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

http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/rethinkinghomework.htm

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).

Added: I found an interesting review (available here):

Page 4:

�Research and case studies in the UK and US suggest there be no more than 10 minutes of homework per school day in Year 1, increasing by up to 10 minutes a day with each year level to a maximum of two hours per day in Year 12. This maximum time allocation for each year level is generally consistent with national and international policies.

Overall it seems that some homework is better than too much or none at all, however the time on homework needs to be responsive to the student�s age and development. The research indicates that a �more homework the better� view is misleading and should not be the basis for policy and practice.�

From pages 6-7:

Researchers in the past decade have not conclusively agreed on whether homework is effective in improving student achievement. Cooper and Valentine (2001) [found] that students who did homework generally outperformed students who did not. The authors found a low association between the amount of homework young students complete and their subsequent achievement and that the relationship between homework and achievement was moderated by the students� age and grade level (Cooper
and Valentine, 2001).


The evidence also suggests that although homework has a positive impact on student achievement, too much homework or homework not completed properly appears to reduce this positive effect.

Further evidence includes:

� The relationship between homework and achievement appears to be curvilinear, so that moderate amounts of time spent on homework are related to higher subject test scores, while a lot or very little time spent on homework is less productive (Keys et al., 1997).

Val- there is other research that refutes the above data too- it's really all over the place. I have read "Rethinking Homework" and also "The Case Against Homework", as well as a bunch of Kohn works. The general data seems to suggest that for middle class, parent involved students, homework has absolutely no affection on retention, standardized test scores or long-term memory until you reach the end of high school years. Homework in math in particular does show a pretty useful jump in the post-Algebra I period.

We're homeschooling this year in large part due to homework. My DS's school's philosophy was that 10 minutes per grade, per night PLUS 30 minutes of logged silent reading was a good idea. In addition, the kids all had long-term projects once a month. In third grade, on a good night, he had an hour of homework, on a bad one- it was more like 2.

All of the homework sheets were repetition of what had been done in class. In addition, the homework was not differentiated (to fill in "Gaps") so he would be doing 6th grade math in class and 3rd grade homework. I finally just gave up and stopped fighting. In a standards based report card system, it doesn't actually matter if you do the homework LOL! So he got a "U" for turns in homework on time and got an E+ "exceeds the standard" in everything else.

OK, putting stats geek cap on top of my teacher hat...

NCLB requires the use of criterion referenced tests, not standardized tests. Yes, there are percentiles printed with the test scores. The theory goes that these scores are based on whether students have demonstrated they can do the stuff in the state content standards and benchmarks, so all students might potentially score as proficient.

The theory also goes that my state can somehow leap from having 44% of its students scoring as proficient in math to having 82% of its students scoring as proficient by 2014, but I do not see that happening.

By standardized, I mean each student is taking the same test at the same time. Differentiation of the test is not allowed (unless you have a very complex 504/IEP or in my state, a 1st language waiver).

Regardless of the test, if a teacher were to commit to raising their entire class above proficient, they will not be able to do it with homework. If you have a group of students that is scoring at basic or below and aren't on the cusp of breaking up to proficient, you also likely have a group of parents that are unable to help with the math at home. Those students need more time at school, more hands on math, a differentiated program and small group time to master basic concepts they likely didn't catch the first time around a few years ago.

Two years ago, I had a group of 120 6th graders enter my school with 36 of them testing at 3rd grade math. Many couldn't multiply two digit numbers. It took two years of intensive math instruction, summer school and tutoring and we were still only able to get 20 of those kids up to grade level math (prepared to take Algebra in 8th).

DD does not have any time during class to do homework, except on very rare occasions. I actually think this is a sign that the curriculum is working for her--if she had plenty of time to do this, I'd wonder what was going on.

This I believe. I don't know why it's the case, but I'm going to hypothesize that homework helps with higher-level subjects because succeeding in them requires the development abstract thinking skills (assuming that the course hasn't been watered down).

Also, I'm thinking that these classes move frequently to ideas that are conceptually very different compared to math courses in primary school, which tend to focus on ideas that are the same or conceptually related. Lower-grade math classes also seem to go over last year's stuff until November-ish, as well (at least around here).

