Homework at Ridgeview
I am appreciative of those parents who completed the recent homework surveys, and more appreciative still for those students who expressed their concerns to me in the Student Ambassador and Student Council lunches. Fifty-six percent of the elementary-school and nearly forty percent of the upper-school parents responded to these surveys.
Among the broad-stroke conclusions that can be drawn from these survey results and my conversations with students are:
There were fewer complaints of excessive homework in the lower elementary school than the upper elementary school.
In some of the elementary grades, the homework exceeded the recommended guidelines.
There is considerable and understandable dissatisfaction with PowerSchool’s Unified Classroom (the successor of the LMS).
A heavier homework load in the upper school is being exacerbated by multiple assignments in multiple classes coming due on a single day.
The subjects that most upper-school students are spending the greatest amount of time on are literature and history.
Teachers in the elementary school have been working diligently for the past two weeks to make sense of these survey results and to respond to them intelligently. As a result, I have begun to see a reduction in the amount of homework being assigned without a diminishment in the quality of the work assigned. The upper-school teachers have not yet seen the results of the survey, but mitigating the homework load and providing for a better middle and high-school experience will be a priority for the administration and faculty in the coming weeks. For both schools, the goal will be to get back to our long-established guidelines of “ten minutes per grade plus thirty minutes of reading per night.” Moving forward, homework should hew more closely to these guidelines:
Kindergarten 30 minutes
1st Grade 40 minutes
2nd Grade 50 minutes
3rd Grade 60 minutes
4th Grade 70 minutes
5th Grade 80 minutes
6th Grade 90 minutes
7th Grade 100 minutes
8th Grade 110 minutes
9th Grade 120 minutes
10th Grade 130 minutes
11th Grade 140 minutes
12th Grade 150 minutes
When considering these ‘guidelines’, it is important to bear in mind some of the following considerations:
These guidelines are averages for average students. Some students will regularly complete the work in less time, while others will regularly require more.
These are not minimums. Teachers do not create work for the sake of building up to these times.
As students acknowledge when registering for AP or concurrent enrollment classes, these courses will often require a heavier workload.
These guidelines are unlikely to be especially accurate when quarters and terms are ending. It is for this reason that Ridgeview has implemented a finals week schedule at the end of each of its two terms.
These guidelines are not particularly useful when applied to juniors who are typically working on outside projects like college applications and their associated essays.
That homework at Ridgeview has long been contentious is to say little more than that homework has long been contentious. The debate about homework is decades, if not centuries, old. At the turn of the twentieth century, there were those who regarded the assigning of any homework that might rob from children’s playtime as a “rank injustice.” In truth, a nineteenth-century education revolved around memorization and recitation. A child mostly ‘prepared’ at home to demonstrate his lessons to his teacher the following day, and most students did not progress much beyond fourth grade. Those who did were expected to be studying in the evenings. Once attendance at schools became compulsory, there was no ability to opt out, and unsurprisingly the anti-homework sentiment grew. As education policy analysts Brian Gill and Steven Schlossman have pointed out: “homework has been one of the most emotionally charged topics in American education…One side has idealized homework: The more the better. The other size has demonized homework.” And, as Slate columnist Rebecca Onion has noted, the debate over homework is really about a much larger and more fundamental question: What is childhood for?
There are certainly some parents who would prefer that school be a self-contained part of their children’s lives. Essentially, they would like for no part of school to be allowed to bleed over into life; and life is here understood to mean time with family, time engaged in play, and time spent in religious observance or athletic events. This compartmentalization is arguably anathema to a classical, liberal arts education that is designed to impact the whole of an individual’s life. While some students and parents, and more regrettably, some teachers, will get hung up on the first five or six letters of the alphabet, we would all do well to bear in mind that the education matters much more than the schooling. As Alain de Botton wrote recently, “Society has no shortage of people and organisations offering to guide us around distant continents, but very few that will help us with the arguably far more important task of travelling around the byways of our own minds.” A classical education aspires to make individuals who possess the self-knowledge necessary to travel around these byways and the solitude of individual study (homework) is essential.
It is not by reading Paradise Lost or Fahrenheit 451 or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics that one is better at this kind of intrapersonal travel; rather, it is more often the case that a subconscious change is taking place amidst this reading, and the memorization of countless poems and verb conjugations and the multiplication table. What is important, alongside the amount of homework any student is doing, is the quality of the things chosen for him to do. Ideally, at Ridgeview, the homework is principally about preparing and practicing. We should be preparing for the conversation to come the next day in class—preparing to be conversant, to be intelligent, and to be inquisitive. We should be practicing to become better readers, and we cannot do this without reading; we should be practicing to be better writers; and we cannot do this without writing; we should be practicing the art of conversation, and we cannot do this without conversing with our families and friends about what we have learned and experienced. Homework extends into the home because it is a part of life—not something separate from it.
This is not to deny that there must be a balance of life. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” dates from at least 1659. It is as true now as it ever was. In 1612, Francis Bacon contended that, “To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor of a scholar.” There should be time for play, for religious obligations, for athletic events, for frivolity, whimsy, and diversion. Life is more than school and an education happens as much outside the classroom as within. To take up the question earlier posed, childhood is partly for this, but it is also partly a preparation for the more rigorous and unforgiving challenges of adulthood.
With that said, teaching too should be about more than simply assessing and accounting. It is about watching students mature and progress not only relative to some objective standard, or relative to their peers, but relative to themselves. That is a hard thing to capture in a grade, and while not everything about the tutorial method can be captured in a school, what the French essayist Montaigne wrote about the teacher around 1580 remains true:
“It is good that he should have his pupil trot before him, to judge the child’s pace and how much he must stoop to match his strength. For lack of this proportion we spoil everything; and to be able to hit it right and to go along in it evenly is one of the hardest tasks that I know; it is the achievement of a lofty and very strong soul to know how to come down to a childish gait and guide it. I walk more firmly and surely uphill than down.”
Whether in our roles as teachers or parents, we are constantly trying to “judge the child’s pace,” and know what is appropriate to him. We can do this but imperfectly at any time, but I do wish to assure you that homework at Ridgeview is not rigor for rigor’s sake, or preparation for standardized testing or college admissions, or bragging rights about being a challenging school. The homework that is assigned is assigned with the intent of providing students with an opportunity to prepare and practice, to be a part of a conversation, and to grow in character and intellect. I, as much as any other parent, yearn for some unlikely panacea in which the perfect balance is struck, but not being a utopian, I hope for a tolerable balance among all the things that matter in my child’s life. For your children and my own, Ridgeview will continue working towards this.
D. Anderson
Principal
