What's wrong with homework and how to fix it

Rocket surgery. (San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives, 1959)

I took my work to a particular suburban Starbucks one afternoon before a tutoring session. There were a few tutors there working with students.

I watched a tutor write an entire essay in longhand for her student to type up (presumably to submit for a grade). I scoffed.

And then, about an hour later, I was working with my own student, helping him to limp through a math worksheet from a major textbook publisher — and found that the only way he was going to succeed was if I did more or less the same thing as the tutor I had seen at Starbucks.

My student, age nine, was actually a strong math student — as long as he was working with numbers. But this particular assignment required him to explain some reasoning that he didn’t have the vocabulary for. After a lot of thought, I would have written, “Each distinct element of this figure is actually a rotation of only one unique component. Only the orientation of that component has changed in each iteration.” But that might have given the game away a little bit. I think we ended up with something like, “The green triangle was on the top, and now it’s on the bottom,” and called it good. But it took a lot of coaxing to get there.

There’s a feeling of relief that comes when the work is complete and ready to be turned in. We’ve survived another night.

But what is the point of worksheets the student barely understands, glitter-encrusted posters that are more about graphic design than the subject area being studied, and projects that require professional project management skills and hours of painstaking adult supervision to execute and assemble? Is any learning actually happening?

Yes. What the student learns is that homework is inscrutable, so you have to either rely on adults or guess.

So that’s the problem — how do we fix it?

Here’s the solution: We teachers have to give students only homework they can do themselves, with no help from adults.

If a teacher actually tries to follow this guidance, it may result in not giving any homework at all. Oh well.

Another potential result would be that different students have different needs. That’s a much harder one for a teacher to manage.

There is so much at stake. Students learn to be self-reliant by succeeding on tiny tasks, we can gradually expand their capacity. They will be able to do increasingly complex or challenging work independently. However, if we burden them with more than they can handle, it will take years for them to recover — and they may never.

The support of tutors and parents is resulting, in many districts, in an ever-higher volume and difficulty of homework — and then more adult support is required. It’s high time to reverse the trend.