by Caryl Harvey

I was in the cell phone business office the other day. The mom who works there was bemoaning that her boy was bright, but he wouldn’t apply himself. Why?  He doesn’t know.

He does his homework, but he won’t turn it in.  This is a phenomenon that affects most of today’s kids. Okay. I don’t know if it affects most kids. It affects mine, my grandkids and the woman at the phone company.

There seems to be a BIG attitude problem surrounding homework.

So, do you suppose kids have too much? ( Homework, that is.)

Not according to Education expert Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy, based in Washington, D.C. Brown reported, in a USA Today Weekend article, three to twelve year olders spent an average of 134 minutes of study per week.  Divide that by 5 and you come up with about 27 minutes per night. Okay, that is probably a little misleading because the three year olds probably didn’t do a lot of studying. But even if the total was 45 minutes a night, it wouldn’t be an excessive amount of time to spend in study.

Harris Cooper, an expert on homework, recommends ten minutes a day per grade level. A first grader would study 10 minutes. A sixth grader, sixty.

According to current available data, the average American high schooler spends five hours a week on homework. That’s the DAILY average in many high achieving nations. And it’s not even a tenth of the time kids spend on out-of-school activities ( besides sleeping and eating.)

Kids spend a lot of time with their friends. And, according to the USA Today article, that has a detrimental effect on  academic performance. A social life is an expensive item, time-wise. Added to the amount of time they spend is the cumulative attitude kids adopt  which devalue learning. Think PEER PRESSURE. In a recent poll, only one teen in three said that their friends thought grades were important. But another poll—taken by Agenda, a non-partisan educational polling group—said that teens felt adults did not demand enough from them.

SO HOW DO WE GET THE KIDS TO DO THEIR HOMEWORK (AND TURN IT IN?)

1)      Model the attitude you want your kids to adopt. Show them you are interested in current events. Help them with their homework…and if you can’t, at least show involvement. Assist them in finding the answers.  

2)      Don’t take TV away from them altogether. It seems that moderate viewers (an hour a night) do better academically than non-watchers. Why? Perhaps, say the pundits, because the kids become discriminating and learn to manage time. Also, they tend to get current events from TV. And American kids watched no more TV on average than kids in foreign countries. BUT kids who watch three or more hours an evening did significantly poorer academically than those who watched only an hour a night. (This almost sounds like the recommendation by the AMA for drinking a glass of wine once a day for your health and relaxation. My Uncle Arnie decided to adopt the standard—retroactively. Uncle Arnie is so relaxed now that  he wouldn’t be shaken by news of a world-wide ban of Big Macs. And he’s only up to 1976.)

3)      Limit sports and clubs. The average American teen spends ten to fifteen hours a week on extra-curricular activities. Some participation is healthy. More than one youngster has stuck with high school to get an athletics scholarship. And for kids who don’t plan on higher education, sports can offer a chance to succeed. But the polls found that kids who spent twenty or more hours on extracurricular activities ( like varsity practices) fail academically. They may take time earmarked for homework or study and apply it to their clubs or sports. At any rate, if a child struggles academically, parents must make the hard choices. (This even applies to part-time jobs. Parents have to prioritize because kids will not see choices clearly.)

4)      Generally, kids need help with organization. Help them set up a routine. If they are moderately successful in their studies, older kids should have some leeway in deciding the environment of their study area ( though TV is a definite NO during homework and study time.)

5)      If a child doesn’t do his homework, or doesn’t hand it in, USE YOUR PARENTAL POWER. Take away privileges: the phone, car keys, video games. But DON’T TAKE AWAY PRIVILEGES UNTIL THE NEXT REPORT CARD. Most kids can’t delay gratification that long. They’ll give up. AND LIMIT--RATHER THAN STOP—sports and club activities.

6)      Maintain contact with the school. Our school system has a parent bridge—an Internet site where teachers post grades and assignments and where parents may email teachers about problems. If you don’t have this system, use your phone. Keep up on your child’s performance. Don’t let a failing grade be a surprise to you—and don’t let your child tell you it is a surprise to him. Address problems like tardiness and skipping classes when they are small. They could be symptoms of an overwhelmed child, of poor choice in peers or even of the beginnings of substance experimentation.

7)      Don’t be afraid to ask the teachers for specific involvement. Ask for a signature on an assignment notebook and you sign the homework paper. Ask the teacher to “sign the assignment in.”

8)      Insist that the child do papers listed as “incomplete” even if he gets no credit for them. The assignments are given to teach skills. And the accountability of following through teaches a skill in itself.

It doesn’t seem fair that we Beyonders must spend so much effort on homework. I can diagram a sentence. I can use Algebra (sort of.) I did my homework  (sometimes) and I believe I always turned it in. In short, I was a model student. But I’m a Beyonder. Would you expect less?