Kids have too much homework! Hasn’t this argument been around forever?

In My Humble Opinion
1

The Atlantic has the 2021 version of, ‘Kids have too much homework!’ Homeroom: How Much Homework Is Too Much? - The Atlantic

These arguments have been around forever, certainly since I was in high school in the 1980s.

I’d like to know the entire story. Are they given some time in class and the students don’t take advantage of it? How ardently are they working on homework without getting distracted by social media or texts/FaceTimes? And, some students work hard but not smartly.

I find these arguments tiring. High school at the college preparatory level needs to be rigorous. That also means if the student can’t handle the workload, it’s probably time to drop down from the Advanced/AP class level. There’s no shame in that, not everyone is cut out for the toughest academic classes a school offers.

Is it your experience that we’ve had high school is too hard arguments forever? How many hours of homework is reasonable for top students? 3 hours a day sounds about right to me.

I don’t believe the above article is paywalled. I am a subscriber but I’ve tried the link on other browsers where I’m not signed in to my account at The Atlantic.

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You obviously needed to do more homework if you think the 80s were forever ago.

Based on what?

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Based on a student with a class schedule of college preparatory classes

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Which student, you? Wouldn’t it require a larger sampling to make such a determination?

5

I was in high school in the 70s. I didn’t have too much homework, and no one was really complaining about it.

My kids, however, did have too much homework. Kids are in school for around 8 hours. That’s a full day. A little extra is okay, but it’s different in college where you might have a class (or two) for an hour (or two) on any given day and most of the work was expected to be done outside of class.

6

So did mine. Way too much. Teen years should be more than school, homework, and bed.

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IIRC they said in college that the number of credit hours was the amount of time you spent in class, and plan on three hours work per credit hour outside class. So if you took 15 credit hours, figure on 45 hours of study outside for a total of 60 hours. Some professors gave very little homework; others gave a lot. Hopefully you got a mix of those types so it balanced out each semester.

8

My kids had way too much homework. We barely saw them during the week, outside of dinner time. And, my kids spent less time than some of their friends – my kids would go to sleep around 10 or 11, but their friends would stay up much later.

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There are some courses where homework takes the place of the hands-on teaching that the teacher should be doing in the classroom. Language classes, for example, and some math classes. Maybe others. I would like to see some attention paid to the purpose of the homework, to make sure that it’s not just busy work and that it’s purpose could not be served just as well or better with classroom work. (I realize this assumes that classroom work is possible and that the teacher is not spending their entire day just trying to keep order).

Here is an anecdote to show what I mean. In my early 20’s I was taking some night classes at the local urban 4-year college. One of those classes was first-year German. The first term, the material consisted of a large-format book with a lot of pictures, and a relatively small amount of written material (I don’t remember exactly how much, it might have only been a couple of sentences). There was a slide projector, which projected the same pages on a screen. For each page, the teacher would walk throughout the classroom, engaging each student one at a time with some variation of what was on the screen. He was “on” every minute of the class, engaging with students, making sure no-one was hiding in the back, and constantly talking in German at a level that the students could grasp. The key was the variations, different tenses or declensions or whatever it was about the material on the screen. I think we had this class three times a week. There was no homework. The exams were individual and oral, and there was no escape from having to actually use the language. I learned a lot in that one term.

The second term the school suddenly switched to a traditional approach – a thick book with no pictures, lists of vocabulary to memorize, every verb form was written down in a list, the teacher (a different one) would go through the material in class but the students had to study these lists on their own, and the tests were written in class. This teacher, who was a native German speaker, got very discouraged about how poorly the students pronounced his language, even though he sat at the front of the class and didn’t do much interaction with the individual students. I learned very little, and dropped out of the language after that term (the next term I switched to Japanese).

The second term was a lot easier for the teacher in a sense – although he had a lot of grading to do, he didn’t have to put out all that energy in the classroom. But my experience in these two classes showed me that homework isn’t always necessary to facilitate learning and in fact can do the opposite. Boredom and drudgery on the one hand, engagement and fun on the other.

