Monday, August 17, 2020

Why Homework Is Bad

Why Homework Is Bad I wonder about the students next year, students who I’ll spend the next four years with, whose family died because of this, whose parents died because of this. If my family will be the one this virus reaches next. I start high school next year, and I wonder how. Every parent I know in New York City comments on how much homework their children have. These lamentations are a ritual whenever we are gathered around kitchen islands talking about our kids’ schools. I don’t remember how much homework was assigned to me in eighth grade. I’m not interested in the debates over teaching to the test or No Child Left Behind. What I am interested in is what my daughter is doing during those nightly hours between 8 o’clock and midnight, when she finally gets to bed. During the school week, she averages three to four hours of homework a night and six and a half hours of sleep. She has told me she feels that the many hours of homework in middle school have prepared her well. “There is no way they can give me more homework,” she reasons. But at least one parent didn’t agree, and forwarded the whole exchange to the teacher in question. My teachers think what a responsible amount of work to be assigning is 40 minutes plus half an hour plus of homework. This is from EVERY teacher, so it adds up real fast. Over the last few days, I’ve had more work than I would usually have if schools weren’t closed â€" and I have to do it all sitting in the same spot for hours. A district in Illinois says students need to follow the school dress code, even when learning from home. The latest highlights as the first students return to U.S. schools. My wife and I have noticed since she started there in February of last year that she has a lot of homework. We moved from Pacific Palisades, California, where Esmee also had a great deal of homework at Paul Revere Charter Middle School in Brentwood. There are standardized tests, and everyoneâ€"students, teachers, schoolsâ€"is being evaluated on those tests. I do know that I didn’t do very much of it and that what little I did, I did badly. In Southern California in the late ’70s, it was totally plausible that an eighth grader would have no homework at all. Some evenings, when we force her to go to bed, she will pretend to go to sleep and then get back up and continue to do homework for another hour. The following mornings are awful, my daughter teary-eyed and exhausted but still trudging to school. Esmee is in the eighth grade at the NYC Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies, a selective public school in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. I feel like I understand more at school than at home looking at the screen. I think some of my teachers try their best to teach me through video calls, but for some subjects, it doesn’t always work or help. Even if I ask a million questions, I don’t feel that it is the same, and I can’t believe I am going to say this, but I would rather be at school than home. I can say emotionally my teachers have been very helpful and caring, which I love the most. Some turtles that start out small can grow to the size of a garbage can lid, so do your homework ahead of time when selecting a type and gender of turtle to call your own. In many species, females grow to be much larger than their male counterparts, Smith says. The one-on-one time, the accountability, the schedule and routine are all gone. No parent is perfect, and no parent can effectively replace seven to eight teachers, all with different subjects. The issue is the loss of many factors for success. Isolation, no routine, even just the lack of repercussions for not doing work. I’m in my last year of middle school, and I will probably have to finish it from home.

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