Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
Today's 7-year-olds must do interviews, look through thousands of words, and answer 60 math questions in four minutes. This homework mania doesn't teach kids anything except that life is full of pain.
Oct 22, 2005 | It was the night we wove an Iroquois cradle board out of natural fibrous materials that drove me over the edge. It was 9 p.m., an hour after bedtime, when Sophie suddenly remembered that in addition to a written report, her Native American history assignment required a visual presentation.
"It's OK, I can do it," she said. "I just need some hemp."
Frankly, so did I.
I hate homework. I hate it more now than I did when I was the one lugging textbooks and binders back and forth from school. The hour my children are seated at the kitchen table, their books spread out before them, the crumbs of their after-school snack littering the table, is without a doubt the worst hour of my day. If my son Zeke's teacher, a delightful and intelligent woman, were to walk through my kitchen door between 3:30 and 4:30 p.m. on a weekday, I could not guarantee her safety.
Eight-year-old Zeke routinely has an hour of homework a night. He's an interesting kid, one who's described as having a lot of "personality." He's the kind of kid who, left to his own devices, thinks it's funny to write "a Rottweiler" as the answer to every question on the homework page, even the math problems. Especially the math problems.
Accordingly, either my husband or I have to sit next to him and insist that he read the directions in his homework packet, instead of riffing on the crazy soundtrack that runs in his head.
School for Zeke is work, and by the end of a seven-hour workday, he's exhausted. But like a worker on a double shift, he has to keep going. When, halfway through kindergarten, we had to break it to him that this wasn't a one-year gig, that in fact he was looking at, conservatively, 17 more years of school, the expression on his face was one of deep, existential despair. That evening he calculated that the next time he could count on being really, truly happy was in 60 years, when he retires. His sister, however, is one of those cheerful Pollyanna types who finish their summer reading list before Memorial Day, and at 11 is already counting on getting at least one graduate degree. But even she hates homework.
When I sent out a feeler to mothers of other elementary-school students asking for their experiences with homework my in box was immediately flooded with replies, some furious, some rueful. "We had to set up an interview with someone in the community, transport the children, supervise the interview, take notes, take photos, print the photos, assist the students in making note cards for a speech, and help the kids make a poster about the community member," said Martha, the mother of twins in the Bay Area. Sounds like a nice project, doesn't it? It might have been -- for a 10-year-old. But Martha's boys are in second grade.
Six-year-old Katie Williams of Maryland spent days trolling newspapers looking for "io" and "ou" configurations in order to begin her "Rainbow Words" assignment. "Do you know how many thousands of words we had to read to come up with enough to satisfy that assignment?" asks her mother, Carlie. Once she found the words, Katie had to write each one over and over again, using every color of the rainbow. Get it? Rainbow words. What ever happened to using a No. 2 pencil?
Another mother described the weekly timed math tests mandated by her kids' teacher. "Sixty problems correctly answered in four minutes. We parents are supposed to stand over our kids with stopwatches. My children are very different from each other, but they have this in common -- they have both been in tears due to their fear of failing these inane tests. Mind you, these children are 7 years old."
But my favorite is Carlie Williams' nephew. Assigned to construct a relief map of one of the 50 states out of plaster of Paris, the boy chose Nebraska. He made a flat rectangle. As his aunt said, "You've got to love a kid who puts into the assignment exactly the effort it's worth."
How would we be spending our time if we didn't have to slave over these piles of mind-numbing make-work? Maybe some kids would be vegging out in front of the television or exercising their thumbs on their Gameboys, but I would guess that's not what would be going on in my house, or in most others. Instead, we'd do the things we rarely have time for during the week, like go for bike rides or shoot hoops. My kids might even occasionally enjoy the opportunity to be bored. You remember boredom, don't you? That state where the imagination is forced to take over and create entertainment?
Harris M. Cooper, the director of the Program in Education at Duke University and author of "The Battle Over Homework: Common Ground for Administrators, Teachers, and Parents," tells me that the homework load for most students has actually remained steady for the past 50 years, except for the group in which I did my very unscientific survey -- middle- to upper-middle-class students in the lowest grades. Cooper says that it's probably because educators of the children of the middle and upper classes feel a great deal of pressure to maintain test scores that they up the homework ante.
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