About our Cause
So when students get home from school, what is the first thing they do? As most of you probably said, homework is in their daily routine. However, if they were to not do their homework, no matter what excuse they might come up with, even most legitimate ones, you’d still be viewed the same. An irresponsible, incompetent, slacker. Because common belief is: “Well if you don’t do your homework, it shows just that.”
If you don't believe me, all you need to do is read what Flip wrote on http://stophomework.com/ interview-with-kerry- dickinson-a-california-parent- who-successfully-changed- homework-policy-in-her- district/1322 She said "Raised 6 kids. Teachers get too settled in behind their desk. Same assignments year after year. For Example. My 5th grader had a 10th grade SAT score. The School board was going to hold him back because he had an F for homework grades. They passed him to 6th. The 6th grade told him if he would do his homework they would pass him to 7th midterm. The child did not. By 7th&8th grade we had monthly teacher(s) meeting with 7 teachers, me and the boy. No one could understand why he had passing Test Scores but F in Homework. This kid loved to read, but not what they assigned him. Why should kids read only the material the teachers like to read? They placed him in Remedial classes (special education for slow learners) He hated school. I eventually had him home schooled where he dropped out in the 10th grade. "
As you can see this belief is firmly ingrained in our local communities and society as a whole. Some of you may be wondering why does everyone believe in assigning homework if we say it's so bad. Well let’s just take a second and back up. Why is homework assigned to begin with?
Homework has held its spot in educational philosophy due to the common belief that it promotes responsibility and a better student. However, responsibility is often confused with obedience, as students are being forced to do homework. So far studies and surveys have only ever proven that homework for children in elementary school does more good than bad, in middle school anything over an hour becomes counter-productive, and in high school anything past two hours doesn't hold any benefit to the student. While what they did find is that to much homework increases stress, let’s grades slip more easily, and steers the students’ interests away from the subject in question. In fact, kids who do 60 to 90 minutes of homework in middle school and over two hours in high school actually do worse than average on standardized tests. So why do people still insist on implementing it? The answer is that there are 5 common beliefs that everyone still believes in.
Most teachers provide homework because they believe that it can raise grades, promote responsibility and improve time management, also they believe that practice is necessary to reinforce the teacher’s lesson from the day. Then there is the 2002 Federal "No Child Left Behind,", which pushed States and then schools to higher standards and increased performance on standardized tests, leading to an increase of academic pressures on teachers, schools, and students. If teachers don't do it, they lose their job. Teachers are also pressured by the school to assign homework because the schools earn bonus money based on how good their students' test scores are. And of course if everyone believes in these myths, then of course they'd push homework. Not only are these beliefs preposterous, they also lead to a destruction of the student's afternoons and healthy habits.
Belief #1: The role of the school is to extend learning beyond the classroom. This is ridiculous, school keeps us for about 8 hours of our day and then sends us home with another hour. Or Five. But this frightening ratio gets worse still! They keep us for 5 days of our week and assign homework for the other two. How is that a weekend? And then they expect us to come back all happy and ready for the next week! I mean, who invented this logic. Worse still they keep us for 248 days of our year, not including breaks, and then still send us summer work over our long awaited summer vacation.
Belief #2: Intellectual activity is more valuable than non intellectual activity. This is true, but too much of it can lead to a shut down in your brain, making any further homework unhelpful. So while intellectual activity is important and will help you become smarter and more helpful, non-intellectual activity was, until recent times, considered important to develop a well rounded, fit, healthy child. So far this is the main supporter of homework, but it isn’t good enough reason to waste our student's time. If you don’t think student's across the world have something better to do than the same math equation fifty different ways, think again.
Belief #3: Homework teaches responsibility. As I said earlier, responsibility is often confused with obedience, responsibility is being given a completed review sheet, you must be responsible and study or you’re putting yourself in danger of failing. Or if you're unsure about how to do a certain math equation, asking your teacher for a few practice problems and coming in the next day to make sure you did them right. Obedience is being given given a 50 question review packet and being told it will be taken as a grade the following day.
