Do our kids have too much homework?

 

Have you helplessly watched your kid do long hour homework before? Were you pissed that they had to sacrifice their sleep to complete their work? As a student, what sacrifices have you made to get your homework done? Does it include forfeiting your sports or hobby or a whole weekend?

Well, our kids go through these troubles and more to do the piles of homework from school. Students are mostly overwhelmed by the long hours of homework they have to do almost every day. Nonetheless, some researchers claim that students have the right volume of home tasks. Schools and educators have also taken advantage of this to stress out students. 

Some worried parents have openly expressed their frustration towards the number of assignments given to students. 

In an email, to GreatSchools.org a concerned parent expressing her anger said, in one assignment, her first-grade son was to research a prominent historical figure and write a two page paper about the person, with a bibliography. “How do you expect him to do that by himself, she quizzed?” “The boy just started learning how to read and write a few months ago. Schools are being forceful and expecting too much from kids,” she noted.

A fifth-grade teacher in San Francisco, Diane Garfield, empathized with the mother saying, “I agree that we’re stressing children out.”

Another parent expressed her disbelief in the type of assignments kids are given. Revealing how parents also suffer, she said, “Currently, teachers assign almost college-level assignments with requirements that shocks me to the bone.” 

Many other parents have such concerns and seem helpless about the situation. A New York attorney and a former high school English teacher, Tonya Noonan Herring, believe the amount of homework given to students is counterproductive and mostly not necessary.

This proves that parents even believe their kids are unnecessarily overburdened with home tasks.

The homework debate 

Researchers are divided on the benefits of homework. While some believe it is essential, others think it should be scrap.

On whether children are overloaded with homework, a senior social scientist at the Rand Corporation, Brian Gill, believes not. He said nothing shows that children are given more homework than before. 

He said, “looking at high school students in ’90s; they’re not doing more homework than students in the ’80s, ’70s, ’60s or the ’40s,” did. He continued, “The developments through most of this time are flat; hence most students in the country don’t have much homework. On average, they do about four hours of homework a week.”

However, author Etta Kralovec believes otherwise. According to him, the date by NAEP is not reliable information. The author of The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning indicated, “One of the questions students are asked during NAEP test is, ‘How much homework did you do last night?’ People cognisant with school know that teachers do not give homework the night before a national assessment. They instead tell kids to have a good night’s sleep and eat well to prepare for a test.” 

“Therefore asking students how much home tasks they did the night before the test and claiming that the answers given are the real situation on the ground is dishonesty.”

This tells us that even experts are divided over the issue of do our kids have too much homework.