Memorization,
not rationalization. That is
the advice of my 13-year-old daughter, Esmee, as I struggle to make sense of a
paragraph of notes for an upcoming Earth Science test on minerals. “Minerals
have crystal systems which are defined by the # of axis and the length of the
axis that intersect the crystal faces.” That’s how the notes start, and they
only get murkier after that. When I ask Esmee what this actually means, she
gives me her homework credo.
Esmee is in the eighth grade at the
NYC Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies, a selective public school in
the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. My wife and I have noticed since she
started there in February of last year that she has a lot of homework. We moved
from Pacific Palisades, California, where Esmee also had a great deal of homework
at Paul Revere Charter Middle School in Brentwood. I have found, at both
schools, that whenever I bring up the homework issue with teachers or
administrators, their response is that they are required by the state to cover
a certain amount of material. There are standardized tests, and
everyone—students, teachers, schools—is being evaluated on those tests. I’m not
interested in the debates over teaching to the test or No Child Left Behind.
What I am interested in is what my daughter is doing during those nightly hours
between 8 o’clock and midnight, when she finally gets to bed. During the
school week, she averages three to four hours of homework a night and six and a
half hours of sleep.
Some evenings, when we force her to
go to bed, she will pretend to go to sleep and then get back up and continue to
do homework for another hour. The following mornings are awful, my daughter
teary-eyed and exhausted but still trudging to school.
I wonder: What is the exact nature
of the work that is turning her into a sleep-deprived teen zombie so many
mornings?
I decide to do my daughter’s
homework for one typical week.
Monday
By late afternoon, I am tired after
filing a magazine article on deadline. I’m not looking forward to homework.
When I arrive home, a few minutes ahead of Esmee, I consider delaying my week
of homework, but then I realize that Esmee can never put off her week of
homework.
So I am relieved when she tells me
she doesn’t have much tonight. We have 11 algebra equations. (Esmee’s algebra
class is doing a section on polynomials, a word I haven’t heard in decades.) We
also have to read 79 pages of Angela’s Ashesand find “three
important and powerful quotes from the section with 1–2 sentence analyses of
its [sic] significance.” There is also the Earth Science test tomorrow
on minerals.
I am surprised by the amount of
reading. Reading and writing is what I do for a living, but in my middle age,
I’ve slowed down. So a good day of reading for me, assuming I like the book and
I’m not looking for quotable passages, is between 50 and 100 pages.
Seventy-nine pages while scanning for usable material—for a magazine essay or for
homework—seems like at least two hours of reading.
But the math is easier than I
thought. We are simplifying equations, which involves reducing (–18m2n)2 × (–(1/6)mn2) to –54m5n4, which I get the hang of again after Esmee’s good
instructions. I breeze through those 11 equations in about 40 minutes and even
correct Esmee when she gets one wrong. (I think. I may be overconfident.)
I then start reading Angela’s
Ashes while Esmee studies for Earth Science. We have only one copy of
the book, so we decide it will be more efficient to stagger our work. I’ve
never read Angela’s Ashes, and it’s easy to see the appeal. Frank
McCourt, whom I once saw give a beautiful tribute to Peter Matthiessen at a Paris
Review Revel, is engaging and funny. But after 30 minutes I am only
about 16 pages in, and Esmee has finished studying for Earth Science and needs
the book.
So we switch. It is now time for me
to struggle with Earth Science. The textbook Esmee’s class is using is simply
called Earth Science and was written by Edward J. Tarbuck and
Frederick K. Lutgens. “The term synergistic applies to
the combined efforts of Tarbuck and Lutgens,” says the biographical note at the
beginning. “Early in their careers, they shared frustrations with the limited
availability of textbooks designed for non-majors.” So they rolled up their
sleeves and wrote their own textbook, which reads exactly like every other
textbook. “If you look again at Table 1,” begins the section on silicates,
“you can see that the two most abundant elements in Earth’s crust are silicon
and oxygen.” I spend the next five minutes looking for Table 1, which is
12 pages earlier in the book.
Then come carbonates, oxides, the
sulfates and sulfides, halides, and—I am asleep after about 20 minutes.
