the cult of homework j pinsker

The Cult of Homework

America has long had a fickle relationship with homework. A century or so ago, progressive reformers argued that it made kids unduly stressed, which later led in some cases to district-level bans on it for all grades under seventh. This anti-homework sentiment faded, though, amid mid-century fears that the U.S. was falling behind the Soviet Union (which led to more homework), only to resurface in the 1960s and '70s, when a more open culture came to see homework as stifling play and creativity (which led to less). But this didn't last either: In the '80s, government researchers blamed America's schools for its economic troubles and recommended ramping homework up once more.

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The cult of homework: america’s devotion to the practice stems in part from the fact that it’s what today’s parents and teachers grew up with themselves..

Hillsborough, California, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, is one district that has changed its ways. The district, which includes three elementary schools and a middle school, worked with teachers and convened panels of parents in order to come up with a homework policy that would allow students more unscheduled time to spend with their families or to play. In August 2017, it rolled out an updated policy, which emphasized that homework should be “meaningful” and banned due dates that fell on the day after a weekend or a break.

“The first year was a bit bumpy,” says Louann Carlomagno, the district’s superintendent. She says the adjustment was at times hard for the teachers, some of whom had been doing their job in a similar fashion for a quarter of a century. Parents’ expectations were also an issue. Carlomagno says they took some time to “realize that it was okay not to have an hour of homework for a second grader—that was new.”

Most of the way through year two, though, the policy appears to be working more smoothly. “The students do seem to be less stressed based on conversations I’ve had with parents,” Carlomagno says. It also helps that the students performed just as well on the state standardized test last year as they have in the past.

Earlier this year, the district of Somerville, Massachusetts, also rewrote its homework policy, reducing the amount of homework its elementary and middle schoolers may receive. In grades six through eight, for example, homework is capped at an hour a night and can only be assigned two to three nights a week.

Jack Schneider, an education professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell whose daughter attends school in Somerville, is generally pleased with the new policy. But, he says, it’s part of a bigger, worrisome pattern. “The origin for this was general parental dissatisfaction, which not surprisingly was coming from a particular demographic,” Schneider says. “Middle-class white parents tend to be more vocal about concerns about homework … They feel entitled enough to voice their opinions.”

Schneider is all for revisiting taken-for-granted practices like homework, but thinks districts need to take care to be inclusive in that process. “I hear approximately zero middle-class white parents talking about how homework done best in grades K through two actually strengthens the connection between home and school for young people and their families,” he says. Because many of these parents already feel connected to their school community, this benefit of homework can seem redundant. “They don’t need it,” Schneider says, “so they’re not advocating for it.”

That doesn’t mean, necessarily, that homework is more vital in low-income districts. In fact, there are different, but just as compelling, reasons it can be burdensome in these communities as well. Allison Wienhold, who teaches high-school Spanish in the small town of Dunkerton, Iowa, has phased out homework assignments over the past three years. Her thinking: Some of her students, she says, have little time for homework because they’re working 30 hours a week or responsible for looking after younger siblings.

As educators reduce or eliminate the homework they assign, it’s worth asking what amount and what kind of homework is best for students. It turns out that there’s some disagreement about this among researchers, who tend to fall in one of two camps.

In the first camp is Harris Cooper, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. Cooper conducted a review of the existing research on homework in the mid-2000s, and found that, up to a point, the amount of homework students reported doing correlates with their performance on in-class tests. This correlation, the review found, was stronger for older students than for younger ones.

This conclusion is generally accepted among educators, in part because it’s compatible with “the 10-minute rule,” a rule of thumb popular among teachers suggesting that the proper amount of homework is approximately 10 minutes per night, per grade level—that is, 10 minutes a night for first graders, 20 minutes a night for second graders, and so on, up to two hours a night for high schoolers.