Belief #4: Lots of homework is a sign of a rigorous curriculum. MANY believe that when teachers don’t assign homework they are giving their students a break,or they’ll ask, “Is (blank) taking it easy on you before you start finals?” It has come to be considered laziness or kindness when the teacher doesn’t assign homework.”If the mind is a muscle to be trained (as was believed in the 19th century), then more work must equal more learning. If some homework is good for children, then more homework must be even better. If 10 math problems for homework are good, then 40 problems must be better.” After all, you get more practice in. This one guiding principle has led us from our parents’ five minutes of homework after school, to two hours of busy work, with required steps and other things for all the questions. But again, I guess practice makes perfect.
Belief #5: Good teachers give homework; good students do their homework. This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, a good teacher wants his or her students to enjoy learning and make them want to learn more. Now I can almost guarantee you that almost every student in the world will agree that homework is not fun and prohibits them from doing what normal children would do. Now tell me, does making students do things the hate make them want to learn about that topic? This alone creates almost a partial paradox. The teachers wish us to “have a good evening!” knowing they just sent us home with 30 minutes of work, and that's just the one teacher! Separate, the amount of homework doesn’t seem bad. Heck, I mean what's another 20 minutes out of your feeble amount of time you actually get to spend at home? But then you add in the other five twenty minute assignments and you're getting to 2-3 hours worth of homework. And therein lies the problem.
Now some of you may be going "Well I did homework when I was in school, it wasn't that much." and "Oh, it wasn't that bad." Well, a recent study shown on "The Race to Nowhere" shows the amount of homework assigned to kids from 6 to 9 almost tripled between 1981 and 1997. This amount continues to increase leading to the average assigned homework for a week increasing from about 44 minutes a week to more than 2 hours a week in the space of just 16 years! Then homework for kids aged 9 to 11 increased from about 2 hours and 50 minutes to more than 3 and a-half hours per week. Just think, these are third and fourth graders sitting still writing math problems for 3 HOURS!
These beliefs can equate to a situation where homework is viewed as essential and the brief holidays where students do not receive homework, at least in personal experience, are considered wasted by teachers and school staff alike . When we don’t have homework, it’s almost thought that we aren’t working to be smarter to those people. I will never forget what Mrs. Causey, our very own counselor said to me, “I wouldn’t want to work for a school where the students didn’t work hard and do their homework to achieve academic success.” These very words told me exactly how ingrained these common beliefs are in our society and our school system. They all believe that homework is essential, and this is exactly what needs to change because this hurts not only the students but their parents as well.
Homework squeezes family life. All parents have educational agendas for their children. They want to pass on their cultural heritage, religious beliefs, and important life skills. They want to teach their children how to be good citizens and how to share in the responsibilities of running a home. More homework makes parents put their own agendas on hold even as they often struggle to help their children cope with homework assignments. Additionally, families need time to constitute themselves as families. According to a 1998 survey by Public Agenda, nearly 50 percent of parents reported having a serious argument with their children over homework, and 34 percent reported homework as a source of stress and struggle. Parents often have conflicting feelings about homework, viewing it as a way for their children to succeed but also as imposing serious limits on family time.
On top of all that, most every student has some extracurricular activity, which they need time to practice, train, and work at. If you work every student at this schedule, they won’t be able to keep it up. They won't have any life skills or hobbies for them to use or enjoy. Part of growing up is learning your interests and what you're good at. How can you do that while stuck doing homework? There is no time for play, family activities, or learning what you're good at. It all becomes centered around school. This is not something that should happen.
This may also come as a surprise to some of you, but homework also affects our teacher's lives. As said on OPB by Aaron Johnson at Beaverton’s Westview High “I hate to talk about the grading workload, but grading this class’s unit test – just this one class – took me three, almost four hours. So, that’s a lot of time outside of class,” Johnson said.
