Author: Naimish Gohil
Posted: 12 Jun 2013
Estimated time to read: 3 mins
Homework impacts three types of people in a school: teachers, students and parents. There are pros and cons for all three of these stakeholders, as every one of them has something to lose and something to gain.
Pros and Cons for Teachers
Teachers, for the most part, view homework as a necessary staple to instruction. It helps the students absorb the material so more class time can be spent in discussion, asking questions, experiments and learning. It can provide practice for rote learning skills and concepts like math facts and spelling or vocabulary words.
Homework can be individualized to help with remediation, maintenance or extension of skills. Student can get caught up or take that family trip and stay caught up with the class. Homework encourages students to engage in learning, to read and write and think, and to achieve beyond the classroom.
It is a tool to teach responsibility and time management, discipline and study skills necessary for post-secondary education and job careers. Homework increases performance on standardized tests, and therefore, helps students to accomplish their educational goals that eventually lead to life goals.
However, time needs to be devoted to prepare and explain the homework, and then there is additional time needed to correct the homework and to explain the corrections to the students so the ultimate can be gained from doing the homework in the first place.
Also, there is a lot of time spent on those students who just do not turn the homework in. How do you get them to do it? How to you weight the grade for homework?
Pros and cons of homework for parents
Parents see homework as a positive activity opposed to watching excessive TV or computer gaming and any other activities not recognized for their health or positive contribution to daily life. They feel homework teaches essential life skills concerned with studying, discipline and time management.
Parents feel their kids deserve a better life than themselves and one avenue on the road to success is to read and study. They want their children to succeed. However, parents feel that sometimes the homework is too much or not as relevant as it should be.
They feel that homework can take away from other time the student needs to devote to either more meaningful study or other relevant activities like sports, music, art, volunteer work, church, clubs and family. They witness the stress that homework puts on students, as well as the entire family. Especially when students are younger, parents question if this is interfering too much with their free time, creativity and time for just being a child.
Pros and cons of homework for parents
Students are proud of themselves when they do well in any subject, on a test, or in school for any reason. Sometimes, added study (homework) at night helps students to achieve this.
Therefore, homework to review and reinforce specific skills and concepts is important if the homework is selectively given and it is designed to be high quality and relevant. Homework might be more enjoyable if it involves a curriculum area that the student likes or in a manner they enjoy doing (i.e. computer-assisted, group project, study in their favorite subject area or in the manner they like e.g. written work if they like to write; reading is that is their strength area; etc.).
However, the negative view of homework seen through the eyes of students is that it can be boring, there is just too much of it, it interferes with more enjoyable activities, it may be difficult and frustrating or unpleasant, and it might be seen as useless.
