Susan Solomon of San Francisco saw her son bogged down last year with a language-arts paper that would help his application to an elite high school, she took matters into her own hands: she did his math homework. He later copied his mother's calculations in his own handwriting. "He knew how to do it," Solomon shrugs. "It was just busywork." (Ratnesar 3)
Educators frown on parents' doing homework for their kids; they should instead be monitoring homework and offering guidance, but not the answers when asked for help. Open communication between parents and teachers should include a breakdown on how the kids are handling their homework load (Ratnesar 4). According to Cooper, the “nation’s best-known researcher on homework” (Strauss A04) the actual role parents should play in the doing of a child’s homework should be minimal (“Homework Research and Policy” 4).
“The number-one reason students gave for not doing their homework was that they didn’t have enough time.” (Kralovec and Buell 56) An undue amount of stress can be experienced by students that try to balance homework, extracurricular activities, and family life (Kralovec and Buell 1). Kids seemingly have little time to enjoy leisure activities or family relationships. U.S. students come home with more homework than their predecessors ever did according to researchers at the University of Michigan:
“6-to9 year-olds in 1981 spent 44 minutes a week on homework; in 1997 they did more than two hours’ worth. The amount of time that 9-to11- year-olds devoted to homework each week increased from 2 hours and 49 minutes to more than 3 ½ hours. (Ratnesar 1)
Second-grader Julian Forester and his mother have had plenty of evenings where the homework caused nothing but frustration. Julian and his mom Anne would sit down at 5:30 to work on two pages of homework and it would end up taking 2 hours to complete the assignments, “even though the district’s guidelines say Julian shouldn’t have more than 10 minutes of homework a night” (Nyhan News A1).
Molly Benedict, a sixth-grader at Presidio Middle School in San Francisco begins her homework as soon as she gets home from school. Molly relies on her mom for feedback. Libby, Molly’s mom, makes suggestions and corrections on one of Molly’s homework assignments. Molly then tackles her next homework assignment that has more than a hundred math problems on it. After that assignment is another one and then another one. When all of Molly’s homework is done she barely has enough time for piano lessons or dinner, much less family or leisure time before bed (Ratnesar 1).
The strain of too much homework not only causes stress for students, but for parents as well. “Parents see their kids struggling with far heavier workloads than they ever carried. And parents have less time to help” (Nyhan News A1). “The growth in dual-income families means less energy and shorter fuses for assisting the kids” (Ratnesar 2). Economist Barry Bluestone reports “that in the last two decades the average two-earner couple has taken on an additional four months of full-time work outside the home” (Kralovec and Buell 6). Many American parents do not have the extra time or the knowledge that it takes to give children the help they need in regards to homework. Demands made by corporations on full-time employees have increased over the last 40 years. Many companies require longer hours and with American employees being in fear of losing their jobs or not climbing the corporate ladder, they abide by the demands placed on them. It has become increasingly obvious that the poor do not have the same educational opportunities as their counterparts. “Test scores are tied directly to the wealth of a community: the more money, the higher the test scores” (Kralovec and Buell 65). The relationship between class and academic achievement is important “because homework affects people of different classes differently, and therefore the practice of homework appears to further disadvantage the already disadvantaged” (Kralovec and Buell 77). Parents try to make more money to improve their child’s education but it ends up just being a trade off because now the parent lacks the energy and time that the child may need in regards to monitoring homework.
At the same token, parents could benefit from a new and more fine tuned perspective, due to the fact that “American students on the whole still work less, play more and perform worse than many of their counterparts around the world” (Ratnesar 4).
AFT member Carol Huntsinger, a professor of psychology and education at the College of Lake County in Illinois, has followed groups of Chinese- American and white students, starting in 1993 when they were about 5 ½ years old and continuing through third and forth grade in her latest analysis. (Both groups consisted of similar two-parent, middle-class families.) Rather than focusing on traditional school-assigned homework, her longitudinal study looked at the formal and informal work that parents give their own kids. On a variety of academic measures, assessed three times over the course of six years, the Chinese-American students impressively outperformed their white counterparts in math. And, in a result that surprised Huntsinger, the Asian students even did better in English and vocabulary by third grade after lagging behind earlier (not surprising, because Chinese is the main language spoken in many of their homes). Huntsinger is quick to add that the Chinese-American students showed no signs of undue stress and were no less creative than their non- Asian peers, two common stereotypes often directed at hardworking Asian students. Even among teachers, she says, she finds a mistaken belief that Asian parents are taskmasters who are too hard on their kids. “I think we need to understand what they’re doing rather than immediately labeling it as pushing their child too much,” Hunsinger argues (American Federation of Teachers).
Another issue regarding homework that American parents should care about is the uneven and poorly conceived way in which homework is planned and assigned. "What defines the homework problem in the U.S. today is variation," Cooper says (Ratnesar 4-5). Too much homework or lack of instruction from the teacher or parent can lead to a child in tears, a headache for Mom or Dad, or just an overall negative experience for all involved. Kate Astrove, who is in second grade, “sometimes came home with math problems so vexing that Christina Astrove (her mother) wondered whether algebra was required to solve them” (Ratnesar 2). Mrs. Astrove and her daughter spent hours on some of the problems, finally giving up because the problems were too difficult to solve. Mrs. Astrove stated that she would end up having to leave them for her husband to do when he got home from work. According to the Astrove family the issue of homework made their entire time in the evenings together negative and painful (Ratnesar 1-2). Experiences like these kill the intrinsic motivation for learning. Clearly quantity of homework is not the only important issue with homework. Quality of homework is just as important.
In a study of students, Professor of language and literacy education at Penn State Pat Hinchey stated, “It’s time to stop dismissing students’ criticisms as irrelevant excuses for laziness, to ask ourselves if we (teachers) deserve their criticism, and to start thinking critically about exactly what we assign, under what conditions, and why” (Kralovec and Buell 58) “I would suspect most of the homework decisions that are being made on a daily basis by teachers, principals and school boards are a matter of judgment and not a matter of research,” said Nathalie Gehrke, a professor of teaching and curriculum at the University of Washington’s College of Education (Nyhan News A1). It seems that little attention is paid to the topic of homework during a teacher’s education. It also appears that they receive little training in how to come up with meaningful assignments, how much to give, and how to involve the parents in the the students’ homework (“Homework Research and Policy” 1).
Today, schools of education provide varying levels of training in the art of designing homework assignments that are more than busywork, usually imbedded in courses about curriculum. Many, however, offer none, and teachers say they wish the schools had (Strauss A04).
“One isn’t born knowing how to make sensible lesson plans and homework assignments,” said Karen Zabrowski, a seventh-grade reading teacher at Chippewa Falls Middle School in Wisconsin (Strauss A04)
Too much homework, too difficult homework, and too little guidelines and communication between school and home has kids and parents stressed out and torn over homework. Parents want to be involved, but how involved should they be? Should they help or should they back off but then possibly risk having a frustrated, sleep-deprived child? Should parents stop complaining about the amount of homework and be thankful that kids are being challenged toward higher academic achievement? Homework battles in some school districts have lead to formal guidelines regarding the amount of homework kids at each grade level should be taking home (Ratnesar 2).
