Stop Homework

When I was in Chicago at the AERA conference two weeks ago, I was on a panel with Chris Ellsasser, an associate professor of education at Pepperdine University, a high school English teacher, and the founder of a group of progressively-minded teachers known as the Mad Tea Educators. Chris approaches homework by asking high school teachers and students one simple question: How much time do we really have? Below is an excerpt from the paper he wrote to accompany the presentation.

Do the Math:
Redesigning Homework to Create More Time for Learning
by Christopher Ward Ellsasser

Time is a finite resource and something which cannot be changed, so it makes sense to begin by establishing exactly how time works for students.

Too often discussions and decision making processes in schools related to issues like homework are based on personal preferences, social norms, and the mythology of schooling. Such a process is akin to medical doctors basing treatment on “gut feeling� rather than science and knowledge of the particular patient. In order to develop policies that reflect the best of what we know about education using the most sophisticated ways of knowing we have, time must be created to establish a baseline of facts. Such is the case with homework. While each school and community has it differences which need to be considered, there is also a shared body of knowledge we can draw from.

Developing a thoughtful approach to homework can begin by doing the math on the time students spend each day. We can begin our calculations by looking at how much time students need to be healthy. The following questions reveal how much time students spend per day on health related activities:

• How much time should students spend sleeping? (9 hours)
• How much time should students spend eating? (three meals = 2 hours
• How much time should students spend exercising? (1 hour)
• Total hours spent maintaining basic health = 12 hours per day

The next consideration is time spent engaged in structured activities such as classes and other organized programs. The following questions reveal how much time students spend on structured activities:

• How much time do students spend in school? (6 hours)
• How much time do students spend in after school activities (i.e. sports, art, work)? (2 hours)
• How much time do students spend commuting = 1 hour
• Total hours spent on structured activities = 9 hours

Once we have accounted for maintaining health and engaging in structured activities (21 hours), students have three hours of discretionary time per day. Of course that assumes the day is without unexpected glitches or distractions. Factor in a conservative thirty minutes twice a day for hygiene/waking up/winding down and you are down to two hours unaccounted for each day.

Given the overwhelming research on the importance of reading, we would be inclined to set aside one hour for reading. Now we are down to one hour per day for school age children to play, relax, or just spend down time with others like friends and family. Regardless of the recommended 10 minutes of homework per day (90 -120 minutes for high school students), even if we eliminate “personal time� today’s high school student only have one hour each day to spend doing homework. So now the question becomes what, if anything, can be done in one hour to enhance the quality of their education.

Today I’d like to introduce Lisa Grady, the parent of a fourth-grader from a community of 35,000 in southern California. Lisa is the co-chair of a committee which formed to raise the issue of homework in the fourth grade. Although you might want to turn to The Case Against Homework to learn the research and facts and have sample policies, petitions and surveys at your fingertips, here Lisa will tell us in her own words what’s happening in her community. I wish her lots of luck in her work and hope that there aren’t too many bumps along the way. (As always, please chime in with any suggestions, comments, or your own stories.)

Organizing Other Parents
by Lisa Grady

While I have struggled with the issue of homework in elementary school for years, my struggle was a silent one. That all changed when I learned of two new books, “The Case Against Homework� by Sara Bennett and “The Homework Myth� by Alfie Kohn. I was so ecstatic that others recognized the impact that homework was having on children and their families, that I began carrying the books around with me everywhere I went. Invariably, people would notice the books and ask me about them. My intention was to start a grass roots movement. It took about six months for my intention to come to fruition and the way in which it unfolded underscores how isolated we can feel until we begin talking with each other.

A parent, whom I had never met before,was surprised when another subject showed up on her child’s weekly homework assignment sheet. So, she emailed some other parents in the class and queried how they felt about the additional work on top of the existing homework load. One of the emails she received back suggested that she “email this parent who always carries around these books on homework�. She contacted me and now Cheryl and I are the emissaries for a group that currently represents a third of the fourth grade at our school.

We started with ten active members and then individual members spoke to various people they knew. For those interested in hearing more, we sent out a letter briefly detailing our concerns and summarizing the research. This effort helped us grow to over 43 people. And we have only focused on the fourth grade thus far.

