Homework: Yes or No?
The homework debate has fueled many town hall meetings and board rooms since the early 20th century. Some believe that students need the discipline to do homework to reinforce what is taught in class while others argue that homework is a bunch of busy work that infringes on students’ much needed play time or down time.
I just read a fascinating article “Never Mind the Students; Homework Divides Parents” in the New York Times which addresses the fact that many parents rely on homework to fill the time with productive things for students to do until parents return home from work. Wealthy families have access to enrichment activities and educational supplements that their kids can do when they don’t have homework, but families with less means typically have less resources available to their children. This translates to an unequal playing field where the wealthy kids fare far better than their poorer counterparts.
Homework is a complicated concept. I believe that instruction and introduction to concepts should be done in the classroom and homework should be assigned IF it reinforces what was introduced and IF it is necessary for the student to reinforce those concepts in the first place. In other words, don’t give students busy work to keep them out of trouble because they’ll resent it and they probably won’t be any better off for doing it.
The tricky part is that every student is different and each student has strengths in some subjects and weaknesses in others. So how can a teacher assign the right amount of homework to a class of 30 students? Um, not happening. And we can’t make homework voluntary because kids probably won’t do it and those that do are probably not the students who needed to do it in the first place. Hmmm.
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