Blogger Bunmi Laditan sent her 10-year-old’s school a clear message.
“Hello Maya’s teachers,
Maya will be drastically reducing the amount of homework she does this year. She’s been very stressed and is starting to have physical symptoms such as chest pain and waking up at 4 a.m. worrying about her school workload.
She’s not behind academically and very much enjoys school. We consulted with a tutor and a therapist suggested we lighten her workload. Doing 2-3 hours of homework after getting home at 4:30 is leaving little time for her to just be a child and enjoy family time and we’d like to avoid her sinking into a depression over this.”
A++++ parenting 💜
I’ve talked with a whole cadre of child therapists and psychiatrists about this very issue. There islittleconclusive evidence that homework significantly improves elementary school children’s grades, understanding of subjects, or facility with various operations, processes, etc. However, plenty of evidence suggests that ever-increasing amounts of homework for young children lead to stress, anxiety, emotional fatigue, resistance toward academics in general, lack of leisure time to build social/interpersonal skills, and poorer family relations. (My kids were doing about 3 hours a week IN KINDERGARTEN, at age 5 – so that’s ½ hour every night, after a 6.5 hour school day, or else saving it up for long slogs over the weekend, even more disruptive. And that wasn’t including reading practice!)
We have stopped doing homework altogether with my 7 year old as a result of severe anxiety/depression and a learning disability. She had gotten to a place where she had so little self confidence and truly believed that she was stupid and worthless, not just because of homework of course – but every time we tried to sit down to do homework with her, it’d end in tears with her really vehemently berating herself, and no amount of encouragement could ameliorate the damage done. Now, granted, she’s got other things going on besides just an overload of school work. But in NO WAY did the homework help her, either academically or emotionally.
No little kid should have to spend an hour or more each night getting through homework. Now, my deal with Siena is that if she wants to give her homework a shot, I will absolutely help her if she wishes for help, but I no longer force her to complete all of it or to work on it for some set length of time before finally throwing in the towel.
Guess what? With the pressure taken off, she’s actually doing MORE independent work now, purely out of the desire to learn and practice, than she ever was before we’d decided with her therapy team and school that homework was just not a thing this kid could handle.
Luckily for my older daughter my school’s 3rd-grade team decided to hand out homework only 3x/week, and the sheets take no more than 15-20 minutes to complete. That is totally reasonable for 8-9 year olds!
Anyway tl;dr just because the school system may require it sure as shit doesn’t mean parents can’t, or shouldn’t, fight it. Do what’s right for your kid, and above all, let them be kids.
I eventually stopped doing homework because I was overwhelmed by it.
There was an article just the other day in the local paper about a primary school that’s abolishing homework! You can read it here (autoplay video, gives you a few seconds to stop it).
so at the bar in which I work, there’s an unofficial rule that all of our door staff must have names that start with D or rhyme with ‘doorman’, which has led to me befriending a trio of six foot four men with beards called Doorman Logan, Doorman Drew, and Doorman Dan.
now, let me tell you now that Doorman Dan is the absolute love of my life. I don’t care that he’s a decade older than me and has a fiance. you know when someone is so extraordinary or impossible to define that they’re simply referred to as ‘a character’? that’s Doorman Dan. now, before I get into his personality, let’s describe his appearance. imagine the most stereotypical Scandinavian person ever: tall, white-blond, strong-jawed. now, add a heavy South Walian accent and an orange jumper.
that’s Doorman Dan.
since meeting him last year, I’ve discovered:
he once had a dream that he had a tattoo that said ‘shit happens’ on his left arsecheek, so when he woke up he decided he had to fulfil the prophecy and got it tattooed on his arse by a bloke called Junkie Jeff at 9AM
he forgot to call his girlfriend for three months while he was in the army, and was completely unaware they had broken up until he wished her a happy Christmas and she responded with ‘what the fuck Dan’
accidentally married his army buddy in Vegas for thirty-six hours
he saw someone beating up a guy for being gay, and instead of jumping in and fighting back he decided to get absolutely bollock-naked and stand in front of the homophobe until he got freaked out and ran off
he has a millionare buddy who rings him up once a month for ‘mystery adventures’, one of which has resulted in Doorman Dan no longer being allowed inside any John Lewis shops
he is convinced the love of his life is not his fiancee, but a man named Ned. upon being asked who Ned is, he shrugged and responded with: “I’ll know when I meet him.”
he runs an Instagram account dedicated to his pet rabbits and refuses to let people into the bar unless they follow him
his fiancee booked a wedding venue before he even proposed. “I don’t even know if I’m invited, truth be told.”
when he caught a couple having sex in our loos, he didn’t want to intrude so he just gently knocked on the door and asked if they’d like a snack
he has created his own non-alcoholic cocktail called Doorman’s Sunrise because he feels left out being the only person on the dance floor without a drink when he’s patrolling the bar
I could honestly write a ten-season sitcom about him
so i’m at the doctor’s again and i see a notecard on the reception desk that asks in bright red ink, Do you want to live forever?
finally, i think, finally i’m at the start of a vampire novel. i don’t actually want to live forever, but i’m not about to turn down a call to adventure like that. i try to flip the card over as inconspicuously as possible.
the other side contains a bible verse about keeping jesus in your heart.
Do you ever eat popcorn out of the palm of your own hand with such ardent desperation that you feel like both a wild horse and the gentle schoolgirl feeding it treats to gain its affection
In 1930, Helene Adelaide Shelby patented an apparatus for obtaining
criminal confessions. The police put the suspect into a darkened
chamber where they are confronted by a human skeleton with glowing red
eyes that questions them with a voice transmitted from the interrogator
behind it, through a megaphone in its mouth. A camera concealed in the
skull was to record the confessions
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