But this fall, as students across the country load their JanSports with textbooks and start down the road to lower-back pain, a group of parents and educators are desperately trying to send a message that maybe nights spent cuddling the periodic table aren't so fortifying after all. This month, two books about homework and its discontents are on shelves: "The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It" by Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish and "The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing" by Alfie Kohn.

To hear these homework protesters tell it, recent years have seen an almost comical inflation of the work kids are bringing home from school. Kindergartners and first graders, those squirmy squirts who can barely make it through "Blues Clues," are being asked to do 30 minutes to an hour of studying a night, while middle and high schoolers are forced to slog through four and five and six hours of the stuff. And some of the assignments sound like something out of a Fellini movie: translating arithmetic problems into alphanumeric code and plotting them on a graph to look like Abraham Lincoln, building popsicle-stick replicas of the Pentagon and baking cakes in the shape of Roman ruins.

Salon recently spoke by phone to Nancy Kalish, coauthor of "The Case Against Homework." This Brooklyn, N.Y., journalist and mother of one said her eyes were opened to the scourge of homework when her daughter hit middle school. Kalish teamed with former legal aid attorney and mother of two Sara Bennett to research and write the book, which argues that homework is actually diminishing children's educational experience, turning kids off learning, putting strains on families, turning students into "homework potatoes" and stunting cognitive and social development.

I began reading Rebecca Traister’s interview with great anticipation. I want substance about this issue, not bromides. But here all we got was mushy statements about “love of learning” and red-herings about penne palaces. While I think that the author is correct that homework is (among many other factors) overwhelming education, there is little in her interview that would help me win an argument in a school board meeting.

Finally, statements such as “But no parent should be in the position of having to teach their kids math” are just plain embarrassing. First, if M. Kalish had done her homework, she would have attended to her number agreement between pronoun and referent. Secondly, if parents imagine that they are not in “the position of having to teach their kids math” they must not feel math is work counting on.

-- rlwesty

One part of the problem has been identified by Alfie Kohn - and I hope his book, which was mentioned in the article, will be reviewed on Salon. He has pointed out that 'work' is entirely the wrong metaphor for what students do at school and at home, and gets us locked into all sorts of silly patterns, including the busywork, competitiveness and 'more is better' attitude. When we remember that it's about *learning* - when everyone involved understands that, and all our activities are directed toward students' *learning*, rather than toward the completion of 'work' (and associated work ethic beliefs (or neuroses)) - then what happens at school and at home becomes productive.

Another related issue that was mentioned in the article but hasn't been taken up is parental expectations: when I was a classroom teacher I often tried to give a relatively light but carefully planned homework program, and generally had parents coming to me concerned that their children weren't receiving enough homework (read, as much as the children of their friends). We're in this self-perpetuating cycle, and books like this one are at least part of the pill that at least attempts to drop us out of the homework Matrix, spluttering and newborn, to think about a new mode of living and learning.

-- Bravus

I'm not coming down on the teachers. Most teachers I know are struggling to stay afloat. The school day simply isn't structured in a way that promotes learning. For starters, the school day starts way too early. Studies have shown that children and young adults can't function at their highest levels early in the morning. Personally, I know that's true -- I was always terrible at math, but I was especially terrible at math at 7:19 in the morning! (That's when my first period class began. Oh yeah, it sucked.) The school day should be pushed back so that it starts later, and ends later. A later end time would also make it more convenient for parents to pick up their kids after work, instead of leaving them to come home to an empty house. Also, I don't see why we can't have a longer school day as well. Kalish's statement that students in Japan spend less time on homework may or may not be true, but it's certain that they spend longer days in the classroom. This would allow teachers to pack more into their lessons, instead of leaving students to make up what they didn't get to when they go home.

In high school, the best class I ever had was my AP US History class. Mr. Cozine was a former college professor, and he taught our class as if it were a college lecture. He'd lecture in class and moderate discussions, then assign a paper every month. That's it. No handouts, no silly collages, no busywork. We as high school seniors felt that our intelligence was being respected. As a result, we were willing to do the things he asked of us. And, because of the class's structure, we weren't shocked by class structure in college. I think that more teachers and administrators need to treat high school as preparation for college and the real world.

-- TRM

There are so many students who come to college and are completely unprepared--they can't write simple paragraphs or essays, they have poor reading comprehension, they can't listen and take useful notes during lectures. These students usually feel overwhelmed and frustrated, and often drop out after one semester or less. Are these college students suffering from unreasonable amounts of homework? No. It is ridiculous to think that we should tell future lawyers, doctors, engineers, or any professional that they should just do as much study and research as fits comfortably into 5 hours. In these situations, it doesn't matter how long you spent studying, or how hard you worked---it is only your end knowledge that will make you successful. Mostly, these students just don't understand how to study effectively.

