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Does anyone else out there feel trapped by homework?

Tonight DD7 (3rd) had a good two hours of homework, including 43 math problems and 20 science questions (this was only the beginning). It's like teachers feel this need to fill a certain amount of time with homework, regardless of what's being done. What's the goal? What's the point? What's going on for seven hours in school that the kids need to keep on working afterwards?

My kids dread coming home from school because they have so much homework. And so much of it seems like busy work (Make a collage about yourself! Cut and glue pictures of animals! etc.). And if the kid doesn't do all the homework, they might move her to a slower-paced group. I don't get this at all. It seems to be a choice between exhaustion and doing work that is appropriately challenging. This is not much of a choice, IMO.

I feel like we're creating a nation of automatons who grind away at their worksheets while the universe speeds on by outside their gaze.

Hmmm... 2 hours of homework seems a little extreme to me. I'd be selecting the value-add activities and ditching the rest (!) or replacing the 'busy' work with more meaningful activities. Have you asked the teacher for an explanation? I wonder what his/her philosophy/stand-point on homework is?

jojo

Are you certain they're not being given time in class for some of the work? I discovered with my oldest that she was using her in-class work time to chat and then was overwhelmed at home. You might verify first with the teacher that it is indeed all homework and not unfinished class work.

That being said, my kids routinely had an hour or two or homework. It didn't kill them, and they still had time to compete in sports, play with friends and enjoy veg time. My son, who started college this year, comments that he feels sorry for the kids who came from schools that didn't routinely give tough homework, because they were struggling to keep up the pace - whereas he found it no change over the work he'd done for the past 8 or 10 years.

I've found that my biggest challenge raising gifted kids is teaching them a good work ethic, The attitudes about not wanting to do work that is beneath them whether it was required or not was a huge issue in late elementary and mid school. And while I agree that homework can be mind-numbingly boring, it can teach discipline to suck it up and get through something that doesn't light our fire.

I know mine is likely not a popular opinion, but having hired high school and college interns in my company, I can tell you that a lot of these kids haven't had to do things they found boring. The few who were willing to do the demographic data research, compile XML from that boring data and do the other easy tasks I had - they were the ones who were given the fun assignments, because I knew they would pay just as much attention to the boring details as to the fun parts of the job. When we teach our kids to have a good attitude about their work, even when it's boring or pedantic, we help them acquire skills that will serve them well in adulthood.

We have the opposite problem. My 4th grader has a maximum of 5 minutes of homework, 3 nights a week. I agree with ABQ that he needs more to learn work ethic and discipline. 2 hours is extreme, though. Does the teacher realize this it is taking this long? I would definitely talk with the school.

We have to get Alfie and the Kumon people in a room and let them duke it out. I think that especially for a gifted kid in the lower grades, lack of homework can be a boon. It frees up time for parent-selected enrichment. An hour plus of homework as a regular thing is too much per night in early to mid elementary IMHO. (I might feel differently if the homework was very engaging, project-based, etc. What it's been so far for us is standard worksheets, which DS blows through quickly, thank goodness. There are some writing assignments that I actually think he gets a bit out of, especially because he's up to two years younger than his classmates and doesn't write very quickly.)

I totally understand ABQMom's POV, but I think third (in my DD's case, second) grade is too young for this. There's time later, in middle and high school, to make homework significant and serious. For now, jeez, they're little. They need downtime and playtime.

In answer to the OP's question, yes. We have too much homework here, and I do feel trapped. DD has about an hour a day, on average, and with the exception of the writing, she works quite fast. We have none on weekends still, thank goodness.

Sounds fine to me. I really don't understand why young children need to be doing homework at all. They're studying stuff for seven hours a day. Why is seven hours a day not enough practice? This is what I don't get. It's not like they're climbing trees all day and need to do some learning later on. They're supposed to be learning all day.

I emailed the teacher and am waiting to hear back from her.

I've been wondering if increased homework load is tied to test scores and expecting too much from kids. NCLB and the idea that everyone should go to college demand that all the kids get average to above-average scores on standardized tests. Yet this is impossible. Half of any group has to be below average. Yet educational romanticism demands that everyone be at least average. On the other end, there is a lot of competition to get into "good" colleges, so there is also a push to raise scores at that end, too.

So perhaps the educational establishment (and some parents) have turned to homework. If the kids can't learn it in school, then they can just keep working at home. The assumption that test scores and offers of admission will go up underlies it all. It's like an arms race.

As I said originally, I think that this process creates automatons. When the focus is on industrial metrics, deeper, more meaningful learning gets shoved aside. Our national creativity will also suffer.

I have no problem with ramping up homework load as a child gets older, because a teenager who needs 8 hours of sleep a night obviously has more time to invest than a 7yo who needs 10-11 hours a night.

With that said, a gifted kid (assuming no LDs that impact homework performance time) should be able to find a significant amount of time at school that they can use for the homework. A two-pronged strategy of working with the teacher to reduce homework requirements AND working with the kid to see if he can find more class time to do it would be likely to yield satisfactory results.

As an example, my DD6 brought home a book from her G/T class, and she has to do an assignment on it by the end of the month. Because she procrastinates, I set an aggressive reading schedule for her, which takes up about an hour a day, and replaced our evening bedtime reading (Harry Potter) with the assigned reading. DD has independently responded by reading sufficiently on her own time during school, so she can have her Harry Potter back.

I think my kiddo is one of the lucky ones who has little homework beyond the expected 30 minutes of daily reading. The teacher gives the kids time in class to do their work, and rarely DS in third will need to bring home stuff to finish. It's usually writing that he doesn't finish, as he's still pretty slow at writing, esp. now they're expected to do writing assignments in newly-learned cursive. But I've been very happy with DS's school and their homework philosophy (10 minutes after school reading per grade level, plus finish anything else you didn't complete during school hours).