Stop Homework

Fred Baum­garten, the father of two daugh­ters in pub­lic school in Sharon, Con­necti­cut, began talk­ing to other par­ents in his daughter’s fifth grade class about home­work after he read The Home­work Myth, by Alfie Kohn, a col­lege class­mate. Fred, who has a M.S. in Edu­ca­tion from Bank Street and is cur­rently a direc­tor of Foun­da­tion, Gov­ern­ment and Cor­po­rate Rela­tions at Sarah Lawrence Col­lege, has a blog, Home­work Headaches, where he recently posted the let­ter he wrote to the Fifth Grade par­ents at his daughter’s school. In addi­tion to read­ing his let­ter, you should visit his blog, where you can fol­low his orga­niz­ing attempts.

Dear Fifth Grade Fam­i­lies & Friends:
by Fred Baum­garten
Sharon, Connecticut

I’ve spo­ken with a num­ber of you indi­vid­u­ally in the last few months about prob­lems with fifth grade home­work that have had an impact on our fam­ily and on our daughter’s atti­tudes toward school. Many of you have shared sim­i­lar stories.

Recently the Prin­ci­pal sent out a let­ter address­ing some of these con­cerns and reit­er­at­ing the school’s home­work poli­cies and atti­tudes, but this let­ter pro­poses no sub­stan­tive changes and fails to get at the heart of the problem.

There are really three home­work prob­lems, in my view:

(1) Quan­tity: Even if it’s true that our stu­dents are spend­ing an aver­age of an hour a day on home­work assign­ments, it would still be too much; it means that some days it takes a lot longer; it doesn’t take into account after­school activ­i­ties; and it takes away from time legit­i­mately spent in fam­ily activ­i­ties, relax­ing, reflect­ing, read­ing for fun, going out­doors, etc. Most of all there is the relent­less­ness of home­work – every night, and on week­ends too, which also relates to the sec­ond point, below.

(2) Con­tent: With very few excep­tions, fifth grade home­work assign­ments have been repet­i­tive, unen­gag­ing, and one-dimensional – lit­er­ally the same thing, night after night.
Read the rest of this entry »

Rosie Scrib­ble, a free­lance writer in the U.K. who spe­cial­izes in men­tal health issues and blogs about life with her 6 year old, wrote a won­der­ful piece about why she doesn’t make her daugh­ter do home­work. Many of the com­menters also wrote that they didn’t make their chil­dren do home­work, either. Now, if they could all inspire their friends and their friends’ friends, etc., home­work for young chil­dren would no longer exist (after all, most ele­men­tary school chil­dren require some kind of parental involve­ment to get their home­work done).

I Have Banned My Child from Doing Home­work
by Rosie Scribble

Some­times I get a bit hot under the col­lar, stamp my foot and decide that what­ever I have been told to do — I’m not doing it.

Then I won­der why my six-year-old daugh­ter does the same.

How­ever today, once again, I have decided there are a few things that our lit­tle fam­ily will not be doing, for one day at least.

Here’s the list:

I.J. [my daugh­ter] will not be doing any home­work
I.J. will not be watch­ing News­round
I.J. will not be look­ing at her school read­ing book
I will not be dis­cussing key­words and spellings with I.J.
I will not be test­ing her on her addi­tion and mul­ti­pli­ca­tion
I will not be help­ing her to prac­tise her alpha­bet
We will not be doing any­thing related in any way to edu­ca­tion
We shall only be doing fun things
Why?

Because a mother knows when her child is under stress, when she has had enough and is over-tired and over-sensitive, when being asked to watch the news will only add to her cur­rent anx­i­eties, when num­ber work at school is get­ting her down to the point where she can’t sleep at night, when the pres­sure to prac­tise her read­ing every night is get­ting her down, when it is all becom­ing too much.

A mother knows when her child needs a night off, a break from it all, and when a dose of fun takes pri­or­ity over homework.

So here’s what we will do instead:

We’ll close the cur­tains, turn off the lights and turn the front room into a cin­ema
We’ll watch a brand new DVD, pos­si­bly Cloudy with a chance of Meat­balls as rec­om­mended by A Mod­ern Mother
We’ll eat party food fol­lowed by choco­late cake
We’ll cud­dle up on the sofa
We’ll shut out the rest of the world
We’ll for­get about school
We’ll for­get about every­thing else
We’ll have some fun
And I’ll hope for a calmer more relaxed child tomorrow.

