Thoughts on Homework

It is as much a part of American culture as apple pie and baseball: Good parents do homework with their kids every night. Teachers sometimes even send home letters to parents at the beginning of the school year, explaining that there will be an expectation to that end.

Certainly no one will argue against helping a student study out loud for a spelling test, or occasionally helping with a tough assignment. In fact, one of the privileges I cherish very much is being able to tutor kids at times who struggle with English.  There are many reasons why a student needs an extra boost, and my thoughts today pertain more to the typical student who is capable of managing his own homework.  Here are four things to consider on this important but controversial subject:

1. Homework almost never affects a grade average in a significant way.

Most teachers do not count a missed answer as part of your child's grade average. The bulk of his grade will be earned through tests, exams, quizzes, and projects, not by workbook assignments. This is not to suggest at all that homework should not be finished and finished well (keep reading below . . .). But in most classes, you can afford the risk involved in letting your child cultivate his own thinking skills through homework.  This isn't going to cost him his Harvard scholarship.

2. Homework offers feedback to the teacher of what your child actually knows.

A good teacher is doing more than just scanning for answers in the blank. He/she is looking for a trend. Wrong answers have a story to tell the teacher. When parents supply too many clues and too much help, they disrupt the teaching process. Homework indicates to the teacher whether a child has a problem with the topic itself, with laziness, or possibly with a learning disability. Homework also tells the teacher if he has done his job. Widespread confusion on a worksheet indicates to the teacher that he needs to do a better job communicating. It is better to discover that unpleasant truth on a homework assignment (which does not significantly affect the grade average) than on a quiz, test, or final exam!

3. Homework increases your child's thinking skills.

Following directions, analyzing examples, listening in class (ummm, YES!), asking good questions, remembering to bring the worksheet home, and then focusing for an extended period of time on a difficult task: Those skills are ALL abandoned when parents spend hours and hours breaking down the material into smaller, easier-to-chew bites. The homework is presumably written at your child's thinking level, but when you break it up and spoon-feed it, you have just reduced the grade level at which your child is working.

4. Homework teaches personal responsibility.

Directly related to #3, children often use homework time as an opportunity to shift the responsibility of thinking onto parents or babysitters. Parents and after-school tutors then become enablers by reading the directions out loud, drawing charts, and breaking down the "big words" for a child who really just needed to be left alone for forty minutes with no one to coach him. Thinking is work. Children should be encouraged (through incentives, if necessary) to finish homework in a timely fashion and at school if possible--in study halls, while waiting for the bus, and even in class when the teacher provides opportunity.  

Homework is important and effective--but only if we let it do its job.