madeofpatterns:

gingerautie:

ninjapenguin713:

ryttu3k:

darkwizardjamesmason:

dienaziscum:

fishcustardandclintbarton:

huffingtonpost:

Mom declares her daughter is done with homework in viral email.

Blogger Bunmi Laditan sent her 10-year-old’s school a clear message.

“Hello Maya’s teachers,

Maya will be drastically reducing the amount of homework she does this year. She’s been very stressed and is starting to have physical symptoms such as chest pain and waking up at 4 a.m. worrying about her school workload.

She’s not behind academically and very much enjoys school. We consulted with a tutor and a therapist suggested we lighten her workload. Doing 2-3 hours of homework after getting home at 4:30 is leaving little time for her to just be a child and enjoy family time and we’d like to avoid her sinking into a depression over this.”

A++++ parenting 💜

I’ve talked with a whole cadre of child therapists and psychiatrists about this very issue. There is little conclusive evidence that homework significantly improves elementary school children’s grades, understanding of subjects, or facility with various operations, processes, etc. However, plenty of evidence suggests that ever-increasing amounts of homework for young children lead to stress, anxiety, emotional fatigue, resistance toward academics in general, lack of leisure time to build social/interpersonal skills, and poorer family relations.  (My kids were doing about 3 hours a week IN KINDERGARTEN, at age 5 – so that’s ½ hour every night, after a 6.5 hour school day, or else saving it up for long slogs over the weekend, even more disruptive. And that wasn’t including reading practice!)

We have stopped doing homework altogether with my 7 year old as a result of severe anxiety/depression and a learning disability. She had gotten to a place where she had so little self confidence and truly believed that she was stupid and worthless, not just because of homework of course – but every time we tried to sit down to do homework with her, it’d end in tears with her really vehemently berating herself, and no amount of encouragement could ameliorate the damage done. Now, granted, she’s got other things going on besides just an overload of school work. But in NO WAY did the homework help her, either academically or emotionally. 

No little kid should have to spend an hour or more each night getting through homework. Now, my deal with Siena is that if she wants to give her homework a shot, I will absolutely help her if she wishes for help, but I no longer force her to complete all of it or to work on it for some set length of time before finally throwing in the towel. 

Guess what? With the pressure taken off, she’s actually doing MORE independent work now, purely out of the desire to learn and practice, than she ever was before we’d decided with her therapy team and school that homework was just not a thing this kid could handle.

Luckily for my older daughter my school’s 3rd-grade team decided to hand out homework only 3x/week, and the sheets take no more than 15-20 minutes to complete. That is totally reasonable for 8-9 year olds! 

Anyway tl;dr just because the school system may require it sure as shit doesn’t mean parents can’t, or shouldn’t, fight it. Do what’s right for your kid, and above all, let them be kids. 

I eventually stopped doing homework because I was overwhelmed by it.

There was an article just the other day in the local paper about a primary school that’s abolishing homework! You can read it here (autoplay video, gives you a few seconds to stop it).

As a teacher the only “homework” my students get is the work they don’t finish in class. Assigning homework for work’s sake is the dumbest thing a teacher can do

I think part of the issue is not considering homework time as work. Like, 10 year olds shouldn’t be doing 10 hour days, and that’s pretty well recognised. But 7 hours in school, plus 3 hours at home? that’s fine/sarcasm

Obviously with older students they need to be writing essays on their own at home and so on, but making 7 year olds do maths practice at home isn’t going to help anything. If they didn’t grasp in it lessons, then they’re not likely to figure it out on their own at home.

I was really lucky. My primary school only assigned homework in year 6 (10-11 years) and it was supposed to be 10 minutes a night max. My secondary school had a 20 mins per subject rule, no more than 4 subjects a night, no homework to be due the next day policy, and least in the first few years (up to 14-15 or so). And no homework over school holidays. Your week off was supposed to be actually off, not doing schoolwork. Kids need breaks.

Another problem with homework is that there’s very little that young children can reliably do independently. Little kids need a lot of scaffolding in order to practice things and develop their skills.

The kinds of repetitive drilling that little kids can do independently aren’t a very good use of anyone’s time. The kind of assignments that *are* a good use of time for young kids require support that most parents don’t know how to give. 

Without appropriate support, kids tend to get frustrated and demoralized. It’s not good for their learning, and it’s not good for their relationships with their parents.