(Read the post and the accom­pa­ny­ing com­ments here.)

Yesterday’s New York Times had a won­der­ful op-ed by Susan Engel, Play­ing to Learn, about the press­ing need to com­pletely over­haul the edu­ca­tion sys­tem. Instead of schools focus­ing so much on stan­dards and facts, the author writes:

So what should chil­dren be able to do by age 12, or the time they leave ele­men­tary school? They should be able to read a chap­ter book, write a story and a com­pelling essay; know how to add, sub­tract, divide and mul­ti­ply num­bers; detect pat­terns in com­plex phe­nom­ena; use evi­dence to sup­port an opin­ion; be part of a group of peo­ple who are not their fam­ily; and engage in an exchange of ideas in con­ver­sa­tion. If all ele­men­tary school stu­dents mas­tered these abil­i­ties, they would be pre­pared to learn almost any­thing in high school and college.

With that in mind, schools could be an engag­ing place where stu­dents read for 2 hours a day, write about sub­jects that are mean­ing­ful to them, prac­tice the math basics (and then go on to activ­i­ties that are equally essen­tial for math and sci­ence such as devis­ing orig­i­nal exper­i­ments and observ­ing the nat­ural world), and have plenty of time to play.

Is any­one listening?

Read the piece here and then copy and send it to the prin­ci­pal of your child’s ele­men­tary and mid­dle school.

I love this edi­to­r­ial from 1910, posted in yesterday’s Cal­gary Her­ald. (Thanks to Vera Good­man, author of Sim­ply Too Much Home­work, for send­ing it to me.)

Hope For The Chil­dren
pub­lished in the Cal­gary Her­ald on Jan­u­ary 26, 1910 and reprinted on Feb­ru­ary 2010

The Her­ald has fre­quently urged the abo­li­tion of home work in the pub­lic schools, at least in the lower grades. It believes that lit­tle chil­dren of from seven to twelve years of age do not need to study at home in order to learn as much as their brains are prop­erly capa­ble of car­ry­ing dur­ing that period.

It is a plea­sure now to be able to quote one of the lead­ing author­i­ties in Canada in sup­port of this view. Inspec­tor Hughes of Toronto, whose name is known wher­ever edu­ca­tion is dis­cussed, will rec­om­mend to the board of edu­ca­tion of that city the abo­li­tion of home­work in all the classes below the senior third. His exam­ple will prob­a­bly be fol­lowed by other sim­i­lar offi­cials and may per­haps in time reach Calgary.

There is hope for the chil­dren in this news. Home study, as an east­ern paper recently put it, is the Jack-the-Giant-Killer of pri­mary edu­ca­tion. “It kills,” says the Toronto Star, “the giant in the mak­ing, catches the bright boy, who ought to become the big vir­ile man, and smoth­ers him under blan­kets of books. It stunts his intel­lect by mak­ing him work when he should be rest­ing. It puts his eyes out with night work, rounds his shoul­ders, leaves him a hol­low chest.”

The Her­ald can­not too strongly impress on the par­ents of Cal­gary the far greater impor­tance of healthy bod­ies to crammed minds. Calgary’s schools are well equipped with play grounds. Calgary’s chil­dren, as a rule, are a healthy lot. Calgary’s cli­mate is per­fectly adapted to the mould­ing of vig­or­ous bod­ies. We do not want them spoiled for the sake of a few lessons or a lit­tle more rapid advance in some branch of study. The exam­ple of Inspec­tor Hughes is a strong one. The pub­lic school board of this city might well con­sider it care­fully with a view to abol­ish­ing home study in the lower grades of the schools under their charge.

Lis­ten to this inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion on ADHD on BAM! Radio.

(This is the lat­est in a series of inter­views I’ve con­ducted with edu­ca­tors and activists around the coun­try who are on my radar as peo­ple who are doing their best to change pol­icy and prac­tice in their communities.)

Alan Shus­ter­man, who lives in Chevy Chase, Mary­land with his wife and three chil­dren, is the founder of School for Tomor­row (SFT), an inde­pen­dent non­profit sec­ondary school (grades 6 – 12) located in Rockville, Mary­land which opened this Fall with 18 stu­dents, 3 full-time teach­ers and 6 part-time teach­ers. Its web­site describes the school as a “one-of-a-kind, cut­ting edge, student-centered edu­ca­tion model designed in and fit for the 21st century.”