I think in the higher level math classes there is a lot less in class practice work, and more discussion/explanation. So the homework really provides some necessary practice at that point.

We are in half day kindergarten, though she educationally should be in first, the homework the teacher sends home, and doesnt grade, is so easy my 5 year old (just had a birthday) completes with a little work at. We have to turn in homework on Friday and it gets given to us on Monday. I make my dd's homework that she turns in and grade it myself. She turns in first grade work and her little sister who is in preschool and gets homework on Thursday and turns it in on Monday. We spend between 30 mins and an hour on homework for each girl everyday, Monday through Friday and Saturday and Sunday are completely off.

I asked the teachers for permission to change what my kids do for homework. I will add that my 3 year old has started doing 15 min. of homework that I make a day too. School is important but according to thier age and what they like I make sure they have more stuff they like than the other. For my oldest it is more math that is way harder than kindergarten, for my 5 year old it is art that describes a book (she can read but wont read for me), my 3 year old has preschool workbooks but he doesnt do much. He likes to scribble instead.

My DS is accelerated 5 years. Because of this, his homework is at times insane. I sat down with all of his teachers and made a deal. 30 minutes a class for a total possible 2.5 hours. Anything that doesn't get done gets pushed to the next day or to the weekend. He only has core classes 4 days a week, none on friday and it is very rare to have assigned homework that is meant for the weekend.

His teachers are clear that I monitor his homework time as he tends to screw off. So if something doesn't get turned in on time, they know it's because there was too much. He is not allowed to "spill" into the following week. So far it has worked although there are days that I wonder at the choices i've made.

Which DS is that, Shari? Just curious.

We had another homewowrk meltdown yesterday. I am at my wits' end with this some days. It's only going to get worse. The rote work, like math problems and language arts fill-ins, is fine. But the writing and sometimes the logic/math enrichment she gets, which are more open-ended, seem to sometimes be too much for her at the end of the day. I think she's just exhausted. As I have mentioned elsewhere, she is a model 100% student with perfect behavior while at school and then tends to explode at home.

Like Shari, our DD (who is also accelerated 4+ yrs) has an "outside of class time" workload which is at times vastly inappropriate to her chronological development and also grossly... er... useless, pedagogically speaking.

So sure, do 40 minutes of Algebra II problems. Not the same four problems ten times each.

The open-ended stuff is, IMO, much more appropriate for GT kids, or maybe it's just better for mine in particular. It's the mind-numbing and completely pointless stuff that she resents and drags her heels on.

OMG yes! I can't stand the homework. It's like... be weary of what you ask for.
It's such a catch 22 right? Ask for acceleration and it comes with so much HW. It's part of the package.
I feel like it's robbing time from them.
Yesterday DD came home and ran outside to play because the winter has been so mild. But of course had to come in early to do her homework.
Most 8yos would be able to play outside afterschool and not have to come in and do at least an hour or more of math HW. But she asked for radical acceleration so what else can we do, but deal with the added HW?

This is the stage where a scanner/copier becomes your friend.

Not around here. Both gt and non-gt parents complain about the volume of homework at our school. We have the same deal as many others. Mind-numbing worksheets, weekly spelling/vocab packets with an activity every day, daily reading commitments and long term projects mean that most kids at our school have had 1-2 hours of homework per night since first grade.

I made my oldest do everything and demanded high quality work. Over the years, my mindset has shifted dramatically. For meaningful, homework, I still have high standards. If a homework assignment seems repetitive and asinine, I've told my kids that these assignments merit "good enough" work. It has led to conversations about determining what work is important/relevant and what work is busy work that you can hustle through.

And in the meantime, my DS8's highly academically successful school gives no written homework at all. His school day does run until 6pm, but there's more than an hour of free time every day for clubs, play etc. in there, and more than an hour of sports every day.

(In earlier years, the school day finished at 3pm and he did have some reading and spelling revision to do at home; now even that fits into school hours if he wants it to. Later - the school takes children up to 13yos - he'll have revision that won't fit into school hours, but they retain a no-compulsory-written-homework policy all the way.)

IMO, tidying his room and fitting in music practice gives him all the practice he needs at time management, and this is a policy more schools should copy! (Of course, when I was at school it was standard policy, but that's another story...)

