There’s no secret that the education system has become very competitive nowadays. Like the child’s first step or first utterance of the words mamma or daddy, a child’s first day of school is also a life changing event. Children usually have a relaxing time at the beginning of their school life and begin to catch on slowly. Parents and children get wrapped up in routine and it doesn’t usually take them long to accept this as normal. Parents want their children to compete for a grade and not for knowledge, thus, the pressure is to do well every time. At this point it doesn’t matter how much work the kid has, the more of it is the better. There is a peripheral view that says, kids should have less homework.
The schools are aware of the impact homework has on offspring and family lives. This is the reason they’ve created programs that help get the child through those humps with teachers, therapists and even out spreading school semesters, all with the purpose to encourage more homework. Here is how homework impacts our lives and why teachers should give less homework:
- Too Much Pressure
Life is going too much far from what we have thought in early 90’s and thus children’s now have a lot to learn about life. The Pressure onto children about completing homework is often too much to handle for them. This Pressure makes them lazier and lowers their intelligence level. Parents want their children to compete in this competitive world and thus they measure their competitive level with the amount of homework they do. Keeping these things at a competitive level is disproportionate to what the student can handle.
- Students can be overwhelmed if the homework is too long
The toughest thing about homework is the time it takes students to complete, which is immensely different. What takes a clever kid, 5-10 minutes can take a struggling kid 45 minutes or even an hour to complete the homework. Just imagine how a struggling student feels when he looks at a two-sided worksheet of 40 math problems that he doesn’t understand. The sheer volume of work is extremely intimidating and often causes him to give up before he even tries.
- Impact on family time
Parents have a hard and busy schedule until their child catches up with them. Being able to form a diverse schedule around each other can be stressful. Homework is like the extension of a school where it is not easy to manage a family time. This is the hurdle between parents and children.
Spending more time with family would yield the latter, which comforts the child into taking life more seriously and learning more valuable life lessons from the family than through the pressure of producing ‘machineries.’
- Limit the quantity, increase the quality
When teacher limits the quantity of the homework she gives and/or how long the assignments are, then it is more likely that students will do quality work on what he/she does assign.
More homework doesn’t always have the result the teachers or tutors expect. More homework might entice the student to take shortcuts in their study by cheating or asking their parents or siblings to do it or spend more time doing the things they are willing to do, being a kid. When kids are given a lot of homework they tend to lie to the teachers or even parents just because they don’t want to do it, this sometimes results in stress and depression moods .
It is children’s psyche that if they are forced to do something beyond their capacity, they tend to lie to their parents and even teachers. Giving comfort level to student will motivate them and encourage them to work harder and efficiently. Teachers should give students space so that they may rely on them and are contented enough to talk out their problems.
Generation gap is not due to the age or the mind gap between students and parents but it is because they don’t get much time to communicate with each other.