Is homework a waste of time?
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For years, students have whined that their book reports, math problems and science projects were pointless. Now, several authors, and even some parents, agree that homework isn’t worth much, at least for early grade-schoolers.
“Homework generally is worthless. It’s all pain and no gain,” said Alfie Kohn, author of “The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing.” “No study has ever demonstrated any academic benefit to doing homework before high school.”
The anti-homework gang is not the popular clique on the school policy playground, with far more parents and teachers supporting take-home assignments. It develops study habits, reinforces lessons and builds self-confidence, educators say.
But the backlash against homework touches a nerve among today’s overscheduled two-career families. Parents see their kids struggling with far heavier workloads then they ever carried. And parents have less time to help.
Critics worry that the homework burden can strip kids of their passion to learn, challenge assertions that it builds good habits and argue that it cuts into valuable family time.
This fall, 2nd grader Julian Forester has had plenty of homework, causing nothing but frustration inside his family’s Ballard, Wash., home.
Many evenings Julian and his mother, Anne, sat down at 5:30 to tackle two sheets of work and finished at 7. The district’s guidelines say Julian shouldn’t have more than 10 minutes of homework a night.
The ordeal led to tears and one exhausted 7-year-old.
“It was shocking how he was just so frustrated,” Forester said. “He was being so difficult, and he’s not a difficult child.”
So Forester pushed back. After a friend sent Julian’s teacher an e-mail complaining about the work, Forester did the same, and the teacher responded. Now after Julian spends 15 minutes on one worksheet he can stop, as long as he has a note.
Parents like Forester worry that homework robs their sons and daughters of the little time they have to daydream, goof off and just be kids.
“I just don’t think it’s necessary,” the 39-year-old former grade-school teacher said.
The problem is there isn’t a lot of definitive research supporting or opposing homework loads, though educators and parents seem to agree that kids have more work these days.
“I would suspect most of the [homework] decisions that are being made on a daily basis [by teachers, principals and school boards] are a matter of judgment and not a matter of research,” said Nathalie Gehrke, a professor of teaching and curriculum at the University of Washington’s College of Education.
This year the anti-homework folks may have grabbed a corner of the spotlight, but most parents still like homework.
Nearly 60 percent of parents were content with their kids’ homework load, while only 19 percent said their children had too much, according to an Associated Press/AOL poll released earlier this year.
The statistic may be a little misleading because parents can have a hard time complaining.
With two new homework-bashing books, parents are getting bolder, says Anne Forester, the Ballard parent who got her son’s homework cut.
“I think people are getting fed up,” she said.
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