Stop Homework

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.

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Welcome back to Stop Homework. I was really gratified to see that, while I was taking a break from blogging, people were still stopping by, commenting, sending me emails, and talking to each other in the Comments. I especially liked the sharing of ideas, the recommending of articles, and the support people offer each other.

One person recommended adding a section where readers can post articles. It’s a great idea but it isn’t feasible. So please send me articles you’d like to see me post. I’ll blog about them and then I’ll file them under Resources.

And, to start off the school year with something fun, listen to this song by Nathalie, an eleventh grader from Princeton, New Jersey, who wrote it for a friend who had to take the AP test on her birthday.

Wouldn’t it be great if every student started sending the lyrics around? Maybe educators would take notice and listen.

Here are the lyrics (but I highly recommend listening:

The AP Song
by Nathalie

You would judge me
On the accuracy of my best guess
But you cannot budge me
I don’t want to take this AP test

And my free responses
Will be mainly composed of pure BS
I REALLY DON’T WANT TO
No, I don’t want to take this AP test

And it’s even my birthday
But the College Board doesn’t care about me
Oh, what a Thursday!
I’d really rather not take this AP.

Since I live in Princeton
My neighbors all work for ETS
They don’t know how I hate them
And especially their stupid test

I should be studying
And as procrastination goes, this is far from the best
But I’ll forgo a review book to sing that
“I don’t want to take this AP test”

I paid 95 dollars
And I’ve never regretted an expenditure more
But the check has been written
So I’d better get at least a four

And it’s even my birthday
But the College Board doesn’t care about me
Oh, what a Thursday!
I’d really rather not take this AP.

A few weeks ago, I read a story in examiner.com, about a student, now 25, and a cum-laude graduate from college, who made his homework optional, both in high school and in college.

Intrigued, I emailed his mother, Julia Rhodes, to find out a little more. She told me that her son, who had been diagnosed with a learning disability when he was young, was “smart as a whip,” but struggled in school. His grades in elementary school reflected his refusal to do homework and when he went to high school, he decided that he would negotiate a deal so that he wouldn’t have to do homework. “A great communicator,” her son talked to his teachers and made deals with them. He told them he would help them, tutor other students, and do well on his tests, but that he just couldn’t face doing the “mundane, day-to-day work.” And his teachers, eager to keep the personable athlete in their Sonora, California, high school, agreed. Even through college, her son negotiated deals with teachers.

Rhodes, a single mother and a teacher for many years, instilled in her son “the belief that he could do anything. I didn’t care about his grades,” she told me. “Not everyone has to be an A student. I’d seen too many driven kids, and they weren’t happy or passionate about what they were doing. I just wanted my son to believe in himself and I helped him learn how to advocate for himself.”

I received the following email from a former-graduate student:

A Former Graduate Student Speaks Out

I admire your mission. The subject of how I spent my life doing homework and what turned out to be worthless schooling is a subject I often cry and get angry about, but a past situation I would for one like to make up for, and also a situation that I would like to help others on. I am turning 30 now, and have a lot of living to catch up on and have wasted many of my best years.

Actually my grade school, middle school, and high school were mostly fairly run and had opportunities for the smart and driven students, but they forced students to do work whether they liked it or not. The harder courses were taught by efficient, inspired, and helpful teachers. The dumber courses were run like penitentiaries. I myself was a very smart and driven student, eager to get work done early.

The problem that I and most students faced was that doing our work better and faster only led to getting placed into harder courses that assigned even more work. There was no incentive to reach completion since we were like hamsters caught in a wheel. The faster we ran, the more the wheel turned. The dumber courses did not teach anything, but just wasted time, and assigned about the same amount of work- just dumber and more repetitive. Students who were non-compliant or who failed certain mandatory tests were forced into yet more schooling, summer classes, and force-fed education-–which we all feared.
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I got this compelling email the other day from a Connecticut middle school student:

Dear Sara,

The life of a middle school girl is one of total chaos–cliques, peer pressure, friendships, guys, emotions, and lots lots LOTS of homework. I don’t understand why children are expected to complete assignments that have NOTHING to do with their goals for life. For example, I want to be an author when I grow up, and I’m always working toward that goal. WHEN in my life will I ever be required to do algebra? Why must I complete 50 algebra problems a night, when I COULD be working on my journal? Doing so many problems only makes me hate math more than ever. Plus, when these assignments are graded, I always end up getting the last twenty or so wrong. By this point of the assignment, I am so completely drained that I do the rest haphazardly. THAT is not helping my education. I usually eat dinner while completing homework, because I have so much of it. Therefore, sometimes my dinner is a bowl of Captain Crunch or a bag of chips. By the time I actually have time to myself, it is 9:30, and I have to go to bed. It doesnt matter though. I’m usually up until over 11:00, worrying about tests, quizzes, and whether or not I did all my homework correctly. That is not a healthy lifestyle, but I’m gonna have to deal with it for seven more years.

I’d like to thank you for your incredible website. It has really comforted me to know that other people feel this way about homework- especially adults. Thank you for reading this!

Here’s an email I received from a senior at Camarillo High School in California:

Dear Sara:

As a high school student I believe most homework is just a waste of time.

Simply put, a lot of the work can actually be done in class or not done at all (I’ll get to that later). Homework is just used as a substitute due to ineffective teaching methods and teachers wasting time.

Most homework assignments are just pointless: fill in the blank questions, word seaches, crossword puzzles, drill assignments, etc. It does not help review the material. It’s just used as a tool for teachers to figure out how to grade. Bad students simply won’t do the homework. Good students will do the homework getting nothing out of it.

Excess homework has created a lazy generation. It teaches students it’s okay to cheat, copy off, or even fake assignments. The more homework teachers give, the more tension there is in the class, the more tension, the more behavioral problems and lower grades students have. It’s a lose for the student, a lose for the teacher. Since there is too much homework, after homework is finished, kids just like to watch TV.

This year I pretty much have no homework. Since my calculus teacher only assigns very few problems, I actually learn how to do them correctly.

Lots of homework is the root of student laziness, not the solution. Having better teaching methods in class is the solution, not homework.

Thank you for your website.

The New York Daily News recently ran an opinion piece by fifth grader Benjamin Berrafato, “Fifth-graders of the nation, unite against homework.”

He wrote:

Homework is assigned to students like me, without our permission. Teachers expect us to do homework, even though we’d rather not. It can be hard sometimes. We get punished if we don’t do it. If we do it, we get no reward; we just don’t get punished.

Simply put, if we don’t, we get punished, and if we do, our reward is … nothing.

Thus, homework is slavery. Slavery was abolished with the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on Dec. 6, 1865.

So, every school in America has been illegally run for the past 143 YEARS. That’s something to think about.

Homework is cruel, inhumane, stressful and unhealthy. It should be outlawed.

Read the piece in the New York Daily News.

I am a grade ten high school student and I usually make sure to try my best to do my homework and give it a good effort. I still have to say, the amount is RIDICULOUS! I wish my parents were just as supportive as many of you.

Research has proved that repetitive questions, ones that make up quite a large percentage of our daily homework, only make children forget the formula/method etc. they are supposed to be learning.

And wasn’t the ORIGINAL meaning of homework supposed to be “Work assigned in class that the student did not complete”, not “Work assigned purposely just to go home and waste all our free time”?

The school boards keep telling us that gym class is very important, but we still need to get physical activity after school. Then they tell us that we need to spend time with family. THEN they say that we need to care about our hygiene and shower/bathe/get washed daily. How do they expect us to do all that AND still get free time?

It’s just not fair.