Reply to Atlantic piece: "My Daughter's Homework is Killing Me"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote]Assigning excessive homework is a crutch for poor teachers.[/quote]

I don't know that this is true at all.  I think the problem is the expectations of parents, largely.  I'm young for this forum--in my 20s and I went to high school in the early 2000s.  I had the kind of stressful experience people are describing--played a sport, played an instrument at a high level, and took a lot of honors and AP classes.  For my classes that were honors and AP, what was expected was an average of one hour out of class per class period.  I had 5 academic subjects (science, math, English, foreign language, and social studies), thus an average of five hours of homework.  But this is average--I had a lot of assignments that were long term, like writing a paper--and remember that for those you can work over the weekend.  Some days a class would have more homework, some days less.

Is this healthy?  Well I don't know that it is healthy to subject kids to the kind of stresses that parents subject them to these days, with trying to get into THE BEST COLLEGE OR ELSE.  But I also think that it is nearly impossible to teach a lot of subjects at a high level without investment after the school day is over, and this has nothing to do with poor teaching.  Learning math requires practice.  Teaching a rigorous English class is impossible without assigning reading.  Writing assignments not something that can be done during the class time, and good social studies classes involve research papers.  In the higher levels of foreign language, when you start writing and reading assignments (but you also need to spend time just memorizing vocabulary and grammar for fluency), it is impossible to do that during class time.  Lab write ups?  You barely have time to teach a good lab during the time allotted in a class period, so how are you going to have kids write them up AND do the lab in class?  Especially if you have questions that require them to link up the lab to concepts?

Perhaps homework is a crutch for poor teachers in elementary school, but by middle and high school, you're getting into areas that simply cannot be taught entirely during the class day if you want a rigorous education.  So something has to give--either the depth of the classes (less writing intensive classes, covering less material, less accelerated math sequence, less complex lab write ups, etc.), the intensity of extracurriculars, or sleep.  Or you could not take APs and honors classes.  Choose your poison.[/quote]

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