Sign this petition if you think homework is pointless in improving students' educations?

Question

Not only having barely any benifit to their education but making them sacrifice so many other important and healthy activites, making them hate school and learning in general and causing far more stress than is healthy

please also include your ideas and input on this matter and tell me what kinds of things you've had to sacrifice for homework if you want!

Answer 1

rotflmao!!!

Answer 2

I've been a student for 16 years now (still am one) and although I always hated homework more than anything I've come to realize its the only real way I learned anything. You can sit in class and listen to someone lecture all day and walk out with nothing more than a headache but its when you get home and do the work yourself that you really teach yourself something and understand what you are supposed to be learning. It sucks but it doesn't last forever. If you want a better chance at a successful life, suck it up and do your homework. Really its not that hard compared the the real world. And if you give it a little effort, listen to most of what your teachers trying to say, you'll come out of your school year with less of a headache and a better grade. My point is, homeworks not pointless.

And the only thing I sacrificed because of homework (and sometimes didn't and had to feel the consequences) was alcohol and partying with my friends. Homework isn't intended to steal the 24 hours in your day. You can get your homework done and still have a life on the weekends, if you choose to do so.

I understand your pain though, its not intended to be fun.

Answer 3

You're right, for students of above-average intelligence (like you) homework is an abyssmal waste of time. It can be frustrating and patronizing doing the same @#$%& over and over again. My teachers in school hated me because I never did my homework but I tested well.

I had one teacher convinced that somehow I was cheating so she had me take a test right by her desk. Not only did I finish before everyone else in the class but I aced it like all of the other tests that term.

The problem in modern education is keeping at the pace of the slowest student(s). The smartest and most creative students get discouraged being forced into mediocrity.

Having graduated high-school a long time ago and been in the workforce for as long as I have, I can say without hesitation that most of the @#$%& spoon fed to me was totally useless! I have never been asked to diagram a sentence, write an essay about the cultural differences between the English and French during the industrial revolution, or study about what life must have been like during the Spanish Inquisition -it sucked!

Now in my life I have all the things that I was told I'd never have because I was such a slacker. Grades don't mean @#$%& in the end, what matters most is what kind of person you are deep down -sorry for the cliche.

Albert Einstein was a terrible student and as he said: "Imagination is more powerful than knowledge."

Answer 4

Homework is supposed to make what you learned in class stay in your head. It doesn't have to be a daily thing, however. Perhaps the teachers could have you write one essay per week regarding the work you learned during that time period.

I had homework and still had time for friends, family, extracurricular activities, movies, bowling, and later a part-time job. You can do it if it is important enough to you.

Answer 5

So, will you also include the opinions of people who disagree with you? Or are you just looking to affirm your opinions?

Homework reinforces what you learn in school. It helps the teacher see what s/he needs to emphasize and where you need help. It shows him/her that you've mastered the work. It helps you understand what you were taught. It shows you what the real world is like, when you will have to dig up information and prove that you understand things. It teaches you discipline, too, and how to break a project up into smaller parts, and how to meet deadlines, all skills that you're going to need later.

Sorry to disappoint you.

Answer 6

homework is very helpful.. if you dont do anything outside of class than you wont understand it.. sure theres better things i would like to do but at the end of the day if i didnt do homework i wouldnt be the successful student that i am. just suck it up and do it it will only help you out in the end :)

Answer 7

Homework prevents you from posting bulletins like this :)

Answer 8

http://www.slate.com/id/2149593/

Forget HomeworkIt's a waste of time for elementary-school students.
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Thursday, Sept. 14, 2006, at 7:47 AM ET

The Case Against Homework by Sara Bennett and Nancy KalishOver the last decade, Japanese schools have been scrapping homework while American elementary schools have been assigning more of it. What gives—aren't they supposed to be the model achievers while we're the slackers? No doubt our eagerness to shed the slacker mantle has helped feed the American homework maw. But it may be the Japanese, once again, who know what they're doing.

Such is my conclusion after reading three new books on the subject: The Case Against Homework by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish; The Homework Myth by Alfie Kohn; and the third edition of The Battle Over Homework by Duke psychology professor Harris Cooper. If you already despise homework, Bennett and Kalish provide advice on how to plead with teachers and schools for mercy. If you're agnostic, as I was, Kohn is the meatier read. Kohn is the author of several rebellious books about education, and he exposes the lack of evidence for many of the standard arguments in favor of homework: that it boosts achievement, that it inculcates good study habits, that it teaches kids to take the initiative, that it's better than video games or whatever else kids do in their free time.

Cooper is one of Kohn's main foils and a leading scholar on the subject, so I picked up his book expecting to find a convincing counterargument defending homework. I didn't. Cooper's research shows that, much of the time, take-home assignments in elementary school are an act of faith. No one really knows whether all those math sheets and spelling drills add up to anything. If there's little or no evidence that younger students benefit from homework, why assign it at all? Or, to adopt Kohn's less extreme position in The Homework Myth, why make homework the rule rather than the rare and thought-through exception?

