by David Thompson

Created on: April 22, 2010

Do children receive too much homework?  As a parent and a sixth grade math teacher, I can say:  ABSOLUTELY!  Homework is designed for a specific purpose.  That purpose is to reinforce skills that were learned in the classroom.   The key word is reinforce, not teach.

A teacher’s job is to teach, not to assign materials for a home study course.  I can’t judge a student’s understanding of a new concept when he’s at home at night.  That must be done in class before homework is assigned.  Unfortunately some teachers feel obligated to assign all of the problems given in each section of the textbook.  If a student understands the concept after completing ten to fifteen problems there is no need to for her to complete thirty.  Not only is this incredibly frustrating and boring for students, it actually can be detrimental to learning.  If a student is performing an operation incorrectly, repeating this over and over again only serves to make this error permanent.  Practice does not make perfect.  Practice makes permanent.  If the students do not understand the concept before leaving the class, they should not be assigned homework on it.

Fortunately many teachers learn with experience that they are the final authority on the amount of homework assigned, not the textbook.  A strong teacher will make a decision at the end, not the beginning of class, regarding whether homework will be assigned and how much.  It’s amazing how many of my students will ask me at the beginning of class, “Do we have homework tonight?”  My answer always is, “I don’t know.”  Before I can answer that I have to know how much we will cover that day, and how well my students have understood it.  Only then do I decide.

Teachers today, especially newer teachers, feel pressured to maintain a schedule as set forth by a textbook manufacturer who has no idea of the students’ capabilities.  Consequently, if the lesson takes longer than planned, there is always pressure to assign homework whether or not the students are ready for it in order to “keep up.”  High stakes standardized testing only increases the pressure to cover as much material as possible before the test.  This is simply absurd.  I have had to give my students state mandated tests in April that cover the entire school year.  That means the test covered concepts that had not even been taught yet.  It takes a veteran teacher to be able to resist these pressures and teach the material in sufficient depth before moving on to a new topic.

Experienced teachers can fall into the habit of assigning too much homework as well.  Many of us have had teachers who subscribed to the “drill and kill” method of assigning homework.  This method can be effective for skills that need to be committed to memory such as multiplication facts.  However, for many topics there is simply no need for extensive homework assignments.  How many times do you have to find the area of a triangle before you understand how to do it?  Especially when you will be given the formula A=bxh/2 on the test?  Extensive homework assignments can easily become a teaching habit that is very hard to break.  Furthermore, reviewing extensive homework assignments the next day take away yet more time for teaching new concepts.

Homework is meant to be for reinforcement of what was learned in class and as a quick assessment of the students’ understanding of the topic.  If homework is assigned for any other purpose, it is misused.

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