Stop Homework

Today’s guest blog­ger, Diane Hewlett-Lowrie, has worked for 20 years in a vari­ety of envi­ron­men­tal edu­ca­tion posi­tions in Scot­land and the U.S. and she cur­rently lives in New Jer­sey. She has a spe­cial inter­est in how chil­dren learn and believes in nur­tur­ing the devel­op­ment of the whole child. She and her hus­band have one son, age 6, and their expe­ri­ence with home­work to date has been that it is point­less, causes stress, has no real merit and takes time away from much more valu­able activ­i­ties at home. This piece started as a let­ter to the Super­in­ten­dent and evolved into this essay, which Diane has sent to the school Prin­ci­pal and her son’s first grade teacher, and is plan­ning on send­ing to the Board of Edu­ca­tion and a vari­ety of mag­a­zines. Diane has been a guest blog­ger before. (If you would like to be a guest blog­ger, send me your pro­posed submission.)

We don’t have time to do that; You’ve got Home­work!
by Diane Hewlett-Lowrie

We are a very active fam­ily. We take walks, cook, kayak, swim, visit friends, parks and muse­ums and we read avidly – for plea­sure. Imag­ine our shock as we began to real­ize that we would have to give up those “lux­u­ries” because our son, at the grand old age of 6, has homework!

When our son started first grade, I asked the par­ent of a for­mer first-grader what the home­work was like. It took a half-hour, she said. A half-hour not count­ing the time needed to per­suade her daugh­ter to start the home­work, or the time for the argu­ments to cease and the tears to stop. Yikes!

After a full day in school, Iain gets home by 5 o’clock. He needs at least ten hours sleep, so our bed­time rou­tine – bath, read­ing books, singing songs and talk­ing together – starts at 8 o’clock. This means that, on a week­day, we have three hours per day as a fam­ily. One of those hours is nec­es­sary for cook­ing, eat­ing and clean­ing up. This leaves about two hours for every­thing else. In those two hours, I would like him to play and develop skills other than read­ing, writ­ing and arith­metic (after all, he has a full day at school for that). In those two hours, I would like him to sim­ply enjoy being a child!

In those two hours, I would like to teach him how to cook his favorite meal and clean up after­wards. His Dad would like to show him how to ham­mer a nail, paint a door and play the gui­tar. We both want him to be able to ride his bike, explore his world, learn to swim and enjoy good, old-fashioned, free play­time with his friends. Which of these activ­i­ties will be sac­ri­ficed when the home­work bur­den increases to an hour a night? Two hours?

My son has a won­der­ful imag­i­na­tion. His favorite indoor toys are Legos, dinosaurs, cars and action fig­ures. I enjoy watch­ing him and his friends cre­ate all kinds of sce­nar­ios with their action fig­ures and build­ing toys. They invent sto­ries and some­times pre­tend they are mak­ing movies (com­plete with com­mer­cial breaks!). Out­door fun includes hunt­ing for bugs and toads, rid­ing scoot­ers and bikes, swim­ming at the lake and play­ing made-up games. As I watch him and his friends cre­ate their own games and activ­i­ties, I know that impor­tant social and com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills are devel­op­ing, his capac­ity for problem-solving is being strength­ened, he’s lay­ing down foun­da­tional path­ways in his brain that will ben­e­fit him aca­d­e­m­i­cally in future years – and he’s hav­ing fun!

I believe what Iain is doing in his few hours at home is far more valu­able to his all-round devel­op­ment (social, phys­i­cal, emo­tional, and neu­ro­log­i­cal), than doing any kind of school­work at home. I don’t want him to sac­ri­fice any of these activ­i­ties for home­work. He’s a 6-year-old boy; he needs to run!

I worry about the future.

My friends never see their teenage daugh­ter dur­ing the week because she has three hours of home­work every night. She is over­weight and unhealthy because she spends most of her “home time” sit­ting still doing school assign­ments. How much health­ier and hap­pier would she be if she could spend one or two of those hours on a bicy­cle, play­ing sports, or just tak­ing the dog for a walk?

My son’s best friend loved Kinder­garten and first grade, but the sec­ond grade home­work bur­den proved too much for him. His 20-minute assign­ment took about 2 hours to com­plete. He was tired when he got home from school and just needed to switch off, relax and rest his brain for another day. Home­work burned him out. His fam­ily, tired of the home­work wars, took him out of the pub­lic school sys­tem and they are now home-schooling.

I believe strongly in the ben­e­fits of a good edu­ca­tion; we have read to our son almost every night since he was a baby. I want my son to WANT to learn. I don’t want him to be over-burdened, turned off and burned out.

Why do chil­dren spend the best part of the day in school then have to con­tinue school­work when they get home? Does home­work really help kids aca­d­e­m­i­cally? Is there a good rea­son to endure those nightly tears and tribu­la­tions? Maybe not! A recent Duke Uni­ver­sity study found lit­tle to no cor­re­la­tion between home­work and tests scores in ele­men­tary stu­dents. Alfie Kohn, after care­ful review of many research stud­ies for his book, “The Home­work Myth”, con­cluded “There is no evi­dence of any aca­d­e­mic ben­e­fits from home­work in ele­men­tary school.”

I won­dered if stu­dents in other coun­tries with more home­work scored higher than those in coun­tries with lit­tle to no home­work. Appar­ently not. A research study con­ducted by Trends in Inter­na­tional Math­e­mat­ics and Sci­ence, which com­pared stu­dents in 27 states and 37 other coun­tries, found no rela­tion­ship between national aver­age amounts of home­work and national aver­age stu­dent achieve­ment scores.

Maybe the fact that kids get extra help at home boosts test scores? Again, the research says oth­er­wise. A National Cen­ter for Edu­ca­tion Sta­tis­tics report states that “… researchers have not con­clu­sively demon­strated the rela­tion­ship between assis­tance at home and stu­dent achievement.”

Pro­po­nents of the belief that it must at least be improv­ing study skills will be dis­ap­pointed to know that there is absolutely no evi­dence to back that con­vic­tion either.

So, why bur­den ele­men­tary stu­dents with home­work if there are no proven ben­e­fits? Why make kids for­feit fun with their fam­i­lies, phys­i­cal exer­cise, imag­i­na­tive play, and expe­ri­ences in the real world to sit at the kitchen table with pen­cils in hand? I have not yet heard a legit­i­mate or sub­stan­ti­ated answer.

I fear that in future years, the home­work bur­den will become so great that my son will lose the abil­ity to choose what he can do in his “free” time – because he won’t have any free time. I am afraid that my role as a mother is going to be sup­planted by my role as the “home­work police”.

Schools and par­ents should embrace their roles as part­ners whose joint respon­si­bil­ity it is to help chil­dren develop into well-rounded young peo­ple. Dur­ing the day, learn­ing the skills and knowl­edge nec­es­sary for aca­d­e­mic pro­fi­ciency is in the hands of the teach­ers in the schools. When my son comes home, how­ever, it’s my turn. I want that pre­cious time to teach him about the nat­ural world, to play, laugh and talk with him, to read for fun, and to give him a healthy, fun and lov­ing fam­ily home in which he can truly grow.

PS — I am think­ing of buy­ing a dog to eat the home­work so I can take a hike in the woods with my son.

Posted in category Guest Bloggers on February 8, 2008 at 9:49 am
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