Spare the child--Opinion

[LADY GRAY]

Spare the child Excessive homework assignments don't deepen or enrich anyone's education Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle Aug. 26, 2008, 10:17PM Comments Recommend Share Print Email Del.icio.us Digg Technorati Yahoo! Buzz According to the Australian newspaper The Age, homework resentment might have reached its peak in 1887, when "a Texas student about to be whipped for refusing to do homework brought out a butcher's knife and stabbed his teacher in the leg." A judge was unsympathetic to the family lawyer, who declared homework eroded personal liberty, already under assault when school itself was made mandatory. But conflict over homework still simmers. As the number of homework hours has vaulted, school districts and families are calling for the topic to be revisited — calmly. This makes sense. Too many schools pile on homework, just to seem rigorous, or force it on children too young to get anything from it but stress. A few schools, such as Grant Elementary in rural Wyoming, want to abolish homework altogether. "We want kids to be kids," Principal Christine Hendricks told the Chronicle. But others are taking the more measured approach of Spring Branch Independent School District: The district has asked a committee to decide if its homework policy is enhancing education — or turning students away from it. The question is a legitimate one: Are students enriched by their homework load, or does it just alienate them and bore them silly? While the Spring Branch committee is still at work on the question, a stack of research now offers guidelines on what not to do. Harris Cooper, considered the country's pre-eminent homework expert and a relative moderate in the homework wars, warns that too much homework at any grade level is clearly counterproductive. Harris is the author of Battle Over Homework: Common Ground for Administrators, Teachers and Parents. Moderate homework, his study of research literature shows, has a positive correlation with academic achievement at the high school level. But after two hours a night, the benefits for most high schoolers start to decline. For middle schoolers, homework correlates only somewhat to academic success. And at the primary school level, Cooper and other experts found, homework has no link to good grades whatsoever. In the American classroom, homework assignments have spiralled up and up in recent years. One research team found that the amount of hours that 6- to 9-year-olds spent on homework had almost tripled from 1981 to 1997. The youngsters were spending an average of two hours and eight minutes per week on their homework. Children from 9-11 years old were doing 3 hours, 41 minutes of homework a week. Assigning lots of homework seems what rigorous schools are supposed to, several teachers and principals admit. But assigning hours and hours of busywork can backfire, depriving a child of the free time he needs to develop. To be useful, homework must build on concepts already taught in the classroom and efficiently show a teacher the child has mastered the material. The teacher also needs to read and grade the homework promptly. Homework that is relentlessly dull, takes the place of classroom instruction or completely devours a child's personal time thwarts mental development rather than enriching it. Pro forma busywork can rob children of the sleep they need, and the essential unstructured time necessary for recreational reading, creativity and building relationship skills. Nevertheless, a moderate amount of meaningful homework, about two hours a night for high schoolers, helps students practice what they've learned in school and prods their intellectual curiosity, say educators, including Mike Feinberg, co-founder of Houston's Knowledge is Power Program charter school. It also might reinforce time management skills. Especially in low-income families with parents at work and few neighborhood resources, attending to homework cuts into the number of hours spent dully staring at television. That's no small educational benefit. Splitting the difference, with what experts calls the 10 minute rule — 10 minutes per grade per year, starting with second grade — is a sane rule-of-thumb. But even that shouldn't be blindly followed without scrutinizing what teachers assign and measuring its success. Our students' minds are too precious to be fed empty calories. "Unless we embrace 'TRUTH' and recognize 'EVIL', we will find NO Resolutions to 'PEACE".......