studies that explore how kids spend their leisure time don't show them rushing to libraries, music lessons, etc... they're watching TV, playing video games, or surfing the web.
Maybe if parents started showing a little more finesse and willingness to engage and co-navigate the educational experiences of their kids, we'd have more successful students.
I disagree. I believe there are lots of usefulness to homework. I believe this does not come from a scientific/mathematics view point, and perhaps even a linguistic view point.
I remembered I TA'ed on class a couple of years ago. As a TA I had to grade homework, my mom pointed out to me that by having me grade the homework instead of the professor, the professor has a poorer idea as to how the students are learning and how he can improve things. To be honest, I don't think I know many engineers, scientist, or otherwise who would rather do linear algebra over going to a movie with friends. This reminds me of this commercial where they insinuated that engineers like to think about math and science while 'normal' people like to think about pizza. I don't know, I've met a good number of Ph. D scientists and engineers, most of them are thinking of pizza too. The point being, it seems like no one likes to think about math or science or the history of civil war unless there's a necessity to them. I don't know many 12 year old who believe that knowing how to solve for x in x^2+2x+4=0 is a necessity.
There is something to be said about too much homework and the lack of critical thinking. Perhaps in it's a chicken and egg type of question, do you learn Newton's first law first or do you imagine that you can build a space ship first? The point being, even if you can imagine that rocket ship, it probably won't be going anywhere if you don't know Newton's first law. At this point I feel like I've been in school forever. One thing I've realized that there seems to no end to science and engineering. The more you know, the easier it is to imagine things. The more you learn, the easier it is to do critical thinking.
Schools should not eliminate homework, instead they should build a good foundation for critical thinking.
PS. There are lots of things you don't realize you need to know as a teenager (probably any point in life). I remember in high school, as we were learning geometry, it really seem kind of useless or rudimentary in most applications at the time. It was not until I took an optics class in college, which was based almost entirely on geometry and a little bit of complex algebra, I realized oh, there was a point in learning geometry. And as someone who wanted to go into lasers and optics at the time, it was good to know that even thought I thought geometry was stupid in high school, it was important that I learned it.
As someone else said, homework isnt completely useless, its more that most teachers dont know how to effectively use it. Aside from the learning aspects, however, homework does teach kids the overall point that sometimes you have to do things in life that you dont like. Theres no point to making something like calculus "fun". Its pretty boring, and unless you go into a math related field, pretty useless. Its better to just be honest with kids, and tell them that certain subjects arent going to appeal to them, but alas, they have to suffer through them anyway.
I think there's two separate issues worth examining at here.
The first is an easy one. QUALITY. There is way too much homework out there that is ill-conceived, wasteful, overly stressful. Teachers and administrators should make it a point of pride to assign only high-quality homework: assignments that are clear, well thought out, efficient in their time demands, entertaining and inspiring if possible.
The second issue is a lot tougher. QUANTITY. Even in a world where all homework is quality homework, should we have a lot less of it, so as to give kids more time to pursue their own endeavors, and to rest, and to be kids? This is a difficult question, because on a subject by subject basis, it's easy to make the argument for the importance of high-quality of homework. So something has to give. My gut says that kids need that time to themselves more than they need homework -- even if it is high-quality homework.
What are high-quality assignments? That's such a subjective thing, especially when the judges are primarily students and parents who are at least 1 step removed from the curriculum planning process. Maybe you're talking about rote-memorization like flash cards to increase a student's comfort with vocabulary. Maybe you're talking about readings with questions attached. All these things are helpful if used correctly by teachers and students. Parents and teachers need to instill an understanding in their students that practice after school is important to maintaining a firm grasp of the material. Study skills are important, and they are often taught by homework.
Quantity is obviously more difficult to discuss. With learning disabilities, extracurricular activities, etc. it can be very hard to figure out how much is too much, even on a per-class basis. But again, I'll point to the fact that study after study shows that school just isn't enough for students to understand all this material, and that students will not seek out reinforcement if left to their own devices. I'm not sure that we should be so willing to throw homework out the door in favor based on the assumption that kids don't have enough time to be kids. They'll stay up late to do that after homework is done anyway.
Poorly managed systems always fall back on increasing quantity as the easy way out. Economy's broken? Dump in more money. Schools are broken - more days of classes and more hours of homework. Very disturbing to me that my daughter will have to spend hours a night doing homework rather than pursuing her interests. So much time at school is just wasted that they have to intrude into home time. Students are entitled to a 40 hour work week too, and should be graded on their achievements, not how much 'face-time' they put in.
Brian
Yes, quality is subjective, but that doesn't mean we can't strive for it. I agree that different subjects will call for different kinds of homework.
I'd like to see the studies you're talking about. Can you cite some specifically? Alfie Kohn's book cites a number of studies that seem to tell a different story.
While I didn't like the book much at all, "The Dumbest Generation" cited a lot of studies that broke down how students spend their time:
http://www.kff.org/entmedia/upload/Generation-M-Media-in-the-Lives-of-8-18-Year-olds-Report.pdf
That's one of the main ones used in the chapter about how much time students spend in front of screens. I'm at work so I'll find some more later, but that's a good starter.
Here's one more that I forgot I had bookmarked:
http://www.netday.org/Speakup/pdfs/SpeakUpReport_05.pdf
It appears I loaned my copy of "The Dumbest Generation" to a friend, but the studies cited in that book are quite revealing about how kids use their time. While I can't remember if any of the studies compare screen time with academic performance, studies from the same time frames about the separate issues can still be referenced for the same effect.
dreiner:
I just looked at both your citations, and neither has any direct relevance to what we're discussing here. While the word "homework" does appear many times in the KFF study, there's nothing in that study that even comments on the effectiveness of homework. It's all about how kids spend their time on media and homework and other things. It's a perfectly interesting study to read, but it doesn't back up your argument.
You wrote: "study after study shows that school just isn't enough for students to understand all this material..." I'd love to see just one good study that backs up your statement. (I'm sure there's something out there). Then we can actually discuss.
This is anecdotal, but my public high school had some of the best outcomes in the state (graduation rates were good, PSAT scores were excellent, almost everyone went off to one of the two better state universities) while assigning relatively little homework. Sure, a lot of that was likely down to it being a wealthier area with lots of educated parents, but the lack of homework didn't seem to hurt. I recall regularly spending less than thirty minutes on homework a night, and most nights I wouldn't even have homework (granted, debate ate up a lot of time, but that was voluntary).
I've seen mention of expecting high school seniors to do 2+ hours of homework every night, and that seems ridiculous. If we're talking about a slightly slow student trying for an A and taking the time to read the relevant areas of the textbooks, then fine. But if we're talking about the usual practice of just launching into the math worksheet or skimming the assigned chapters of Huck Finn, then I don't see how that's reasonable. We don't expect most adults to work for more than eight hours a day, and kids are already in school for six or seven hours. I don't think I had two hours of homework each day in college, though grad school might average out to about that (there it tends to be five hours for each of two days).
There's certainly a place for rote repetition of tasks, like doing multiplication or balancing chemical equations, but I don't see the problem with using some class time for that. Many of my classes in early high school would budget fifteen or twenty minutes at the end for doing whatever exercise was assigned. Is the problem that some schools have a very hard time covering everything in lecture in the 50 minutes allotted? I'd imagine that there are diminishing returns to teaching kids for long stretches of time - I'm not sure that lectures longer than about thirty minutes can even sink in particularly well unless you break them up with some other activity.