We hold weekly meetings, complete with agendas so that the meetings are constructive. Our overriding goal of all communication is to be collaborative and non-adversarial. Some members would prefer no homework while others would simply like less homework of higher quality. But we all agree that we want our children to have a lifelong passion for learning and anything that interferes with that demands careful examination.

As we delve further into the subject of homework, we find that homework may only be a small part of our true mission — making sure that no childhood is left behind.

Middle and high school students have been sending me essays they’ve written about homework. On occasion, I will be posting them here. (If you are a student and want me to consider your paper, email me.)

Today’s guest blog entry is by Courtney, an eighth grader who goes to a middle school in the Central Valley of California. Courtney told me that she and her friends “all complain to each other but are too afraid to say anything to the teacher.” When she had to write a persuasive essay for an English class, she decided that was the place to express her feelings about too much homework. Courtney told me that when she isn’t doing homework, I “love to play soccer, softball, volleyball, basketball, and tennis. With all of these sports I get hurt almost constantly (hahaha).” (I have posted Courtney’s essay exactly as she sent it to me.)

Homework Overload
by Courtney, 8th grade student, Central Valley, California

Have you ever seen the amount of homework that students get each night? I think that there is too much homework each night, and it should be decreased. Having the amount of homework that is assigned each night creates too much stress. Also the amount of homework does not allow them time to be involved in extra curricular activities or spend time with friends. Family time is decreased because of the volume of assignments each night. Even with the amount of homework that students get, America has an interesting percentage of college students who cannot do the work or are not taking the classes that an average eighth grader is taking.

Homework overload just causes too much stress because the students worry more about quantity rather than quality. When a student sees that they have 2 pages in their math book, 1 essay to write, 2 workbook pages for science, 4 activities for Spanish, a project due in history, an assignment and study guide for P.E., they are not thinking about how to do it well, but how to get it done as fast as possible. The students do not care how well they do as long as they get it done. When the students realize that their math was harder than they expected, they end up staying up way later than planned. That leaves them restless and stressed out from not finishing everything. When they are tired and restless and still did not finish their homework, they may feel as if they have no choice but to cheat on it. According to a study in 2005, consisting of 18,000 students, more than 65% of the students said that they cheated in some way. Some students get so stressed and overwhelmed by the amount of homework they receive that they feel as if there is no way out other than to cheat.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s guest blogger is Robert McCay, a retired community mental health psychiatrist from Philadelphia who has published articles on schools, reading, child-rearing, and psychiatry. Last summer, I contacted Dr. McCay after I read a letter he had written to the editor in USA Today, and we’ve had several interesting conversations about schooling since then.

If you’d like to be the author of a guest blog, please let me know.

Let’s Help Academia Do What Can Be Done
by Robert McCay

Inasmuch as most of our well-meaning schools and colleges are riven with anxiety, boredom, resistance, anger, forgetting, and failure — even as fewer than one-third of recent college graduates are proficient in literacy, down from 40% a decade ago — it would appear as if it’s time to stop Teach’em-Test’em schooling and start a growth-promoting education instead:

So if we’re serious about turning schools into mind-expanding, ego-enhancing institutions — producing children ready for the rapid changes, high-skill requirements, information overload, and the uncertainties of the 21st century — we should first announce, loudly, that while schools and colleges could educate, as currently organized most of Academia is seriously counterproductive.

And then:

1: Stimulate them with interesting materials like art, music, sports, computers, good books, magazines, work, people, exercise, microscopes, libraries, museums, zoos, trips, and especially the daily newspaper.

2: Abolish all quizzing and formal assessment prior to those necessary licensing exams before doctors, lawyers, and plumbers are let loose on the public.

3: Make the compulsory attendance law apply only as far as the playground and let them mill around until they’re bored to death after which the vast majority will come voluntarily into the classroom and set up a whole new dynamic between teacher and child including the fact that they can be sent immediately back to the playground if they fail to settle down.

4: Always give them plenty of choice and control over what they learn and when they learn it while we can use Purkey’s Invitational Education; i.e. “Show me what you can do and then I, or another child, will help you do better.”

