Having to go to school is bad enough already but now they have to do additional work when they get home? Can the school not get their teaching done during the 8 hour day?
When I’m done with an 8 hour work day, I turn off my laptop and that’s it. What are we preparing kids for if they have to do additional work in their free time that can significantly impact their grades? Just let kids be kids!
Comments
Please remember what subreddit you are in, this is unpopular opinion. We want civil and unpopular takes and discussion. Any uncivil and ToS violating comments will be removed and subject to a ban. Have a nice day!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
Not unpopular at all but not mad at you for saying it.
>Can the school not get their teaching done during the 8 hour day?
No, its a 5 hour of lessons day and there are so many subjects some teachers only get one hour a week and half of the lesson is spent dealing with idiots disrupting class.
Edit: 5 hours of lessons
I think it should be assigned for extra practice, especially for students who are behind and could use the extra skills, but I do not think it should be assigned as a grade if that makes sense
I disagree, time management, resposibility, resilience and self-discovery all done and learnt well when given the oppunity to do so alone.
The school day is less than 8 hours.
There are studies that agree with you. There is no evidence that homework helps kids with subject competencies. It’s something that adds stress to households for no apparent benefit.
Edit: Someone mentioned that it’s an issue of too much homework and I went looking for the research. That reply was correct. Excessive homework and poorly designed homework is detrimental and works against students.
Homework in my class is simply to finish work from class. I do not assign extra but if kids are fucking around/being too lazy to get to parts of the lesson they are still responsible for the work. On the flip side if kids are CRUSHING it with say a class discussion and that leads to them not finishing an assignment I will typically cancel it to reward the good engagement.
Lol imagine 8 hours at school
Our kids are graduating with no life skills whatsoever as it is. And you want to teach them LESS?
Parents enforcing study habits at home after school is by far the biggest correlating factor when it comes to academic and professional success.
Yes. You are going to have to do useful and productive things forever until you die. Deal with it.
Isnt this the way they do it inFinland?
As an adult that doesn’t change, welcome to hell!
110% agree. As it is, we’re expected to respond to mails and calls after hours.
I think it’s just disrespectful for a person’s time to be used on something other than what they want to do with their spare time.
I feel like the additional work I got actually helped me retain the knowledge I learnt in class and it also helps me practice so I can be better.
And thats why US students are continuously dropping in world rankings every year. Other societies prioritize education.
>Having to go to school is bad enough already but now they have to do additional work when they get home? Can the school not get their teaching done during the 8 hour day?
No, obviously not.
>When I’m done with an 8 hour work day, I turn off my laptop and that’s it. What are we preparing kids for if they have to do additional work in their free time that can significantly impact their grades? Just let kids be kids!
School isn’t 8 hours long
It depends on the school system, where I live you either have a full day of school or half days with homework.
But the parents at my school complained and asked for voluntary homework, so I guess this is actually unpopular somehow.
Depends on the homework. All kids learning to read should be reading with their parents for 15 minutes every night. Some parents consider that “homework” when it’s really just basic parenting. Older kids might get homework if they don’t complete their work in class time. That teaches time management, another valuable skill. Don’t want homework? Don’t screw around in class.
Granted, there are teachers who overload their students. BUT homework can be good.
I’ve always had the mentality that your homework is whatever you fail to complete during class. If you manage your time and workload and get it done, you’ll have no homework. If you slack off and don’t do your work in class, that becomes homework.
My previous school only ever gave out homework in case a student was falling behind on their schoolwork. I found I accomplished and learned more in that school than I ever had before, as well as had the will to work harder during actual school time
Anyway, I’ve noticed a significant decrease in homework since the rise of AI. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I think it’s going to end soon.
Here’s the issue I have with this. Sport you practice. If you want to get good at a musical instrument you practice heaps. You learn, you play and you practice to get better. Homework is your practice for education.
