Take Back Your Schools

Top 5 Not-So-Obvious Reasons Why Homework Is Bad

Teachers give homework to students as regularly as possible, but recent studies have shown that this practice should be abolished. There are so much more interesting activities than homework and teachers should follow that trend. Students would definitely love it.

There are several reasons that led to this conclusion and several reasons why home assignments have negative effects on students instead of positive. Some of them are so obvious, but others are not. Here are several obvious reasons:

• Tiredness – Students are tired when they come home from school. They either want to play or to have a rest, it depends on the age. School is quite tiring, too.
• Children are busy – Nowadays, parents force their students with many activities after school. Even young children have more than one activity. Older students have even more: music, sport, foreign languages, a hobby, a night out with friends, etc. Homework is something that can barely fit in their busy schedule.
• Systematic injustice – Students sometimes do not have basic conditions to write homework. They are constantly left without electricity; others should look after their younger siblings while their parents are second shift etc. It is not their fault that they can’t do home assignments.

Below are the top five not-so-obvious reasons why home assignments are bad:

1. Demotivation – Instead of motivating students to learn, home assignments demotivate them because it is mandatory. If it is not mandatory, it will definitely promote higher learning. Why instead of saying: “You must write 5 page-essay!” say something like “Here is additional idea for everyone that wants to try on his own”.
2. Stress – Children do forget home assignments sometimes and they do it just before they go to school. They are afraid that they will not get a good grade if they don’t do it. This kind of doing the assignments for home is not effective. They do this under stress.
3. Encourages cheating – When students are not able to do the assignments at home they start copying one from another, which misses the point of the home assignment.
4. Opposite effect of grading – Teachers usually take students’ assignments to grade and check. By the time they are finished with grading, students moved on to another chapter and don’t pay attention to their graded assignments.
5. Students are learning continually learning today – There is no such force that would stop a child from learning if he is really interested in the subject. Only the Internet is overloaded with information available to everyone. Maybe a research during a holiday would be more effective than everyday home assignments.

Probably teachers should explore different approaches for engaging students in learning and leave the old homework system to rest.