Quit yer whinin', kids, nobody's buying it. The most fascinating thing about this poll of parents about their children's homework is that they don't think the load is too heavy, even though they believe the kids do more homework than the kids say they actually do:
Parents polled said their children spend an average of 90 minutes a night on homework. The workload grows as the students do -- 78 minutes of homework a night in elementary school, 99 minutes in middle school and 105 in high school.
Even those numbers might be lofty. Could be that parents don't really know how much time kids spend on homework when the bedroom door shuts. Consider what the students say.
Most children aged 9, 13 and 17 years say they spend less than an hour a night on homework, according to a long-term federal study. That load has held steady, if not dropped, over the past 20 years. Plenty of students say they are not assigned any homework at all.
I have both satisfying and depressing memories of homework. In classes I liked, about subjects I found interesting, doing the homework was a pleasure, as much fun as playing outside or watching TV. But the dull classes, with busywork assigned by incompetent teachers -- that homework was torture, to be put off till the last possible moment.
Somebody should do a study about our homework experience and what correlation there might be with our real-world work attitudes. In my job history, I've gone through phases in which I constantly took my work home with me and resented it, which led to phases in which I deliberately stopped thinking about work the minute I left the office, which isn't always emotionally healthy, either. The trick is to have work you love, so that it doesn't matter when and where you do it. What I do now involves a lot of reading and trying to start arguments about it, which is what I would do even if I didn't get paid for it. Guess I've been fairly successful at picking the class with the fun homework.
Just something to tell your kids if they start whining.
