Is It True That Kids Have Too Much Homework Assignments?
Every family hits a point in its life where the children suddenly have less free time than their busy and working parents. This is where most parents start wondering if they had the same amount of afterschool studying back in the day, or if kids do have it worse nowadays. The given problem can be observed from several different perspectives.
What Do Children Think?
Students often find themselves studying for the longest time and not living their lives. A documentary devoted to the problem, Race to Nowhere (2009), pictures how stressful and exhausting homework can be for adolescents. One of the teenagers mentions having several nervous breakdowns during school, while another girl chimes in to say her assignments would consume up to six hours of preparation.
What Do Teachers Think?
With scholars, however, there’s no general consensus. Most of them consider the volume of homework to be enough for kids to develop the habit of studying on their own. Others like Diane Garfield, a teacher from San Francisco, assume that the assignments can be quite tiresome. Her way out is limiting the amount of subjects she hands out homework on, as well as their sizes: one question per day, completed in 30 minutes max. However, it is a common opinion in the academic environment that in the previous era, people would get fewer assignments in kindergarten and early grades. It was estimated that the time spent on homework grew from zero to twenty minutes a day in the past 25 years.
What Do Parents Think?
It is not that simple with the older generation either. According to the latest polls, most Americans find the amount of afterschool studying to be appropriate (57%), with about a quarter of participants considering it to be not enough (23%). Parents seem surprisingly unanimous about one aspect: homework is often unnecessarily difficult. For example, a student that just started school is asked to do a project on a famous figure. Being obliged to write a relatively long summary of that by themselves is challenging when you have just learnt to read and write.
What Are the Facts?
Research done in this field shows that kids don’t necessarily carry out as much homework as they claim to do. The amount of time spent on this type of studying ranges from 2 to 5 hours per week, with an average being at 4. These figures can differ from state to state, with the university competition being high or low in the area.