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In The Battle Over Homework, Cooper has crunched the numbers on dozens of studies of homework for students of all ages. Looking across all the studies is supposed to offer a fairly accurate picture even though the science behind some of them is sketchy. For elementary-school students, Cooper found that "the average correlation between time spent on homework and achievement … hovered around zero." In Kohn's book, he highlights a 1998 study that Cooper and his colleagues did with second- through 12th-graders. For younger students, the amount of homework completed had no effect on test scores and bore a negative relationship to grades. (The results weren't quite so grim for older students. Their grades rose in relation to the amount of homework they completed, though their test scores did not.) Kohn looks at these findings and concludes that most homework is at best a waste of time and at worst a source of tedious vexation.

Cooper, despite his findings, continues to back the "10-minute rule"—10 minutes of homework in kindergarten and first grade, with 10 more minutes for each additional grade level. For support, he zeroes in on six studies conducted between 1987 and 2003. These included third- through fifth-graders, and they compared kids who did homework with kids who didn't. (In a rare moment of good science in this field, the kids were assigned randomly to one group or the other in four of the studies.) The homework kids performed better, but only on a "unit test"—a test of the material they'd been sent home to study. Which means that Cooper's best evidence doesn't refute one of Kohn's central claims—that the measurable benefits of homework diminish the longer students are tracked for. Take a snapshot of a math quiz on fractions after kids drill fractions at night and homework looks good. Take a longer view and the shine comes off.

Cooper's support for the 10-minute rule actually makes him a voice of homework moderation in light of evil-homework tales of kindergartners slogging through 130-word lists. But as Kohn writes, "We sometimes forget that not everything that's destructive when done to excess is innocuous when done in moderation." In response, homework advocates emphasize the inviting notion that homework in elementary school fosters good study habits. "Before you can build a house, you need to build the scaffolding," Cooper says. Giving young kids briefer take-home assignments "is like learning to add single-digit numbers before you can add double digits."

This claim seems to make intuitive sense to a lot of people, but there is no research to either support or debunk it—the association between early homework and study habits simply hasn't been studied. And to me, it makes no sense at all. Time management and a general notion of discipline are not refined and specific and cumulative skills like playing tennis or baseball. So, why should we think that practicing homework in first grade will make you better at doing it in middle school? Doesn't the opposite seem equally plausible: that it's counterproductive to ask children to sit down and work at night before they're developmentally ready because you'll just make them tired and cross? "Most twelve-year-olds are better [at time management] than most seven-year-olds regardless of how much homework they've been assigned," Kohn writes. "It's both naive and unhelpful to expect younger children to defer gratification or know how to engage in long-term planning."

The Homework Myth by Alfie KohnNor does most homework teach kids to take the initiative and make learning their own. Instead, it's about following directions. In The Homework Myth, Kohn muses that the real purpose may be to foster uncritical obedience so that when kids grow up they'll accept the long hours Americans are expected to work. I'm not sure I'm ready to join that conspiracy theory, but I do resent the lemminglike nature of homework and its incursion on my kid's time. Eli is at school for 6.5 hours a day already—that seems like plenty of opportunity to get across what they want to teach him.

Kohn makes one major exception to his skepticism about homework—the encouragement of reading for pleasure. But he counsels that schools should take care lest their prodding turn books from a joy into a chore. Eli and his classmates are supposed to write down the books that they've read or had read to them. I'm willing to try this, but wary. It's only the first month of school, and a friend's daughter has already pretended to have read books that clearly haven't left her shelf. Homework as temptation to fib: not the lesson that schools intend to teach, but probably one that a lot of students learn.

When I shopped around the arguments against homework, I discovered that how you feel about it depends a lot on what you think kids will do if they don't have any. Eli's homework seems like an imposition when I measure it against running around the playground or playing card games or building with blocks or talking to his little brother.

In response to this, Cooper delicately suggested that my idea of a childhood afternoon well-spent is idealized and elitist. Maybe so. But the argument that homework is a net benefit for most kids has a big weakness. When homework boosts achievement, it mostly boosts the achievement of affluent students. They're the ones whose parents are most likely to make them do the assignments, and who have the education to explain and help. "If we sat around and deliberately tried to come up with a way to further enlarge the achievement gap, we might just invent homework," New York educator Deborah Meier told Kohn.

I e-mailed the principal of Eli's public elementary school, Scott Cartland, to ask about homework, and he emphasized the value of encouraging reading and making room for long-term projects. But he also fell back on logic that he admits is not, well, logical. "It has been drilled into our collective psyche that rigorous schools assign rigorous homework," Cartland wrote. "I recognize that this is a ridiculous thought process, particularly since your research suggests otherwise, but it's hard to break the thinking on this one. How could we be a high-achieving school and not assign homework?" How indeed. I hope the education establishment begins to wrestle with this question. If not, maybe it's time to move to Japan.