A Tenth Grader Speaks Out: Slowly Strangled to Silence

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.

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The War on Kids

(I’ll be back Tuesday. I’m going to California for a screening of Race to Nowhere at Edutopia.)

In the Comments a few days ago, Psych Mom talked about a new film, The War On Kids, a documentary on the problems with public schools. Unfortunately, I missed the film while it was playing in New York City, but I hope to see it if it comes back. I hope you get to see it in your community. Read the New York Times review here. And watch the trailer here.

What’s Wrong With Our Schools?

This article, What’s Wrong With Our Schools, is worth reading.

What’s Wrong With Our Schools?
by Jennifer Fox
Huffington Post

What was high school like when you were there? How were your classes taught? Thirty-two years ago, I sat in a chair attached to the desk with a shiny silver tube. The trouble with these chairs is that you could not lean back in them, although some boys tried. There was a wire basket attached to the back to put our books in, but nobody ever used it for that. Some kids threw paper balls at the baskets, trying to score points. The desks were set up in rows, or sometimes, if the teacher was cool, in a semicircle. Most classes used a fat textbook that
weighed between two and three pounds. I had between four and six classes a day, and each one of them assigned some kind of homework, usually an end-of-chapter series of problems that we were supposed to solve and turn in the next day. My classmates and I knew that the teacher never read the homework problems; she just walked up and down the aisle scratching a check next to our names in her grade book if she saw that we completed the work sheet. Some kids didn’t really complete the homework; they just wrote some answers on the page so it looked as if they did. The teachers never really looked closely, so the kids got away with it. I thought this was awful until I became a teacher and learned that some teachers don’t really keep track of the homework; they just pretend to mark a check in the book so students think they have to do the homework.

Thirty years later, classrooms look pretty much the same as they did then, except instead of green chalkboards, many classrooms now have white dry erase boards. The basic configuration of the room is still the same — desks in rows or semicircles. Some classrooms have everyone sitting at a seminar table. Fat textbooks still abound, at least for math and science . . . and history . . . and literature . . . and foreign languages.

Read the rest of the article here.

Moms (and Dads) on a Mission – Recess is Important

Denise Hills, a geologist, and her husband, a college geology professor, live in Tuscaloosa, AL with their two children, a first grader and a three-year-old. Last year, when her son was in kindergarten at the local public school, he didn’t get recess. Mid-year, Denise wrote a letter to the principal and local school board, expressing her concerns, but she never heard back.

This year, things are better.

Recess is Important
by Denise Hills
Tuscaloosa, AL

I wrote a letter last year to my son’s principal and the school board about the lack of recess at my son’s school. I quoted research (information that I received through this blog, mostly), and gave an impassioned plea to let my son run around for even just a few minutes a day! I heard nothing back from the school board, and only had a cursory call from the principal. The end of the year was rapidly approaching, and I knew that nothing was going to change for that year.

This year, I was determined to pursue things more rigorously, for my son’s sake. He’s a VERY active boy, and ends up in trouble because he can’t sit still. Recess helps with that. So, at the start of the year, in a new school, I looked at his schedule. Sigh. No recess.

So, I dug out the letter I wrote last year and revised it, and got ready to send it to his principal. However, I ran into my son’s teacher before I sent the letter, and am I glad I did! She told me that they do have recess, they just can’t call it recess. They are required to have a certain number of instructional minutes per day, and recess doesn’t count towards that. There’s no time in the schedule for recess, so they call it something else (I’m not letting on as to what they call it, because I don’t want them to lose it!).

Yay! My son is getting recess! But I wanted to know if this is going to go away next year, so I still wanted to bring it up with the principal. Luckily, we have a fabulous, approachable principal at this school. When I voiced my concerns about recess with her, she immediately said that it is her commitment that EVERY child in her school, from grades 1-5, gets recess EVERY day. She is the one who has told the teachers how to implement it and still maintain the required “instructional” minutes. What a change from the previous principal, who essentially told me she couldn’t do anything!

I’ve spoken with the principal a bit about what we can do to help change things across the district, not just at our school, because while I’m thrilled that my son has recess, I want every child to have recess. We have a new school board now, so I’m hoping that will be a good starting point for my project to get recess instituted at all our local schools, and maybe even eventually at all schools in the state! Wish me luck!

International Standards and Assessments

Two weeks ago, I attended my first webinar, hosted by Edutopia, where Linda Darling Hammond talked about international standards and assessments. It’s really too bad she wasn’t Obama’s pick for Secretary of Education; she’s smart, articulate, progressive, and she even knows how to use power point!

If you have about 50 minutes, it’s worth listening to. You can find it here.

Interview with Dominic Randolph, Head of New York City Private School That Dropped AP Classes

(Happy Thanksgiving)

Last June, I ran a series of interviews I had conducted with activists and educators who were on my radar as people trying to do something to change policy and practice in their communities. Today, I’m running an interview I conducted with one of the most interesting school heads I’ve ever encountered, Dominic Randolph, who is in his third year as Head of Riverdale Country School, an independent K-12 school in New York City. Before that, he was the assistant headmaster at a four-year co-educational boarding school. Randolph’s wife is also an educator; their daughter is a junior in college. Randolph’s blog, is always fascinating and full of interesting references and ideas.

Interview with Dominic Randolph
by Sara Bennett

“Schools tend to be high stress but not intellectually challenging. We need to understand this generation of students and allow learning to be meaningful.

–Dominic Randolph, head of Riverdale Country School, New York,

What are you thinking about these days?
I’m interested in how we keep schools focused on developing people who are creative and great critical thinkers. You can’t be a good thinker if you have to constantly shift from one thing to the next. If a school were to be built around effective thinking, that school and its schedule might look very different from the traditional models we have.

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The Milleys Capture Canada (and the U.S. and U.K. as well)

The day I wrote about the Milleys, parents from Calgary, Canada, who negotiated a contract with their children’s school allowing their children to opt-out of homework, the national press asked me to put it in touch with the Milleys. Since then, the Canadian newspapers, radio, and TV have reported the story, all of the coverage positive and supportive.

I happened to be in Toronto last week and was thrilled to open the Toronto Globe and Mail to discover an editorial, Peace on the Home Front, supporting the Milleys and suggesting that “school boards could easily curtail homework until Grade 9 without fear of educational harm. Younger students could thus be encouraged to read at home, play sports or music and spend more stress-free time with their family.”

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Moms (and Dads) on a Mission – San Anselmo, California

(I’ll be gone until Monday)

Last year, I posted a piece by Torri Chappell, a teacher and mother from San Anselmo, California, who wrote about some of the success she had had in advocating for school reform.

Two weeks ago, the high school in her community hosted a showing of Race to Nowhere, a documentary film that I’ve written about before. (I’m an adviser and appear in the film.). Torri was bothered by the discussion following the screening and sent the following letter to her local newspaper.

To the Editors
from Torri Chappell

What really matters in the life of a child? What really matters in the life of an adult? What does it mean to be ‘successful’? Happy? These are the questions that I wish adults would honestly ask themselves and more importantly ask their children.

Last Thursday Drake High School hosted a screening of the new documentary, Race to Nowhere by Vicki Abeles. This film bravely and honestly depicts the negative effects of our society’s push to make our children ‘successful’. It is powerful, heart wrenching and thought provoking. I applaud Drake High School for providing this screening to the community, to which hundreds of people of all ages attended.

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“My Marks Were Torn to Shreds” For Failure to Complete Homework

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,

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