“I feel like I’m working towards my death. The constant demands on my time since 5th grade are just going to continue through graduation, into college, and then into my job. It’s like I’m on an endless treadmill with no time for living.”
“How long is your child’s workweek? Thirty hours? Forty? Would it surprise you to learn that some elementary school kids have workweeks comparable to adults’ schedules? For most children, mandatory homework assignments push their workweek far beyond the school day and deep into what any other laborers would consider overtime. Even without sports or music or other school-sponsored extracurriculars, the daily homework slog keeps many students on the clock as long as lawyers, teachers, medical residents, truck drivers and other overworked adults. Is it any wonder that,deprived of the labor protections that we provide adults, our kids are suffering an epidemic of disengagement, anxiety and depression?”
Reblogging because, speaking as an autistic person, most of my meltdowns at school came from homework.
Math homework in particular, which gives me the hypothesis that the time we spend teaching math at levels far above what students are going to need in their daily lives and the amount of homework accompanying such is a part of the problem…
Yeah my time in education taught me that homework is kind of a waste of everyone’s time. It can’t be relied on for assessment/evaluation purposes because there’s no reliable way for a teacher to know the student didn’t copy off of someone else, and it can’t be used for instruction because the student works on it when the teacher isn’t around to give, well, instruction. Like standardized testing, it’s basically a pointless relic of a very outdated model of education that America and other countries still cling to because adapting modern techniques costs more money, time, and effort than they’re willing to give.
Down with homework.
I know we’re talking about the kids here, but speaking as someone who trained to be a teacher but is no longer a teacher for mental health reasons: homework also puts a huge strain on the teachers. That shit needs to be marked. As well as the class work. In the bigger schools a single teacher can have hundreds of students. As a trainee I had roughly 200. And they all produced work that needed marking. You end up using up your non-teaching periods – earmarked for sorting out the next classes, preparing future work etc – and a lot of it ends up getting marked during lunch breaks and/or is taken home.
I remember one of my fellow trainees took two entire boxes of work to mark home with him for the weekend. The weekend!
There are a lot of initiatives being put in place or being tried out for reducing marking time (only do every other book! Only tick or cross! Use prewritten feedback! Use stamps! Etc) and this always struck me as completely fucking pointless. If the student isn’t getting good helpful tailored personal feedback – what the fuck is the point?
The homework eats up both the students non-school time and the teachers. It causes extra stress for both. It causes extra anxiety for both.
It’s fucking ridiculous. So basically what I’m saying is that I agree. Homework should be abolished.
If there are any other teachers out there still hanging on, may I recommend watching a video for homework? You can’t really prove they haven’t done it, and things like Khan Academy are great for students who want to pause and re-wind information and can’t do that during a class. It shouldn’t be anything new, just re-capping what you did in class. And if anyone in senior management calls you on it, you can talk about review of learned content strengthening the neural pathways to the memory making it more accessible in the long run, and shifting information from the short term to long term memory centres of the hypothalamus (senior management at my old school were all humanities teachers, whenever I felt spiteful I would blind them with very earnest science…)
Why I Think All Schools Should Abolish Homework
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