I feel so conflicted about homework. One one hand, yes, it’s totally ridiculous for a student to have more than a couple hours of homework. On other other hand, modern college admissions expect extraordinary acceleration from students these days, and you can’t cover twice as much material as “normal” in the same 8 hours.
From the kid perspective
Basically, the real issue is that people should think about what they want to get out of high school. The elite college route is basically deciding you want to work way, way harder than you have to, because that’s the most likely path to affluence in later life. We know that such a path means working really really hard later–to get into Med school or law school, in those schools, and/or working those 60-80 hour weeks as a young professional. Well, it doesn’t start there, if you want be making “good money”, or are just really interested in a high-powered career–that “working harder than everyone else” starts in high school. Kids are truly just expected to have learned a lot more (among other things) to get into the schools that start them on the path to a job at BCG or Bain by 25.
But it’s okay not to want that. It’s okay to want to go to a Regional State School and get a degree and a job and have a life. To work reasonably hard and make reasonable money. I do have some anxiety that as the gap between rich and poor grows, the “reasonable” jobs may become scarcer, but for now, they seem to exist.
The problem is pride, and its ugly sisters, racism and classism. Mommy wars are real, y’all. Feeling like your kids are somehow inferior to their peers is rough, and if you decide that the courses your student is in are a sign of their worth, you will push them into that “most ambitious” path. And they will pick up your fears and learn to push themselves. In a lot of communities, the most advanced courses are where the rich and/or white kids all are, and everyone internalizes that.
I admit I get really, really frustrated with students who pile up intensive course work and then want special grace because they opted into such a situation. I teach in a top ranked STEM high school. Our kids can take calculus as Freshmen–and most take it no later than sophomore year. All our students take at least 15 AP classes before they graduate, and many take 18-20. It’s a program of choice, designed to prepare kids for elite STEM programs. Of course it’s a stupid amount of work. It’s not designed for everyone. The thing we are really, really good at is taking low-income, first-generation students and launching them straight into the upper middle class. They come here to do that. But we also get a fair number of upper middle class parents who sent their kids here because it was prestigious and who then try to turn us into a normal school, by comparing us to what they think a teenager’s workload “ought” to be. I feel like they thought this was the school for the bestest, most specialist kids, not the school with the toughest work. So their special babies should, if anything, get less work. You can’t suggest they take less than the most rigorous courses, because “good” kids don’t do that.
There are also kids who are so perfectionist that they will turn any amount of assignments into 6 hours of homework a night. I’ve had parent conferences where the parent was upset about the amount of homework for a kid who was making all 97s and above. When we suggest that they, you know, be a little more relaxed about some assignments instead of triple checking everything and studying exhaustively for every test, the parent always responds “Oh no, my student’s dream is to be valedictorian”. Well, okay then. That’s a stupid dream, but this is what that takes. That’s why it’s special, albeit worthless.
From the teacher’s point of view
All that said, even where I am, people assign to much work. These are the reasons I see:
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“Accountability”. Teachers live and die by test scores these days. If they aren’t what’s expected, you have to demonstrate that it wasn’t your fault. If people feel like a class was “easy” and they fail, they blame you. If they were drowning in work each night, it’s their own fault for not doing all of it. It’s also true that if you are assigning tons of work and grading tons of work, you are working all the time, so low test scores can’t be your fault because you are truly trying your best. I’m not being sarcastic here: we feel responsible for our students’ educations, and the less we work, the more we worry we are shirking our responsibilities. And honestly, try it. Go to the community and say “we are reducing homework. We expect a moderate drop in AP and SAT scores”. People will lose their minds.
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Cluelessness. Almost every teacher I know is bad at estimating how long something will take. Years and years ago, I had a parent I liked and trusted call me to let me know a project I assigned had taken their son 12 hours, that she sat and watched him at the dining room table working all day. I was a fairly experienced teacher at the time (10 years or so) and I would have described that as a 5-6 hour project, tops. Kids, even smart kids, are just slow processors. Have you ever sat and watched 15 year olds write essays? It can legit take 45 minutes to write a paragraph–like this paragraph I am writing. And I mean kids who later went to Harvard. It’s really hard to believe that, as an adult. So everyone thinks they are assigning 30-45 minutes of homework, but it’s really more like 2 hours.
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Unrealistic expectations. I do work with some people who really sincerely believe an hour of tutoring and 2 hours of homework every day for just their class is reasonable. That if a student really wants to be successful, they can make that commitment.
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Autopilot. Some teachers really don’t think. They don’t try to reduce. They just assign homework sorta at random, with no real understanding or plan–just like “oh yeah, homework. Do the problems at the end of the chapter” or whatever. Electronic platforms make this even easier. They aren’t really deciding anything. And to be fair, we get no training on this. What is enough practice? What Should practice look like, in a discipline?
So, long story long, it’s complicated.