In Cooper’s eyes, homework isn’t overly burdensome for the typical American kid. He points to a 2014 Brookings Institution report that found “little evidence that the homework load has increased for the average student”; onerous amounts of homework, it determined, are indeed out there, but relatively rare. Moreover, the report noted that most parents think their children get the right amount of homework, and that parents who are worried about under-assigning outnumber those who are worried about over-assigning. Cooper says that those latter worries tend to come from a small number of communities with “concerns about being competitive for the most selective colleges and universities.”

According to Alfie Kohn, squarely in camp two, most of the conclusions listed in the previous three paragraphs are questionable. Kohn, the author of  The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing , considers homework to be a “reliable extinguisher of curiosity,” and has several complaints with the evidence that Cooper and others cite in favor of it. Kohn notes, among other things, that Cooper’s 2006 meta-analysis doesn’t establish causation, and that its central correlation is based on children’s (potentially unreliable) self-reporting of how much time they spend doing homework. (Kohn’s prolific writing on the subject alleges numerous other methodological faults.)

In fact, other correlations make a compelling case that homework doesn’t help. Some countries whose students regularly outperform American kids on standardized tests, such as Japan and Denmark, send their kids home with less schoolwork, while students from some countries with higher homework loads than the U.S., such as Thailand and Greece, fare worse on tests. (Of course, international comparisons can be fraught because so many factors, in education systems and in societies at large, might shape students’ success.)

Kohn also takes issue with the way achievement is commonly assessed. “If all you want is to cram kids’ heads with facts for tomorrow’s tests that they’re going to forget by next week, yeah, if you give them more time and make them do the cramming at night, that could raise the scores,” he says. “But if you’re interested in kids who know how to think or enjoy learning, then homework isn’t merely ineffective, but counterproductive.”

His concern is, in a way, a philosophical one. “The practice of homework assumes that only academic growth matters, to the point that having kids work on that most of the school day isn’t enough,” Kohn says. What about homework’s effect on quality time spent with family? On long-term information retention? On critical-thinking skills? On social development? On success later in life? On happiness? The research is quiet on these questions.

Another problem is that research tends to focus on homework’s quantity rather than its quality, because the former is much easier to measure than the latter. While experts generally agree that the substance of an assignment matters greatly (and that a lot of homework is uninspiring busywork), there isn’t a catchall rule for what’s best—the answer is often specific to a certain curriculum or even an individual student.

Given that homework’s benefits are so narrowly defined (and even then, contested), it’s a bit surprising that assigning so much of it is often a classroom default, and that more isn’t done to make the homework that is assigned more enriching. A number of things are preserving this state of affairs—things that have little to do with whether homework helps students learn.

Jack Schneider, the Massachusetts parent and professor, thinks it’s important to consider the generational inertia of the practice. “The vast majority of parents of public-school students themselves are graduates of the public education system,” he says. “Therefore, their views of what is legitimate have been shaped already by the system that they would ostensibly be critiquing.” In other words, many parents’ own history with homework might lead them to expect the same for their children, and anything less is often taken as an indicator that a school or a teacher isn’t rigorous enough. (This dovetails with—and complicates—the finding that most parents think their children have the right amount of homework.)

Barbara Stengel, an education professor at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College, brought up two developments in the educational system that might be keeping homework rote and unexciting. The first is the importance placed in the past few decades on standardized testing, which looms over many public-school classroom decisions and frequently discourages teachers from trying out more creative homework assignments. “They could do it, but they’re afraid to do it, because they’re getting pressure every day about test scores,” Stengel says.

Second, she notes that the profession of teaching, with its relatively low wages and lack of autonomy, struggles to attract and support some of the people who might reimagine homework, as well as other aspects of education. “Part of why we get less interesting homework is because some of the people who would really have pushed the limits of that are no longer in teaching,” she says.

“In general, we have no imagination when it comes to homework,” Stengel says. She wishes teachers had the time and resources to remake homework into something that actually engages students. “If we had kids reading—anything, the sports page, anything that they’re able to read—that’s the best single thing. If we had kids going to the zoo, if we had kids going to parks after school, if we had them doing all of those things, their test scores would improve. But they’re not. They’re going home and doing homework that is not expanding what they think about.”

