Home Work a Hassle?

I was reading a blog posting this morning in our local large city newspaper concerning homework and how kids these days are bogged down with it. Read it here. A Wall Street Journal article (read it here) and the general consensus of parents seems to be that homework is just a time-consuming hassle. It interferes with life and stresses out kids.

I'm a former middle school teacher and the mother of a 14-year old so I have some exposure to this situation from both sides of the fence. When I taught in the public school system, I taught in a rural middle school where the majority of the students came from impoverished backgrounds. Today that would be called an at-risk school but at the time (twenty years ago) we weren't sweating over test scores so the term never arose. I would say we had a good school. We had dedicated teachers, a great administration, and average students. We had an exceptional program for the gifted and talented and for the "educationally challenged" students, too. Some parents were involved but most weren't (not any different than today).

What we DIDN'T have were students whose lives were scheduled down to the last second. If a student played a sport, it was a school sport. There were no community soccer associations or karate schools or other such things. If a student played an instrument, it was in the band. No violin lessons or trumpet lessons after school. A student went home, did homework, and hung out. Parents came home, fixed supper and hung out. There was no "living in the mini-van" as mom carted kids from one activity to the other all afternoon, every afternoon.

The writer of the WSJ blog probably doesn't realize it but his child has just caught his and his wife's anxiety disease. The parents have communicated that the child must get As and Bs and makes it such a priority that they are constantly in the kid's face with flashcards and lists of spelling words, even in restaurants. The school work isn't stressing the kid out - it's the parents! Give the kid a break! Let him do it on his own. How is he going to learn to study on his own if his parents are constantly there pushing this stuff down his throat? He's not anxious because he's getting Ds - he's anxious because his parents are getting Ds! They need to back off.

Home work has it's place. It provides additional practice for new concepts learned at school that day. It can provide supporting learning opportunities for concepts with which the student struggles. Should a parent be involved in all home work activities? NO! Let the child do the work! A parent should be there if the child has a question but the parent should butt out otherwise. Be encouraging and help when needed but let the kid do the work and shoulder the responsibility. The child isn't going to have the parent there by his or her side when they are away at college and then what will happen?

As to the amount of home work. I suggest the parents cut out all after-school activities and just have the child come home and do homework and see what that does to the pace of their lives. I bet they will discover that the home work wasn't the problem after all - it was the million and one activities they had the child doing after school that was sucking up time and creating stress.

It's a documented fact that American children are over-scheduled. Parents use after-school activities as a baby-sitting service. When people my age (41) and older were in school, most moms didn't work so you came home, ate a Twinkie, did your home work and then got to watch an hour of Gomer Pyle and Bewitched before going outside to play with your friends until it was too dark to see. If you had trouble with your home work, you asked mom but otherwise she was probably busy making supper or doing laundry. If it was a math problem, you waited for dad to come home.

Now, moms work so they have to put the kids somewhere until they get off work so they enroll them in after-school programs that are glorified day cares (or even real day cares). To assuage their guilty feelings, parent put pressure on their children to perform in school so they can prove that the lifestyle they've chosen is not detrimental to the child and that they can produce "super kids". Remember, those test scores are all important and now the fever that has infected our educational professionals has spread to the parents. Johnny has to score high on those tests in the spring or he'll be an outcast, won't get into a good college, blah, blah, blah.

What a load of crap. I'm sorry, but there are some children that should just be left behind. It's a good wake up call that no one uses anymore. It was embarrassing as heck to fail a grade when I was a kid and usually it took just once to wake you up. No one is left behind now. It would be too detrimental to the child's self-esteem. (read heavy sarcasm there)

But that's another soapbox for another day. Back to the home work issue. Did I assign home work as a teacher? Yes, when I thought it was necessary which was often. Many of my students didn't have a home life that was conducive to sitting down and studying (as in their parents were drug addicts, etc) so I kept it to a minimum but I did assign it when I felt it was called for. I often provided opportunities to work on it in class simply because I knew what their home lives were like. We also had study hall (something else that is disappearing from the educational landscape) where the student had a chance to work on home work.

Home work teaches a lot of things, but primarily it teaches responsibility. When a parent takes over the responsibility for homework, one of the main purposes of homework is nullified. Do I welcome homework for my own son? Absolutely. In fact, I don't think he gets enough home work assigned.

Bottom line is parents need to stop blaming teachers for trying to teach something to their children and instead cut out all the extra-curricular activities that they've laid on their children in the effort to produce super-kids. Give the kids a break. Moms - get your butts home by 3:00 so your kid can have a normal life if you are so concerned about the kids' stress level.

Beaver Cleaver didn't seem stressed out much. Wonder why?