Too Much Homework, Too Little Play

[Juanita Doyon <Jedoyon@AOL.COM>]

Washington Post

SEP 03, 2001

Too Much Homework, Too Little Play

By KATHY SEAL

SANTA MONICA, Calif.  -- When I was in junior high school, my parents gave
me a typewriter.  My friends Amy Neff and Carol Stein often walked with me
to my house after school, and we closed my bedroom door and spent the
afternoon giggling — or rolling on the carpet, howling with lunatic
laughter — as we tapped out silly limericks and satirical stories on my
sage-green Hermes.  Once we even wrote a play.

Our after-school typing was not homework.  We rambled wherever our teenage
imaginations took us; we explored words wildly for the pure fun of it, with
no exams, report cards or SAT's in mind.  We practiced literary risk-taking
and problem-solving, honed our language skills and learned perseverance, all
with no fear of failure — because we were playing.

Few children today have time for this kind of after-school play — there's
too much homework.  Parents' concerns about overload have become a familiar
story as schools all over the country pile on homework in a misaimed
response to criticism that they were teaching too little.  Some elementary
teachers routinely assign time- consuming work in each of three or four
academic subjects every night.

Amy Neff, one of the friends who helped me enjoy my typewriter in junior
high, learned at a school meeting in May that in fifth grade her 10-
year-old daughter would have an hour and a half to two hours of homework
seven days a week, plus special projects.  "The idea is that, under an
avalanche of work, children should learn to organize their time
efficiently," she wrote to me in an e-mail message.  "Nobody has mentioned
creativity .  .  . ideas, content of what is learned — just doing LOTS,
FAST!"

The parents and grandparents of today's children had time for "playing
around" with stamp collections or model airplanes, writing a fairy tale,
selling lemonade or indulging a fascination with space travel.  What many
people do not realize is that these kinds of interests and hobbies are just
as important as academic learning.

Many successful adults have a childhood history of freewheeling play. Louis
Ignarro, a Nobel Prize winning pharmacologist, had six successively complex
chemistry sets and played with model rockets.  When Letty Cottin Pogrebin,
president of the Authors Guild, an association of published writers, was 9,
she spent afternoons writing and drawing for a monthly magazine she printed
on a primitive press called a hectograph. She charged friends and family 3
cents a copy and then mailed each copy with a 3-cent stamp.  She recalls
now, "I never understood why the magazine didn't make a profit." But that's
just the point: when kids play, they are free to experiment and to learn
from their experiences without worrying about how well they're performing.

Though homework has a clear benefit in high school, there is no research
showing that any amount of it advances the education of elementary school
kids.  They may be stuffing a great deal of information into their heads,
but after an hour or two, children lose any eagerness or joy they had in
learning.  That's important, because research has shown decisively that that
when children study because they enjoy it, their learning is deeper, richer
and longer-lasting.

Parents do have some recourse.  They can meet with principals and teachers,
organize other parents, and protest. Parents in several communities,
including Piscataway, N.J., have prevailed upon school districts to enact
homework limits.  For their children, at least, there may still be time to
indulge in the ancient and powerful medium for learning known as play.

Kathy Seal is co-author of ``Motivated Minds: Raising Children to Love
Learning."

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