Stop Homework

I came across this nicely writ­ten piece by a teenager in his local news­pa­per, The Esta­cada News.

Zzz…Teenagers need more sleep
School board should con­sider late start for high school, junior high stu­dents
BY RUSS CAREY

It is time for the Esta­cada School Dis­trict to switch the school start­ing time of the high school and junior high schools with that of the grade schools. Today’s teens are sleep-deprived.

There are many stud­ies that clearly show that teens need more sleep that they are get­ting. I believe that the junior high and high school classes should begin later in the morn­ing to help solve this problem.

At present, classes for high school and junior high school stu­dents begin at 7:45 a.m., and grade school classes begin at 9:05 a.m. I would like to pro­pose switch­ing these two times. My rea­sons: Teenagers have more home­work, more extra-curricular activ­i­ties and require more sleep than younger chil­dren. This change would give the older stu­dents the extra time for the sleep they need to succeed.

Read the rest of the piece here.

At the end of the school year, I received the fol­low­ing speech from a 16-year-old male stu­dent, who is now a junior at a pub­lic school in Cal­i­for­nia. He enjoys play­ing drums, wants to go to Pep­per­dine Uni­ver­sity, and told me, “I don’t mean to brag, but the class liked my speech most.” I hope his teach­ers lis­tened to what he had to say.

Slowly Stran­gled to Silence: Home­work
by a 10th grader

“Where did my life go?” asked the boy who was killed by home­work. As young peo­ple grow­ing up, teenagers (like any­one else) should be able to enjoy life, not being harassed every week by the obnox­ious voice which taunts “Oh! You can’t go today. You’ve got that huge project to do…remember?” Unfor­tu­nately in the soci­ety that indi­vid­u­als live in today, (hon­ors and AP) stu­dents are bom­barded with ever-increasing amounts of home­work each and every day. Where is the good in mak­ing stu­dents spend their days and week­ends on a pile of work?

Of course, one might argue that home­work is ben­e­fi­cial to a student’s learn­ing and jour­ney to col­lege. Yes, home­work is indeed ben­e­fi­cial and even essen­tial to stu­dents in their road to suc­cess, but exten­sive amounts of it are unnec­es­sary and harm­ful. Aside from tak­ing away time from relax­ing and being a kid, large bun­dles of home­work, for many who choose to take school seri­ously and do their work, harm a student’s well-being.

Many stu­dents have expe­ri­enced sleep depri­va­tion and severe stress because of their large work load. Going to sleep past twelve o’clock every­day is extremely unhealthy. Research shows that sleep depri­va­tion can lead to a weak­ened immune sys­tem, depres­sion, irri­tabil­ity, and decreased alert­ness and abil­ity to focus. If teach­ers do not care enough about their stu­dents’ phys­i­cal health, then they should at least rec­og­nize that they are also hurt­ing them­selves by assign­ing hours of home­work. As men­tioned above, stu­dents who are not get­ting enough sleep will have decreased alert­ness and abil­ity to focus. This means that their grade in the class is bound to drop. Because the student’s grades will suf­fer, the teacher also suf­fers as he/she is respon­si­ble for teach­ing the students.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, I heard from Etta Kralovec, author of The End of Home­work, that she is look­ing for sto­ries about stu­dents whose grades were low­ered due to home­work incom­ple­tion. Have you sent her yours?

I passed on this email I received from a 19-year-old Aus­tralian high school grad­u­ate, who is very artic­u­late about why he didn’t do home­work and what that has meant.

Dear Sara,

Thank you very much for your strong opin­ion and pro­fes­sional stance against home­work, and most cer­tainly bring­ing to light the harm home­work can do to chil­dren. Now, although I am aware that your peti­tion­ing is only for ele­men­tary years, I wish to share with you my expe­ri­ence, and how home­work can and does affect many tal­ented indi­vid­u­als who are not pro­vided with the proper edu­ca­tion stim­uli and are just thrown an enor­mous pile of ‘homework’.

Per­son­ally, I am a 19 year old Aus­tralian male who has declined doing home­work for most of my nat­ural born life,

Read the rest of this entry »

About a year ago, I posted a piece by a New York City pri­vate school 10th grader, I love School, but it’s Killing Me. I was reminded of her when I received a call from the mother of a New York City 10th grader, whose daugh­ter was spend­ing 6 hours on home­work a night and was both sleep deprived and start­ing to dis­like school. The mother let her daugh­ter stay home from school for a few days to catch up on sleep and noti­fied the school that accom­mo­da­tions would be needed so that her daughter’s home­work load would be less­ened. When it was clear that the school wasn’t inter­ested in reduc­ing its home­work load, despite the con­cerns raised by many stu­dents, the 10th grader (with her par­ents’ approval) decided to with­draw. Here’s the let­ter she wrote to the school:

A Tenth Grader Speaks Out – “My Curios­ity and Desire to Learn is Con­stantly Shrink­ing” Because of Exces­sive Homework

I hope you will under­stand that I am more com­fort­able express­ing my feel­ings through this let­ter than a con­ver­sa­tion in your office. Believe me this is a dif­fi­cult let­ter to sit down and write. I am dev­as­tated by the way things have pro­gressed and yet I know I am mak­ing the right deci­sion. I would like to explain my rea­sons for want­ing to leave your New York City pri­vate school.

