Homework Stinks
I’m an educator, so it’s particularly painful for me to admit this, but when I sit my kids down at the dining room table to do homework, I turn into this monstrous version of myself, barking at my kids to “Just read the word!,” criticizing messy work, and volleying threats about cancelling tablet time or longed-for playdates. I just want them to get it done and they just keep getting up for another glass of water or a different pencil or a bathroom break. A five-minute worksheet becomes a forty-five minute fight.
Nobody leaves the table happy.
Nor does anybody leave the table more intellectually curious, excited about learning, or measurably better at math.
In fact, according to at least one researcher, homework can be counted on to promote stress and negative feelings about school.
Jessica Valenti said it a couple of week ago and it’s worth repeating: homework doesn’t make kids smarter or better students.
But but but, people say. But kids need to do homework. I did homework and look how smart I am! Plus, it teaches them discipline and responsibility.
Does it, though? Or does it teach kids that they have to be yelled at by parents or babysitters to do this thing they don’t want to do before they can go do the things they do like to do, even though that’s basically what they’ve been doing all day at school: sitting still, practicing skills, deferring pleasure until some, much-too-abbreviated future time like “recess” or “after school” to finally let loose.
Or, more likely, kids are learning that although we are busy and often forget about homework until twenty minutes before they are due at school, we all have to pretend that homework is this meaningful activity that we take seriously, even as we scramble to get it done in between bites of oatmeal, if you can get your kids to eat things like that. There’s a lesson there somewhere, although I’m not sure what it is.
John Paul Gatto, skewering the educational system, years ago described homework as “a type of extended schooling” which has “the effect of surveillance” and “travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or mother, by exploration, or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood.”
Gatto’s point is a good one. In fact, what I think homework teaches is that you are never free, that school doesn’t end at dismissal, that your time at home is not your own, at least not until you’ve finished this one last bullshit but somehow necessary thing. Honestly, I mean honestly, if homework is so important, then the school should keep my kids for another hour and have them do it there. Or use the last hour of the day to review. Don’t make us do it at home.
Because we have other things to do! While it’s possible that my kids are overscheduled — that’s another post — the truth is, even if they weren’t doing worthy things like martial arts or piano lessons, they’d still be doing “enrichment”; that is, they’d be visiting their grandparents or playing with friends or maybe, if it wasn’t mandatory, they’d pick up a book to read on their own.
My point is: homework does not enrich our lives. In fact, it gets in the way of enrichment. So even these “projects” that ask us to do family trees or interview folks in our neighborhood: they stink too. Because if children aren’t already talking to their families about traditions and culture and if they aren’t already going to interesting places and learning about community, then giving their parents — yes, their parents — an assignment that demands they do these things is not going to all of a sudden make them parents who are really involved and invested. No, you’re really just giving overworked parents more work to do and more things to feel shitty about.
I love my kids’ teachers and I love my kids’ school. They are actually toning down the homework this year, and I appreciate that. But I hear other parents grumbling and I go online and see commenters writing that they had homework and so our kids should have it too.
And so I submit to you: you want your kid to have homework? Make some up! Buy some Kumon workbooks and have them do that in the evening. But please, please, I’m begging you, leave us out of it.
