Should Homework Be Banned?
by
J. Steven Carr
It is the dream of every grade school child. The evening news announces that homework has been banned from elementary school. Are these merely the fantasies of lazy children? Or is there some merit to banning homework-especially in the early grades.
We send our children off to school as early as 6:00 a.m. and most do not return home until the late afternoon. After dinner and the dishes, most students sit down to almost 2 hours of homework each night. Hours spent studying Algebra, World History, Plate tectonics and diagramming sentences.
And this is in elementary school.
Things were different when I was a kid. Yes sir, they sure were. I never received homework until I reached the 7th grade. Now there are kindergarten teachers sending homework in backpacks that weigh more than the students carrying them.
Have we gone too far?
I have been in education for 24 years. Eight of those years were spent as a school administrator evaluating teachers. I saw many changes in education. But there was one trend that surprised me very much. I saw a direct correlation between teachers that gave a lot of homework and the effectiveness of their teaching. I found that homework was being given out so the teacher would be viewed as a “tough” teacher, which the teacher hoped would be interpreted by all as a “good” teacher. In my experience quite the opposite is true. Homework is given by the least effective teachers to make up for their lack of true teaching skills. If you have an elementary student in your class for over six hours, why are you sending home another two hours of work? A classic defensive response (by teachers that give a lot of homework) is that there is a lot of material to cover. Hogwash. The work that teachers send home is busy work, the same problems that they did in class that day. And when teachers send homework on a new topic, no one is there to help the child that does not understand the material. A fair percentage of parents will sit down with their children each night. I will not argue that. But how many children are going home to an environment that is conducive to homework? How many parents are simply asking, “Did you do your homework?” to which the classic response is always the same.
In my sixteen years in the classroom I have been guilty of assigning homework. I found that one third of the students understood the homework and did it, one third did not understand the homework but tried, and the final third did not even try. I also found that these percentages were loosely correlated with social class. Yes, the upper middle class students did their homework, the middle class students at least tried, and the lower middle class students did not try. Not a scientific study, just a personal observation. I decided to examine why we were giving homework that was only further entrenching students into a social class that they were born into. Why not stop giving homework and make the classroom the great equalizer for all students? Why not teach twice as much in school and then work twice as hard to reach all kids so that no student would be penalized based upon his home environment, or lack thereof? I tried it and it worked. As soon as I stopped assigning homework my students began achieving more academically. I gave them the work that they needed to do in class. If they got behind they would assign themselves the negative consequence of completing the assignment at home, without the luxury of having their teacher around. The class mood elevated. I no longer started the class with the stressfully cheerful, “Please pass forward your homework”. (Which, to this day, still causes me anxiety when I hear it). I started on a cheerful, even playing field note, “When we left yesterday we were doing…” And every kid was right with me. No excuses about not getting the homework because the dog ate it, not one stressed out lower middle class student too embarrassed to say that he doesn’t have a desk to do work on. Everyone was on the same fresh page every day regardless of the success, or failure, of his or her parents. Now that’s a level playing field.
So imagine my displeasure when I cannot play catch with my 12 year old, who gets home at 5:30 (after cheerleading practice), because she has “too much homework”. She begins right after dinner and some nights is still going strong at 9:00 at night, which is a fourteen hour day for her. We should ban homework, or at least expose it for what it is-busy work designed to further saddle kids with unrealistically high expectations. Let’s teach the kids what they need to know during the time they are in school. Then when the little rascals come home they can do what kids are designed to do-run and play and burn off energy. Maybe a little exercise would slow down the burgeoning weight crisis our kids are facing. But don’t get me started on our children’s diets.
That‘s another story.