When I wake up, I go out to find
Esmee in the living room, where she is buried inAngela’s Ashes. I
struggle with Earth Science for another half hour, attempting to memorize
rather than understand, before I give up and decide I have to get my reading
done. Since Esmee is using our copy of Angela’s Ashes, I figure I
will just read another 63 pages of the novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour
Bookstore, which I started yesterday. I don’t make it. I’m asleep for good
after about 15 pages.
Esmee stays up until a little after
midnight to finish her reading.
Total
time: 3–5 hours
I don’t
remember how much homework was assigned to me
in eighth grade. I do know that I didn’t do very much of it and that what
little I did, I did badly. My study habits were atrocious. After school I often
went to friends’ houses, where I sometimes smoked marijuana, and then I
returned home for dinner; after lying to my parents about not having homework
that night, I might have caught an hour or two of television. In Southern
California in the late ’70s, it was totally plausible that an eighth grader
would have no homework at all.
If my daughter came home and said
she had no homework, I would know she was lying. It is inconceivable that her
teachers wouldn’t assign any.
The teacher was unmoved, saying that
the homework was reasonable. If Esmee was struggling, perhaps she should be
moved to a remedial class.
What has changed? It seems that
while there has been widespread panic about American students’ falling behind
their peers in Singapore, Shanghai, Helsinki, and everywhere else in science
and mathematics, the length of the school day is about the same. The school
year hasn’t been extended. Student-teacher ratios don’t seem to have changed
much. No, our children are going to catch up with those East Asian kids on
their own damn time.
Every parent I know in New York City
comments on how much homework their children have. These lamentations are a
ritual whenever we are gathered around kitchen islands talking about our kids’
schools.
Is it too much?
Well, imagine if after putting in a
full day at the office—and school is pretty much what our children do for a
job—you had to come home and do another four or so hours of office work. Monday
through Friday. Plus Esmee gets homework every weekend. If your job required
that kind of work after work, how long would you last?
Tuesday
My younger daughter, Lola, 11, is a
little jealous that I am spending my evenings doing homework with her sister. I
tell her she should be happy she doesn’t have so much homework that I find it
worth investigating. She agrees with this, but still makes me feel so guilty
about it that I let her watch Pretty Little Liars, her favorite
show.
The co-op board meets—and over my
objections makes me secretary—before I can start on Esmee’s homework.
Tonight we have 12 more algebra
equations, 45 more pages of Angela’s Ashes, and a Humanities
project for which we have to write one to two pages in the style of The Absolutely
True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, the young-adult novel by Sherman Alexie. There
is also a Spanish test tomorrow on irregular verbs.
The algebra is fast becoming my
favorite part of this project. I may have picked an easy week, but something
about combining like terms, inverting negative exponents, and then simplifying
equations causes a tingle in a part of my brain that is usually dormant. Also,
the work is finite: just 12 equations.
The Spanish, however, presents a
completely different challenge. Here, Esmee shows me that we have to memorize
the conjugations of the future tense of regular and irregular verbs, and she
slides me a sheet with tener, tendré, tendrás,tendrá, tendremos,
etc., multiplied by dozens of verbs. My daughter has done a commendable job
memorizing the conjugations. But when I ask her what the verb tener means
(“to have,” if I recall), she repeats, “Memorization, not rationalization.”
She doesn’t know what the words
mean.
I spend a few minutes looking over
the material, attempting to memorize the list of verbs and conjugations. Then
it takes me about half an hour to memorize the three most common conjugation
patterns. I decide to skip the irregular verbs.
Esmee already worked on her Spanish
this afternoon, so she goes right to the Humanities project, which she has been
looking forward to. She calls her project “The Ten Secrets to Being the Only
Sane Person in Your Family.”
No. 6: Don’t Listen to Anything
Your Father Says.
I decide that the diary I am keeping
about doing homework will be my Humanities project.
Soon it’s 11 p.m., and I start
bugging Esmee to go to bed. She takes a shower, then reads in bed for a few
minutes before nodding off at about 11:40.
I sneak in and grab her copy of Angela’s
Ashes and catch up on my reading, getting all the way to page 120. The
hardship of too much homework pales in comparison with the McCourt family’s
travails. Still, because we are sharing our copy of Angela’s Ashes,
I end up going to bed an hour after Esmee.