“Exploratory” is one word Mike Simpson used when describing the types of homework he’d like his students to undertake. Simpson is the head of the Stone Independent School, a tiny private high school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that opened in 2017. “We were lucky to start a school a year and a half ago,” Simpson says, “so it’s been easy to say we aren’t going to assign worksheets, we aren’t going assign regurgitative problem sets.” For instance, a half-dozen students recently built a 25-foot trebuchet on campus.

Simpson says he thinks it’s a shame that the things students have to do at home are often the least fulfilling parts of schooling: “When our students can’t make the connection between the work they’re doing at 11 o’clock at night on a Tuesday to the way they want their lives to be, I think we begin to lose the plot.”

When I talked with other teachers who did homework makeovers in their classrooms, I heard few regrets. Brandy Young, a second-grade teacher in Joshua, Texas, stopped assigning take-home packets of worksheets three years ago, and instead started asking her students to do 20 minutes of pleasure reading a night. She says she’s pleased with the results, but she’s noticed something funny. “Some kids,” she says, “really do like homework.” She’s started putting out a bucket of it for students to draw from voluntarily—whether because they want an additional challenge or something to pass the time at home.

Chris Bronke, a high-school English teacher in the Chicago suburb of Downers Grove, told me something similar. This school year, he eliminated homework for his class of freshmen, and now mostly lets students study on their own or in small groups during class time. It’s usually up to them what they work on each day, and Bronke has been impressed by how they’ve managed their time.

In fact, some of them willingly spend time on assignments at home, whether because they’re particularly engaged, because they prefer to do some deeper thinking outside school, or because they needed to spend time in class that day preparing for, say, a biology test the following period. “They’re making meaningful decisions about their time that I don’t think education really ever gives students the experience, nor the practice, of doing,” Bronke said.

The typical prescription offered by those overwhelmed with homework is to assign less of it—to subtract. But perhaps a more useful approach, for many classrooms, would be to create homework only when teachers and students believe it’s actually needed to further the learning that takes place in class—to start with nothing, and add as necessary.

From the Atlantic

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Blog Post #14 ~ “The Cult of Homework”

The Atlantic ‘s Joe Pinsker’s “ The Cult of Homework ” is an article over homework and its lack of importance/need. Covering multiple reasons, Pinsker shows how homework is not needed and is consuming.

First, Pinsker talks about how much time homework takes now then when it did 30 years ago. He says students now spend “about twice as much time spent on homework each day as their predecessors did in the 1990s”. Teachers today hand out homework in almost every class. In math you get homework every night, in science class it is every night, and in social studies and English it is about every two weeks. However in English, reading takes an hour at minimum each night. The average student today at Consol spend all night doing homework and are ” drained by their daily workload” from schools.

To prove his point, Pinsker gives examples about social experiments and examples around America of teachers providing less to no homework. One teacher gave students less homework because students in lower income families were not doing it. In conclusion, the lower income students were helping their parents take care of littler siblings. Another gave students work to do in class and gave them the choice to do it or not. The results of giving students time was that they got the work done and if they wanted to do deeper level thinking they could do it home. I personally like the ” give students time in class” option if homework is assigned because then when they get home they have less task to do which frees up space.

Finally, Pinsker talks about homework being a “crammer” before test. students will spend all night doing homework before a test, but then all the information is gone the next day. Homework is “counterproductive”. It has no effect in critically thinking skills or on social development too. To me, homework is busy work. Yes, students do need to practice but giving homework crams students schedules and makes their life harder and stressful. Teachers should provide class time to do work so students have the option to complete it at school.

School is 7+ hours long, it should not be made longer at home.

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English understanding

The cult of homework.

