No doubt I was the bane of several teachers’ existence when
I was in any school. Once I left school,
I locked my thoughts of school work and home work in my locker and teetered out
the front door—free at last.
The idea of doing more school work after school let out was
foreign in my mind. Why on earth would
anyone do homework?
I would like to dump all that on the teachers, explaining
how good they were in covering the topic during class. They taught to the slowest learner in those
days, or at least I thought they did, and covered the salient points of the
lesson at least three and often four times in each lesson. So, in my mind, going home to reinforce an
idea or concept that I picked up in the class seemed like a waste of time. Besides, my fishing pole was always there and
the stream behind my house was always stocked with trout.
No doubt my grades in high school suffered due to my
philosophy of ignoring home work. Instead
of the A-B student I probably should have been, I was left on the C-pile and
was totally unconcerned. Even when one
of my teachers posted our names and “average” on the chalk board as if that
might be motivation, I still didn’t care.
In retrospect, a little extra effort there would have helped
me a lot. But I didn’t see it that way,
and to me, most of the time, school was an encumbrance. Yes, I have long since changed my mind about
that, but at the time it seemed like the right course of action.
Even today the idea of homework gnaws at me. Recently Heather Shumaker’s report about
homework wrecking our kids appeared in Salon.com, an online journal. Shumaker avers that no proof exists that
substantiates homework as being a benefit for grammar school students.
Duh-huh!
“There is no evidence that any amount of
homework improves the academic performance of elementary students,” Shumaker
says in the article.
Well I have to agree with that. In my gut, I feel this is true, but Shumaker
goes further by citing several studies. In
the end, she says, “homework has benefits, but that the benefits are age
dependent.”
What does “age dependent” mean? Age dependent means that most of the homework
our youngest students get amounts to busy work and a source for grading samples
for the teachers. It is not very
effective in the learning process, and, while it may have some bearing in
creating habits, the disruption to the family and the creation of the homework
police is more detrimental.
Sure this is my summation (see opinion). And, given my history as described above, I
naturally have a bias. But still, what
good does a math worksheet with 10 add, subtract, divide, and multiply problems
serve? Most kids, by the time they have
to deal with that, have already had the numbers thing drilled into their heads. The multiplication tables, out to 12 or so,
are immediately retrievable to most kids, I think. We spend time reinforcing material that does
not require reinforcing. Do we really
believe our kids are so dumb?
I realize I am fighting the current of popular
belief here, but to me most homework is busy work. Most homework, especially in elementary
school, benefits only the teachers.
Meanwhile, it creates havoc in homes as parents try to deal with their
kids’ reluctance to do homework, and often either “help” or in fact do it
themselves.
Still, my experience in school as shown
earlier, puts me on a different tack.
Yes, I have been subdued. I
realize that failure to comply with this Draconian practice will end up harming
my grades. So, I guess, I will continue
to ensure that my kids “do their homework” despite knowing that the benefit of
such is far less than what the Education coalition seems to believe. That’s how we live today in this round
hole-round peg, square hole-square peg, and color inside the lines society.
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