I’m a teacher, and I agree with two exceptions. I think homework should be any uncompleted work from school from the student wasting their time. If everyone doesn’t finish, it should be done in class the next day. If a kid screwing around doesn’t finish then that’s their responsibility at home. Also, math is a weird exception as a couple of problems at home really helps to lock it into their memory.
If we kept childhood out of schools we’d have a lot more time to learn.
Hear me out.
American schools are chaos and the total opposite of a quiet, calm place to learn and think. There’s so much focus on making it fun, free, individualistic, a celebration, happy, joyous, etc that there’s just no calm. Colors and signs and noises are everywhere. Screens and videos. Pajama days and “100 day celebrations”.
How could a child contemplate a concept long enough to understand it? It’s like learning math on a New York City sidewalk. No wonder there was a knife fight in my son’s middle school! And that is one of the best schools in the metro?
I’m all for good public education. But I can’t help but look at the local private schools and ache for my kids sense of calm. We get more done at our kitchen table after school when he finally admits to me that he needs help. In fifteen minutes of quiet review we learn more than in two days of class.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. Maybe assign a little reading but I had massive anxiety and depression as a child, and much of it was due to piles and piles of homework, no free time, exhaustion.
>When I’m done with an 8 hour work day, I turn off my laptop and that’s it.
What if you have work that you couldn’t get done in the same day and is required to be done by tomorrow? Do you work overtime, or just not do it?
Agree! But I wish parents would take the time to read with their kids a few times a week.
It’s not as common as it should be anymore.
Agreed, but since there’s no chance of that happening where I live, I homeschool and he does probably 3-4 hours of school a day instead of 7 in a building somewhere else and another 3 in homework at home.
I agree. It’s called going home for a reason.
Opinions like this is exactly why our kids are growing up dumb. Most of the people I know who make this statement are the lazy parents who don’t know how to help with homework. It’s an hour of homework cry about it. You come home from an 8hr day and that’s that right? That’s why you work the same job everyday and will work that job and always be mediocre at it. That why you’re not the boss. You quit learning. You have the mentality of just being average. Sad mentality to pass on to your kids.
Well, first of all, they’re not in school for 8 hours a day, it’s more like 7 including lunch and recess/free time. Sooooo… /s
Anyway. It’s not that I have a problem with homework. You need to practice to learn better. It’s a lot of information and concepts that only get more complex and difficult as you advance. It’s not comparable to a job.
The problem i have is that some teachers/professors think their class is the only class the students take and the only thing they ever do. At times it seems impossible to juggle every assignment and project while still having time for sports and other extracurricular activities. It results in a lot of people being burnt out before they enter the real world. Academia has a way of detaching itself from reality.
Homework is also used to reinforce the lesson taught. Practice reinforces concepts taught during class.
Feel like it’s largely a holdover from when Gen X and Millennials were all being told college is a must.
My school made getting us ready for college a thing in the 90s. Teachers taught us note taking, used blue book essays for finals, and assigned lots of homework because they would tell us how every hour of class work in college has 4 to 6 hours of expected work on your part alone to go into it
Not sure that’s an unpopular opinion. Many educators agree actually.
IA.
I just don’t think human brains are meant to be running 8+ hours a day. Mine certainly isn’t so why would a child’s be? When the school day is over we should ALL be bedrotting and snacking!
There’s nothing really wrong with homework, it’s just the excessive amounts that they give.
I mean that’s how my school worked. No homework, everything should be done in class.
There needs to be something there that prepares high schoolers for university cause boy would they then be unprepared when they have to work on assignments for 90% of their free time.
As a long time teacher, I agree.
Also, if you go home and practice doing your math work wrong 30 times it is just more work for me to undo what you practiced and re teach the correct way.
There is an argument for simple homework to teach responsibility and time management. Imaging never having homework then getting into college. Yikes. But homework shouldnt be as plentiful as it seems to be.
Too much homework, bad. Enough to enable the student to commit how to solve the homework to memory, good.
