Child Counselor Protests Homework in Arizona

Posted bySara BennettPosted inMoms (and Dads) on a Mission

A child counselor from Arizona who believes that children shouldn’t be given homework before sixth grade has taken to the streets to protest homework. According to azfamily.com, the counselor, who is leading the weeklong protest at a street corner, doesn’t think children should be given homework before sixth grade. “They’re already getting in trouble in school for not being able to sit for six hours,” she said. “Now they’ve gotta come home and do homework. So, now mom is screaming at them to do their homework. It’s slavery is what it is. It’s a horrible job. It’s a six-, seven-, eight-hour job that they’re not getting paid for.”

79 thoughts on “Child Counselor Protests Homework in Arizona”

  1. I couldn’t agree more. Child labor laws were passed for a very good reason. I also agree that ADD and ADHD are largely artificial disorders that were invented to prevent the schools from taking responsibility for their failure to meet our children’s educational needs.

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  2. I am a teacher. No child needs to have homework. There is plenty of time for practising the application of a concept in the period provided for that subject. After 75% of the class period, a teacher can ask the pupils to write a two-sentence summary of what they learned that period in an on-going journal. Then, add some references like page numbers of a book(s) or a web address to learn more if necessary. What kids DO need to learn is how to handle stress, how to be organized, how to express themselves well orally and in writing and how to hit the high points or the main idea and to remember some vital details that support it. Students need to comprehend what is going on. They need to know how to compare and contrast, see clearly the cause and effect in relationships, evaluate, analyze and critique. They need to be able to think and see globally and in detail. They do not need homework. Homework has never been good practice or good food for the mind. If “homework”, per se, would involve about a half hour of reading per evening, with each “discipline” having one of the five nights,that would be sufficient. For example, Math reading on Sunday, English on Monday, Social Studies on Tuesday, Science on Wednesday, and Humanities/foreign language on Thursday. Teachers can post the readings and know the following day of “their” previous night that the assigned reading was read, then that is when that topic is addressed in the class. Teachers should urge students to apply to life what they are learning in class and students can then be putting down in their journals what they did, how it evolved and how it helped them. Let students discover how it all can apply and then by jotting it down in their journal for extra credit or for class discussion sessions is far better than “doing homework”.
    I hope homework is abolished. It’s better for teachers, too, they don’t need to be correcting papers all night just to pass back and enter grades. With the paltry pay they get and the disrespect they get, they need to just be able to go home empty handed and have a nice evening with family.

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  5. Homework prevents me from doing after school activities such as basketball or football. It also stops you from hanging out with your friends.

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  6. I’m a student. I disagree with having homework because most of the tasks that we’re set are hard and most of the time have absolutley nothing to do with what we were learning in the lesson, so then we get stuck we cant do the homework then get detention for it. People may think because I am a student im just being lazy but now we get so much of it, its just stupid, also we have to carry heavy books to and from school just to do maybe a little sheet. I dont really see the need to do 1 hour of lesson then come home and have to spend maybe another 3 hours doing the homework you’ve been set!

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  7. I am a sophomore in high school and i believe that homework is unnecessary. Many adults think that us students only have 6 1/2 hours of school every weekday and we get the weekends off. That is NOT true… I often go home and spend 1-5 hours on my homework a night. And on the weekends, we usually have AT LEAST 2 hours of homework, sometimes more. My friends and I often discuss the unfairness of the situation… it is very difficult to have a social life, visit with your family, get enough sleep, and finish all your homework. If I add up the total hours of school work that I do a day, it averages out to approximately 9 hours a day. If the schools want us to do more work, then they should jjust keep us in school for an extra hour and give us no homework. It usually takes twice as long to finish my homework when I am at home rather than when I am in a quiet classroom where I can focus. If we stayed in school for an extra hour, and had no homework, we would still have much more free time than we do now. With the increasing amount of homework, throughout years, decades, I really do hope that by the time I have children, and they are in school, something will be done about this unnecessary amount of work….. 🙂

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  9. we spend 25 hours in school every week and with homework it adds about 5 hours and 30 hours prevents us from other things

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  15. very week we send 25 hours in school
    we shouldn’t do work at home so kids want to play not be stuck inside esbecially on a beautiful day

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  19. Homework is so unnecessary. It does not reinforce learning as it is presently used. Teachers need to make learning meaningful and that should be done in the classroom. Incentive to learn more on a topic is what is valuable and is what is important. A talented teacher leads the learner to the well, and wets the learner’s appetite to drink, or, drink more. Extra credit, then, is what will separate the enthusiastic learner from the average student. It seems now that homework is assigned to justify the course or the teacher’s half hearted efforts to teach are then seen by the teacher as just not up to snuff, so the teacher assigns homework to make them feel as though they’re doing enough to promote learning. It’s a bust, though. Kids hate it, and it turns them off to school, learning and keeping an open mind and being curious. Getting this reactionary attitude about learning from our youth is going to ultimately harm our society.

