In Finland, schools starts at the age of 7, high school students spend less than 1/2 hour a night on homework, and very little time is spent on standardized test preparation. This Wall Street Journal article titled “What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?” takes a closer look at schools in Finland to show how their students come to be so well educated.
From My Mailbox: Letter from an Anonymous Freshman
Do you have any advice for this anonymous freshman?
Dear Sara,
You’ve devoted a lot of space on your website to the issues surrounding homework in elementary and secondary schools, but I couldn’t find any information on what to do when the onslaught continues into college. As a college student, I continue to experience the detrimental effects of excessive homework described in your articles (I had to sideline an independent study that I had wanted to pursue for years because I was falling behind on my homework). Since parents aren’t expected to have much of a role in the college curriculum (no PTA) and students are expected to be more independent, what can I do? How can I organize other overworked students? How do I raise the issue without looking like I’m just trying to get out of doing work (my parents are in another state and can’t vouch for me on this one)? I’ve been in college for less than a year, and I’m already exhausted. Help!
Tune in on Thursday to All Day Web-a-Thon on School Reform
The American Sports Institute is creating a new, ground-breaking, wellness-based school (The Arete School) in Marin County, California, and, to support its efforts, there will be an all-day streaming telethon on the internet on Thursday, February 28. The event will feature leading sports figures and educators discussing topics ranging from school reform to the keys to athletic and academic success.
“The problems plaguing America’s public-school system are well documented, yet solutions remain frustratingly elusive,” says Dr. Joel Kirsch, president of the American Sports Institute. “Despite a powerful, natural desire to learn inherent in all children, the vast majority of our nation’s students are disengaged in their academic classes. In addition, too many students are unhealthy and unfit, with childhood overweight and obesity at near-crises levels. We’ve developed a new way for educators to connect with students that is being validated by current research, and is grounded in the perspectives of great figures throughout history and in ancient Greek culture. This learning process has positively impacted students from all major demographic groups.”
Most of the guests, including me, are interviewed for 20-30 minute segments. Some of the other educators and education guests are William Damon and Denise Pope of Stanford University, Charles Hillman of the University of Illinois, Fernando Gómez-Pinilla of UCLA, John Ratey of Harvard, Alex Filippenko and Stephen Miller of UC Berkeley, David Shernoff of Northern Illinois University, Brian Storts of the San Francisco Art Institute, California State Senator Tom Torlakson, Marshall Smith of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, three moms representing Vallecito Elementary School in San Rafael, California, three advanced-placement students and their parents representing Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, California, three San Francisco Bay Area students, and futurist Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock and The Third Wave.
The Web-a-Thon will be webcast beginning 8:00 a.m., Pacific Standard Time, on February 28, via the following website addresses:
KGO-TV: abc7news.com
KGO-Radio: kgoam810.com
San Francisco Chronicle: sfgate.com
From My Mailbox: Portland School Cannot Take Away Recess for Failure to do Homework
I recently heard from the father of a 7th-grader in Portland, Oregon, who told me that he and his wife allow their son “to set his own priorities and to decide for himself whether he wants to do his homework. A couple of the teachers in the school took offense by this approach and exercised all sorts of disciplinary actions against him for not completing his homework. Initially they detained him during lunch recess time. After challenging that practice and going all the way to the school district attorney it turned out that this practice is actually against the district own rules applying US federal policy to combat obesity in American children.”
Hearing from this father reminded me how important it is for all of us to carefully check school policies. The Portland policy is from an Administrative Directive, which states:
On June 30, 2004, Congress passed Public Law 108-265 and reauthorized federal funding for Child Nutrition Programs. Section 204 of the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act directs all school districts participating in the federally funded Child Nutrition programs to establish a local school wellness policy for all schools in the district. The Board of Directors of the Portland Public School District adopted Board Policy 3.60.060-P (Student Wellness through Nutrition and Physical Activity) on June 12, 2006. The Portland Public School District is committed to school environments that promote life long wellness by supporting a school environment with excellent and consistent nutrition, nutrition education, physical education, and physical activity.
* * *
Section II (3)(c)(B) Schools shall not deny student participation in recess or other physical activities as a form of discipline or for classroom make-up time. While this practice has been used by many throughout the years, continued use is strongly discouraged and should be avoided.
Unfortunately, the school decided that since it couldn’t take away recess, it would instead bar the student from all school electives (two complete afternoons a week).
If you have any advice for this father as to how to challenge the banishment from electives, please post a comment or send me an email.
Vacation Homework: Tokyo-Style
Here’s an interesting piece in the International Herald Tribune describing the amount of work an 8-year-old child from a Tokyo school had to take on his family vacation to Hawaii. (I know many of you have children who are currently on winter break or are about to be on winter break. Please send me your stories of vacation homework.)
Homework For the Beach
by Kumiko Makihara
As I plan our spring vacation, I’m dreading how much homework my 8-year-old son will have.