Having to go to school is bad enough already…. That’s a shit take for getting an education that teaches you to read, math, etc.
It’s to train your children to expect to take work home with them. It is to condition them to not be able to set boundaries with their jobs in the future
Some people want kids to “work hard”
But we’re also implementing “right to unplug” laws about “off the clock” or work for professionals.
I think kids should treat school like their full time job.
Do the work at work, leave it at work.
Class sizes are too big and they don’t have enough resources to teach effectively. Plus they can’t send kids having a hard time home. Also, the culture at most public schools is one of a inconsistent lack of discipline. Add on to that the general type of people attracted and retained as teachers. Let’s not even open the can of worms that is administration. All that combines to be not the most effective learning experience. I would bet your child learns and practices more concepts with you in that 15 min to half hour experience then they did all day at school. So it is an extremely valuable time where you show in a very direct way your investment and commitment to hard work to your child. Though I get it – we work all day, pay taxes, and feel a bit shafted by the school system. Like wtf is up with the massive disruption of summer vacation every year?!! Anyway I get your frustration
Teachers rarely teach your kids math or reading comprehension well if you want smart kids it’s up to u as a parent to teach them.teachers provide a basic lesson you must persue full understanding on your own.
Homework is meant to be more about retaining information than learning it. It’s unrealistic to think kids can retain all of the things they learn over the period of a whole hours. That’s a lot of stuff. Teachers should get their teaching done, but it’s ridiculous to think that kids will retain information after hearing it at one time.
Edit to add: you’re entitled to your opinions, obviously. We just feel differently.
I have homework as an adult in the work force. I have submissions that I need to take home and finish after dinner. A lot of industries have this.
Homework in my school growing up was work not finished in class. Basically, wanna be disruptive in class and have fun? Well the lesson that would’ve been done at the end of it if you just followed the lesson, is now homework because it wasn’t finished. Some teachers gave out prizes to the classroom that had the least homework each semester.
I only read the first sentence: “having to go to school is bad enough already”.
Mmmmkay… bye.
In college most work is done outside of lectures so they should be prepared and taught. Also, kids don’t have jobs or responsibilities which prevents them from doing homework.
As research has shown education and healthy habits from younger age stay throughout life so shouldn’t we encourage hard work. Stopping education or work after 8 hours is ridiculously limiting yourself.
Too much homework is bad but homework in general is not.
“Bad enough already” shows you don’t see the value in school, so obviously you don’t see the value in homework.
I think this is less an unpopular opinion and more an uneducated one.
Do you do much thinking in your free time?
>Having to go to school is bad enough already
Explain
>Can the school not get their teaching done during the 8 hour day?
The average school day is 6.8 hours in the USA.
>When I’m done with an 8 hour work day, I turn off my laptop and that’s it.
Ok?
>What are we preparing kids for if they have to do additional work in their free time that can significantly impact their grades?
Life? Being successful? Learning to be self starters?
>Just let kids be kids!
And according to you not go to school, not become educated and not be ready to do anything meaningful?
I think a small amount of homework is good so that kids learn over time as they grow how to be responsible for their own project management and grades. Even if they don’t do their homework, they will be more ready and less surprised about how the world works when they get become an adult as college and adult life have deadlines and consequences for not meeting them.
Also, in the US, kids can literally do no homework and advance to the next grade without any difficulties. Teachers often are required to give a minimum grade of 55% for a class. Many kids know this and do nothing and then get surprised after they graduate high school and the real world has consequences for not doing your work.
Homework teaches kids discipline, hard work, and prepares them for the fact that a lot of jobs in the economy require regular overtime. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, teachers, truck drivers, garbage collectors, people who work on location, the list goes on. Tons of jobs require overtime. Teaching kids the value of hard work ensures your kids don’t become spoilt brats who can’t handle hard work and get nowhere in life.
Also, how the hell are kids supposed to get through university if they haven’t been prepared for the immense workload by doing homework outside of school when they are younger?
