How to Make Homework Matter
By: Shawn Laib
Tags: Schools, Learning, Kids, Advice, Education

How to Make Homework Matter

Photo by Jessica Lewis on Unsplash

I got accepted into the gifted program before my sixth grade year of elementary school. As a 12 year old, I was obviously ecstatic! I felt validated for my thorough assignments and mature thinking so far in my schooling career, and could’t wait to be challenged further.

Then the homework happened. The actual curriculum was only one year ahead of the one taught to the typical sixth grader, but the number of assignments compared to previous grades was simply obscene.

I later learned that the workload had nothing to do with the highly capable program I was in, as my brother and other classmates who weren’t in that class setting also were bogged down with the same assignment count.

Busy work and cluttered folders of worksheets sprawled my backpack each night in every subject area. I was deeply overwhelmed and eventually gave up on the homework.

My missing assignment folder was bananas by the end of the year, and there was much scolding by the teachers who instructed the class.

This has always made me think about one of the hot button topics in education for what feels like an eternity: how much homework is necessary for a student to succeed? Does there need to be any homework of any kind? Can all instruction necessary for learning take place in the classroom?

Some numbers

The Atlantic wrote in 2013 that 45 percent of students in grades three through 12 spend more than one hour doing homework every evening. In that same article, a 2003 study by the University of Michigan found that the average amount of homework for ages six through 17 was three hours and 38 minutes per week.

A study by Stanford claims that 56 percent of students consider homework a primary source of stress, and less than one percent of students said that homework is not a stress of any kind.

What does all of this mean though? Students aren’t going to like homework no matter how much of it there is. It’s like an adult not wanting to get up and go to their job every day. Sometimes, it’s an unnecessary requirement to the learning process.

Perhaps this opens up the question of what type of homework is being assigned. Is it interactive and engaging? Does it benefit the student on a deeper level than just asking random memorization questions from the day?

Photo by Simeon Frank on Unsplash

If students feel they are being challenged to think about the world in a way that is meaningful and provoking, it will no longer feel like they are working.

I know that I gave up on my sixth grade homework because it felt like the instructors were trying to meet some sort of quota for each day; this is the definition of busy work.

There was always an assignment in Wordly Wise, an English language arts handbook that focused on grammar, spelling, sentence construction, etc. Content creation was negligible, and creativity was really nowhere to be seen.

By this time in my life, I was ready to start expressing my thoughts through writing, not just learn the semantics of the field. The work was redundant. There are only so many synonyms you can learn and punctuation lessons to be had.

No matter what, there had to be at least two dozen math problems given out each night, even on ideas that were not taught that day. The worksheets regurgitated assignments for the sake of having something to give out to the kids, which makes the stuff meaningless.

Solutions

One of my favorite things about getting into college was that the work given out turns into a “quality over quantity” method. No longer do you have to reach some sort of required number of homework assignments. Larger projects and big-picture work is encouraged. There is a great explanation of what I mean on planbook.com

Development that is unrelated to school work is imperative, and I know that the mountains of assignments that are given out in some cases make it so that a student has nothing in their schedule but going to school and doing their homework.

Free time must be given to explore the world and the life that kids and adolescents deserve. The Stanford study I already mentioned talked about some of the same ill-effects in the quote above.

Busy work takes time away from family, hobbies, sleep, and mental recovery. Kids are human, not robotic. Allow each student to find the ways their lives can connect with the class they are in and you create a healthy relationship between school and home. A partnership which lets domestic interests leak into education.

I would have loved if my sixth grade teachers would have let me create a project centered around NBA basketball, one of my main hobbies in life, instead of just rote language arts papers.

It’s not a teacher’s job to create a unique assignment for each student’s interest, but it is their job to come up with something that is open-ended enough for kids to interject their passions on their own terms.

Musically-inclined students can write a song, or movie fanatics can write their own amateur script.

Let a football fan take the statistics of their favorite player and calculate their scoring average when studying the concept of a mathematical mean.

Whatever you do, the focus should be on the student, not the curriculum. That’s the main takeaway I hope you get from this piece. Kids shouldn’t adapt to the work. It should always be that the assignment brings out the best in them.