If children don't learn how to deal effectively with homework, then they will be unprepared for college and for work. Good time management is not quitting after a set amount of time, it is learning how to acheive a goal by using time effectively. It seems to me that setting time-related goals rather than task-related goals is a bad idea. If you tell a child to work on math for an hour and then stop, in most cases they will just waste time until the hour is up, completing very few problems. If you tell a child to finish 20 problems, then there is more incentive for them to work efficiently so that they can complete their task and move on to other things.

Unless they have a learning disability that requires special intervention, a child who is frustrated by homework probably just needs to learn how to work more effectively. In some cases, this may mean recognizing that a stupid, busywork assignment does not need to be completed, in favor of working on more significant homework tasks. However, in most cases, students will probably find that a collection of homework assignments that seemed overwhelming at first is actually quite managable if they make smart use of their time.

No one wants to see their child upset and worried, but kids have to learn to deal with stress---not just to avoid it. You are doing your future college-student or job-holder no favors if you allow them to quit when their homework gets hard.

-- Molly

When I was a kid, I think my mother helped me with home work about three times in 12 years, and went to the school about the same number of times. The year I graduated from high school, national SAT scores peaked and began a long decline which ended only when they jiggered the grading and inflated all the results. When my friends all began to have kids in the 1980s and 1990s, the mothers were down at the school constantly for this, that, and the other, and they were sitting at the table with their elementary school children working on homework every night. It's outrageous and it's counterproductive.

Every child without exception has an innate desire to learn and to gain mastery over at least some intellectual material of some type. School systematically kills this--or tries to. It does not have to be this way. The other key point is mentioned briefly--children need to be playing a lot MORE, and a lot more of the play needs to be PHYSICAL. Not just because exercise is another Yuppie value, but because it is of such inestimable importance in developing a sound mind.

The brute equation of lots of homework with lots of character is a holdover from Salem, Massachusetts c. 1690. Not surprising the current administration is down with it.

-- G. L.

Kids are exhausted and miserable because an 8 hour school day sucks the life out of them. All day they are policed by adults, forced to sit quietly and listen in

uncomfortable chairs. They are not even free to use the bathroom without a pass.

Then, they get home, and after wasting all that time at school, they have to spend their free time doing the brain work that *should* happen in school.

I remember the absurdity of my junior year of high school. I would spend eight hours yawning and daydreaming in school -- then I would spend 5+ hours reading and writing and thinking for my homework. The school day seemed useless, while the learning took place at home.

College works because there is a reasonable balance between class time and independent work. A one hour class, twice per week, is enough time for instruction -- then students have plenty of time to work independently and still have a life. I'm convinced that teenagers should be on this schedule by high school. If we must have an 8 hour school day, let them spend half of it on homework.

There is NO reason why students should spend 8 hours at school plus 5 hours at home. Would you want a 13 hour work day?

-- Kelly

But some of the homework assignments I see are not designed to promote learning - they're meaningless, mindless busywork. And that's the problem - not the fact that the kid is getting homework, but the fact that it's such mindless busywork. There was the kid whose teacher gave her 84 pages of homework to do in a week - yes, 84 pages of math homework, it's not a typo. And the homework was all over the place - about 30 different topics that had nothing to do with each other. Why did the teacher do that? She took over the class in mid-year, and she "wanted to know what the kids knew".

Then, there was the 10th grade kid whose geometry teacher assigned them the project of making a Platonic solid - basically a crafts project that had nothing to do with geometry. And then, she told the kids that they couldn't keep their work after it was graded - she would just throw them away. She gave some kind of rationale for it, but I forget what it was. Think about how much disrespect of the kids' time and effort this expresses; it took my student hours to get this project done, and it was going straight into the wastebasket?

Reasonable homework is a good idea. Mindless busywork and pointless torture is not.

-- 565656565656

Why do we lag behind other countries? The reasons are legion, but one of the biggest is our continual worries about the 'self-esteem' of our children. If you have a student who loves working on cars, who is GOOD at working on cars, and who works on cars every day after school in his dad's or cousin's auto shop, why is he FORCED to sit through 4 years of high school? I'm sorry, but he has no interest in Chaucer, or the Moghul Empire in India, or trigonometry, and he will be bored, disruptive, and disengaged when having it crammed down his throat. Going to a 'vocational school' will hurt his self-esteem? How, exactly? Does it not hurt his self-esteem MORE to struggle and struggle through coursework beyond his ability, with all of his peers watching the struggle? We have stigmatized working for a living in this country, and our schools are filled with the results. I have seen students who knew what they wanted to do, and already knew how to do it, being held back for a year or even two years, just to satisfy the myth of the 'well-rounded' high school graduate. Four years of high school will benefit the aspiring accountant, but ask that accountant to reproduce the Shakespeare sonnet they memorized in 10th grade and you will get the same answer as you would get from the guy fixing your transmission.

-- noillusions