Total
time: 3 hours
One evening
when Esmee was in sixth grade, I walked
into her room at 1:30 a.m. to find her red-eyed, exhausted, and starting
on her third hour of math. This was partially her fault, as she had let a
couple of days’ worth of worksheets pile up, but it was also the nature of the
work itself. One assignment had her calculating the area and perimeter of a
series of shapes so complex that my wife, who trained as an architect in the
Netherlands, spent half an hour on it before coming up with the right answers.
The problem was not the complexity of the work, it was the amount of
calculating required. The measurements included numbers like 78 13/64, and all
this multiplying and dividing was to be done without a calculator. Another
exercise required Esmee to find the distance from Sacramento—we were living in
California—to every other state capital in America, in miles and kilometers.
This last one caused me to question the value of the homework.
What possible purpose could this
serve?, I asked her teacher in a meeting.
She explained that this sort of
cross-disciplinary learning—state capitals in a math class—was now popular. She
added that by now, Esmee should know all her state capitals. She went on to say
that in class, when the students had been asked to name the capital of Texas,
Esmee answered Texas City.
But this is a math class, I said. I
don’t even know the state capitals.
The teacher was unmoved, saying that
she felt the homework load was reasonable. If Esmee was struggling with the
work, then perhaps she should be moved to a remedial class.
That night, in an e-mail chain
started by the class parent to seek chaperones for a field trip, I removed the
teacher’s name, changed the subject line, and then asked the other parents in
the class whether their children found the homework load onerous.
After a few minutes, replies started
coming in from parents along the lines of “Thank God, we thought we were the
only ones,” “Our son has been up until 2 a.m. crying,” and so forth. Half
the class’s parents responded that they thought too much homework was an issue.
Since then, I’ve been wary of
Esmee’s workload, and I’ve often suspected that teachers don’t have any idea
about the cumulative amount of homework the kids are assigned when they are
taking five academic classes. There is little to no coordination among teachers
in most schools when it comes to assignments and test dates.
Wednesday
This morning, we attended Lola’s
class “celebration” of the Revolutionary War. The class had prepared dioramas
of the role women played in the Revolution, the Boston Massacre, the Battle of
Yorktown, and other signal events of the period. In hand-drawn murals
explaining the causes of the conflict, the main theme was that excessive and
unfair taxation had caused the colonies to rebel. The British had run up
massive debts in the French and Indian War and wanted the colonists to repay
them. The colonies also wanted, several children added, freedom. When pressed
as to what that meant, they seemed unsure, until one boy came up with “Freedom
to do what they want!”
I came home and took a nap.
My older daughter’s homework load
this evening is just seven algebra equations, studying for a Humanities test on
industrialization, and more Earth Science.
This algebra unit, on polynomials,
seems to be a matter of remembering a few tricks. Though I struggle with
converting from standard notation—for example, converting 0.00009621 to
scientific notation is tricky (it’s 9.621 × 10−5, which
makes no intuitive sense to me)—it is pleasing that at some point I arrive at
an answer, right or wrong, and my work is done and the teacher will give me
credit for doing my homework.
My daughter has the misfortune of
living through a period of peak homework. But it turns out that there is no
correlation between homework and achievement.
Earth Science is something else.
I’ve been dreading returning to Tarbuck and Lutgens since our first meeting.
And tonight, the chapter starts in the familiar dispiriting monotone. “Rocks
are any solid mass of mineral or mineral-like matter occurring naturally as
part of our planet.” But I am pleasantly surprised when T&L take a turn
into the rock cycle, laying out the differences between igneous, sedimentary,
and metamorphic rock in terms that are easy to understand and visualize. The
accompanying charts are helpful, and as I keep reading into the chapter on
igneous rocks, the differences between intrusive and extrusive igneous rocks
make clear sense.
The upcoming test in Humanities will
focus on John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, monopolies and trusts,
laissez-faire capitalism, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the foundation
of labor unions, the imposition of factory safety standards, and the populist
response to the grim conditions of the working man during the Industrial
Revolution. My daughter has a study guide she is ready to print out. But our
printer has just broken.
