SCHOOL DAZE
By Gigi

It’s August, school will be starting soon next month; and already homework is weighing heavily on elementary, middle and high school age children. Parents have complained for several years that teachers give out too much homework. Nightly homework from Monday to Friday for most students is more than two and sometimes three hours every night including weekends and holidays!!! And if your kid is in elementary school and sometimes middle school, you’re right there with them helping out. So family life is disrupted and parents are fed up and are rebelling. The parent’s claim that the amount of time spent nightly on homework, far exceed the ten minutes per grade level recommended by the National Education Association; because NEA claims there is zero co-relation between homework and scholastic achievement, especially for elementary school age children; for high school age children, the benefits of homework decline after two hours.

The New York City Department of Education DOES NOT have a strict homework policy…this is left up to individual teachers and most are ill-equip and the teachers are over-worked, that they barely have time to plan lessons. It’s time for parents to get together with the teachers during parent-teacher meetings and suggest decreasing the homework especially since it has been proven that homework has no value; why should children spend all day in school and then do tedious homework at home for another two to three hours? Parents should suggest to the teachers which assignment would benefit the child more and this way, time would be left over for the entire family to spend quality time together in the evening; which is the single strongest predictor of better achievement scores, according to the University of Michigan. Kids will have more time to spend with friends, family and they’ll be happier, healthier and more well-rounded.