Looking at the article “The cult of Homework” by Joe Pinsker it is clear to see that he believes that there should be less homework and the homework that the teachers do give us should be valuable and significant. In a sense I think that he is right but I do think that there is exceptions to this rule. For example in AP classes and college level courses there should be a significant amount of homework in order to imitate the life of a college student. Though I do believe that elementary schools and intermediate schools should be exempt from all homework because that is when a meaningful relationship is established with your family and homework would get in the way of that.

All in all it is ok to see how Pinsker is right. Pinsker believes that there should be less of a load on kids in school and that homework should be meaningful, he shows this by a quote given saying that homework should be to go to a park or a zoo. While this sounds like a good idea in theory the reality is it might not always work. For the hardworking high schooler it is hard to find the time to work and go to school and do extracurriculars and do homework, yet we do it. But if a teacher changed our homework to something that takes time like going to the Zoo it could drastically hurt our grades. Though with elementary students I believe that there should be no homework. The time a little child spends with their parents when they are young will shape their families relationship for the rest of their lives and it is important to keep the relationship strong. With meaningless homework this would take up the family time a child may have had and change a relationship.

All together Pinsker is right about the fact that something needs to be done about the amount of homework in schools though some things may need to be changed about what he believes. The fact is that elementary students should not have homework and maybe some high schoolers are fine yet what we do with the amount of homework we give will 100% effect the lives of the students so make a decision for the better.

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Read Ch. 1 on Antifragility

In Chapter 12, we offered our suggestions for raising wiser kids. Advice for parents is on a separate page . On this page we repeat the outline of our advice for K-12 teachers and administrators. We do not repeat the text from the chapter, but we add in links and resources, including those we found after publishing the book.

MOST IMPORTANT SUGGESTIONS:

Check out the beta version of Greg's 10 principles for a happier, healthier, more empowered K-12 education.

Visit the Schools page at LetGrow.org, for dozens of great ideas.

Educate teachers, parents, and students about antifragility . Few reforms make sense if people think that kids are fragile. 

Encourage parents to not let kids have social media accounts until high school. Get it out of middle schools and elementary schools, where it is distracting kids from learning and may be particularly harmful to mental health (given that pre-teen girls have by far the largest increases in depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicide since teens began daily use of social media around 2011). 

K-12 schools should have policies to put devices away during the school day. See Jon and Jean Twenge’s NY Times article for more.

Here is Jon's most comprehensive lecture to educators, laying out the mental health crisis, its causes, and how to educate for strength and wisdom. At the Excel In Ed National Summit on Education Reform 2019:

Here are some ideas for elementary schools

​A. Homework in the early grades should be minimal. (See this essay, The Cult of Homework , by Joe Pinsker, in The Atlantic)

B. Give more recess with less supervision.

Watch " No Rules School "

C. Discourage the use of the words “safe” or “safety” for anything other than physical safety. 

D. Have a “no devices” policy. See our two reviews of the literature on rising rates of depression and anxiety, and the possible links to social media use (more so than to "screen time"), on our page for " better mental health ."   And see this short video from Rob Montz 

Here are some ideas for middle schools and high schools:

E. Protect or expand middle school recess.

F. Cultivate the intellectual virtues.

See the Intellectual Virtues Academy in Long Beach, CA.

See this  online guide to intellectual virtues

See Jason Baehr's  Educating for Intellectual Virtues: An Introductory Guide for College and University Instructors

G. Teach debate and offer debate club.

See the International Debate Education Association's guide to creating a debate club

Read  All Minus One: John Stuart Mill’s Ideas on Free Speech Illustrated  by Heterodox Academy

H. Promote reasoned discussion

Assign the OpenMind  program

Read Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts by Annie Duke

I. Explicitly reject the Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. Show all high school students this wonderful 4 minute clip of Van Jones speaking at the University of Chicago. Then speak often about the fact that students are antifragile. Without a common understanding of that concept, policies that promote growth and independence will sometimes be criticized as uncaring or insufficiently sensitive toward sudents' needs.

