I was a teacher for a while, and even so, am very much against homework. It's a stress on the family and there's little evidence that it provides any added educational benefit.

By far the best thing to do at home is encourage kids to spend a half an hour a day, at least, just reading a book of their choice.

Couldn't agree more. Homework is the work of the devil and it's inevitably the crap schools that make the kids do more and more and more of it - at the same time as they have eliminated study hall, so the kids can't do it in school. What with everyone working, scheduled activities and hours of homework (when my daughter was in Baltimore city schools in 4th grade she would literally have 2 - 3 HOURS A NIGHT WHICH IS INSANE) when does a kid get a chance to be a kid and just do nothing?

I could go on. This is one of my major huge enormous issues with the schools as a parent - that one and the way they start the damn middle and high school day so early when study after study has shown that adolescent body clocks are set to sleep late; the kids perform better when they get to sleep in AND for god's sake, moving the school day from 8:00 - 2:30 to 10:00 - 4:30 would give those same adolescents two hours less a day to get into trouble! Because nobody, but nobody, is going to wake up early to smoke pot and tip cows or whatever, I swear to this.

Mine starts kindergarten this year. And with the schools' only priority nowadays to make sure the students pass the stupid ass standardized tests (how I love that the test acronym is "SOL"), I expect that all of her useful learning will have to come from me. Y'know, in all the free time that she'll have after finishing her homework.

I hope she turns out to be a sponge like I was. I just did my homework while the teacher was talking.

I was never assigned homework until I hit high school (and even then no more than a couple of hours a night). My private Catholic school didn't believe in it for young kids. Consequently (I truly believe) I fell in love with books and became a giant nerd, doing extra math homework for fun in high school.

I can't ever remember being upset about homework, but I was a giant nerd, so...

Like Mike, though, I tended to finish most of mine during class. Or get through it quickly after school so I could fun things like... reading books.

I just read the linked blog entry. I'm sure the book she's talking about addresses it, but it seems like statistics like this:

Too much homework brings diminishing returns. Cooper's analysis of dozens of studies found that kids who do some homework in middle and high school score somewhat better on standardized tests, but doing more than 60 to 90 min. a night in middle school and more than 2 hr. in high school is associated with, gulp, lower scores.

are a bit suspect. I mean, that seems to be saying that kids who take longer to do homework have lower test scores, not necessarily that kids who are assigned more homework do worse.

I see what you mean, occhi, but depending on how the study was designed it might still be kosher. That's because school policies often specify how much homework a teacher is supposed to assign based on time estimate alone.

That is, your school policy might say "Students in sixth through eighth grade are to be assigned 60 minutes' homework each weeknight." The 60 minutes is the amount of time presumed to take an average student to complete the work.

So if the study people were using the teacher's time estimate to determine what '60 minutes' worth' is, it's probably an acceptable finding. But if they were using students' actual-time-to-complete, I agree that then the, um, less academically gifted students would skew the outcome by taking much longer than average to complete the same amount of work.

I do hope they did the study that way. One hallmark of many kids who struggle academcially is actually not slower completion, but faster. They often rush through, they're typically sloppier, and they rarely go back and check anything. They don't feel successful at the stuff anyway and they withdraw from the miserable effort. So even time-to-complete might not directly correlate with poor performance.

Yes, but you'd still have to correct for a lot of variables to compare this data, I think. Figure you've got a lower-quality school, where a lot of students are struggling. The amount of work that constitutes an hour of homework would probably be much less than the amount of work that constituted an hour of homework for kids in a magnet or competitive private school. Which, presumably, would mean kids who are spending longer on homework but accomplishing less work are getting lower test scores.

I'm sure there are ways of comparing the data that could work -- lord knows my statistical skills are not even approaching adequate -- but there just seems to be a lot of room for fudging there.

True - good point about the different student populations and average time.

But even anecdotally, I don't know many teachers who feel that homework is doing much of anything. WE'd be so much better off putting school time to better use, providing teachers adequate support staff, insisting on smaller classes, and keeping up with individual students in a way the present system doesn't allow.

I certainly agree with that.

Heaven forbid your child gets into the gifted and talented program where instead of just ramping up the difficulty level they feel compelled to dump a pile of rote nonsense on a group of kids who really don't need that to learn the material. Challenge their brains, not their stamina.

Giving a lot of homework is the easy way for today's schools to tell parents that they are serious about education. Quality beats quantity, but for the schools quantity is easier. Since everyone is doing it, it becomes hard for any one school to say no.

Our state government has recently adopted a realteively sane policy on homework. Prior to that, my 6-year-old was doing anything up to 3 hours a day of homework and was constantly stressed about not being able to complete it. Now, she reads a lot more (which she loves doing) and, I suspect, learns a hell of a lot more. She is still being set way more than the requisite 1 hour per week, but at least the schools now have some kind of benchmark and can get over competing to see who can suck the most life out of primary school kids.

Just reading stuff that interests them is the best way for kids to learn, I think. Even my 3-year-old son has his own library card and loves taking books out (hates taking them back, though). My two younger daughters both topped out the reading levels for their year by about April this year and just devour books that most kids their age struggle to comprehend at all. I suspect that there is some correlation in the fact that video games are not a part of our kids' lives and that we limit the TV/DVD time but let them read all they want (and lead by example, being keen readers ourselves). All 3 younger kids are starting to explore the Web, have their own e-mail addresses etc, so they are learning to explore their world rather than having everything spoon-fed to them via TV.

Growing up comes soon enough - let them be kids while they can, for fucks sake.