Hmm--no homework sounds good, but school till 6pm does not! Doesn't sound like enough unstructured time for me. And my DD is not at all into team sports (apple doth not fall far from the tree) but loves to play actively outside...

It's important to distinguish two (alleged) purposes of homework: 1) improving learning, and 2) teaching work ethic and organizational skills.

I personally think the second one is a weak argument, until kids are into their teens and learning to organize an open-ended, long-term assignment. For an elementary school kid, I think a much more meaningful lesson is imparted if the kid has to do things they don't like that are ACTUALLY USEFUL, like chores around the house. Doing pedagogically useless homework purely to teach them to do things they don't like seems like an insane distortion of the values it's supposed to impart. Not to mention an egregious intrusion of the schools into the family's role in teaching values.

So, what about the pedagogical value of homework? The 2004 report from Queensland that Val linked is actually wrong when it says that research supports the 10-minutes-per-grade-level rule. That report cites the work of Harris Cooper (Duke University) on this point, and Cooper's own work shows that the evidence for any benefit of homework at all in the elementary grades is exceedingly weak. (In fact, Cooper is more sanguine about the literature than I am. He finds that every single study on this question has flawed methods, but he thinks that on aggregate they add up to something. In fact, you can stack up as many seives as you want, but they're still seives, and the stack is not going to hold water. In particular, not a single study has shown a CAUSAL relationship between homework and performance. Studies do attempt to account for mediator variables -- motivation, parental involvement, socio-economic status, quality of school, quality of teacher, etc. -- but as Cooper says, all of them are flawed. In short, better-prepared students are probably given more homework. The homework is the stone in the stone soup.)

In short, the idea that 10 minutes of homework is the magic right amount for first graders, and 20 minutes for second graders, and so on, is simply pulled out of thin air. It has no empirical support.

I'm so glad someone started this thread... we have been having major homework angst here as well. dd6 is accelerated to 3rd grade. She should be getting about an hour of homework (per her teacher) but it is more like 4. I will say this is more dd6's issue than the schools. The homework seems challenging and appropriate (hooray!) and when I look at the homework - I think -not so bad - this will not take so long - but it takes her absolutely forever! Lots of whining, tantrums, tears. I don't get it. For a kid who generally has excellent focus, she is completely unable to focus on her homework - I think that after 7 hours of school she is just pretty cooked mentally. Also, I think she just hasn't learned the art of just getting it done. So for example the other day she had to make a list of 10 questions for George Washington. She came up with three - and then the frustration began. She just could not think of any more... I offered suggestions and she would say, "well I am just not so curious about that" or "that is not interesting"... uggh! I felt like saying just write anything - it does not matter if you really care what George's favorite color was - just get it done! It literally took her three hours. On another day she had to respond to a writing prompt - the teacher said they had to "fill a page" with the answer. After about an hour I went to check in and see that dd6 is writing microscopically. Ugh - I mean really- she is a smart kid - to me "fill the page" would automatically translate into "write big"... so here she is after an hour and only 1/3 of the page filled and completely tapped out as to what she wants to say. Other things take her forever because everything has to be perfectly neat - she will erase the answer 24 three times and re-write it so that all of the columns line up perfectly. It is tough because I know I probably send her mixed messages, "just try your best" and "just get it done"...for her trying her best really means going way overboard.
Wow, I had a lot to say.

Yes, I think I'd prefer him to get more unstructured time, too. Still, at least this way he gets some at school with his friends, the whole weekend with us, and, with no stress about getting stuff done at home, maximal use of what he has. Compared with many children I know here who have school until 3 or 4, then have to be in after-school care till 5.30 or 6 because their parents work full time, and then still have homework to do when they eventually get home (because it needed support not available at the after-school care place) it's definitely good. Also, although I used the word "sports", "physical activity" might have been a better choice - it isn't all team games, and they get increasing choice about what they do as they get older.

Yep, I have one of those too (when he took I don't remember which assessment test the psych had to confiscate the pencil with the eraser).

Let me know if you find the magic answer...

LOL. Well, of course I don't mean that it is literally the same four problems. Just metaphorically; that it's the same basic concept/application done to death with a more-is-better, we'll-bash-this-concept-into-submission-by-brute-force approach...

