How Much Homework to Give Kids?
To many kids in elementary schools, homework is a menace. It takes away quality time from a student’s daily life and activities. In Romesh Ratnesar’s article “The Homework Ate my Family”, Ratnesar mentions about a student named Molly and her daily routine. Her daily routine consists of “spending two hours doing homework, practicing the piano, doing more than 100 math problems, labeling the countries and bodies of water and reviewing a semester’s worth of science” (Ratnesar). Molly barely has time for dinner. Ratnesar also mentions about a girl named Christina who “does not want to go to middle school, high school or college because of homework” (Ratnesar). Jonathan Keys, a parent of two boys in Orange County, says that his “boys aren’t doing things normal boys are doing.” As a result, parents like Jonathan Keys complain that elementary schools are assigning too much homework to kids. They believe that the amount of homework should be greatly reduced in order to make way for quality family time and friends. Boys should go out and do things normal boys do, and girls should go out and do things normal girls do. As Jonathan Keys puts it, “Kids should go out, play, and have fun”. However, these parents are missing a major point: the real world does not work this way. Our homes and neighborhoods are surrounded by corporate buildings and government facilities. The employees of these corporate buildings and government facilities are not playing or having fun. They are busy trying to use their education to make a decent living. So the question is: how much homework should children in elementary schools get? I agree that some teachers give to students too much junk homework and not enough clas...
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...s. I strongly feel that elementary school children need to do at least 15 minutes of homework a night but keep a social balance as well. However, parents need to do their part in putting major emphasis on the importance of homework. If every parent this duty, our nation would probably rank number one in the world.
Works Cited
Allen, Carol. “Re: Child Life. This is Tu Do!!!!!” E-mail to Tu Hoang Do. 11 March 2004.
Keys, Jonathan. Telephone interview. 15 March 2004.
Mauldin, Deena. Lecture. University of California, Riverside. Riverside. 3 March 2004.
Van Linge, Mona. “Re: Child Life. This is Tu Do!!!!!.” E-mail to Tu Hoang Do. 12 March 2004.
Ratnesar, Romesh. “The Homework Ate My Family”. 25 January 1999: 312-319. Article. Perspectives on Contemporary Issues – Readings Across the Disciplines – Third Edition. Ed. Katherine Anne ckley. MA: Boston, 2003.
In Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, the narrator who is the main character goes through many trials and tribulations.
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Although the living conditions of children are getting lot better than when we were kids, the children study more time than we did. The pupils have to get up at earlier than 7 o 'clock to make sure they won’t be late for school. Not only have that, these pupils still had to participate in various after school program, and a lot of variety of training during the weekends. The most pressure is homework. As a summer school teacher, I always can hear kids say that the teacher gave them too much work, had to spend two hours a day to compete the homework, and have no time to play. Is it too much pressure for the kids? That is the question for most of the parents. What should the parents as should do to let these children relax and do not have that much pressure? The author of Help Children Form Good Study Habit, Erika A.Patall points out those parents should not help children do their homework because they need their own practice. Not only that, the author of The
To understand the narrator of the story, one must first explore Ralph Ellison. Ellison grew up during the mid 1900’s in a poverty-stricken household (“Ralph Ellison”). Ellison attended an all black school in which he discovered the beauty of the written word (“Ralph Ellison”). As an African American in a predominantly white country, Ellison began to take an interest in the “black experience” (“Ralph Ellison”). His writings express a pride in the African American race. His work, The Invisible Man, won much critical acclaim from various sources. Ellison’s novel was considered the “most distinguished novel published by an American during the previous twenty years” according to a Book Week poll (“Ralph Ellison”). One may conclude that the Invisible Man is, in a way, the quintessence Ralph Ellison. The Invisible Man has difficulty fitting into a world that does not want to see him for who he is. M...
Everytime a kid does his homework, correctly, they are possibly advancing their knowledge and understanding of the subject at hand. Although, Alfie Kohn, author of the book “The Homework Myth” states, “Such policies sacrifice thoughtful instruction in order to achieve predictability, and they manage to do a disservice not only to students but, when imposed from above, to teachers as well” (Suhay). Not all homework will be beneficial. It can harm
Many people often say that students, teachers, and parents, think homework should be banned, but multiple people disagree. This heated topic has been debated for many years. Some parents and teachers think students have too much. However, some believe their students receive too little. Few schools already have banned homework, but the majority of schools don’t. Some people agree with having ten minutes multiplied by the grade level of the student. As experts continue adding additional facts about homework, it is clear that homework can help students in different ways.
