Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
In the closing days of the last millennium, Poor Elijah burst into my kitchen, madly waving the latest issue of Time. “Stock up on canned goods! It’s the end of the world!”
There on the cover I read the awful news: “Too Much Homework! How it’s hurting our kids, and what parents should do about it.” Inside, the bold print bespoke even worse – “Kids are dazed. Parents are stressed.”
Never mind killer asteroids and flesh-eating bacteria. Students are complaining about homework. They’re saying it’s boring and sometimes they don’t understand it. Even more amazing, some parents are sick of dealing with their children’s complaints.
Behold a pale horse. And its rider said to do the odd-numbered problems on page 187.
Today education reformers are again proposing to eliminate homework. They denounce it as a “horrible” burden that doesn’t help students learn. They charge that schools have increasingly heaped busy work on American children, and that homework constitutes an “undemocratic” “outrage” that “deforms” family life.
That sounds awful. But is it true?
According to a 2014 Brookings report, 60 percent of parents approve of how much homework their children are assigned, 25 percent believe they have too little, while only 15 percent think they have too much. Parents demanding less homework are “outnumbered in every national poll.”
The Third International Math and Science Study found American students have “one of the lightest homework loads in the world.” Brookings’ multiple research sources document that apart from 9-year-olds “who once did not have any [and] now have some,” and middle school students, whose homework has “lightened slightly,” the American “homework load” “has remained remarkably stable since 1984,” and is significantly lower than 1960s highs, a reduction condemned in A Nation at Risk as a prime cause of American educational “mediocrity.”
Brookings concluded that the data “do not support the view that the homework burden is growing” or “onerous,” and that “homework horror stories” reflect the “discontents of a small group” and not the “experience of the average family.”
Critics complain that “kids today” are “overscheduled” with “Taekwondo lessons, ceramics workshops, and bassoon practice,” leaving “scant time” for leisure, let alone homework. But nobody was more overscheduled than my 1960s suburban college prep classmates. After-school jobs aren’t innovations, either.
There’s also nothing new about parents eager to send their children to “top colleges.” Somehow, though, we’re worried those children are working too hard.
Homework prepares students so teachers can move beyond the basics that often contribute to classroom tedium.
Some probably are. Some always have. But ask teachers and employers if most of the work they see shows excessive effort. Despite reformers’ ravings about higher standards and global competition, many apparently expect students to succeed without breaking a sweat.
The international Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development determined that students who “spend more hours on homework or other study tend, on average, to perform better.” Meanwhile, one prominent non-teacher expert, Alfie Cohn, attacks the alleged “myth” that homework fosters “self-discipline and responsibility.” He characterizes homework as a “burden on parents” that causes “family conflict,” “stress for children,” and “less interest in learning.”
Other critics condemn assignments where students practice what they’ve learned as “mindless, repetitive” “drill and kill.” This commonplace disdain for practice explains why many students never master fundamental skills.
The like-minded authors of “The End of Homework” assert that homework interferes with “the adolescent’s first priority … developing a social self.” They decry homework’s “injustice,” on the grounds that students who do it learn more than those who don’t, a curious allegation since they also insist that homework doesn’t help students learn. They then level the mind-boggling charge that homework leads to classes where students who do it “dominate discussions.”
That’s supposed to be bad.
This folly appears in books and journals, read by millions of teachers and parents, endorsed as “fresh” and “compelling.”
I assign homework because students need to practice the skills I’m teaching them, the same way musicians need to practice music. I assign homework so we can talk about a story instead of using valuable class time to read it, and so students can develop responsibility and self-discipline, essential for the “lifelong learners” everybody talks about. I assign homework so students are familiar enough with what we’ll be discussing in class that they’ll have something worthwhile to contribute.
Class time is precious. It’s an opportunity to explain things that most students can’t grasp independently. It’s a chance to help them think things through, to show them how I think things through, and for them to test each other’s ideas and mine.
Anything they can do by themselves outside of class gives me more time to teach them what they can’t learn on their own. Sacrificing prime class time to do homework is irresponsible and imprudent, especially when I’m losing it because some students won’t do work “on their own time.”
Homework prepares students so teachers can move beyond the basics that often contribute to classroom tedium. It enables students to practice the skills everybody agrees they aren’t mastering. It offers parents the opportunity to get involved constructively in their children’s education.
Yes, practice often is boring, whether you’re working on foul shots or fractions. But the guy who said, “Practice makes perfect,” wasn’t far from the mark.
No, 9-year-olds shouldn’t be lugging home hours of homework. Excessive, pointless assignments are just that, excessive and pointless. A little homework, though, helps younger students develop the organizational skills and responsibility they’ll later need to bring assignments home, complete them, and return them safely to class. By middle school, homework is the key to both practice and preparation for class so the enriching discussions we’re supposed to be having rest on something besides ignorance and speculation. The alternative to homework, giving students time to practice and prepare during class, leaves me less time to teach them.
Time is finite.
Do away with homework, and your children will learn less.
Childhood is the time to be a child. Part of being a child, though, is learning to work.
Education doesn’t happen by sleight of hand. Achievement, whether athletic, artistic or academic, doesn’t come cheap or easy. That’s a lesson children need to learn.
First, though, some adults need to learn it.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Poor Elijah’s Almanack: In defense of homework.
