10/27/2022
As someone who grew up in an era when nightly homework was rare, especially in the elementary and junior high years, I have many thoughts and ponders about homework. As a mother who watched nightly homework(starting the FIRST night of kindergarten)arrive when our oldest was in a public school setting, I remember wondering why in the world was a child getting sent home with homework in elementary years.
Homework doesn’t bring relationship together, it doesn’t reinforce healthy lifestyle. It attempts to cover material that wasn’t covered thoroughly in class. For students that need extra assistance/understanding, the parent does the teaching. And often, the parent will pull from their own current knowledge, using a different strategy than utilized in modern classrooms. From an institution that postures that a parent has the inability to effectively teach, why are they shifting the teaching to the parent? It’s inside out, black hole infolding logic. Confusion and frustration arrive for both parent and child, relationship suffers.
And in the morning, we send the child back to repeat this process over and over again.
Many might pivot the problem as a teacher problem. I disagree. Very few could carry the weight of a modern public education classroom. The pressure is real, teachers are spread unhumanly thin, there’s unspoken expectation that teachers should do more with less and magically produce result for a cookie cutter test-a test that never shows the sacrificial work the teacher brings to the student each day. A test intended to push the dots higher on a bar graph, not produce whole adjusted conscious humans. When you have to produce printable proof results on top of trying to meet each students individual needs, you cannot cover all the test material.
