Reply #91: Homework is still perceived by many, the way movies & TV shows depict it [View All]

[SoCalDem]

The scene is always the same:

Mod doing dishes and dad & the kids gather at the dinner table.. He's hleping them with homework and getting Mom's occasional input...or Mom is sitting with the kids after school, helping them.

Times have changed...

Most kids probably arrive home to an empty house, and kill time until Mom gets home..or they arrive at a sitter's house or afterschool daycare until Mom or Dad picks them up.

Then there's a madcap daily frenzy to get dinner ready for everyone, many of whom arrive home at different times.. If Mom starts dinner after she picks up kids from various daycares & afterschool activities, and only gets HOME at 6-ish, dinner will probably be at 7 or even later...or may be a catch-as-catch-can variety of drive-thru pickups or delivery fast food...but even then, dinnertime can reach into evening hours..and then it's time for baths.

2 hours of homework is likely to be a daily chore left to the kids themselves, to figure out.

and there are many families where one parent is headed to a night job, soon after arriving home from their day job.

Mom no longer has the luxury of advance-prepping dinner at 3, and helping with homework until Dad gets home at 5:30..dinner at 5:45, and then a little family time before bedtime.

In many families these days, people can go days without even seeing all the family members in the same place at the same time.

If the kids are self-starters, they will manage to get their homework done in the time between school's end and when the parents pick them up or get home, but many kids are not .

When my boys were in school, they figured out that often the homework was not even graded..just checked off as "done". teachers these days often have no "extra" time to grade in-school work, let alone extra homework.

I don't know what the solution is, but I can see that piles of homework may not be the optimum plan anymore.