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8/27/2004
Conservative Homework-Pushers
 I'm a big proponent of year-round schooling and this is why.
With most students around the country heading back to school this week or next, gripes are already surfacing about assigned summer homework. And get this, the parents are complaining too! The AP reports,Summer homework has increasingly become a popular tool used by teachers to bridge the gap between the end of one school year and the start of another. But some parents worry that the workload is making summer fun slip away.
"I don't know what good this really does," said Sheryl Preiss, a Baltimore, Maryland, mother parent of twin 13-year-old girls entering high school this year. "Life isn't always about a test. I think it's important for children to be children, to be well-rounded. When I was in sixth grade, I recall reading Tolkein's The Hobbit in one day. It was the day before we had to return from summer vacation, and it was the lone book we were assigned over the summer. I of course, being the procrastinator-perfectionist that I am, waited until the very last day to read it. I hated summer assignments. The summer was for vacations, swimming, and stealing from the ice cream man. In my mind, summer vacation was purely established to be the polar opposite of everything that took place from September-June. There was to be absolutely NO thinking during the summer. None whatsoever.
For me, school meant life in the homework inferno. Private schools have absolutely no mercy when it comes to piling it on. By the time I got to high school, I easily had five hours worth of homework every night. There was almost never a time when we came from under the burden of repetitive assignments. I still have gripes about the intensity of private school workload, but for what it's worth, it gave me a great work ethic and the summer was indeed a welcomed break.
Unfortunately, these days the worse lot of public schools don't give nearly enough homework if you ask me. I know many parents who actually supplement their children's workload with additional materials just to fill in some of the holes the educational system leaves.
The summer is a prime opportunity to go brain-dead. As I got older, I started realizing how much I forgot over the summer. In math classes for example, we generally spent the first two months strictly re-learning everything we'd flushed away via our summer lack of scholastic aptitude.
As with all things, it seems conservatives are to blame for the summer homework craze,Some education experts say the "lazy, hazy, crazy" days of summer are over as schools feel increased pressure on accountability for student achievement under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
"It's really going to focus attention on this period of time when kids aren't engaged," said Ron Fairchild, executive director of the Center for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins University.
But parents from Prince George's County in Maryland to Salt Lake City, Utah, are fighting back, questioning the usefulness and legality of teachers piling on summer reading and math problems. The legality of piling on homework? Now we've officially gone off the deep-end. In the article, they also interview Director of Teacher Education at Pepperdine University, Etta Kalovec, author of The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts families, Overburdens Children and Limits Learning. Her main argument being that homework puts poor children at a disadvantage. I am trying very hard to wrap my mind amount this logic. Granted, yes I believe our educational structure could stand some reform and yes I think that in many cases the homework load can be a bit much and pull children away from more important family time, and yes kids without the traditional family structure in place can suffer a bit with bringing work home, but to say that it puts poor children at a disadvantage? That's a bit advantageous.
posted by ambra at 8/27/2004 03:01:12 PM | link to this entry |
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