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When I was in high school, I took seven or eight classes each year, and I was in a gifted and talented magnet program that sent students to the top colleges and universities in the U.S. In order to keep us competitive with high-achieving students across the country, our workload was in many ways accelerated--which meant for most of us hours and hours of homework every night. I fought endless battles with my parents over the many, many math problems I had to solve each night, the lab reports I had to write to prepare for college (where, BTW, I never had to write a lab report as extensive as those I wrote in high school), the essays in Spanish and French, and the extensive reading for all my humanities and social science courses. I grew depressed because of my workload, and my parents, schoolteachers themselves, instituted mental health days, where they occasionally would write me a note so I could stay home from school and just chill--and in a couple of cases use the day to catch up on all my homework.
These days it's not just high school students with too much homework. Elementary school students, too, are bearing the brunt of the high-stakes testing industry. A recent study from Duke University says all this homework doesn't actually help young students do better on national tests. (Secondary students do benefit from regular homework assignments, although not, I imagine, from an avalanche of them.) The Evening Standard reports on the study and some UK teachers' reactions to it:
Margaret Morrissey, of the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations, said she was not surprised by the results.
She said: "Children get extremely tired mentally and physically at school. Then they have to come home and do more work on top of that. It's counterproductive.
"While we're making six, seven and eight-year-olds do extra work, in some countries they wouldn't even have started formal schooling."
But David Fann, head of Sherwood and Broughton primaries in Preston, insists that homework does improve achievement.
He told the Times Educational Supplement: "Reading books at home, or doing half a dozen spellings, is an essential part of primary education.
"Without that process, a lot of children wouldn't have acquired confidence in their literacy and numeracy skills."
At present, the Government recommends that a Year Five pupil (ages nine and ten), should spend an hour a week on homework.
However, it is not uncommon for pupils in Year Five and Year Six (ages ten and 11) to be set two or three hours a week.
Last month, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers called for homework to be scrapped at primary school because it puts children under too much stress.
If you're looking to build a case against homework, and especially if you're looking for overwhelming anecdotal evidence against homework, your first stop should be Stop Homework, a blog by Sarah Bennett, co-author of the book The Case Against Homework. For example, she shares the story of an honors student who earned mostly As and an occasional B, but who dropped out of high school in his junior year. His story:
I was a bright student. I was quick to learn. And, I still passed all my tests. A’s. Maybe the occasional B. I paid attention in class. I took in the knowledge. And, I gave that knowledge right back to them when tested. Typically you would think that my test scores would show competency and success. I understood what I was taught without a doubt. Yet I failed four courses! Because I wouldn’t (no, because I couldn’t!!!) do my homework. It was too much. Way too much. Years and years of excessive homework took its toll on me. I was tired. I was fatigued. I was beat. And I dropped out.
The system turned a successful, smart kid into a worn out dropout.
Definitely go check out Bennett's blog. It's an eye-opener. I especially enjoyed the entries by Fed-Up Mom, who in one entry disabuses readers of common myths about homework. In responding to an apparently common response from schools that "A lot of our parents want more homework!" she writes,
This used to slow me down, but increasingly, I see it as a red herring. The bottom line is that nothing a parent says makes the slightest difference in how a public school is run. Parents don’t make policy. While it may be true that some parents want more homework, the school has no
