4-6 hours of homework a night! This has been the norm for many of my client’s kids. Many parents are very concerned when their child is up until midnight doing homework, getting very little exercise, free time sleep for the next day.
Are the schools handing out too much homework? As a processing, attention, behavior learning expert, my response to this sometimes surprises people. Since I see an inverse relationship in achievement levels and amount of homework and a synergistic effect of lots of homework on family discord, and pain, as well as a deadening of kid’s natural curiosity in learning, I am a big believer that overkill has been achieved here.
Since people are probably scratching their heads and disagreeing with me right about now, let me explain…I do not believe more hours of homework creates better students, nor do I believe that more homework makes kids smarter. Harris Cooper, professor of Psychology and Director of the Education Program at Duke University agrees with me. He has found that "for kids in elementary school there was hardly any relationship between how much homework young children did and how well they were doing in school, but in middle school the relationship is positive and increases until the kids were doing between an hour to two hours a night." After that it didn't go up anymore. Kids that reported doing more than two hours of homework a night in middle school weren't doing any better in school than kids who were doing between an hour to two hours." He also claimed that "While it's clear that homework is a critical part of the learning process, Cooper said the analysis also showed that too much homework can be counter-productive for students at all levels. Even for high school students, overloading them with homework is not associated with higher grades," Cooper said.
Homework levels have gone up significantly and achievement levels are down. The Washington Times notes the lackluster performance of America’s schools with an astonishing figure — "75% of High School graduates aren’t prepared for college and will likely need to take at least one remedial class before enrolling in regular college courses." Additionally, The latest annual survey from the non-profit testing organization ACT delivers the sobering numbers: "Only 25 percent cleared all of ACT’s college preparedness benchmarks, while 75 percent likely will spend part of their freshman year brushing up on high-school-level course work. The 2011 class is best prepared for college-level English courses, with 73 percent clearing the bar in that subject. Students are most likely to need remedial classes in science and math" the report says. This at the same time as homework levels are high. How do I know this? I can quote from documented information which I will, but just from talking to the parents and kids I work with for the last 25 years, I can say that those people have definitely experienced a huge increase in the amount of homework they are assigned. At the same time, their excitement for school is waning.
According to William Crain, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at City College of New York and the author of Reclaiming Childhood, "Kids are developing more school-related stomachaches, headaches, sleep problems, and depression than ever before." The average student is glued to his or her desk for almost seven hours a day. Add two to four hours of homework each night, and they are working a 45 to 55 hour week! In addition, a student who receives excessive homework "will miss out on active playtime, essential for learning social skills, proper brain development, and warding off childhood obesity," according to Harris Cooper, Ph.D., a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University.
Also a bad side effect from this, parents and kids end up with a wedge driven between them and constant fighting about getting the work done, harming their relationships, sometimes permanently. After this happens, kids never get to spend any positive time with parents and instead of learning morals and values in their home, learn whatever is being touted in school by kids and curriculum. Many times this doesn’t fit well with what parents would like their kids to be learning. In many cases it can lead to some bad behaviors. Kids feel frustrated with never having any time off to rest their brains and the pursuit of education becomes painful and awful, thus shutting down what might have started as a natural attraction to learning. Diane Garfield, a fifth-grade teacher in San Francisco, concurs. "I believe that we're stressing children out," she says.
If you look at a child who is 4 or 5, they go to school and usually have fun learning. They become hungry to learn. Once they get to 11 or 12, if they are getting bursitis from the mega stack of books in their backpacks and are facing another 4 to 6 hours of work, after coming home from a 6 hour day already, it isn’t a surprise that their original spark for wanting to learn becomes severely muted.
Many people would disagree with me and say that to compete with foreign competitors, kids need to be at the top and work the hardest. Again I disagree. Many of those countries produce drone like people who are meant to be another "brick in the wall" and work for the "greater good" as opposed to creativity and innovation which is the American way. Now I don’t want to paint all with a broad brush because certainly we do not hold the monopoly on creativity, but I feel that being in the salt mines all day can really squelch that creative spark. According to Professors Gerald LeTendre and David Baker of Pennsylvania State University from their 2005 book, National Differences, Global Similarities: World Culture and the Future of Schooling, "American middle-schoolers do more homework than their peers in Japan, Korea or Taiwan, but less than their peers in Singapore and Hong Kong." They found that more homework does not correlate with higher test scores.
Others might tell me that the work world is about working all day and then bringing your work home. I would again disagree. Unless you have your own business like I do, most people leave their work and come home for at least a couple hours of rest and regrouping. When you consider that these kids have to do dinner and get in bed early enough to get there in time the next day, and do it all again, the couple to 4 to 6 hours of homework, makes for no down time. In my mind, a recipe for depression, anxiety and a hatred of school and learning.
When I see things like creative spelling, estimation math and problems with no answers that need to be poured over for hours, I again, question what the benefit is of making the kids spend all their time doing this.
There are also lots of kids who may have 1 hour of homework but though dawdling and stalling can make it take 4 hours. Since creating faster processing skills is what I do, I meet lots of those kids and the parents who are struggling with it. Processing speed, multi tasking and auditory visual memory problems can create a lot of extra time and working on those skills the right way can go a long way to shortening homework time. Working hard is not the key. Working smart is.
After a day of work at school and many hours of homework, our family time challenged society needs to have some family centered cementing time at the end of the night. This would go a lot further towards creating a good future for everyone involved.
Do I believe there should be no homework? Not at all. Let’s keep it reasonable though. Doing an hour of material to review what they did during the day seems logical allowing for more family and relaxation time to get ready for the next day. I believe that Montessori has it right. A child’s natural leaning desire should be supported and nurtured. Not buried under hours of wasteful work.
As I know lots of you will have opinions, would love to hear from you and discuss it here.
Dr. Sherri is a Psychologist and Parent Coach helping kids avoid behavior, physical behavior attention symptoms without medication while developing fast processing speed, multi-tasking and memory skills. Contact her at http://www.happyfamilysite.com