« The Importance of Flow in Learning and Happiness | Main | In Praise of Unusual Courses »
School Board Proposes Limitations on Homework
By Richard Nantel | April 8, 2008
If their legs were long enough to reach the pedals of their parents’ cars, young children would be emptying their piggy banks for gas money and immediately relocating to Toronto, Ontario.
Why the move? The Toronto District School Board, the largest public school board in Canada, is proposing to eliminate homework for kindergarten children and ban homework for all elementary and high school students on holidays, including winter and spring breaks. In addition, homework assigned to students in higher grades would be restricted to no more than two hours per night.
According to a news report, the Toronto School Board is recommending that:
- “Students shouldn’t be penalized for handing in assignments late or incomplete.”
- “Students shouldn’t be assigned homework on scheduled holidays or other significant days.”
- “The amount of workload should be broken down by grade: Those in Grades 1 to 6 should only get reading assignments, those in Grades 7 and 8 should get no more than one hour of homework a night, and high school students should get no more than two hours.”
These recommendations come after the release of a report stating that the amount of homework assigned to some children is depriving them of leisure and family time.
What I see as a parent is that the amount of homework assigned has little to do with the individual needs of the child. Rather, two factors drive the amount of homework a child receives:
- The teacher to which the child is assigned. You can have two grade three classrooms in the same school with children of similar abilities in each. One class will get minutes of homework per night; the other class will get hours of homework. It’s demoralizing for children in the class getting large amounts of homework to hear that their fellow grade three friends get away with so much less. We’re out to teach kids learning is fun, not that life’s unfair.
- Pressure from parents. I’ve seen parents pull their child from one school and transfer them to another because the child was assigned to a teacher that gave little homework. Fearful that this would lead to a life of poor paying jobs and misery, the parents elected to transfer their child. I’ve also heard parents complain that their child was getting too much homework and threaten to change their child to another school if the burden wasn’t reduced.
I applaud the new Toronto District School Board homework guidelines and would add others:
- Homework, when assigned, should be fun. The plan is to get kids excited about learning. Ten pages of multiplication table exercises due the next day isn’t the way to do this.
- Homework should, when possible, encompass physical activity. Kids don’t play outside as boomers did when they were kids. Creative homework assignments encouraging physical movement would improve kids’ health and their academic results.
- Homework should never be assigned on one day and due the next. Children may not have time to work on the assignment on a given night due to other obligations.
Topics: Academic, Children, K-12, Learning |
