The Conversation: Homework: Burden or benefit?
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From: Ablang on 18 Jan 2010 23:29 The Conversation: Homework: Burden or benefit? By Jill Duman Special to The Bee Published: Sunday, Jan. 17, 2010 - 12:00 am | Page 1E Last Modified: Sunday, Jan. 17, 2010 - 1:38 pm Do teachers give students too much homework? To comment on this issue, please see our forum. Most afternoons and more than a few evenings homework in my house is accompanied by sounds verboten in most libraries: the scrabbling of papers and folders, books slamming against tables, grumbles, growls and miserable bleats reserved for calves heading off to slaughter. Those moments, when the school day oozes out of backpacks and onto the kitchen table, homework becomes more than it is. Suddenly, a collection of cryptic notes and assignments becomes a referendum on my kids' intelligence, a challenge of my own (distant) education, a litmus test of my ability to ensure that all assignments are wrapped up at a reasonable time, without someone in the family dissolving into tears. What is the purpose of homework? Most of us remember elementary school and junior high homework as exercises to reinforce math, spelling and foreign language skills. Projects, reports and creative writing that couldn't be finished within the confines of class time were also assigned for home completion. Daily homework was not part of the curriculum until junior high or high school. Today, homework starts in kindergarten and continues to build. I have a fifth-grader studying the periodic table of the elements and a ninth- grader reading "The Odyssey." I am not convinced my kids are smarter than I was at 10 and 14 but they are definitely more frustrated and more confused about what they should be gleaning from the hours that extend their school day. In Davis, questions about the mission of homework prompted the Davis Joint Unified School Board to survey parents, teachers and students with the goal of revamping the district's homework policy before the start of the next school year. The district's current policy, in keeping with National PTA guidelines, calls for maximum homework time of 10 minutes per grade level completed beginning in kindergarten, with a cap of two to three hours per night for students in grades 10 through 12. But school board members and the chair of the board's homework committee say they may decide to leave the amount and scope of homework assignments up to individual classroom teachers, who could decide to pull the plug on home assignments altogether. "Defining the purpose of homework has to be the philosophical place that we start," Davis Teachers Association President Ingrid Salim told the Davis school board at a recent meeting. "There used to be a premise that academic rigor equals the quantity of things done. In today's world," Salim added, "that is not true any more, but the paradigm remains." Heidy Kellison, a parent who chairs the homework committee, says volunteers are still tabulating responses to the survey, but the sheer volume of comments from respondents including about 1,800 parents and 225 teachers indicates that homework is troubling the community. "I think homework is the tail wagging the dog in many families," she says. The Davis district's re-examination of homework comes amid nationwide questions about the very premise of sending work home after school. Two 2006 books, Alfie Kohn's "The Homework Myth" and "The Case Against Homework" by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish, contend there is scant research connecting homework in elementary school to academic success. Research has also shown that excessive homework more than 90 to 120 minutes is associated with lower test scores in junior high and high school. Homework has lately been debated in the national news and on the "Today" show and Oprah Radio. Clearly, there is plenty to hate about homework the minutes and hours spent on academics that could be spent on music, theater, sports or play; the depth of assignments that are supposed to be planned and executed by students but often require parental time, energy and money. Yet we continue to believe homework equates to academic rigor the same way old-time schoolmasters adhered to rote spelling and corporal punishment. But the worst part of daily homework is how it polarizes the educational community: teachers who privately admit they feel driven by parents and community standards to assign homework, students who feel their academic success measured by what they've produced rather than what they've learned, and parents who find themselves adversaries rather than advocates in their children's schooling. These are perspectives the Davis community will weigh when considering what work should go home and what should remain in the classroom. One model the Davis homework committee is reviewing comes from Toronto, where homework is clearly defined in terms of mission and scope. Toronto teachers are instructed to assign homework "appropriate to the student's age development level and learning style." Students are responsible for "asking for clarification or assistance" from the teacher, should their assignment be unclear. Toronto parents are responsible for "stopping their child from continuing to complete homework at bedtime, even if the child is not done." And doesn't that make sense? Because at the end of the day, a child's homework isn't a referendum on parenting, teaching or learning. It's one assignment in a single class maybe an assignment that shouldn't have been given in the first place. http://www.sacbee.com/740/story/2466114.html |