We have the opposite problem. My 4th grader has a maximum of 5 minutes of homework, 3 nights a week.
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.
