The homework wars among education wonks, teachers and parents don’t, as my friend and colleague Bruce Feiler writes in “The Homework Squabbles,” his This Life column for Sunday Styles, matter much on the scale at which most families are dealing with homework. To us, the question of how valuable homework is has to be set aside daily in the name of the backpacks, folders, binders and worksheets full of the stuff that our children actually bring home. And it’s worth noting that this idea of “too much homework” as a national problem is a myth. Instead, homework is something of an ironic twist in the American inequality story, with the more pressing problem being with the children who have too little rather than those who have too much.
But for the privileged families to whom homework unquestionably does not feel like a privilege (and mine is one of them), the mechanics of how to get the homework done loom large. Especially at this time of year, as parents and students are getting back into the groove of homework, questions of when and how and where can make us feel like we’re once again reinventing the homework wheel. That’s true at my house. In spite of a long-standing hands-off approach, and an attempt to set timers to focus my younger children on staying on task while limiting the time homework takes, homework is really wreaking havoc on our afternoons and evenings.
Bruce pulled together advice from experts and from parents whose experience makes them expert on everything from the when and where of homework to how involved a parent should be. How is the self-reliance we all hope our children will achieve best encouraged? What kind of help motivates, and what kind is too much? Is there any defense for the beloved teenage (and adult) habit of multitasking? Their answers are worth reading.
In spite of our timers (which we’re using more when necessary than as a habit, with two children relying more on them than others), and in spite of the fact that at the moment, homework is feeling like an instrument of torture designed to destroy my relationship with my two younger children, homework mechanics at our house haven’t changed much this year, and they won’t. It’s done in the kitchen unless you’d prefer to go elsewhere, or unless your method of objecting to the homework you’ve been given is detrimental to the ability of others to do theirs. Need help? I help sound out spelling on difficult words, but your teacher doesn’t want to know what I’ve learned through research about horse hooves. Frustrated with how much there is? I sing one song again and again in many keys: If you put the time into doing the homework that you’ve put into complaining about it, you’d be done by now. Just put one foot in front of the other, my friend.
Right now, two weeks in, it feels like I’ll be repeating myself all year. Like we’ll never pass another evening without a child strewn across the floor of the kitchen, screaming “but it’s too hard” or somehow managing to spend 90 minutes copying 20 spelling words 3 times each. Like every night, the homework, timers or no, will drag on past dinner, past soccer practice, toward bedtime and beyond.
But I’m relying on the curative powers of time and habit to work their magic. I know that what takes over an hour now will take far less time once my children stop spinning their pencils and get down to it. I know that once she knows it isn’t going to help, the child will get up off the floor and get it done. And I know that the homework habit, timers or no, takes time to develop.
We go through this every September. Some things change, some thing stay the same. The second grader who could gaze into space for hours at our house turned into the fifth grader who could buckle down, but couldn’t plan, who eventually turned into the eighth grader who knows that if it’s due next week, now’s the time to start, even if he doesn’t always pull it off. He still has plenty of room to improve, but he will. His siblings, I hope, will follow, but it doesn’t have to happen — it isn’t going to happen — today, or even this week.
What will happen is that the mechanics, like everything else, will evolve along with the children and the year. Some nights homework will progress in an orderly fashion in the kitchen; other nights someone will be stuck doing it in the lobby of a hockey rink. Some projects will happen in a timely way, others will be left until the last minute. Some homework will be a child’s best work. Some won’t be done at all.
When things go wrong‚ and they will, I’ll fall back on this: Learning to deal with your mistakes and roll with the things you can’t control is an important lesson. The one thing I know about homework at our house is that it’s pretty much guaranteed to offer my kids the opportunity to learn it.
Note: The original post stated that the author’s children were capable of spending 90 minutes copying 20 spelling words 30 times each. They have never been assigned so much; they are asked to copy the words 3 times each.