I mean, if my daughter can demonstrate mastery with four multi-step problems that incorporate all of the four concepts in the lesson, then why, oh WHY does she really need to do ten of each single-step type?

That's just drill-and-kill and it serves no purpose other than to teach my child to loathe and dread the subject itself.

I really like the description of the two-fold nature of outside of class activities. That sums it up beautifully, and I think it highlights immediately why "radical acceleration" and a lot of not-truly-differentiated GT programs fail HG+ kids in all their asynchronous glory. Teaching "responsibility" to a fourteen year old looks dramatically different (from a developmental stance) than doing so with a seven year old. WAY different executive skills readiness at work there, just for starters. That 14yo is capable of seeing "yes, I just need to get this done and then I can do what I want" whereas the 7yo may simply not be capable of "forcing themselves" to do the work if it is obviously redundant and unnecessary.

We've seen this play out time and time again with DD. It's ultimately a fit issue that dictates changes in placement as much as purely cognitive needs do.

There will be many changes when I am made ruler of the known universe. Alas, this does not seem to be imminent.

YES to this. It can become increasingly apparent that this is so when a child has an inappropriate placement in undifferentiated curriculum year after year.

BTDT, currently living it. It's difficult to convince educators that "100%" should not be a goal for some learners-- particularly not those for whom it is a somewhat realistic target. Students like that need to be in curriculum that either moves away from a criterion-based or norm-referenced assessment scheme entirely, or needs to be placed into a situation in which 100% is pretty much ONLY achievable through good luck in combination with top performance, and therefore seldom realistic and merely a pleasant surprise when it DOES happen. Alternatively, assessment can be based on crystal clear curricular goals and stellar writing of assessments, so that the level of effort necessary to earn "perfection" is clear and consistent. (Yeah, I know-- I had trouble not laughing, there, too. Never going to happen.)

Otherwise it leads to completely out of control perfectionism, especially in students who have a penchant for high achievement and recognition, or in those students whom adults have placed obviously high expectations on.



It's very hard not to praise kids for perfect scores, even when we know that the effort required is not always proportional.

Same here!

Although I can see the benefit of not having your child do alot of repetitive homework they already know, I do have my kids do it. I think that some of life is doing things that you already know, even if it's easy. How about most jobs that people have? Even stimulating jobs have parts that are dull or repetitive.

Yes, and we do promote that, within reason and where it is actually developmentally appropriate.

An analogy that I like here is to consider the benefits of teaching a child to "wait your turn."

Suppose that the "wait" in question is a line that is an hour long, with dozens of people in line ahead of us. Well, that might be a perfectly appropriate thing with a seven year old (well, some seven year olds, anyway-- mine would have been fine with that), and well within age norms for a child of 10 or older. Not so much with a two year old, no matter how appropriate the activity/event itself might be at the end of that wait.

In that instance, it would be much more appropriate for that asynchronous child for parents (or a group of adults) to tag-team and hold a spot in the line, so that the 2yo wouldn't be stuck there continuously, but rather get to 'practice' that waiting skill in shorter bursts (10 min, not 60).

I hope that makes sense. It's not that the wait is "wrong." It is what it is, and yes, the real world requires us to adjust to it, and not the other way around. But it also isn't possible for the 2yo to learn patience from that particular exercise, just in general terms.

I'd also argue that it flatly isn't possible for most 8yo to learn the value of 'just do it' when they knew perfectly well how to do two hours of math homework for precalc when they started the evening.

Our school gives no homework per se up until 4th or 5th grade. With that being said, they do ask that we spend 15 minutes a night reading (Kindergarten) and his 2nd grade class actually asks for 30 minutes a night reading. DS reads stuff ALL THE TIME so I don't usually worry about making sure that he puts the time in every night. Some nights he may read for 2 hours and others not at all. Either way, his reading level has increased a full grade level in 3 months so I'm not too concerned. DS does also occasionally get a little bit of math to finish up because the 2nd grade class does math for 90 minutes every day but he is only in the class for 60 minutes of it. He is keeping up just fine and supplementing on his own by learning multiplication, division, negative numbers, and roman numerals at home. Usually if he does bring anything home he has it done before I pick him up from daycare.

Wow...um...yeah, this is true, isn't it.

Says the mom whose kid gets 100%s on everything (but, but, this year the 100s are harder earned, at least).