I’m a teacher and I 100% agree.
What an actual trash opinion
School is badly designed and needs to evolve
I’m generally against lots of homework. But let’s play devil’s advocate for a minute anyway. Eight hours of school is hardly 8 hours of learning. At least when I was in school, you’re often wasting 10-15 mins at the start of half your classes. And if you’re not block learning, that ends up adding up to anywhere from a quarter to a third of the total day between everything.
I agree. That was the only negative part of my school experience (even though I was lucky enough to not have to do them and the teachers still not beeing able to justify bad grades). Its so freeing to come home from work and having to do NOTHING.
IMO homework should be voluntary. “Here, if you are struggeling with what we are doing right now I would recommend you guys try your hands on this.” kinda stuff.
There have been studies showing that homework does more harm than good:https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2014/03/too-much-homework-031014
Homework is the reason I failed most of my classes.
I wish this was the case when i grew up in the 80s/ 90s. I had to stay up till 10 pm to 12 am doing homework cause i didn’t understand the assignment cause my teachers were ass. My mom was a teacher, but she spent several hrs after school talking on the phone or sleeping on the couch instead of helping me , ” cause i needed to figure it out.” Then, after my brother’s went to bed, i was still up doing work she’s now grading her kids’ papers, yelling at me that im not done yet. By midnight, whatever I’ve not finished just didn’t get done cause i had to wake up for 5 am for school.
It teaches them study habits which they’ll need if they go to college.
True especially in middle school and high school where u have seven teachers and they all assign it. Don’t know how teachers can look themselves in the mirror after loading a kid up with useless info to do. School sucks!
I never did homework. Eventually my teachers just accepted it and stopped bothering me about it.
it depends i guess, where i grew up school was usually from 8/9-13/14/15, so it was pretty much never a full 8 hours.
besides studies have shown that students who dutifully complete their homework have markedly better grades than students who doesn’t. it is to establish a sense of independent thinking and ability to work and solve problems without having a teacher hanging over you to make sure you do it, it instills responsibility.
it prepares you for university where you are fully responsible for your own advancement, and honestly looking back i rarely spent more than 1-2 hrs max on homework, and usually we got a plan for homework for the entire week and i did the majority of it on monday leaving the rest of the week free.
all in all it’s just a good experience to learn how to plan and see immediate rewards for your own planning and preparation
8 hour day ?, School was and is 0900 to 1500 ish. Homework is a good thing as working life isn’t 6 hours a day.
I agree but also the whole point is so that they guage if the kids understand, there isn’t enough time in the day for a teacher to check if every kid understands every point during class.
In theory it makes sense it also builds character, doing something you don’t want to do but have to do is important otherwise you’ll grow up to be lazy and full of yourself, this is coming from someone who despised homework growing up.
If you can’t handle doing homework when you’re a kid you’re gonna struggle massively with uni/work.
Alternative title: “adults should know less”
Disagree some more complicated subjects require repetition and practice like learning to read or math. Doing various projects teaches children a variety of soft skills.
I do agree that the school day is too long, but this is because teachers are now serving as babysitters. I don’t think the solution to this is to take away vehicles of learning though.
Finally regarding our jobs no you don’t have homework but you also don’t have summer break,spring break, Christmas break, every federal holiday and all the random half days, school resource days and whatever other day they can come up with to dismiss school. Kids should not be getting busy work home work but our jobs aren’t really comparable to school.
Last 3 years of high school I just turned into a zombie. They figure if you’re copying text off the board then you’re more likely to learn it, but no I’m just shutting down and writing.
The preface that you make of going to school being bad in the first place probably suggests that you are not a fan of the system to begin with, let alone most of that which comes out of it. I’m reaching here, but you probably might say learning trigonometry or reading Shakespeare is pointless too.
