A recent Board of Education meeting brought up the subject of homework again. This rears its head every 5 to 10 years. Usually there is discussion for a while, mostly complaints: There’s too much homework. Why does my child have to do school work at home when they have finished 6 hours of work in school? There’s not enough homework. Vacations are for families, not for schoolwork. My child spends 4-5 hours a night on homework. Homework looks just like busy work. Does the teacher even look at what they are assigning?
Occasionally after discussions, surveys are taken, sometimes decisions and policies are made and then we wait another 5 to 10 years until the topic comes up again with a new set of parents.
As a teacher I always had a different take on homework. I must note that I’ve always taught elementary students through 6th grade; I was the sole provider of academic work and homework, which is different from the concerns of Middle and High School parents, where teachers from different classes all assign homework with little knowledge of what other teachers have assigned. For me the expectation was that I had to give homework. Homework was supposed to be an extension of the class work that we were doing. Early in my teaching it was difficult to come up with homework since I felt that most of the things I taught worked better when I was there to mediate. There were other subjects that I didn’t feel was as prioritized to focus on which I was mandated to teach and give as homework. One principal said to me if I give homework in certain areas, even though I didn’t want to, it would appease the parents and thus allow me to do other things that I wanted to do that might have more resistance. This actually worked out to be a good philosophy; only I didn’t use it as a way to appease parents as much as I did to appease my administrator. I had the range of parent complaints of there is too much to there is too little homework (on the same assignments).
One thing that was consistent in my homework for almost all of the 33 years that I taught were two weekly assignments. Each child had to read and log 2 hours of reading a week, outside of school that was verified by their parents. This reading could include any assigned reading or reading of their own choosing. The other assignment was each student had to write at least 1 page a week in a journal that I had provided to them. The writing was of their choice. It had to make sense and could be anything from fiction to non-fiction to poetry to letters to me. They could include illustrations if they wished, but the total amount of writing had to be the equivalent of one page’s worth (normal print handwriting). In my final years, students were allowed to type their journal entries. The journals were a great way for me to communicate one on one with my students as I always wrote back to the students in their journals before returning them. On long vacations, I generally had one journal and the normal reading diary due (meaning if it was a two week vacation, students only had to hand in 1 page of writing but 4 hours of reading).
In my last 6 years of teaching I changed my philosophy about homework. I taught 5th grade (10-11 year olds). Journals and reading diaries continued, however my homework assignments became time oriented rather than content oriented. My focus was not homework as an extension of class work, but learning as an extension of life. Every student was given a homework log, which included a calendar for the school year and under each date a space for homework and reading diary. At the beginning of the year each student was required to log in 30-45 minutes of homework a night (weekends Friday, Saturday and Sunday were considered one night). Their assignment was to utilize this time to either do something that I assigned or something of their own choosing to fill up that time frame, for example practicing times tables, their own writing, study for an exam, work on an independent research project, etc. They could choose how to do it (right after school, before supper, at night, split between multiple times). Their parents had to initial the log each night (or before school the next day). As the year progressed the times for this homework increase to 45-60 minutes). Reading diary reading was an acceptable use of time, however once they reached the 2-hour expected requirement; they couldn’t use additional reading as acceptable homework (some kids would have just read and done nothing else). Journals were acceptable as long as they didn’t do it in school during free time.
No child was allowed to do homework any night for more than an hour. If it took longer than an hour to complete any assignment I gave, students were allowed to stop; all they needed was their parents to sign off that they worked an hour.
Not allowing students to work longer than an hour (some of which just did, because they loved what they were doing, which was fine with me) gave me indications about needs of individual students. If the work was too hard, I altered it for those students. If their work strategy to complete assignments was the issue, we worked out a better plan to help complete assignments.
The goal in all this was to establish a pattern of study skills in my students so that when they went to Middle and High School, they would be better prepared to manage time in doing homework and to foster the behavior that helped them become well-rounded learners. “Even though my teacher hasn’t assigned me work I know that there are things that I need to work on.” “Even though I don’t have that much homework to do, there are these topics that interest me that I would like to explore.”
Over the years, I didn’t have many parent complaints about the homework I gave. Most of the issues arose at Open Houses at the beginning of the year, when parents were unfamiliar with my philosophy. But once known, it was accepted.
Did this solve the homework issue that parents keep bringing up at the district level? It solved it for me. I never had to deal with kids going home and telling their parents that they had no homework. As instructed, all parents had to respond to their child was, “So what are you going to do for your 45 minutes today? “ And for me that was all I asked.
My accomplice and I really loved reading this weblog post, I was just itching to know do you commerce featured posts? I’m always trying to find somebody to make trades with and merely thought I might ask.