We end up borrowing our neighbor’s
printer. The logistics of picking up the printer, bringing it over to our
apartment, downloading the software, and then printing take about half an hour.
The study guide covers a wide range
of topics, from how Rockefeller gained control of the oil industry, to the rise
of monopolies and trusts, to the Sherman Antitrust Act, to the Triangle
Shirtwaist fire. Esmee and I have a pretty long talk about the causes of the
tragedy—the locked doors that prevented the young girls from taking breaks,
stealing merchandise, or escaping the flames; the flammable waste material that
had been allowed to accumulate—that leads to a discussion about trade unionism
and then about capitalism in general. This is, I realize, a logical
continuation of the conversation in my younger daughter’s class this morning,
which started with unwieldy dioramas and implausible impersonations of King
George. Freedom, in the form of unfettered capitalism, also has its downside. I
tell her my view: laborers have to organize into unions, because otherwise
those who control the capital have all the power.
“That’s why it’s called capitalism,”
Esmee says, “not laborism.”
She falls asleep reading Angela’s
Ashes.
Total
time: 3 hours
My daughter
has the misfortune of living through a
period of peak homework.
It turns out that there is no
correlation between homework and achievement. According to a 2005 study by the
Penn State professors Gerald K. LeTendre and David P. Baker, some of
the countries that score higher than the U.S. on testing in the Trends in
International Mathematics and Science Study—Japan and Denmark, for example—give
less homework, while some of those scoring lower, including Thailand and
Greece, assign more. Why pile on the homework if it doesn’t make even a
testable difference, and in fact may be harmful?
“It’s a response to this whole
globalized, competitive process,” says Richard Walker, a co-author of the book Reforming
Homework. “You get parents demanding their children get more homework
because their children are competing against the whole world.”
The irony is that some countries
where the school systems are held up as models for our schools have been going
in the opposite direction of the U.S., giving less homework and implementing
narrower curricula built to encourage deeper understanding rather than broader
coverage.
In the U.S., or at least in the
schools my daughters have attended, there has been no sign of teachers’ letting
up on homework. According to a University of Michigan study, the average time
spent weekly on homework increased from two hours and 38 minutes in 1981 to
three hours and 58 minutes in 2004. Data from a 2007 National Center for
Education Statistics survey showed American students between grades nine and 12
doing an average of 6.8 hours of homework a week—which sounds pretty reasonable
compared with what my daughter is assigned—and 42 percent of students
saying they have homework five or more days a week. Esmee has hours of homework
every night. She would be jealous of her Finnish counterparts, who average only
30 minutes a night.
I’m not interested in No Child Left
Behind. What I am interested in is what my daughter is doing between
8 o’clock and midnight, when she finally gets to bed.
Attitudes toward homework swing in
cycles of roughly 30 years, according to Harris Cooper, a professor of
education at Duke University and the author of TheBattle Over Homework.
We went from piling on the homework because of fears of a science gap brought on
by Sputnik in the late 1950s, to backing off in the Woodstock generation of the
’70s amid worries about overstressing kids, to the ’90s fears of falling behind
East Asian students. The current backlash against homework has been under way
so long—expressed in books like 2006’s The Case Against Homework,
by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish, and in the 2009 documentary film Race
to Nowhere—that we may now be living through a backlash against the
backlash, at least in elite schools. “We’re in a heavy-homework part of the
cycle,” Cooper says. “The increasing competition for elite high schools and
colleges has parents demanding more homework.”
Back in California, when I raised
the issue of too much homework on that e‑mail chain, about half the parents
were pleased that someone had brought this up, and many had already spoken to
the math teacher about it. Others were eager to approach school officials. But
at least one parent didn’t agree, and forwarded the whole exchange to the
teacher in question.
As the person who instigated the
conversation, I was called in to the vice principal’s office and accused of
cyberbullying. I suggested that parents’ meeting to discuss their children’s
education was generally a positive thing; we merely chose to have our meeting
in cyberspace instead of the school cafeteria.
He disagreed, saying the teacher
felt threatened. And he added that students weren’t allowed to cyberbully, so
parents should be held to the same standard.
