Stop Homework

Here’s an email I received from an adult who dropped out of school because of too much homework. The writer, now 35, told me he went on to get an associates degree, joined the military, worked as a flight attendant, and is now a contract worker, using skills he picked up in the military:

I dropped out of high school during my junior year. Why? I got tired (of homework). I was mostly an A and the occasional B student while growing up. Honor roll student every quarter/semester. But I failed my first course ever in the first quarter of my junior year. In fact, I failed four of six classes that quarter! Why? Homework. Believe it or not, I quit doing my homework. I had enough.

I was a bright student. I was quick to learn. And, I still passed all my tests. A’s. Maybe the occasional B. I paid attention in class. I took in the knowledge. And, I gave that knowledge right back to them when tested. Typically you would think that my test scores would show competency and success. I understood what I was taught without a doubt. Yet I failed four courses! Because I wouldn’t (no, because I couldn’t!!!) do my homework. It was too much. Way too much. Years and years of excessive homework took its toll on me. I was tired. I was fatigued. I was beat. And I dropped out.

The system turned a successful, smart kid into a worn out dropout.

A middle-schooler from South Dakota has this to say about homework:

Homework: It’s Not Worth It
Homework: it stresses you out, causes writer’s cramps, and simply takes up your time to relax and be yourself. Teachers assign homework because they believe that it builds character, academic skills, and work habits. What homework really builds is an immense pile of textbooks and paper resembling a mountain. For middle school students, homework should be less than one hour per night, but the average middle-school student has 1-2 and a half hours of homework. If you have less than an hour of homework each day, you really don’t know how blessed you are.

Research says this: Homework demands limit the amount of time students spend in sports and community projects. Too much homework may cause students to dislike the subject, or even learning. Students may also get confused by their parents’ teaching methods because they may be different from the teacher’s teaching methods. Homework also may (believe it or not) encourage cheating.
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About a year ago, I posted a guest blog entry by Chris Elssasser, an associate professor of education at Pepperdine University, in which he analyzed how much time high school students really have and asked what students should give up for homework.

A middle school teacher responded, writing that students have plenty of time for homework. It’s important to read what the teacher had to say, because it shows why some teachers believe that parental complaints are baseless.

Here’s what the teacher wrote:

Why are you accounting for exercise PLUS sports PLUS assuming the students have gym class. And last time I checked that 45 minutes for breakfast was more like 5, and the 45 minutes for lunch a part of school.

6 AM Wake up
8-3 School
3-5 Afterschool activities
5-6 Relax
6-6:30 Dinner
6:30-9:30 Homework
9:30-10 TV
10 Bed

As a middle school teacher, we aim for between one hour and 90 minutes a day. I doubled it, and still find this to be an honest expectation. The students I find can’t complete the homework are either in a day care that doesn’t enforce homework time and have no study skills themselves and don’t begin till 7 when their parents come home; or the students who are over dedicated to sports and have multiple 3-hour-a-day practices during the week and feel that athletic achievement and ‘well-roundedness’ are more important than school.

Before I wrote The Case Against Homework, I rarely corresponded with authors about their books and ideas. But since the publication of my book, I’ve heard from thousands of readers and I’ve been inspired to write to other authors as well.

Last week, I exchanged books with Carl Honore, author of Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting. Honore is also the author of the best-selling In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed. Under Pressure is an easy-to-read, common-sense musing on how parents’ natural instinct to want the best for their children has backfired, turning childhood into a rat race.

I’ve also corresponded with Roger Schank, author of Coloring Outside the Lines. Schank, the Founder of the renowned Institute for the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, explains that being smart doesn’t necessarily mean getting straight A’s, and he writes about the importance of, among other things, nurturing our children so that they can speak convincingly and eloquently, think on their feet, create original ideas that push the boundaries, be willing to risk failure, and feel free enough to color outside the lines.

These books are all worth reading.

A sophomore at a Rhode Island public high school sent me this essay he wrote for English class. When he’s not doing homework, the student likes to do yoga and is a member of two clubs, People Respecting Individual Differences and Equality (formally known as the Gay-Straight Alliance) and Students for Social and Environmental Justice.

Homework Should be Optional
by a Rhode Island Sophomore

The time a student spends in school is generally six and a half hours. The bus ride can be anywhere from five minutes to over an hour, each way. The day begins at seven thirty-two in the morning, with a twenty-two minute lunch and a five minute break between classes. And when the student reaches home, more work awaits him or her: some times many hours, if the student does all of his/her homework. Yet, this nightly practice is often unneeded and causes much unnecessary tension and stress. Homework should not be mandatory; rather, it should be optional.
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The Toronto School Board has just implemented the best homework policy I’ve seen. The policy, which will affect close to 300,000 students, focuses on quality, not quantity, suggests that homework in the early grades be limited to reading, talks at length about the value of family time, and recommends that all homework assignments be differentiated. I hope that the Toronto policy becomes a model for other school district across Canada and in the U.S. as well. You can read all about the policy in my earlier blog post here.

In the Spring, 2008 issue of Rethinking Schools, I read a wonderful article by Peter Campbell, an educator who writes a blog called transformeducation.blogspot.com. His article vividly describes how time in pre-kindergarten classes is now spent on worksheets and traditional academics at the expense of play:

My daughter came home the other day in an incredibly grumpy mood. “How was school today?” I asked. “Terrible,” she answered. “Why? What happened?” “I want to play with my friends,” she said. “Don’t you get a chance to play with your friends?” “No,” she replied.

To be honest with you, it’s not so much the addition of academics that worries me as it is the subtraction of everything else. We seem to have lost the balance here. What are we getting rid of to make more time for all this skill building? Art, music, foreign languages and – yes – recess are being cut to make more time for skills, specifically math and reading skills. Starting in pre-K.

So I met with a district administrator at the Office of Teaching and Learning. I said to her, “Ideally for me, pre-K can be about play, socialization, and fun. I think we can introduce some early literacy and numeracy in Kindergarten, but let’s wait until first grade to get into formal instruction.” She replied, “Oh, no. That would be too late.” “Too late?” I asked. “Too late for what?”

Read the entire piece, The Scripted Prescription: A cure for childhood, here.