I was intrigued by that descrip­tion, and by the fact that the school stated up front that research shows lit­tle value to home­work, so I inter­viewed him to find out more about SFT and his inspi­ra­tion for start­ing it.

Inter­view with Alan Shus­ter­man
by Sara Bennett

Can you tell me a lit­tle bit about your back­ground and why you decided to start a school?
I was a pub­lic school kid, always a good stu­dent but never par­tic­u­larly engaged in school. I was able to get As despite myself. Grow­ing up I loved hang­ing out with kids younger than me, I set up school for my younger sis­ter and taught her how to read, and I always had the teach­ing bug.

But because I was a good stu­dent, I ended up at the Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia, and becom­ing a teacher was never on the hori­zon. Back then, before Teach for Amer­ica, it wasn’t cul­tur­ally accept­able for some­one grad­u­at­ing from an Ivy League school to go into teach­ing. So, instead, I went to Har­vard Law School. As his­tory would have it, Barack Obama was in my class at Har­vard; as luck would have it, I didn’t befriend him.

Every lit­tle aspect of my life story has informed my phi­los­o­phy of edu­ca­tion, includ­ing hav­ing gone to Penn and Har­vard and see­ing first­hand what the best and bright­est sec­ondary school grad­u­ates are like and do. Of course this is an over-generalization, but, in gen­eral, the stu­dents who suc­ceed in high school arrive to col­lege narrow-minded, con­formist, and sup­port­ers of the sta­tus quo. That Pres­i­dent Obama, for one, has turned out to be a rather con­ven­tional politi­cian, espe­cially with respect to edu­ca­tion, has not sur­prised me, given his edu­ca­tional pedigree.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday’s New York Times had a piece Play, Then Eat: Shift May Bring Gains at School about the impor­tance of hav­ing recess before lunch. I couldn’t help but won­der, once again, why some­thing so com­mon­sen­si­cal requires experts to weigh in. And, even more, I couldn’t help but won­der why so many kids don’t get recess at all.

Can some­thing as sim­ple as the tim­ing of recess make a dif­fer­ence in a child’s health and behavior?

Some experts think it can, and now some schools are resched­ul­ing recess — send­ing stu­dents out to play before they sit down for lunch. The switch appears to have led to some sur­pris­ing changes in both cafe­te­ria and classroom.

Schools that have tried it report that when chil­dren play before lunch, there is less food waste and higher con­sump­tion of milk, fruit and veg­eta­bles. And some teach­ers say there are fewer behav­ior problems.

“Kids are calmer after they’ve had recess first,” said Janet Sinkewicz, prin­ci­pal of Sharon Ele­men­tary School in Rob­binsville, N.J., which made the change last fall. “They feel like they have more time to eat and they don’t have to rush.”

One recent week­day at Sharon, I watched as gag­gles of sec­ond graders chased one another around the play­ground and climbed on mon­key bars. When the whis­tle blew, the bustling play­ground emp­tied almost instantly, and the chil­dren lined up to drop off their coats and mit­tens and file qui­etly into the cafe­te­ria for lunch.

“All the wig­gles are out,” Ms. Sinkewicz said.

Read the entire arti­cle here.

Vicki Abeles, the film­maker of Race to Nowhere, had an excel­lent video op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times about the prob­lems with Advanced Place­ment Classes. Watch it here and then let me know what you think.

If you’re a par­ent of a high schooler, or a high schooler, I’m curi­ous to know what, if any­thing, you do about AP classes. I, for one, dis­cour­age my high schooler from tak­ing zero period classes (those that start at 7:10) and from tak­ing hon­ors or AP classes. While her teach­ers (and other par­ents) often look at me askance, I think her free time is bet­ter spent on activ­i­ties of her own choos­ing (and get­ting a good night’s sleep) than on doing the extra home­work that comes along with those kinds of classes. And although the video doesn’t really get to it, AP classes in par­tic­u­lar don’t require more advanced or cre­ative think­ing. They do, though, require an awful lot of memorization.

(You can see Race to Nowhere on Thurs­day, Jan­u­ary 28, in Salt Lake City, Utah at 7:30 p.m. at the Megaplex Theater).