5: Let the colleges, businesses, and graduate schools give their own tests for admission because K-20 teach’em-test’em is making a farce out of the term “education.”

6 :Use choral reading, a.k.a. reading in unison, as the #1 method above all others combined with group arithmetic-problem solving and writing together.

7: And/or maybe have the government declare reading, writing, arithmetic, and button-pushing illegal (!) before age 14 because then we couldn’t stop those rebellious critters from teachin’ ‘emselves how, just like they taught themselves to speak the native tongue, the most difficult thing we’ll ever do.

8: Have the public schools work with the homeschoolers/unschoolers.

9: Note the success of experiments where the reward for demonstrated learning is to be excused from all examinations.

In a commentary in today’s North County Times, Stephen D. Aloia, Associate Professor of Education at California State University, Fullerton, writes that one of the reasons teachers give so much homework is that they spend so much time on test prep that they don’t have time to teach. With his permission, here’s what he has to say:

State Standards Measure Wrong Things
by Stephen D. Aloia

Research shows that schools spend one day per week testing and preparing kids for tests.

No wonder we give so much homework. There’s no time left to teach. Tests cost money, take up teaching time, cause teachers to “teach to the tests” and give administrators ulcers. And tests cause students and parents to go off the deep end worrying about the wrong things.

Every year, our children are subjected to a number of tests that are supposed to help us determine the wellness of both our students and our schooling system. For purposes of space (and to avoid boredom), just the abbreviations will be used herein. There’s the API, AYP, PI, STAR tests, Exit Exam (CAHSEE), CAPA, CELDT, EAP, PFT, CHSPE, CAT/6, STS, NASP, GED, SAT, ACT, and perhaps a few others. (See the State of California Web site, www.cde.ca.gov/ta, for details of each test.) Not every student takes every test, but you get the point —- too many tests!

Sadly, these tests fail to assess the most important things about which schools are supposed to teach, but don’t. Tests tell us who can write well, think critically (it doesn’t matter about what, as long as it is critical thinking), calculate some fancy equation (that they will never use for the rest of their lives), and in some cases even tell us if our children know something about our own past —- our U.S. history (not social studies).

But we have no state standards nor tests that address the most important things in life, such as the importance of compassion, honesty, integrity, sincerity, patience, persistence, effort, fairness, justice, temperance, fortitude, courage, faith, hope, charity, magnanimity, trustworthiness, loyalty, helpfulness, friendliness, courtesy, kindness, cheerfulness, cleanliness, reverence, thrift, bravery and obedience. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I posted an article about how teenagers need more downtime, which was written by Dr. Daniel Gottlieb, a clinical psychologist, family therapist, and author of, among other things, Letters to Sam: A Grandfather’s Lessons on Love, Loss, and the Gifts of Life. On Monday of this week, he wrote a follow-up piece, again originally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Inside Out | Would less homework lead to more learning?
By Dan Gottlieb

My last column was about too much homework and what to do about it. I advised adolescents to form committees of students and parents to examine homework practices at their schools. I suggested they consult several recent books that argue that excessive homework does little good and a great deal of harm. I supported the position taken by many educators that homework should total no more than 10 minutes a night multiplied by grade level (90 minutes in ninth grade, for example). And I recommended that the newly formed committees meet with administrators and teachers to make their case.

Of course, I received dozens of e-mails. Most were from parents like Ginny DeLong, who said that when her daughter was in 10th grade, her English teacher would assign two hours of homework a night just for her class (one of six). When she complained, it turned out the school did have a homework policy - but no one was aware of it.

Jim O’Brien wrote that his adolescent daughter is “buried under homework; every night, every weekend and most holidays.” I also heard from a friend whose child is in kindergarten; he is already hearing about excessive homework requirements in first and second grade! Read the rest of this entry »

The Philadelphia Inquirer ran an article this week by Dr. Daniel Gottlieb, a clinical psychologist, family therapist, and author of, among other things, Letters to Sam: A Grandfather’s Lessons on Love, Loss, and the Gifts of Life. I was excited to read Dr. Gottlieb’s article because he talks about what students themselves can do to deal with the homework problem. Only days earlier, I’d been asked by Teen Vogue what teens can do. It’s unfortunate that we don’t hear very much from students, since they’re the people most affected by homework and education policies. (On this blog, I’ve posted a poem by a teenager and a few students have left comments, but I’d love to have more entries by students. So spread the word.)

