HOMEWORK- something that most students don’t want to think about on a weekend, especially a good one like we’re having now with a little morning rinse off and then sunshine again. There’s a story in the L.A. Times today that shows there is a trend to reducing or cutting out most homework for students. “Some schools are cutting back on homework: When is homework just busywork? Weighing stress against learning, some districts are cutting back on academic work outside the classroom,” by Seema Mehta, March 22, 2009. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-homework22-2009mar22,0,1964937.story That’s kind of an odd situation from my viewpoint, but I’ll get to that later. The story mentions that there has been so much homework placed upon students that they don’t have time to be kids. The students get so stressed out by having to keep up with assignments, especially on the weekends, that it interferes with other activities.
There’s a short recap of homework being disfavored by educators at other times in history, but the idea that there should be no busy work is a little more understandable. Some comments are presented with the opinion that the forced reading makes children more resistant to reading on their own for enjoyment. There is a variable on the amount of homework that is given according to the grade level of the student. The story is still not convincing me that there is too much homework for children to handle.
But my opinion comes from my own experience at Lincoln High. The story’s point has to be based upon the important consideration that these students ARE DOING all the assigned homework. I suppose there is still some stress when the students continue to IGNORE or struggle with getting homework assignments partially done. I tried to give a little each day, hoping that the doing some work in the subject at different time of the day might help them actually learn the subjects a little more.
But as a more productive activity, my students would probably have been getting more out of being in school longer each day than having to be on their own with homework. I don’t think I gave much homework in the overall picture of a semester's time simply because the bottleneck in the path to moving ahead was reading. Plain and simple, the reading skills were poor, generally, and THAT was the key to having all the rest of school work become something that the students could handle at an appropriate, or even outstanding level.
If anything, being able to do homework on a regular basis- and not at amounts that will require the same daily amount of hours as the school day- will get their work habits up so that they will be better able to function AFTER they get out of high school. With the dropout level as high as it’s been, if students don’t meet some success at school SOMEWHERE, either in academics or other school activities, they become candidates for increasing absenteeism, declining grades, loss of social acceptance, and then dropping out begins to make sense to them.
Like I said, the story’s premise has to assume students are doing all the homework. My experience doesn’t have that many students doing all the homework, or even able to handle much of what should be homework. What I think would help would be more monitoring of the progress after assessments are made of work level for the students, so that they don’t fall more behind. They need to catch up to grade level in most cases where I was assigned, and that’s a different problem to add to the job of teaching.
Most students had more potential that was not being realized- and who doesn’t? - but in their cases, the ones that were my students, the non-achievement often led to anti-social behavior that accelerated poorer performance in academics and in regular school socialization. And that was long before they reached me in the chain of events that is LAUSD's social promotion. I won’t even get into the influence of the gang environment in high school, yet another factor in how the high school experience is handled by students of today in Los Angeles.
Homework has several functions and deciding which are the most important ones for your purposes- and it should be educating the student- will be what influences when and what kind and how much homework you will assign. It all depends. How's that for a definitive answer on the matter?
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