I explained that we never intended
for the teacher to read those notes. This was a forum where we were airing our
concerns.
What was frustrating me was that the
underlying issue of ridiculous amounts of busywork was getting buried beneath
the supposed method we had used to discuss the issue.
Even when I showed the vice
principal examples of the homework assignments, he didn’t see them as outside
the usual in terms of content or time commitment.
I left believing I hadn’t solved the
problem.
Yet something did change. Over the
next few months, the math teacher assigned a more manageable workload. My
daughter now went to bed before 10 o’clock most nights.
Thursday
Parent-teacher conferences at the
Lab School are similar to what I imagine speed dating to be like. Each
conference is three minutes, and parents can attend an afternoon or evening
session. My wife and I choose the afternoon. The conferences are strictly first
come, first served. At noon, my wife and I sit in chairs outside each classroom
waiting our turn, sometimes for as long as 45 minutes. A student is supposed to
be timing each conference, but the students often wander off, and the teachers
ignore the parents’ knocking after three minutes.
In each conference, I urge the
teachers to give less homework. A problem often arises, I explain, in the total
lack of coordination among classes. A Humanities assignment requiring the kids
to render in words, pictures, or both a scene fromAngela’s Ashes, say,
can take an hour or two, yet most teachers don’t seem to consider anything
creative to be homework. The creative stuff, like drawing or writing a short
story or preparing a scene from a play, is all extra, to be completed in
addition to the hours of humanities, math, science, and Spanish.
The teachers usually respond in one
of two ways. They nod sympathetically and agree that the kids do have a lot of
work, as if they have nothing to do with the assigning of it. Or they say that
time management is one of the skills that a successful high-school student will
need, and if my daughter wants to perform in an elite high school, she had
better learn that in middle school. Both answers amount to essentially the same
argument: the vast amounts of homework are somehow handed down from on high,
and mere teachers can do nothing to tamper with the ordained quantities.
Because I happen to be in the middle
of my week of homework when this year’s parent-teacher conferences take place,
I am uniquely equipped to discuss the work Esmee is doing. And over the years,
I have noticed that the amount of homework does let up, slightly, after the
conferences—if enough parents complain. However, there is always a clique of
parents who are happy with the amount of homework. In fact, they would prefer more.
I tend not to get along with that type of parent.
At a meeting with Esmee’s Earth
Science teacher, I find out that my daughter has in fact not been giving me all
the work. There is a worksheet, for example, requiring a reinterpretation and
annotation of the rock cycle that Esmee never handed over. The teacher finds an
extra copy for me. So I have another date with Tarbuck and Lutgens.
When I get home, Esmee tells me she
got a C on her math homework from the night before because she hadn’t made an
answer column. Her correct answers were there, at the end of each neatly
written-out equation, yet they weren’t segregated into a separate column on the
right side of each page. I’m amazed that the pettiness of this doesn’t seem to
bother her. School is training her well for the inanities of adult life.
Our math homework this evening is
practicing multiplying a polynomial by a monomial, and we breeze through it in
about half an hour.
Then we have to translate some song
lyrics from Spanish to English. Esmee’s Spanish teacher already told my wife
and me in our conference this afternoon that she can tell when the kids use
Google Translate—which is all the time. It’s a wonder: simply type in the
lyrics, copy down the translation, and then, in an attempt to throw off the
teacher, add a few mistakes. So Si te quedas a mi lado, si te subes en
el tren, which Google renders as “If you stay by my side, if you get on the
train,” becomes “If you stay by my side, if you go up on the train.”
Total
time: 1.5 hours
The more
immersed I become in Esmee’s homework, the
more reassured I am that the teachers, principals, and school-board members who
are coming up with this curriculum are earnest about their work. They are
making difficult decisions about what to teach or not teach in the limited
class time they have. The overall education being imparted is secular,
humanistic, multicultural, and intensely quantitative. The math Esmee is doing
at 13, for example, is beyond what I was doing at that age. Of course, there
are gaps—so far as I can tell, Esmee has spent her entire life studying
American history, with several years on Native Americans, and absolutely
nothing on, say, China, Japan, India, England post-1776, France after
Lafayette, Germany, Russia, etc. Like many parents, I wish there was more
emphasis on creative work, on writing assignments that didn’t require Esmee to
use eight “transition words” and seven metaphors. This school has clearly made
choices—these kids are going to get very good at algebra and maybe a little
less good at creative writing. I can’t say I fault them in this, though I know
what I would prefer to spend my days doing.
