Case Against Homework How Homework Is Hurting Our Children And What We Can Do About It

So Much Work, So Little Time "We feel like we're rushing our kids from the minute they walk through the door at four until they crawl into bed," says Wendy, a mother of first- and fifth-graders who attend a private school near Highland Park, New Jersey. In the three hours before her six-year-old son's bedtime at seven, they have to fit in twenty to thirty minutes of homework, dinner, a bath, and some reading time. "That leaves a whopping fifteen minutes to play. My son will often take out a game and ask one of us to play before he even starts his homework. We grit our teeth as we gently break the news that he has to get his homework done first. It hurts to have to do this--we want him to play! He's six! He's worked hard all day." Wendy's daughter, a fifth-grader, goes to bed at eight after slogging through an average of 90 to 120 minutes of assignments. "My daughter has no time to herself between Monday and Friday--no exaggeration," says Wendy. "And this schedule does not include time for spontaneous events, such as phone calls from grandparents (especially precious from those that live a plane ride away). My daughter goes to ballet one day a week, and that is a challenge. We don't do other activities because the stress level is just not worth it. We truly feel that homework is taking away from the quality of our lives." "During our daughter's third-grade year at our parish Catholic school, the volume of homework coming home increased on a daily basis and led to much frustration," says Beverly of Beaufort, South Carolina. "The only way the children could keep up was because very involved parents 'homeschooled' each evening." "My son hasn't been able to attend his last five Boy Scout meetings and has had to skip weekend camping trips because of his heavy homework load," says Linda, whose ninth-grader attends public school in Woodbury, Minnesota, and tackles three to three-and-a-half hours of homework each night. "He holds his head in his hands and cries. He also gets very angry and vents his anger by yelling. It's not good for any of us!" "I sit on Amy's bed until 11 p.m. quizzing her, knowing she's never going to use this later, and it feels like abuse," says Nina of Menlo Park, California, whose eleven-year-old goes to a Blue Ribbon public school and does at least three-and-a-half hours of homework each night. Nina also questions the amount of time spent on "creative" projects. "Amy had to visit the Mission in San Francisco and then make a model of it out of cardboard, penne pasta, and paint. But what was she supposed to be learning from this? All my daughter will remember is how tense we were in the garage making this thing. Then when she handed it in, the teacher dropped it and all the penne pasta flew off." These days, says Nina, "Amy's attitude about school has really soured." Nina's has, too. "Everything is an emergency and you feel like you're always at battle stations." These aren't just the gripes of a few chronically disgruntled parents, though many school principals and teachers would like to think so. In fact, more than one-third of the families we surveyed and interviewed admit to feeling crushed by the workload. This is true no matter where they live (urban, suburban, or rural areas) or what kind of school their kids attend (public, private, or parochial). So if you feel overwhelmed, too, you're not alone. Some people insist that kids aren't working any harder than they did in the past. But a 2004 national survey of more than 2,900 children done by the University of Michigan found that the time kids spend doing homework has skyrocketed by 51 percent since 1981. For some kids, that adds up to just a few minutes more. But for many kids, the amounts have become staggering. In fact, the hours of homework many of our kids are doing far exceedBennett, Sara is the author of 'Case Against Homework How Homework Is Hurting Our Children And What We Can Do About It', published 2006 under ISBN 9780307340177 and ISBN 0307340171.