But, I digress. I believe I stand alongside you, in the instances that the homework that is given is purposeless. I think that any homework that is given must be checked or followed up in some way and used to supplement the learning, rather than to provide additional workload. For example, if students complete 20 questions in class about a topic and most have succeeded in demonstrating their learning, then there is no purpose to giving another 20 questions for homework. That content can be recapped and practiced in the next lesson. However, if students are to explore some themes in a book and are required to read the chapter before class, so that the time in class can be used purely for the discussion and teaching, rather than just reading, then that is purposeful.
Putting aside any supporting research, homework probably exists because of two possible issues. One, the curriculum is too crowded and no, the school day (which is not 8 hours) is not long enough to cover it. Two, teaching does not take place in classes, as intended, because half the time is spent on getting some kids to stop spitting paper balls around, and handing out stationery to other kids because their parents sent them to class with the mindset that they are wasting their time there anyway.
I do believe that a good percentage of us in the working world do bring work home after a day at the office. Not because we want to, but because we have to. Either it’s because spending the time to prepare things helps us in the future, or we just slacked off earlier in the day and now we are making up for it. Two of the very same conditions why homework is given in schools.
Is this something every single student will benefit from? No. But that is how school is. You take from it what you will. Every single thing about school is not meant to impact every single person in the same way. Doing homework may have no significant benefit to some students. Others might see uniforms as pointless. For some, it might just be a case of learning how to be a nice person.
I can only hope this remains as an unpopular opinion.
Guess you don’t want to raise business owners
I think that it teaches discipline.
The school is not just to learn but also to learn how to learn. The school cannot teach everything. Kids need to learn to research and do things independently.
Just absorbing what someone else tells them leads to people not developing critical thinking.
Counterpoint: unlike work, which can start/end at set periods, parents should be continuing their child’s education at home, and lack of doing so due to expecting learning to only be limited to school hours/the teacher is a big part of why kids are doing so poorly in school.
However, that doesn’t HAVE to be homework, if parents are involved and doing things with their kids like reading and other learning activities. Which, most aren’t.
So with so few parents being involved with their child’s education, and teachers needing kids to build on what’s taught inside the classroom after hours to cement it as a concept, I can see why more homework is being given as an attempt to try.
I think I’m in a middle ground here. There’s definitely room for practicing skills outside the classroom, and essays and research papers are important to be able to write in high school, but I don’t think kids need so much homework and especially not so young. Like, I really can’t see a need for homework that takes longer than 15 minutes for kids younger than 10. 15 minutes is enough time to do a math worksheet or look over a spelling list a few times, and I think that’s enough.
When my daughter was in first grade, she had 3-4 hours of homework almost every night but it was an unusual issue. One teacher was trying to teach several classes at the same time. Changed her school and it went down to ‘normal’ levels. It was too much pressure on a kid that aims for perfection.
Example: once she put herself in time out because she THOUGHT about talking back to her mom.
There is research that agrees. And some that doesn’t.
I tend to agree. But they also need study halls and my granddaughter doesn’t have one.
Homework has been proven to be unnecessary.
I gave up doing homework in grade 5. By high school I was barely scraping by. I managed change habits, and bring my grades up so I could get into university. Guess what I had to do in university? A fuck ton of reading and writing, i.e. homework. Term papers, research, essays….none of that was done during lecture time.
Your kids need to be prepared to have to tackle a large workload. What if you’re child is interested in starting a small business? That requires a ton after hours work.
> Can the school not get their teaching done during the 8 hour day?
Yes. But then kids need extra time for the material to be absorbed and actually learned. How otfen have I sat in class, writing notes, but not actually hearing what the teacher is saying? In my head I’m already planning my weekend, or staring at the girl I’m crushing on. By the time class is over, I learned nothing….but I have notes.
Independently practicing what we learned is how we retain information and learn to apply it better. It also allows students to figure out areas where they need further help from the teacher.
Too much homework where kids are spending hours on school work is the problem. A few mathematical problems to solve, pages to read or writing practice is not.