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The arguments have been around for a long time. And they’ve likely also been true for a long time. And they’re almost certainly true now, since the amount of homework kids have keeps increasing.

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I should say that I didn’t have too much homework when I was in high school in the 80s, and my parents didn’t complain about me having too much homework. Unlike today, where I’m complaining and so were my kids when they were still in HS.

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This. I went to HS in the early 70’s, graduated in 1975. I rarely brought ‘homework’ home, I did it in study hall. That included AP biology class. After school time was spent cruising with friends, smooching my girlfriend (now my wife), working in a bookstore in the evenings, and staying up too late reading SF and JRRT.

My kids however, had hours of homework starting in middle school.

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On the campus where I teach, the general guideline is two hours of outside work for every credit hour spent in class. So, one 3-credit class (3 hours per week in the classroom) should require about 6 hours per week outside the classroom. That means that a full course load of 15 credits should require a total of about 45 hours per week - 15 in class, 30 outside.

I believe that this 1:2 ratio was used as the formal definition of a credit hour by the federal Department of Education, at least under the Obama administration, for various accreditation and calculation purposes. As someone who has taught college-level history for the last 15 years or so, I think it’s a reasonable measure, although obviously the reality will depend on the instructor, the students, their other obligations, etc., etc., etc. It also changes from week to week; some periods during the semester tend to be busier than others.

I don’t have kids, but I’ve been amazed, over the last ten years or so, by how much homework some of my friends’ kids have to grind their way through each week, at the middle and high school levels.

I went to high school in the 1980s, in Australia. I went to a selective, public, boarding school - quite an unusual place. You sat an entrance exam to get in, and the school prided itself (still does) on its academic achievements.

Each weeknight, the boarding students (about one-third of the students were boarders) had to walk from our dorms down to the classrooms, and we would sit in the classrooms and do our homework from 7.00 - 9.00 p.m., with a 10-minute break at 8.00. No talking allowed except at break, on pain of a caning or, for the girls, detention.

But despite the fact that almost two hours per night were allocated for homework (“prep” was the name given to the ritual), it was nearly always pretty easy to get all of your actual homework done in the first hour. I usually spent the second hour of prep just reading a book, which was allowed. I read a lot of books in high school!

That was the case right through grades 7 through 10. In grades 11 and 12, things heated up a bit, and the homework burden became greater. But it still seems, in my memory, to have been considerably less than what many modern kids get.

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I’m not sure what this means - both when I went to school and when my kids went to school, “homework” was work that was meant to be done at home and you weren’t given time in class to complete it. If you’re talking about “study hall” , not every school/student has those.

3 hours a day sounds about right to me.

It doesn’t to me- because when people say things like “three hours a night” that’s usually only counting the homework that is due within a day or two and not longer-term projects like papers or studying. So three hours a day will be something like 3 hours Mon - Thurs for 12 hours and probably at least another 12 between Fri-Sun between what was assigned Friday and longer-term projects and studying.

Thinking back to my schedule and my kids’ schedules, we had to be at school by around 8:00 am and got dismissed around 2:30. That’s about six hours after lunch is deducted. To get to school at 8:00, my kids had to leave at 7:30, which means awake by 6:30 or so. They got home around 4. High school age kids should get 8-10 hours of sleep (most probably don’t) so getting up at 6:30 means going to sleep between 8:30 and 10:30. Three hours a night for homework leaves between 1.5 and 3.5 hours on weekdays for everything else- eating dinner, doing chores, extra-curricular activities, relaxing, reading for pleasure. If my kids had had three hours of homework a night, they would have spent more hours on schoolwork than I have ever spent working a full time job - six hours in class times 5 days is 30 hours, plus a minimum of 15 on homework for a total of 45.