In Ralph Ellison’s novel The Invisible man, the unknown narrator states “All my life I had been looking for something and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was…I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself the question which I, and only I, could answer…my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!” (13). throughout the novel, the search for identity becomes a major aspect for the narrator’s journey to identify who he is in this world. The speaker considers himself to be an “invisible man” but he defines his condition of being invisible due to his race (Kelly). Identity and race becomes an integral part of the novel. The obsession with identity links the narrator with the society he lives in, where race defines the characters in the novel. Society has distinguished the characters in Ellison’s novel between the African and Caucasian and the narrator journey forces him to abandon the identity in which he thought he had to be reborn to gain a new one. Ellison’s depiction of the power struggle between African and Caucasians reveals that identity is constructed to not only by the narrator himself but also the people that attempt to influence. The modernized idea of being “white washed” is evident in the narrator and therefore establishes that identity can be reaffirmed through rebirth, renaming, or changing one’s appearance to gain a new persona despite their race. The novel becomes a biological search for the self due through the American Negroes’ experience (Lillard 833). Through this experience the unknown narrator proves that identity is a necessary part of his life but race c...
In the year 2007, China and India ranked first and second respectively in the list of ideal foreign direct investment (FDI) destinations, according to A T Kearney, a global strategic management consulting firm (The Press Trust of India Limited, 2007a). The two nations, because of their similarities in geopolitical, economic and demographic aspects, are often compared with each other. To determine which one is more attractive for businesses to expand to, this essay will examine the business environment of both countries from the following perspectives: political/legal, economic, socio-cultural and technological.
The narrator's life is filled with constant eruptions of mental traumas. The biggest psychological burden he has is his identity, or rather his misidentity. He feels "wearing on the nerves" (Ellison 3) for people to see him as what they like to believe he is and not see him as what he really is. Throughout his life, he takes on several different identities and none, he thinks, adequately represents his true self, until his final one, as an invisible man.
Have you ever wanted to just shred up your homework or throw it out the window and have no consequences? Kids are assigned daily homework from the time they start kindergarten at the ripe young age of five. Is it really necessary? Does it even help better learning or even higher test scores? The amount of homework we do wastes time, money, paper, and trees because it’s practically the exact same thing we did in class that day. Homework causes kid’s and teen’s frustration, tiredness, little time for other activities and possibly even a loss of interest in their education. It also keeps everyone up; it has kids and teens staying up until they finish it, the parents trying to help them and the teachers grading it. So, I think that homework is a waste and kids and teens should choose whether they want to do their homework for extra credit and practice or not.
As Boekaerts and Corno pointed out in 2005, although teachers set goals and expectations for homework, students must independently complete homework by practicing self-regulatory and responsibility. Behaviors such as planning, inhibiting distractions, persisting at difficult assignments, organizing the environment, overcoming unwanted emotions, and reflecting on what they have learned are developed in the process of complete an assigned homework. “Children who complete homework outside of school often develop an aptitude for academic work through extra practice and are responsible for regulating their own behavior, making homework a classic form of self-regulated learning” (197). Other researchers such as Zimmerman, Bonner, and Kovach acknowledge that these skills (responsibility and discipline) promote positive behaviors that, in addition to being important for academic pursuits, generalize to other life domains. “Because homework generally requires students to complete tasks with less supervision and under less severe time constraints than is the case in school, home study is said to promote greater self-direction and self-discipline attributes apply to the nonacademic spheres of life as well as the academic” (1). Furthermore, not only does homework instill positive attitudes that would last a life time, it also brings families closer together and strengthens team work amongst them. In Hoover Dempsey’s article titled The Motivational Benefits of Homework, “teachers can use homework to increase parents' appreciation of and involvement in schooling” (2).
These activities, not homework will ensure that our children are happy and competitive in a highly competitive world.” (Bennett and Kalish). Homework may cause more harm to students and children at such an early age rather than having a positive effect. Others claim that homework regulation is a serious matter that should have parents more aware of this issue. If teachers would either regulate the amount of homework they assign, then students would actually be able to enjoy their school years before entering the working
In today’s time homework is something that most schools find necessary to pile onto their students,