During our winter holiday in Hawaii, too many beach days were cut short by our laboring to get through the inventory of five pages of math, four pages of writing practice, three pages of reading comprehension drills, two geography quiz sheets, two independent reports, an English alphabet sheet, a book log, a diary and a Japanese card game.
Japanese elementary schools don’t believe children should hang loose during extended vacations. “Unless you are vigilant, you could end up spending time passively,” warned my son’s school’s newsletter.
Letter to the Editor: “I’m a Weary Veteran of Homework Wars”
Last week, after two researchers from the University of Toronto released a study on parental attitudes towards homework and recommended that homework be abolished in elementary school, there were numerous letters to the editors of Canadian newspapers. Here’s one of my favorites, written by Toronto mother of three, Claire Watson, and published in thestar.com:
After reading Andrea Gordon’s affirming response to the “homework wars” and agreeing with everything related to parent-child conflict, unrealistic expectations of what children can accomplish on their own, her legitimate examples of “good” homework vs. “bad” homework, I was dismayed to read her conclusion. If research shows that homework in the elementary years is of “no benefit” to students, then her suggestion to “outsource” the supervision of homework to tutors or after-school clubs is a sellout position.
The logical conclusion to draw from the research is that homework should be abolished for Grades 1 to 6. As the parent of three children, the youngest in Grade 2, I have quietly rebelled for many years on behalf of my kids at the quantity of homework, the unclear guidelines that lead to parent and child frustration, and at the encroachment of homework into other life-enriching activities, such as sports and music that are not available in school due to cutbacks.
I wholeheartedly agree that reading to your child is essential for fostering parent-child relationships, language and literacy. I believe that children learn so much about life incidentally through play and need after-school time to hang out with other children. I also believe in a parent’s role in helping their child observe and discover their world, as this complements the academic learning of the classroom.
All this can best be achieved through communication from teachers on what children are learning from week to week so that parents can extend classroom themes into their child’s larger world.
I, too, am very weary of the homework slog and hope the Toronto District School Board will heed the research and make appropriate changes to homework policy now. What adult in their right mind looks forward to taking work home at the end of the day?
Guest Blogger: A Father’s Epiphany and Homework Reform
Today’s guest blogger, Frank Bruni, the father of a 12-year-old seventh grader, lives in Toronto, Canada. Frank, who has been quoted extensively in the Canadian press, has been a driving force in pushing the Toronto District School Board to review and revamp its homework policy.
A Father’s Epiphany and Homework Reform
by Frank Bruni
Last year, when I was sitting in the doctor’s office with my 11-year-old son, the doctor said, “he should get more exercise.” I thought to myself, “and when he would do that?”
It is hard to describe the impact that that day had on everything that would follow. I started to think about how our family manipulated our lives around homework. In fact, we rarely made any decisions about how we were going to spend our free time without taking homework into consideration. I remembered my own childhood and could not recall having as much homework as my son. He was missing being a kid. It bothered me – it bothered me a lot.
Continue reading “Guest Blogger: A Father’s Epiphany and Homework Reform”
Canadian Study: Homework Has No Value
Researchers in Canada just released the results of the first study ever on homework and concluded that homework has no value through 6th grade. “”For elementary school, especially for the primary grades, I am down on homework entirely,” said Linda Cameron, one of the authors of the study and a former kindergarten teacher. According to thestar.com, the study also found:
* Not only does homework cut into family time, it becomes a primary source of arguments, power struggles and is disruptive to building a strong family, including putting strain on marriages.
* A large number of children in kindergarten are assigned homework, most of it “drill and practice.”
* 28 per cent of Grade 1 students and more than 50 per cent of Grade 2 students spend more than 20 minutes on homework daily.
* While there’s no real difference in the attitude of children toward homework, Ontario parents definitely feel more negative about it than others across the country.
* More than three-quarters of parents with children in Grade 4 and under help their children with homework. But, by Grade 4, only half of parents feel they are competent enough to do so.
* Parents are unsure about the benefits of homework; by Grade 5, just 20 per cent of parents feel it has a “positive effect on achievement.”
* Half of children in junior kindergarten are enthusiastic about homework; by Grade 6, it drops to just 6 per cent and by Grade 12, just 4 per cent.
The researchers also came across several themes from parent comments – that homework is too difficult or the assignment unclear, that it cuts into family time and causes stress at home and that children are left with little time to play.
Guest Blogger: “We don’t have time to do that; You’ve got 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?
Continue reading “Guest Blogger: “We don’t have time to do that; You’ve got Homework!””
Study: New Middle-School Teachers Woefully Unprepared to Teach Math
A study released in December concludes that soon-to-be middle school math teachers in the U.S. are ill prepared for the task. “Our future teachers are getting weak training mathematically and are just not prepared to teach the demanding mathematics curriculum we need for middle schools if we hope to compete internationally,” said William H. Schmidt, a Michigan State University researcher who conducted the study…. In Mr. Schmidt’s study, U.S. teachers scored significantly lower than those in all countries except Mexico on knowledge tests in algebra and functions, which are considered critically important for teaching middle school math.” Read the article in edweek here.
Stop Homework 