I asked Dr. Gottlieb whether I could post his article and he graciously told me I could. I hope you like it as much as I did.

Inside Out | Teenagers Drastically Need More Downtime
By Dan Gottlieb

To all adolescents,

You need more time.

Ninety percent of the high school students I speak with say they are under great stress. Most of it is time-related, and much of that is a combination of too much homework and too little sleep. You need time to sleep (physicians say nine hours a night at your age), to read whatever you want to read, to dream about your future, to just hang out. You and I are not the only ones who know this. A new study by local pediatrician Kenneth Ginsburg demonstrates how important unstructured play (a.k.a. hanging out) is for children’s development. The same is true for adolescents.

Free time fosters creativity and emotional development. It gives you the opportunity to deepen relationships and learn about yourself. Without free time, I worry that you could grow into adulthood valuing yourself more for your performance than for your humanity - therefore putting yourself at greater risk of self-absorption, depression and anxiety disorders.

Mental health professionals all over the country are concerned, but nothing seems to change. Perhaps, in talking to adults, we’ve been addressing the wrong people.

So, how can you create more time? Let’s start with homework. The three to four hours a night I’m told is typical is way too much. Many well-respected educators say students should be assigned about 10 minutes of homework per grade (20 minutes in second grade, etc.).

For seniors in high school, that means two hours or so a night. Harris M. Cooper, a psychology professor at Duke University and author of The Battle Over Homework, agrees; so does the National Parent Teacher Association. In their new book, The Case Against Homework, Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish find no evidence that homework helps elementary school students at all. And the U.S. Department of Education has said elementary students should be given a maximum of five math problems a night. Yet many children are sent home with dozens of math problems and words to memorize.

Convinced? Here’s what you can do about it:

At each school, form a committee to deal with this issue. Check at least one of the above books out of the library and start gathering evidence for your argument. Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s guest blogger is John Painter, the editor of readingtonparents.org. On that web site, you’ll find interesting articles on a variety of topics, including: scripted learning, cheating, and homework. You’ll also find a pretty decent homework policy from the Readington, New Jersey, School District. Here, the father of two describes the all-too-familiar trials of a family immersed in homework hell.

A Father’s Lament
by John Painter

It is 6:30pm this Tuesday night, and we are knee deep in homework. My wife, a teacher, is helping my fourth grade daughter with her assignments while I help our sixth grade son with his. The glasses and serving dishes from dinner are piled up in the sink, although we have moved to paper plates as a way to save time. The kids are 11 ½ hours away from starting another school day, and my wife and I are an hour less than that away from our respective Wednesday workdays. Without our direct involvement in this homework, our kids will get “stuck� at some point. Sometimes the reason is because the material has not been covered well or at all in class, and frequently it is because the assignment is unclear.

My fourth grade daughter is mispronouncing the word “tranquility� as she attempts for the umpteenth time to recite the preamble to the US Constitution. I’m trying to focus on my son’s homework, but my blood is boiling and I’m having trouble staying focused. The assignment for my daughter is to memorize the preamble and to recite it publicly in class. There are so many facets to the wrong-headedness of this assignment that I struggle to contain them in some reasonably organized criticism.

It isn’t as though we are not patriotic. I spent time in the US Navy, and my father will always be a US Marine. My mother and grandmother were active in the Daughters of the American Revolution and my daughter can trace both sides of her family tree on this fertile soil back before any federal American government even existed. As a youth I was taught by my grandmother to stand with my hand over my heart each time an American flag passed by in a parade. My children feel the same stirrings. We usually watch the movie form of the play “1776� each year around the fourth of July, and my daughter can tell you a thing or two about John Adams.

My back is up not because I don’t think the preamble is worthy of study, but because I don’t think my daughter is learning anything about the ideas, the principles or the sacrifice behind the words she is memorizing on this Tuesday night. And, that is not all. Read the rest of this entry »