This argument hasn’t been going on forever everywhere. I graduated from high school in 1981, took honors and AP classes and didn’t spend more than 10 hours a week total on homework, projects and studying. If my kids had so much homework that it took the average student three hours a night, I’d be wondering why the school’s curriculum wasn’t more closely tied to class time. Sure, kids need to practice math, and they need to read for literature classes because you can’t discuss something in class if the students haven’t read it - but it seems to me that having students answer essay questions for their history class is something that should be an in-class school quiz or test, rather than homework. And some homework is just plain busywork that has no purpose or is even detrimental to learning. I remember one teacher my kids had in middle school- she would assign questions at end of the chapter for homework. But she also wanted the "page , column, paragraph " where the answer was found in the textbook written next to the answer. And if it wasn’t there , the best you could get was partial credit. So the kids read the questions first , which is not terrible. But then they skimmed the chapter looking for the answers to the questions rather than reading the chapter for comprehension and paid no attention to any other information in the chapter.

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One of the other issues is that the six or seven high school teachers you have don’t coordinate. Each one assigns an hour or two of homework, so you don’t end up with three, you end up with five or seven. And the Math teacher thinks “well, an hour of practice is reasonable” and the Literature teacher thinks “a close reading should take an hour and its important to learn” and the History teacher thinks “you need to read the book, I can’t cover everything in lecture.” And the band teacher expects practice outside of class. And then the soccer coach says “three hours of practice every day and the game on Thursday.” And each of these things seems reasonable, but the kid gets up at 6 to catch a bus, and doesn’t get home from soccer practice until 6 at night, and Mom and Dad still expect some chores to get done, and you still need time to be a teenager. And teenagers have to fit it other things, there might be religious requirements, or a job, or drivers ed courses, or watching their younger siblings, or trips to the orthodontist.

(I had almost no homework in high school, and therefore didn’t arrive at college with any study skills - it was the mid-80s in a school that was stuck in the late 70s graduating students who would work in factories, join the military or marry and work part time jobs while raising kids…but I still know people who managed to get through med school or law school despite that)

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I can definitely remember times where the teacher gave us time to do problems 1-20 in class and the rest was homework. Getting a bunch of them done before the bell meant less to do at home

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My kids had more classes than I did in high school. A normal load was 7-8 classes at a time for them, but I took 5-6. I don’t know if the total amount of work was that different, though. My MO was to do the homework in most cases, but half ass it. My kids took the “blow it off” approach way too often, so I’m not certain how much homework they actually had. Our son is doing far better in college than he did in high school; I should ask him if he does two hours of work outside class for every hour in. He has a campus job and a social life, so it he is his days must be pretty full.

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The link is to a question from a parent whose kid is spending a lot longer on homework than he should be:

So in this particular case, the problem may not be that the teachers are assigning too much homework, but that the kid is taking too long to do the homework that they’ve assigned. If so, we can only guess why. Maybe he’s taking classes that are too hard for him. Maybe he’s a slow reader or has a learning disability. Maybe he’s disorganized or distracted or trying to do other things while working on his homework.

Homework typically isn’t assigned by the hour, but by the task: read these pages, work these problems, write this essay. How long it takes can vary wildly.

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Three hours a day sounds like a LOT after a full day of class. High school is not like college, where students are only in class for 12 to 18 hours a week and it’s reasonable to expect them to put in a lot of hours outside of class. High school is more like a full-time job where you HAVE to be there for most of your waking hours, and expecting students to spend three hours a day on top of that seems a bit much.

Homework is the ideal format for some things that high school students have to do – reading a novel, writing longer essays, mastering the sort of foreign language grammar stuff that you have to drill until it becomes automatic – so it’s necessary up to a point, but more is not always better.

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That actually sounds more to me like the problems were classwork and you had to finish them at home if you didn’t finish them in class - semantics perhaps, but it doesn’t sound like it was the teacher’s intention for the work to be done at home.