Homework: An Unchecked Tool as a Weapon

Santiago Dent
Wells
ENG 105: Advanced Composition
17 November 2019

Homework: How An Unchecked Tool Can Be a Weapon

It is something so ingrained in modernized culture that nobody is alive to remember a time without it. It’s part of almost everyone’s lives, a mandatory task that is to be completed simply because it’s mandatory. It can take any form, from rote memorization to critical thinking. Often, students work just as hard trying to find shortcuts to its completion as they would on the content itself. Homework is commonly understood as encompassing any academic assignment to be completed outside of class. What a horridly broad definition, open to interpretation by anyone finding themselves in the powerful position of assigning homework. Will this person assign something easy to complete uniformly – and therefore easy to grade – or something that each student can answer differently, requiring individualized feedback? As can be expected, the path of least resistance is far too easy to turn down, and as such students most often receive the former version of homework, rather than the latter; homework that exists simply to check both a teacher’s and student’s respective boxes, or busywork.

The reason this is allowed to happen comes down to the very definition of homework. As previously noted, homework can quite literally be anything assigned for completion outside of class. I want to stress how broad this definition is; homework doesn’t even have to be related to the course material, as I’ve been assigned crossword puzzles in math when the teacher didn’t have time to come up with a legitimate assignment. Monica Fuglei, a writer for an academic blog by Concordia University-Portland, highlights the detriments of busy work in her recollection of responses to the assignments, “One student shared that on occasion they spent more time on homework than at school, while another commenter pointed out that, ‘We don’t give slow-working children a longer school day, but we consistently give them a longer homework day’” (Fuglei). These anecdotes from students reflect the common perception of homework, and isn’t a positive one. The second quote provided by Fuglei is especially striking, as many people who are efficient at homework (or those who create it and fully understand it by default) do not realize how much longer the same assignment can take different students to complete. The thought of spending more time outside of school than in it on a subject is staggering, and is even worse when that time spent doesn’t increase a student’s understanding of the material. It’s enough to make one wonder what the assigners of this work must be thinking, and the answer is simple: they aren’t.

Wasting valuable at-home time that could be spent with family or on other activities is only the tip of the iceberg, however. Homework, in excess, actually harms children both physically and mentally. This is supported by analysis of a 2013 Stanford University study by Sandra Levy, a writer for the online publication Healthline, “The researchers asked students whether they experienced physical symptoms of stress, such as headaches, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, weight loss, and stomach problems. More than 80 percent of students reported having at least one stress-related symptom in the past month, and 44 percent said they had experienced three or more symptoms” (Levy). This puts the negligent assignment of homework beyond a mere nuisance and into new territory; it can be used to damage students. This surely is not the intended effect of homework, and the best solution short of an outright prohibition is to more stringently define what is allowed to be homework.

What definition is then necessary for the proper implementation of homework? We need to define it in specific terms that do not allow for excess or pointless assignments. A good way to avoid both of these pitfalls is by defining homework as something that requires individualized feedback to students. By implementing this, educators must create more specific and complex assignments, which mitigates students being inundated by too many assignments as the teacher cannot so easily pump them out. It also helps guard against busywork, as it’s nearly impossible to purposefully craft busy work that needs individual feedback after. Fuglei echoes this stipulation later in the same article, “Gerald LeTendre, of Penn State’s Education Policy Studies department points out that the shotgun approach to homework, when students all receive the same photocopied assignment which is then checked as complete rather than discussed individually with the student, is ‘not very effective.’ He goes on to say that, ‘If there’s no feedback and no monitoring, the homework is probably not effective’” (Fuglei).

The misappropriation of homework-assigning powers is actually a much bigger issue than many assume, as it is something that isn’t often thought about since we are so used to it. Complacency doesn’t signify correctness, however, and if we were not already used to such an exorbitant amount of homework we would almost surely see an issue with it. This is an issue that affects almost every student in every developed nation, affecting their mental and physical health, their free time and time for other commitments, and even affecting their confidence in their understanding of the coursework – in the opposite way to what was intended. Homework needs to be redefined immediately, for the betterment of every student’s future.
 
Works Cited
Fuglei, Monica. “The Homework Debate: The Case Against Homework.” Room 241, 6 Apr. 2018, https://education.cu-portland.edu/blog/classroom-resources/the-homework-debate-t...
Levy, Sandra. “Is Too Much Homework Bad for Kids’ Health?” Healthline, 22 Aug. 2019, https://www.healthline.com/health-news/children-more-homework-means-more-stress-...