Topic: Homework

What Teaching 8th Graders Has Taught Me About Homework and Stress

This is my first year as a full time teacher, after working for many years in education as a part-time teacher, researcher, and coach with Challenge Success. Throughout the year I’ve seen the complexities and nuances of how student stress works up close. Stress doesn’t just come from one place. It’s not only teachers assigning too much homework, or a hectic school schedule, or one too many extracurricular activities. It’s deeper than any one of those things. It’s cultural, and it’s something we not only feel, but also go in search of.

Helicopter Teaching and the Challenge of Mythrules

In an era of hyper-focus on students’ academic performance, is it possible that schoolwork is actually too easy? I recognize that this might seem a strange question, given how much we hear of stressed-out students, slogging through hours of homework and blizzards of standardized tests. If anything, school is too hard, right?

What I Learned About Why Kids Cheat: A Parent’s Perspective

“Well, I’m not saying I cheat all the time but I do feel the pressure to get straight A’s.” “I am willing to stand up at a school board meeting and explain to them why, we, as students would like to see individual rankings done away with. Because we are ranked, and well aware of our ranking amongst our peers, we are constantly competing.” A teacher leaned over to the new freshman mother and said, “Don’t worry, freshman are not aware of the rankings.” “Yes they are, Mr. Kravitz,” he says earnestly. “Yes, they are. I always knew what my ranking was and so did every other kid I knew since freshman year.” These are the comments I heard at the first Challenge Success meeting I attended last May. These were the responses to a teacher’s comment about wanting to address, “Very creative and out of control cheating issues that high schools are experiencing.” What I found so refreshing at this m …

Why Cheat? More Importantly, Why Not?

Reports of academic dishonesty – within prestigious universities, on high school exit exams, by authors of bestselling books – have been widespread this fall. In the wake of cheating, academic communities rush to bolster or clarify disciplinary procedures. New or repeated sessions about proper citation techniques are added to the curriculum. Teachers ask students to leave backpacks at the door and phones on the front desk. Then we all pause and ask, “Why?” The answers may vary slightly each time, but they usually include some variation of the following: “I just didn’t have time to really ‘do’ the work.” “Because I could – it is so easy.” “I don’t care about the material – it’s totally irrelevant to my life.” “The teacher doesn’t even care or check.” And most often: “Because I can’t mess up.” In our current high stakes system where every test or assignment seems to be a critical step on the pathway to adult …

Busywork Blues

This was written by a student (and friend) involved with Challenge Success. We appreciate his wlllingness to share his personal story with us. In the living room of my parent’s house there is a table worn smooth from the weight of books and spotted with flocks of pen tip indentations. This of course is the dreaded “Homework Table,” which sustained nearly two decades of use by both me and my older brother. It is from this table that I would often depart early in the morning, only to return again later—after school was out, after tennis practice was out, well after sundown. Although I explicitly remember spending what constituted a significant portion of my adolescence at this table, I am hard pressed to recall the specifics of any of the actual assignments. Granted, this retrospection is a few years removed, it still brings up an interesting question: if the overwhelming majority of homework is busywork, why assign it at all? While each of the papers t …