conuly

One very important lesson for children to learn about school is that many of the lessons in school are not very important. The real question is whether what they're told to do is helping them learn something, demonstrating that they have learned it so they can be graded, or just wasting their time. Almost all homework falls into the third category, so there is nothing wrong with slamming it out in the most expedient fashion, or better still, not doing it at all.

I hold with no homework in grade school; no more than an hour per week-night in middle school, and no more than two hours per week-night in high school - which would mean teachers could only assign it once a week per class. Of course there could be extra-credit assignments for those wanting to pull their grades up, but they'd be optional and voluntary, and hopefully tailored to the individual pupil's needs, at least to some extent.

If your girlies are both crying at bedtime over homework, what are they learning from it? How's it affect their health, their attitudes about learning and about themselves, and the serenity of their family relationships? Are they in fact learning anything positive from this forcible intrusion of schoolwork into their supposedly-free time, let alone anything valuable enough to warrant putting them under that kind of stress? How would they be spending their time if they never had any homework?