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  24. After reading many of your comments…which almost all have some sort of misspelled word or words in them I feel that you all need to have homework so when you comment on something you spell it right!!! Crazy fools!!!

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  25. Homework is meant to reinforce the materials that are being learned in class. I do feel that some teachers use it for the wrong reason. Some teachers give homework so they don’t have to teach, which in my opinion is the wrong reason. It should be limited to 20-30 minutes a day maximum. Student do need time to practice skills that they were just taught. The homework also needs to be gone over the following day so the students know exactly what they did wrong if they had mistakes. Giving the homework back days or weeks later is NOT going to help the students, they need instant feedback. I know that students don’t enjoy homework, but in the long run if it is assigned correctly and used as a tool instead of a punishment or ” busy work” then it helps everyone involved. Teachers can use that to see what and where students are confused.

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  26. Im a student. Homework wastes your time because after school your SUPPOSED to have a BREAK from school and have FUN!!!!!!

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  27. I could not agree more! I hate homwork. I am a student in Middle school, and even though all 6th graders hate homework, it is child labor, a waste of perfectly good trees, and keeping usfrom having a break from school! i mean if we didnt have any more homework and just did work in class then we might be able to help in the ‘save the earth’ process!!! it isnt like we are rebelling against school or something! just homework. because school isnt a waste, but homework is! we learn enough in school, we dont need the same thing we already went over on paper!

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  28. Homework is so retarded. It wastes my time and it kills trees. The load is a lot especially if you live in places like New Orleans when you have to make up a lot for evacuating… They should honestly give us a BREAK.

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  31. homework leads to depression, and it doesn’t give the student adequate time for sleep, eating, or staying healthy.
    its a form of abuse.
    even at the college level.

    homework is mental slavery. u control the persons focus everyday all day. this is torture and leads to chronic illness and stress.
    students, lets rise up!

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  32. i think that teachers give to much home work they want us to know the things they teach us but they dont give us enough time to do it. with school and friends and also my free time there is no way to balance it out. i think teachers should have us write a short summery on what evey we learned in school and we can write that as a exit ticket.

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  33. If students know how to do homework, they aren’t learning anything. If students don’t, they still won’t learn how to do it by looking at questions they don’t know.

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  37. it’s not teachers, it’s administration who forces this upon us. they just want us to be “capable” to “compete with other countries” because they’re letting too many immigrants in and they’re taking all our jobs. and when you have after-school activities like i do then it’s just torture and it takes away our sleep.

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  38. I am a 6th grader and I do not believe homework is neccessary. I find it keeps me from learning new things more than it teaches me. In fact, it doesn’t teach me anything at all! I find that the information my teachers want me to memorize is intensely boring compared to all the other things I could do with my after school hours, therefore I forget all the facts and statistics I am forced to swallow.
    “It’s a hor­ri­ble job. It’s a six-, seven-, eight-hour job that they’re not get­ting paid for.” This is utterly true. Some would argue that we are payed with knowledge, but we are not. Most teachers at my school do not seem to try to get their students to learn. They try to get them to obey. Many of my teachers simply wish to move the students along to the next grade, and the next, and the next. My teacher, the students around me, and my school in general keeps telling me, in a way that cuts deeper than mere words, that I will go through all 12 grades, then become a factory worker or a secretary.

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  39. I feel like my now 7th grade son’s childhood has been stolen from him by the outrageous homework load that he has had since Kindergarten. SInce finding this website, I will no longer allow any teacher to do that to him again even if it means pulling out of public school for independent home study. Untill schools get hit in the pocket book, they will not change there homework policy. My fifth grade daughter’s school however is showing “The Race to Nowhere” and her teacher gives very little homework and she is learning! Her school seems to be on right track!

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  40. hi im a freshman in highschool and i think that home work is realy stupid. First of all today i get out at 3:05pm thats 7 hrs of my day at school i get home at 3:30 or so and i have to write an essay do my french homework then i have to find some definitons for my english class after that i have some astronomy homework to work on and when i finish that il have to do my algebra homework. thats about 4 hrs worth of homework im usaly done with homework around 7pm which means school takes up most of my day and then i got chores and if i have time il try to work out.. thats wat a typical day is i almost have no time for myself only on weekends when my algebra teacher dosent decide to give us homework .

