Homework, the Pedants’ Lackey

Every American student is familiar with it. Every American student dreads it. Every American student has felt it: the pinch of homework. It is the bane of the high school student. It bogs students down, takes up their time, and stresses them out. And for what? Increased test scores that can be supported by a single statistic? Homework is a stressor that many a high school student has complained about and despises dealing with. There are several reasons for non-compliance, the most common being lack of motivation and failure to see its benefits, and they all come back to the fact that students either have too much else to think about or just do not learn in the way that homework attempts to teach. I also know that homework is nothing more than a burden for me. It is something that schools should seriously consider sharply reducing or making optional (to appease both those who study with it and those who have no use for it). For myself and many other students, reducing the workload and increasing in-class learning time instead of assigning a plethora of minute labors to be completed on one’s own time would be an ideal academic model that would produce the best results.

I am ranked second in my class. Therefore, the stereotype that I either like homework or embrace it far too much might be applied to me. But that is simply not the case. It is in fact the opposite; truly, I loathe homework. I find it incessant, tedious, stressful, and above all, distracting from responsibilities like college applications and the idea that, God forbid, I relax or take a break every now and again. I am a conceptual learner, so applying concepts to cookie-cutter problems manufactured by pedants will teach me little to nothing. I am the type of student who learns through discussion, debate, and and analysis (a side note: to me, analysis does not mean sitting down and spending hours writing an analytical paper by performing research – it means talking about all the facets of an idea and moving on from it afterward). It is why I can thrive in an English class and enjoy it at the same time, rather than just thrive in a math class and not really look forward to it. That being said, English classes tend to assign the most homework. In my mind, the system is flawed. Classes where learning could best be achieved without homework assign it the most, while classes that do need it either do not assign it correctly or at the right times. What good does it do students to have to do homework that is misplaced or unneeded?

I also find it useless to learn about the same thing for weeks and then never touch it again. It is only teaching for the sake of following a curriculum. It can be equated to mass-production of canned food, in that there is a disregard for quality in favor of quantity. Is that doing justice to the students, preparing them for the world? Or is it just shoving them through the machine, to make room for the next? Learning styles are not universal, just as there is no one type of human being. Learning must be individualized to meet students’ needs; for me, that would mean ridding me of homework.

I know it is impossible for every student to receive a perfect education under the public school system in this country. Some students learn better with homework, students who differ from me. Others would be happy if homework were only reduced, while some want to see it gone completely. If the homework problem can be considered side-by-side with the poor education of many of America’s citizens, then the solution for both would be to customize learning and make it as individualistic as possible to motivate self-directed learning. Our school system is trying to do that now, with the mass customized learning initiative, and I think it is a step in the right direction. But it takes more than that. Personally, I would like to see a reduction in homework to little or none. As I stated before, I do not learn well that way. I would like to see more in-class learning, with debates being fostered even if they stray from the topic of original discussion. In a good debate something is always learned, and school is about learning whether it is the “correct” learning or not. Taking away the take-home aspect of school would give me a renewed motivation and desire to learn, because I would be able to focus all my energy on the day rather than spend it dreading the night ahead.

I believe that homework and the educational experience go hand-in-hand. By catering to the students’ desires, learning will come more naturally to them and they will be more inclined to work. By reducing homework or making it optional, the dogmatic pedants who have championed it for so long as the only way to guarantee learning could single-handedly rejuvenate their entire system. And honestly, I think they would be more than impressed with the results.