My Daughter's Homework Is Killing Me

Karl Taro Greenfeld was concerned about the amount of homework his eighth-grade daughter was doing -several hours every night. She wasn't getting enough sleep. Was the homework that hard? So he decided to find out in the most personal way possible: he would do the same homework every night for a week. It was an eye-opening experience, as homework was different when he was a student.

In Southern California in the late ’70s, it was totally plausible that an eighth grader would have no homework at all.

If my daughter came home and said she had no homework, I would know she was lying. It is inconceivable that her teachers wouldn’t assign any.

What has changed? It seems that while there has been widespread panic about American students’ falling behind their peers in Singapore, Shanghai, Helsinki, and everywhere else in science and mathematics, the length of the school day is about the same. The school year hasn’t been extended. Student-teacher ratios don’t seem to have changed much. No, our children are going to catch up with those East Asian kids on their own damn time.

Other parents were concerned about homework, too, but when Greenfeld discussed it with them, he was admonished by the vice-principal. Check out his week of homework assignments and see if you could keep up. How much homework does your child do each night? Link -via Digg

When I was in 8th grade in 1976-1977 and I recall some homework but not the amounts I see kids have today. Even second graders come home with assignments in every subject, taking them an hour or more to complete at times. Fortunately all of my children except one have graduated high school, so it won't be something that I will deal with directly for much longer.

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When I was in school, homework did not count much towards the final grade. While lots of it was assigned, if one did well on the test then it did not need to be finished. Has this changed?

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Sometimes I see how little some students focus on getting their work done in class. Is all this homework assigned to be done at home? Or is it because she didn't do it at school?

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I teach in Canada and at my school we have spent the last few years moving away from homework. The majority of teachers in my school don't give any homework or rarely give homework. This didn't come about because parent were complaining, it came about because very few of the students did their homework. We are an inner city school and the kids are often working at least one job if not two, or going home and making dinner and caring for siblings, or a million other reasons why they don't get to it. So we just stopped the struggle. It meant marks actually went up because there were no zeroes for homework. Instead we came up with different strategies to cover things in class and have the students show us that they understand the information.

It's completely idiotic to deduct marks for not having the correct column in place, Esmee had the right answer, she met the learning outcome!

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My daughter goes to school in Southern California. And She gets hours of homework per night. Has since she was in 1st grade. While that is a problem in and of it self, the real problem lies in the fact that she has not been taught how to do the home work before it is sent home. We send her to school, pay the taxes, and for the most part, we have been teaching her for an hour our two each night. This is on nearly every subject, but mostly math. What is the point of sending my daughter to school if we are just going to teach her after she gets home.

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