If Esmee masters the material
covered in her classes, she will emerge as a well-rounded, socially aware
citizen, a serious reader with good reasoning capabilities and a decent knowledge
of the universe she lives in. What more can I ask of her school?
But are these many hours of homework
the only way to achieve this metamorphosis of child into virtuous citizen?
According to my daughter’s teachers, principals, and administrators, the answer
is an emphatic yes. Certainly, they have told me, all the homework does no
harm. As I watch my daughter struggle through school days on too little sleep
and feel almost guilty if she wants to watch an hour of television instead of
advancing a few yards in the trench warfare of her weekly homework routine, I
have my doubts. When would she ever have time to, say, read a book for
pleasure? Or write a story or paint a picture or play the guitar?
I can’t imagine there will be a
magical reduction in homework assignments anytime soon. But what I will
continue to do at every opportunity is remind teachers that if each is
assigning an hour of homework a night, and the average kid is taking four or
five academic classes, then that is simply an unrealistic cumulative workload.
Give the kids a break. Once in a while. I don’t expect teachers to drastically
curtail their assignments, just to occasionally lighten the load. Of course, I
may just be balancing the scales against those parents asking for extra assignments
for their child.
Has this worked? Well, it did in
Brentwood, even if it took parental pressure. And though I can’t draw a causal
line between my day of speed dating—I mean, going to parent-teacher
conferences—at the Lab School and a reduction in homework assignments, it did
seem to me that in the months afterward, Esmee was able to get more sleep. At
least a couple of minutes’ worth.
Esmee just started high school. She
has told me she feels that the many hours of homework in middle school have
prepared her well. “There is no way they can give me more homework,” she
reasons.
I have my doubts.
As for Lola: When it came time to
select a middle school, she took the admissions test for Lab and listed it as
her first choice, despite my telling her that in my view, the school is too
rigidly focused on academics and assigns too much homework. Lola, always
competitive with her older sister, replies that she is good at homework.
She’s going to need to be. She was
accepted at Lab.
Friday
Lola is sleeping over at a friend’s
house. Esmee hasn’t started her weekend homework yet. Instead, she’s watching
episodes of Portlandia on her computer. The weekend homework
includes another 15 algebra equations, studying for a Spanish test on Monday,
and, of course, more Angela’s Ashes. She also has an algebra
midterm on Tuesday. I tell Esmee that this seems strange—didn’t she just have
an algebra midterm? She says that in her class, they have more than one midterm
every term.
My wife and I decide to go out to
dinner, and on our way up Hudson Street, we run into another couple we are
close friends with. This couple’s oldest daughter also goes to Lab. She’s at
home doing homework.
We stand on the sidewalk for a few
minutes, chatting. The husband is smoking a joint, and he hands it over. I
haven’t smoked in a few months, but it’s Friday night and I’ve been doing
homework all week. I take a few tokes. We part ways, and my wife and I go to a
Japanese restaurant, where, as soon as I am seated, I regret smoking. It’s
going to be hell trying to do algebra tonight with the head I have on right
now.
Nonetheless, when I’m home, I sit at
the dining table and attempt to work my way through the polynomial worksheet. I
am immediately lost in all the 2x(–3y5+ 3x2)6s. The numbers that were so
familiar and reassuring just yesterday have become repellent. I realize,
sitting there, failing to solve my algebra homework, that I have inadvertently
yet perfectly re-created my own eighth-grade homework conditions: getting
stoned, attempting math, and failing at it.
I consider my daughter, who to my
knowledge has never smoked marijuana. That’s a good thing, I think in my hazy
state. I wouldn’t wish this condition—attempting algebra when high—on anyone.
One of the reasons I believe my
daughter hasn’t yet tried marijuana is because she simply doesn’t have the
time.
I decide to give up on algebra for
the night. It’s only Friday, and I have until Monday to finish my homework.