Do your kids understand the classroom lessons? Are they getting straight A’s? Are they book smart? Answer Yes, you don’t need homework. Answered no to any of those 3? The answers no, they need more time to understand and learn. It’s that simple.
As a 12 or 13 year old i would have 100% agreed with you on this one but, at least here in the UK, it is the norm to only teach a specific subject for one hour a day, maybe for 2 hours if you’re in 6th form with double maths or something like that, so homework is primarily used as a tool to accelerate learning by either giving kids work to do to reinforce what was taught that day, or to prepare for an upcoming lesson. Some subjects have a lot of content to teach so sometimes giving kids some to do at home can help with this. Teachers do at least try to help balance it by usually giving a week to do what is actually only a couple hours of work
Homework should be an activity to do within school premises only
Not going to lie, homework teaches such an integral part of life, you don’t realise until you’re older.
Unless you can a learning disability and/or just don’t give a shit about school, homework is such a great way to learn discipline and stress management.
I speak from experience with ADHD and struggling in Uni rn, without my mum forcing me to do my homework to the point not even my ADHD couldn’t stop me from doing it (or else my mum would’ve done much worse lol), I would NOT have the individual discipline I have now that’s allowing me to better manage my ADHD alongside my current uni projects.
For reference I have diagnosed hereditary moderate-severe (sporadic) inattentive-ADHD and am in year 2 of a med Sci bachelor’s.
As someone who went to a school that didn’t care about homework. Homework is important, it gets you ready for life, getting ready for life is the point of school. I wish I had stricter teachers. The whole “done with school, done with responsibility” vibe is no good for life.
I suppose people learn differently but I benefitted from extra work driving the point home. How much of, if any, an amount of credit towards a final grade could be up for discussion? But with the lack of discipline I’ve seen in classrooms, I feel taking away any form of structure left would be detrimental.
I despise homework for my elementary age kids. My high schooler, fine. But the younger kids it just ends up being yet another task that becomes MY responsibility to walk them through it during week night evenings when I already have only a few hours to get a dozen things done on top of cooking for a family of six. It just isn’t realistic for families. School should be where that gets done, because that’s literally their job.
Kids have a 6 hour day, at least in the US. The point of homework is to utilize a reasonable extension of time after school with solo work so that they can apply what they’ve learned without oversight to help them learn to manage (or manage to learn) on their own. It’s an important skill that they might otherwise never be forced to work through. We could send these kids to study halls for an extra 2 hours of their day, but that’s the state paying for basically baby sitters for two hours of the day for everyone’s children for no other reason so… not really a huge societal need.
Homework just makes sense for building unique skills and solidifying knowledge.
As an adult professional, I often have to do homework to keep abreast of my field: going to conferences, having test equipment, subscribing to mailing lists and journals. It’s a different _kind_ of homework than what’s assigned by a teacher, and it’d be nice if I could keep abreast solely during work hours. But that’s not how life works. It’d also be nice if I didn’t have to come home and cook dinner, do laundry, clean, etc. That’s also homework of a different sort.
Now whether kids need hours upon hours of homework… I don’t know. At some point, it’s too much.
Homework was extra brutal if you were an athlete. I’d get home as late as 7:00 sometimes after a full day of school and a soccer game. Literally a 12 hour day. Having to do homework after that wasn’t ideal.
If homework consisted of an hour or so of work, I would have been fine with it. From 6th grade through senior year, I had, at MINIMUM, 4 hours of homework each night. It was harrowing. I was sleep-deprived for years and was always stressed. A little is good to lock in new concepts and skills, but when 6 classes give 30 minutes to 1 hour of homework each day, it does much more harm than good. I suppose me being kinda dumb played into it too, but I really did try.
ADHD life hack, do your homework in class the day it’s due
Stupidest comment in a while, take my upvote. Repetition of anything you’ve learned can only help greatly in the retention of that knowledge, you don’t use it you lose it. Having it be more fresh in their minds coming unto the next lesson can only be a good thing.