Read the rest of this entry »

Alfie Kohn, the author of The Home­work Myth, sent me the home­work of the nine-year-old son of a friend, who was required to put the weekly list of spelling words into sentences:

1. I am sooooo aggra­vated about my home­work sit­u­a­tion that I can’t think of any­more sen­tences.
2. I want to decline this home­work so badly.
3. I despise my home­work sit­u­a­tion.
4. My home­work sit­u­a­tion is dis­turb­ing me.
5. My sec­ond encounter with home­work is sick­en­ing.
6. I wasn’t to estab­lish an anti-paper club, A.P. for short.
7. I want to for­bid home­work after 8:00 p.m.

Dear Sara,

I’ve seen your web­site, and I just want to say how grate­ful I am that some­one out there besides my friends and I under­stand how awful home­work is and how it really doesn’t help us learn at all.

I’m a fresh­man at a com­pet­i­tive pub­lic high school in Philadel­phia, Penn­syl­va­nia. I’ve always spent large amounts of time on home­work; last year, I spent maybe 2 1/2 hours on home­work on aver­age. This year, it’s much worse. On good nights, I spend maybe 3 1/2 hours on home­work. On espe­cially bad nights, I spend up to 4 1/2 hours doing homework.

All my teach­ers give hor­ri­ble amounts of work; my math teacher gives us up to 30 long, com­pli­cated math prob­lems, which takes me a while because I’m not par­tic­u­larly good at math, and I check my work because I’m afraid he’ll give us a pop quiz on it the next day. My his­tory teacher gives long, gru­el­ing assign­ments, mostly involv­ing read­ing long text­book chap­ters and then doing work­sheets on them. My Eng­lish teacher gives huge amounts of work; we have to mem­o­rize 200 vocab­u­lary words a month, com­plete ter­ri­bly long essays he grades metic­u­lously, do work­sheets on a novel we’re read­ing exclu­sively in class, AND read a novel that’s sup­posed to be read exclu­sively at home. It’s hor­ri­ble, because Eng­lish has always been my favorite sub­ject, and now I dread

Read the rest of this entry »

Kira, an thirteen-year-old eighth grader in a pub­lic school in Penn­syl­va­nia, sent me the fol­low­ing email:

I just want to say I sup­port your web­site com­pletely, and every­thing on it is true, and relates to my school expe­ri­ence. My fam­ily gets really stressed out, to the point of tears, scream­ing, or yelling, etc. at least 3/5 school nights, and I believe homework’s one of the rea­sons we are all often stressed and high-strung.

I think school is mak­ing every­one very unhappy and unsat­is­fied at my school. We often have very lit­tle time to social­ize or have any fun (we are only 13!), and we are always doing our home­work all night, and hav­ing to go to bed early. I go through the whole long day half falling asleep because I am so tired from get­ting up so early and stay­ing up too late doing home­work. Also, we carry extremely heavy loads in our back­packs. I have back pains now and am really tense from car­ry­ing that up and down stairs every day.

I think the sys­tem is ridicu­lous. School is already mur­der­ing my child­hood, and giv­ing me lit­tle time for fun, but with that lit­tle time I’m review­ing every­thing I learned in school until at least 8 PM. It’s depress­ing, insane, and, erm, yes. It makes me mad.

Let me say, I would have writ­ten a lot more and given a whole lot of points here, but I just fin­ished my home­work (its 9:00 PM), and I have to go to sleep by ten every night because I have to get up at 5: 45 AM to make it to the bus to school. And, oh, I just remem­bered some more home­work I’ve got to get done.

The Edu­ca­tion Sys­tem is Cheat­ing Me
by a high school senior from south­ern California

I’m a high school senior now. I live in an urban com­mu­nity, mean­ing that schools in my town are embar­rass­ingly under­priv­i­leged. All my life I feel that I’ve been cheated by the tra­di­tional edu­ca­tion sys­tem. All stu­dents do is zone out on lec­tures, do class activ­i­ties, and then go home with home­work. My younger brother suf­fered so dearly dur­ing ele­men­tary school and the fam­ily would be up past 10pm shout­ing crit­i­cisms, shed­ding tears, then leav­ing the rest for the morn­ing as we ate break­fast. Although the whole sys­tem is flawed, home­work is pos­si­bly the most respon­si­ble for fail­ing and loss of interest.

Read the rest of this entry »