The Cult of Homework

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The difference with school communities, just looking at a normal mainstream school community, what I perceive is a community where there's lots of external goals. You've got five stickers for being great. You've got three they call them smiley faces or they have a name for something. So there's an external reward for being good. For me, it's just like, "Eh-eh." It's such a fundamentally wrong thing in a community to have that as your basis of if you're good or bad.

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America’s devotion to the practice stems in part from the fact that it’s what today’s parents and teachers grew up with themselves.

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Jewish Journal

Connect. inform. inspire., sci-fi author sarah pinsker on “we are satellites”.

• By Eve Rotman
• Published May 30, 2021

Science-fiction novelist Sarah Pinsker believes she owes an apology to the late Ursula K. Le Guin.

Approximately thirty years ago, Le Guin was discussing her essay, “Why are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” at an author Q&A in Toronto. A fourteen-year-old Pinsker raised her hand.

“Are we still afraid of dragons or is speculative fiction more accepted?”

“I don’t say ‘speculative fiction,’” replied Le Guin. “I say science fiction.”

“Well, I don’t!” Pinsker snapped.

Pinsker has carried the guilt with her ever since. Fortunately, it hasn’t prevented her from pursuing her own career as a songwriter and award-winning author. The daughter of a Reconstructionist rabbi, Pinsker grew up reading science fiction and fantasy. She graduated with a history degree from Goucher College and became the lead singer of “Stalking Horses,” a Baltimore-based rock band.

Pinsker wrote pieces for Uncanny Magazine and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, including the acclaimed short story, “The Transdimensional Horsemaster Rabbis of Mpumalanga Province.” In 2019, her short story collection, “Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea” (Small Beer Press, 2019) was awarded by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society.

In 2020, Pinsker became the second Jewish woman to ever receive a Nebula Award for Best Novel from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. “A Song for a New Day” (Berkley Books, 2019) was Pinsker’s first published book after years of writing novelettes. The heroine is a Jewish musician in a pandemic-ridden world, a creepy coincidence considering what real life had in store.

“When you write something near-future like that, you try to do a lot of homework–at least I do–and you try to ask a lot of questions, like, ‘What would happen?’” Pinsker explained over the phone. The author was sitting inside her family’s home in Maryland. “I think I must’ve asked the right questions and… it just happened that we got a very similar pandemic to the one that I was writing in a lot of ways. But I didn’t particularly want to ever live it and I was hoping not to, but here we are.”

Pinsker undoubtedly did her homework when writing her latest book, “We Are Satellites” (Berkley Books, 2021). “We Are Satellites” follows an all-American family adapting to the latest tech fad: surgically-implanted brain chips called “Pilots” that allow the wearer to multi-task at an extraordinary pace. Pinsker became curious about the role of technology in treating neurological disorders while working with the Epilepsy Foundation of the Chesapeake Region. She learned about implanted devices for individuals with epilepsy that “normalized” brain cells via neuromodulation. After attending various information sessions, Pinsker was inspired to begin typing the first draft of “We Are Satellites” inside a coffee shop.

“I was worried that whole time that life would catch up with this book before I got a chance to write it, which was a very real risk,” Pinsker laughed. “The near future that I write is so close to the present that there is a major [risk of] being lapped by the actual present.”

Perhaps someone is even designing an actual “Pilot” at this very moment.

“I know that Elon Musk has brain implants in mind,” Pinsker pointed out. She’s not wrong–the billionaire CEO is currently developing actual brain computer chips. “Google Glass failed, but there’s other stuff that people can do. And these companies have ethics officers, but profit is still their motive and there is always going to be a question of, ‘Will they listen to the ethics officer? Will the ethics officer think of everything?’ And I think that’s where science fiction sometimes comes in–we get to ask some of those questions.”

Ursula K. Le Guin would certainly agree.

Eve Rotman is a writer on the West Coast.

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