Stop Homework

Read­ers of this blog are, at this point, pretty famil­iar with the work of Kerry Dick­in­son, a mother from Danville, Cal­i­for­nia, who, last year, got her school dis­trict to reeval­u­ate its home­work pol­icy and insti­tute a new one. You can read Kerry’s ear­lier guest blog entries here and here and here.

This year, Kerry, con­cerned about a new school pro­gram which would have made stu­dents fin­ish uncom­pleted home­work dur­ing lunchtime, wrote a let­ter to her school at the begin­ning of the year. The upshot: the pro­gram was imme­di­ately turned into a vol­un­tary, as opposed to manda­tory, program.

The pro­gram was called Zeros Aren’t Per­mit­ted (ZAP), and was explained to the par­ents: “When a stu­dent arrives at school with­out their home­work done they will be ZAPPED or assigned to get the assign­ment fin­ished dur­ing lunchtime by their class­room teach­ers. Like it or not, in real life we are not able to just chose not to com­plete assign­ments or ful­fill our respon­si­bil­i­ties. Our goal is to not allow stu­dents to fall behind by not com­plet­ing cru­cial assign­ments which may lead to failure.”

Here’s Kerry’s response.

Lunchtime Should be Lunchtime
by Kerry Dickinson

After hav­ing served on the SRVUSD home­work task force last year I am con­cerned that Char­lotte Wood is begin­ning a pro­gram this school year called “ZAP” that will ask chil­dren to com­plete unfin­ished home­work assign­ments dur­ing lunchtime. The “Zeros Aren’t Per­mit­ted” or “ZAP” pro­gram implies that stu­dents will learn respon­si­bil­ity by giv­ing up their lunchtime to com­plete home­work because “like it or not, in real life we are not able to just choose not to com­plete assign­ments or ful­fill our responsibilities.”

Well, actu­ally, we ARE allowed to choose things in real life, whether it is doing home­work, or com­plet­ing a project for an employer, or sim­ply going gro­cery shop­ping. We make these kinds of choices every­day, and when we chose NOT to do these things we suf­fer the con­se­quences; get­ting a zero on a home­work assign­ment, get­ting fired at a job, or sim­ply being hun­gry because we chose to put off gro­cery shopping.

In our demo­c­ra­tic pub­lic school sys­tem and in our soci­ety we have choices and we have con­se­quences. When deci­sions are made for us, how­ever, such as in an auto­cratic soci­ety, we lose our auton­omy. We also lose our chance to become respon­si­ble cit­i­zens. When we are given the oppor­tu­nity to make our own deci­sions we then begin to think crit­i­cally, curi­ously, and cre­atively and become true learners.

The new SRVUSD home­work pol­icy states that:

• “Time spent on home­work should be bal­anced with the impor­tance of per­sonal and fam­ily well-being, and the wide array of fam­ily oblig­a­tions expe­ri­enced in our soci­ety today.”
• “Parents/Guardians are respon­si­ble for being an advo­cate for their child, while encour­ag­ing the child to advo­cate for himself/herself.”
• “Parents/Guardians are respon­si­ble for pro­vid­ing a healthy bal­ance between home­work, extra and co-curricular activ­i­ties, and fam­ily com­mit­ments.”
• “Teach­ers are respon­si­ble for encour­ag­ing a part­ner­ship between fam­ily and stu­dents that pro­motes timely com­mu­ni­ca­tion and sup­ports fam­i­lies in the home­work process.”

Dur­ing the school week, fam­ily oblig­a­tions or parental deci­sions will some­times trump com­plet­ing home­work assign­ments. On occa­sion, fam­i­lies may decide to leave home­work at home dur­ing a school hol­i­day or choose to do activ­i­ties other than home­work over the week­end. Teach­ers may not always meet on a reg­u­lar basis to coor­di­nate assign­ments, and stu­dents may at times be over­loaded with home­work. In these cases, when par­ents advo­cate for their child not to miss lunch due to incom­plete home­work assign­ments, will they be heard?

Fill­ing a mid­dle school student’s lunchtime with aca­d­e­mics is unhealthy. As Richard Louv points out in Last Child in the Woods, “Play­time – espe­cially unstruc­tured, imag­i­na­tive, exploratory play – is increas­ingly rec­og­nized as an essen­tial com­po­nent of whole­some child development…In the United States, as the fed­eral and state gov­ern­ments and local school boards have pushed for higher test scores…nearly 40% of Amer­i­can ele­men­tary schools either elim­i­nated or were con­sid­er­ing elim­i­nat­ing recess.” And, Eliz­a­beth Good­e­nough, edi­tor of Where Do The Chil­dren Play? Michi­gan Pub­lic Tele­vi­sion, 2007, notes that “dur­ing school, unstruc­tured, open-ended play is essen­tial to the health of the young…it enhances social skills, teaches con­flict res­o­lu­tion, increases fit­ness, improves learn­ing and reduces stress by con­nect­ing youth with nat­ural environments.”

If par­ents and/or stu­dents decide that a home­work assign­ment will not be com­pleted one par­tic­u­lar evening, that stu­dent will suf­fer the nat­ural con­se­quences set up by the teacher. For exam­ple, that stu­dent will most likely get a low grade or a zero on the assign­ment. That is pun­ish­ment enough. Tak­ing away lunch is not only unhealthy, but is coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. Instead of mak­ing stu­dents want to com­plete home­work assign­ments, infring­ing on their lunch hour will most likely turn them against home­work. Teach­ers get a lunch break built into their day. Stu­dents should cer­tainly get one too, regard­less of how they spent their time the night before.

Lastly, I would like to point out that the email dated August 25, 2008 announc­ing the ZAP pro­gram con­tained many gram­mat­i­cal errors and a spelling error. This makes me ques­tion how much time was actu­ally spent devis­ing this pro­gram and decid­ing how to present it to the Char­lotte Wood community.

Posted in category Moms (and Dads) on a Mission on October 23, 2008 at 7:06 am
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