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  41. I am in 8th grade and up until halfway through 6th grade, I was a straight A student. So what happened? You could say I got lazy but you’d be wrong. I was always lazy but the homework only took about 15 minutes before. So in 6th grade I got all A’s except a B in English in both the 3rd and 4th quarter. No big deal. Then 7th grade rolls around and I start getting nothing but B’s C’s and D’s because that was when I started getting large amounts of homework. I just couldn’t do it anymore. I never had the energy, I never had the focus, I never had the strength for it. Eventually I stopped doing homework altogether and I sort of justified it because I always got A’s on the tests. My parents found out and they tried micromanaging me but I didn’t make it easy for them. I wish I could have explained to them that the homework was unnecessary but it’s hard to make a case for that when you have a D in math. The problem is that you’re assigned more and more homework the older you get. This makes sense at first but when you really think about it, is there really any reason to assign an hour or 2 of math homework when we only needed 15-30 minutes of math homework in elementary school? What I’m saying is, in elementary school, the concepts we were learning were appropriate for our age and we only needed about 15 minutes of homework. The concepts I’m learning today are still appropriate for my age so shouldn’t I still only need 15-30 minutes? It’s ridiculous. And ya know what makes me seriously wonder if they’re just trying to waste my time? When the concept we’re learning is easier to learn and do, they give us twice as many problems. Does that make any sense at all?

    It’s not the hours you put into your work that counts toward you remembering what you learned. It’s the work you put into your hours.

    I have no problem with English homework or science homework but I hate math homework and I think it’s completely unnecessary.

    One last thing I haven’t mentioned is that I didn’t do any of the homework for chapters 7 and 8 in my Honor’s Algebra class this year and yet I got 100% on both tests. I had 12 missing assignments at one point (I turned about 8 in) and yet I still had a 75% overall.

    So I guess what I’m trying to say is…

    OUTLAW MATH HOMEWORK!!!!

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  42. Homework prevents me from doing active events such as basketball, biking, etc. I come home and get right on it and im still doing it really late. I’m an Honors student but due to that we still have the same amount as general. I DON’T THINK TEACHERS KNOW WE ACTUALLY HAVE LIVES!

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  43. I agree that homework is CHILD ABUSE.. My child is in 1st grade and has had homework every night since he was in head start, even though it hurt me to have had seen him cry about having to do his homework I made him do it until I didn’t have to fight him anymore… now i see him stress every night because of it. It is horrible to see and force him to do something he does not want to do… plus they give him stuff that only an adult could answer or do and so the homework is not only for him, it is for the parents also… I am a single mother of 2 and when I get home from work, I spend at least 1 hr 1/2 helping him and my daughter with their homwork, some times 2 hours because they have to read books with many pages, then I make dinner, then we eat, then I clean our mess, then I bath them and get them ready for bed… It is a weekly routine and we have no time to sit around as a family co-exist, talk and play…. It is sad, but I do this weekly and wish he had no homework so that I have more time for them as a mommy, love them instead of fight them and stress them every night

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  44. Hello, I personally LOATHE homework with a deep, firey passion. I want to prostest it soon, but is there a legal way to do so? If there is then COUNT ME IN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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  45. i am in high school, and i get a ton of homework and its takes atleast 4 or 5 hours to do and i get about 10pieces a week if not more =( its not fair =( if i had 1 wish i would use it on getting no homework! i hate it

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  46. I cannot do anything after school. Homework takes up all the time. I have 2 to 3 hours a night. I’m in 7th grade. I have 6 periods and i get homework in 4 of them (the other 2 are PE and elective. The kids who are in band and stings for elective have homework.). Each teacher assigns homework. They don’t seem to understand that the other teaches are assigning us homework, too.
    I have about 8 pieces a week in Language Arts
    About 6 pieces a week in Math
    About 4 pieces a week in Social Studies
    In sciene we don’t have nightly homework, but for about 2 weekends at the end of the semesters I have to spend the whole weekends doing work.
    Without the science we have about 18 pieces a week!

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  48. hi im in 5th grade and get TONS of homework [5 to 7 hrs a night] . i beleive that this not only kills trees, but is a form of child labor. hw makes my grades WORSE, and leaves me restless.please, if you are a teacher, dont give us kids homework. and if you do ask yourself this… do i really want to abuse children?

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  49. I’m a freshman in high school and this past year I’ve had to deal with around 5-6 hours of homework a night. Usually about 12 hours of my weekend is also spent doing homework. I definitely think that students could learn just as much without the excessive amount of homework. Some of the teachers in my school don’t teach our classes at all-in fact, I have one teacher who assigns us irrelevant classwork during our hour and a half class period then assigns us an hour or two of bookwork for homework. Sometimes our teachers will just leave the class and not come back for around a half an hour. I wish my teachers could find ways to teach us the required material without giving us so much homework. I miss my free time! Now my whole life is school for around seven and a half hours, then soccer practice, then homework until bedtime.

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