“Grading is this never-ending stress,” according to Angela Nurre, a health and English teacher at David Douglas High. As we’ve reported previously, classes there have often ballooned by ten or more students this year. And when you add more students to a classroom, teachers have a bigger grading load. Some of the teachers are even saying "I’m not even looking at it to grade it, to see if the answers are correct – it’s like, did they get it done? They got it done, I’m giving them points.” In fact, Clackamas High School principal Matt Utterback and the teachers at Clackamas High are approaching homework differently. They’re not grading it.
In which case, why assign it? If you assign students homework to do during THEIR afternoon and then don't even look over it to see if they did it right, is that not their afternoon they spent working on it wasted? The whole reason homework is supposed to be assigned is to reinforce and to clarify the day's teaching, so if you don't look at it and tell the students what their mistakes were, what is the point of doing it? If there is no point in assigning it then why assign it in the first place. If the teacher's hate it, the students hate it, the families hate it, and it doesn't do any good, then why assign it?
My mother is a pediatric doctor and runs her own local practice. As a doctor, she has had a first hand viewing of how detrimental homework is to not only the student's lives, but the family's as well.
In fact, a recent study shows the number of 7 to 17 year olds who visited the doctor for depression more than doubled from 1995 to 2002, when 3.22 million children were treated. This was during the same years that homework levels were increased. In fact, one in three American children suffers from depression and over 25% of adolescents have felt sad or depressed every day for 2 or more weeks at least once during a year's time. By age 15, however, girls are twice as likely as boys to have experienced a major depressive episode.which is up from the 1980's before they started increasing homework.
Another nationwide survey of youth in grades 9-12 in public and private schools in the United States found that 15% of students reported seriously considering suicide, 11% reported creating a plan, and 7% reporting trying to take their own life in the 12 months preceding the survey. This just goes to show how much homework drags on our nation. An article on suicide by EMPS states "Suicide rates, for 15-24-year-olds, have more than doubled since the 1950’s, and remained largely stable at these higher levels between the late 1970’s and the mid-1990’s." Now suicide is the third leading cause of death for 15-24 year. In fact in the United States, a young person commits suicide every two hours.
Homework has changed the student's, the teacher's, and the families of America's lives for the worse and prohibits and hinders the ingenuity and passion of our generation. With the time we could be using to play or read, we instead spend inside working the same math problems and equations over and over. If you want us to practice our skills, to reinforce the valuable skills we learn in the classroom, let us live our life. Let us live and call upon those skills when we need them in real life, where the work we do actually has a point. Let our passion to learn new things be found by ourselves. You cannot teach passion, so give us the chance to find our own. Homework cannot reinforce what the teachers teach, teach responsibility, make you time manage, or make you “smarter.” Only living and personal experience can truly do that, and we cannot experience anything while stuck inside, doing the same thing over and over again.
If Isaac Newton had had homework, he’d have never seen the apple fall. If Galileo had had homework, he'd have never seen the stars. If Aristotle had had homework, he'd have never started to question life, science, or math. Maybe the reason our parents went to the moon, invented the microwave, the satellite, the fridge, the A/C, the radio, the TV, recorded video, the polio vaccine, and the millions of other major steps for mankind that have forever changed our life is not because they're smarter, but because the students had the time and opportunity to find their own interests and passions. Just think of what the 1.8 BILLION kids in school could find and discover if they had but the time to do it.
Sign my petition at https://www.change.org/p/help-us-to-change-homework-policy petition to join me in getting rid of this unnecessary parasite on the minds and hearts of our nation's children so that they can learn these traits on their own! If a student wishes to have homework, then they should be able to ask and receive it. Or if the teacher wants to hand out a review for a test, which would be nice, then they should not make it required. That would be responsibility. If the student is responsible, they would do it. If not, their grade on their test will show that. What should not happen, is the teacher assigning it without the student wanting it. Or for that matter, actually NEEDING IT. Help me create this change!
After signing this petition spread the word. Demand change. Tell your teachers and your parents. Approach the PTA and talk to them about this. Talk about this at your next school board's meeting. Together we can take down homework and change it for good. We must make homework nonmandatory, or at least setup limits. Do not let homework continue to hinder our nation's ingenuity, stop it before it stops us.ps us.