What is the problem with homework?
Rhetorical Answer: What's wrong with a practice that…
- Students don't like
- Adds to the teacher's workload
- Adds stress to family life
- Decreases children's play time
- Fails to demonstrate that learning is increased in meaningful ways
- Often seems like a punishment for working slowly (even meticulously) in school
- Alienates teachers in the minds of students
- Often is at the "frustration level" of the student, rather than the "independent level"
Homework Hot Potato
Here are some (honest, but less than politically adoptable) slants on homework...
Suggestion #1.) Teachers should not have to take so much work home, either.
Pay teachers overtime for any training, paper-grading and lesson planning that they can't complete during the school day.
Suggestion #2.) If students can't learn enough in the regular school day, provide tutoring with qualified staff for every one of these students.
Sidebar
The lack of tutoring is where No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is "backward." Instead of an "impersonal, data-collection-from-afar, punitive, unfunded-mandate" that can never work, let's provide an immediate, up-close-and-personal, hands-on solution that will work (individual tutoring for ever child).
Provide as much individual tutoring as each child that is "behind" needs.
Of course our sarcastic comment is that, if school districts were "forced" to provide individual tutoring for every student that is "behind;" then school districts would find creative ways to measure students and find them "caught up"...in ways similar to how so many school leavers (drop outs) fail to show up on school district and state tracking lists.
Why?
School districts can't deliver tutoring "on the cheap."
Suggestion #3.) Extend the school day
If the school day is not long enough for students to complete their work, then extend the school day and increase teachers' salaries proportionally.
And, don't just add more of the same hollow test-prep and lifeless, mindless, drill to the school day.
Add art, music, drama, dance, sports, chess, debate and other missing ingredients of today's sterile, high-stakes testing environment.
Suggestion #4.) Remove any requirement for homework, and let children bring in anything that they choose to do for "extra credit." Then, give the children credit for their work, no matter how banal or how creative.
Sidebar
(Note: This is the suggestion that you can easily do. Follow this suggestion and you will add delight to your school day.
Remember: When you punish students for failing to complete homework assignments, you are "classically conditioning" students to react to learning with negative feelings and emotions.
In "operant conditioning," that which is rewarded increases, that which is punished is avoided.
When assessment is "polluted with punishment," grading reflects compliance with work assignments, rather than progress toward testable learning targets. Punitive grading because homework was not completed confounds the reporting of actual student learning.
There is no limit to the amount of data that children could collect…fodder for meaningful math problems, charting and graphing..when they are at school.
There is no limit to how many creative ideas that children can devise, and no limit to their motivation to express themselves if someone listens to them.
And, there is a need for teachers to understand what the daily lives of our children are like.
Thought Stoppers?
The reason that thought and discussion of the curriculum stops at the classroom door is that the "work" often is boring, irrelevant, and insulated from students' experience. Sometimes this is because the content is lacking, sometimes this is because the presentation is lacking. Learning for the sake of achieving a high score on a test motivates only the same minority of students who willingly do their homework.
Children flourish when we start with their world and help them expand their thoughts and perceptions. Children stagnate when we shoehorn their thinking into lockstep and force them to trudge through benchmark and high-stakes testing ruts.
Children learn by play and laughter. Memory connects best with joy and fun, and almost not at all with stress. Our schools would be delightful places if they were designed for children. But, our current factory-based school design doesn't allow for the messy, ad hoc, spur of the moment, catch a firefly, serendipity that typifies a real learning environment.
Our schools are too big and unmanageable. Immediacy and intimacy are structured out of the school day.
An Anachronistic Practice Geared for the Convenience of the Factory School
There are a minority of children that like academic work and are eager to complete homework assignments. For these students, the best thing that teachers can advise is, "Get a life!"
The reason that homework is for the convenience of the school is that it seeks to keep students in the grade-level, lockstep…supporting the fiction of "uniform, homogenized learning" and the "school-year, adequate-progress-month."
If children have to call a hotline, the homework is too difficult.
If family stress increases because the parents have to coerce their child to "do their homework," than the student has the wrong assignment.
But imagine the logistics and "grading nightmare" that the shop overseer (I mean teacher) faces if all students have different assignments.
How could such a flexible, built-on-student-choice-of-assignments, highly motivating, strategy demonstrate that all students are on track to meet the year-month-grade targets?
Keep Workable Suggestions Under Wraps
But keep the suggestion about individual tutoring to yourself.
Otherwise, the "behind" that will be left behind will be yours…because there is no room in a school district's political establishment for anyone who suggests an expensive solution to educating our children. The school district bureaucracy can't count on your loyalty if it spins the "nothing is too good for our kids" mantra, but you suggest a solution that the bureaucracy can't deliver, cheaply."
So, pretend that homework is important, secretly assign the right kind of homework where students think, create, gather data, dance, sing, act out, write, design…think. Assign the right kind of homework where students always succeed…homework that always brings their grades up.
Look at homework as the contents of a cafeteria tray, and don't insist that every student finishes everything.
A few changes on your part will transform homework from a divisive issue into meaningful learning.
"Backing off" on homework is the quickest strategy to making headway in learning.
