Homework Hell

You and your child are facing off again. You’re both angry. One of you, or maybe both, has tears of frustration in your eyes.

Your child says, “I’m trying! There’s just too much of it!” You blast back, “You’re not trying or it’d be finished!”

And so goes the struggle over that age-old childhood responsibility — homework.

“Don’t even mention that word,” one Boston-area mom of three kids told LifeZette. “I’m not ready for the tears, the anguish, the bargaining. I have to nag my kids to do homework. It’s my night job!”

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A new study reveals that it may not be your child’s fault if that homework is not getting done. Instead, the sheer amount of homework handed out nightly is to blame. The study, composed of questionnaires filled out by 1,100 parents of both English and Spanish-speaking students conducted by four leading colleges and two top medical centers, found elementary school students are getting nearly three times as much homework as the National Education Association guidelines recommend.

Could this increased homework load be due to the increasing number of hours our kids are in school not studying reading, writing and arithmetic, but instead being force-fed politically correct but educationally irrelevant material?

Following the so-called “10-minute rule,” kids should have 10 minutes of homework multiplied by what grade they’re in — so a first grader should have 10 minutes of work, second graders 20 minutes, and so on. But the new study shows an average of 28 minutes a night for first graders.

The NEA does not recommend kindergarteners have any homework at all, and yet according to parents surveyed their kindergarteners were also doing nearly 30 minutes of homework a night – the amount recommended for third-graders.

Could this increased homework load be due to the increasing number of hours our kids are in school not studying reading, writing and arithmetic, but instead being force-fed politically correct but educationally irrelevant material?

Is homework where the real work gets done?

In Chicago, for example, all students in grades K-12 must take sex education. Aside from being controversial, it takes up precious time that could be used for traditional learning. (You can opt to get your child out of sex-ed.)

Assemblies and classroom time focusing on diversity and values-teaching, things that parents used to be trusted to handle at home, now chew up classroom time once used for actual subjects.

“I don’t even really believe in homework. I think an hour of review a night should suffice,” May Donaghey, a mother of four who lives in the Boston area, told LifeZette. “They are so busy conducting ‘programs’ in school — for who knows what — and getting the kids ready for the next grade, they don’t spend time focusing on teaching core subjects in the grade they’re actually in.”

In the Denver, Colo., area, elementary school teacher Kallie Leyba quit her job because the students were spending too much of the school day on standardized testing as prescribed by a Common Core curriculum.

“They’re upset,” Leyba told the Denver Post, referring to her students. “They feel like all they’re doing is preparing for tests.” Then they get stuck doing hours of homework to learn what they should be learning during the school day.

What is the price of all this homework? What about other activities, time with friends — what about childhood itself?

“The cost is enormous,” Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman, contributing editor of the study and clinical director of the New England Center for Pediatric Psychology, told CNN.

“The data shows that homework over this level is not only not beneficial to children’s grades or GPA, but there’s really a plethora of evidence that it’s detrimental to their attitude about school, their grades, their self-confidence, their social skills and their quality of life.”