As the Board of Trustees considers policy changes regarding grades and behavior, it should also consider reforming the way in which homework is assigned. Many classes at Redwood overwhelm students with busy work or new material, leading to high levels of stress and incidences of cheating.
Many teachers may feel that the amount of homework assigned is necessary to cover the entire curriculum, but the district needs to emphasize a focus on understanding the material, not just answering an infinite number of questions about it.
Other districts have already implemented policies to deal with the issue. The Ross Valley School District, which includes elementary and middle schools Brookside, Hidden Valley, Manor, Wade Thomas, and White Hill, limits homework assignments to 20 minutes each class per night.
David Finanne, the principal of White Hill Middle School, said that this policy is effective because it strengthens students’ skills in a streamlined way.
“We feel like homework should be reviewing or practicing something they’ve already learned,” Finanne said. “For instance, in math, if we’re not teaching dividing fractions, I will not assign that if they have not taught it.”
The Board of Trustees should consider similar policies to ensure that students are being assigned only what homework is necessary, which will likely rarely exceed 20 minutes.
“If teachers create thoughtful homework that’s aligned with the concepts they’ve been covering, then I think 20 minutes per content area for sixth, seventh, eighth graders is more than enough time,” Finanne said. “That means that homework needs to be well done and class time well used.”
Senior Isabelle Carbone, who transferred to Redwood from The Branson School after her sophomore year, said that she has received noticeably more busy work while at Redwood.
“Not to say that some of the homework at Redwood isn’t meaningful or helpful or beneficial to learning,” Carbone said, “but I just feel that at times, I’ve done work just for the sake of doing work instead of for the sake of learning.”
Besides creating more meaningless work for both students and teachers, the prevalence of busy work at Redwood has fostered a culture of cheating. If students feel like they are not going to learn anything by doing their homework, they are all the more likely to copy it from a friend.
Senior Joe Gray said that the amount of homework he is assigned is manageable, but he thinks that the emphasis should be on controlling quality instead of quantity.
“I don’t believe that homework itself is necessarily a problem, but it needs to be delivered in a more effective way,” Gray said. “Rather than say, ‘Let’s assign more homework’ or ‘let’s assign less homework,’ teachers should be measuring the value of the work and results it gives.”
Some teachers excuse students from homework based on performance in class: for example, APES students do not have to complete reading notes if they earned an ‘A’ on the previous test. Because some students benefit from taking notes, while others learn just as well without them, this policy is a step in the right direction.
The board also needs to consider the fact that learning outside of the classroom can be just as valuable as learning that takes place inside. Are worksheets and reading notes really more valuable than the life experience that students could use the time to gain in the real world?
“It’s really important that schools recognize that kids have a lot of things that they like to do and need to do in order to be well-rounded people,” Finanne said. “One of those things is school and school work, but they also participate in athletics, dance, they participate in community service opportunities and hanging out with their friends. We need to always remember that young people do not always exist to do school work.”
Teachers who assign busy work most likely do not realize that their homework is largely unnecessary. However, it is important to remember that not all work aids learning. The focus of homework should be to strengthen skills, and students will likely learn more by using the rest of their time to explore the world around them.
