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After-school workloads are at an all-time high -- for children and their parents alike. When the burden turns quiet family evenings into tearful battlegrounds, reports ERIN ANDERSSEN, many parents are tempted to give their kids shortcuts (don't call it cheating). Worse yet, current research shows homework in the early grades may hurt learning more than it helps -- so why is there so much of it?

By: ERIN ANDERSSEN

The Saskatchewan mom hadn't meant to help her daughter cheat. But when her Grade 5 student came home from school weeping, after a stern lecture from her teacher, she wondered if that was pretty much what she had done.

The mother had only corrected a few spelling errors and fixed the capitalization in an essay about a Greek, chariot-riding god. She actually had done more on some of her daughter's projects last year, surfing the Web for information on volcanoes, disease pathology and data about Canadian currency. In some cases, the mom admits, "Basically, I did the assignment. . . . The homework got done, but it didn't really get done by her.

This time, though, the alert teacher asked in class who had gotten help from their parents, and her 10-year-old was one of several kids who raised their hands. They were told they had to do the work over again. When the mother complained, she received a terse note back: "I'm not grading the parents, I'm grading the children."

 

Many parents across the country, however, do feel like they're the ones being graded. The homework weighing down the kitchen table, which has been getting heavier at most schools by the year, does not seem like a burden their grade-school children can handle on their own.

 

Classes are too big, they say, the curriculum is too hard too early, and in this age of standardized testing, homework has become an after-hours substitute for fully productive school days. Students are left trading knapsacks for wheeled luggage, and parents are left to navigate how much to help -- and sometimes, out of mercy, how much homework they just do themselves, to keep it from wrecking their family lives.

 

"I'm not a saint," said Karen, a Calgary mother with a daughter in Grade 2, who typically gets 90 minutes of homework each night. "There are times when we are both frustrated, and I give in and give her the answers."

 

In the past decade, education researchers in North America have tracked a marked increase in elementary-school homework, while the high-school burden has held steady. One Canadian survey reported that homework in the early grades has increased by up to 30 per cent in the past three years. A University of Michigan study found that six-to-nine-year-olds in the United States were doing three times the homework in 1997 that they had been in 1981 -- up from 44 minutes to, on average, two hours a night.

 

Parents shouldn't be stepping in, acknowledged Helen Jones, a spokeswoman for the Association of Parent Support Groups in Ontario. But they're afraid not to -- "because the homework won't get done, and their kids won't turn out to be brain surgeons, and they'll end up on skid row. But this is a myth."

 

In fact, not one of the latest educational studies suggests that early homework creates A students. On the contrary, most agree that too much homework can hurt. In North America today, it tends to bore and overburden kids, and take away from important family and play time.

 

But this is not the message parents hear. "If they miss one night, they fall behind," one stressed mom said, her family having cancelled all weeknight activities to make room for elementary-school homework.

 

Desperate to get it done, parents admit they sometimes give too much of a nudge in the direction of the answer. Few of them will cop to doing the work entirely, but a recent Rutgers University survey of 4,500 high-school students in the United States found that 53 per cent didn't think it was cheating if their parents did their homework.

 

The teachers often suspect when it happens, even if they can't prove it. Betsy Reilly, a 30-year-veteran primary-school teacher in London, Ont., says she occasionally sees homework returned in adult handwriting. And parents, she says pointedly, would be "embarrassed" to know how often their kids confess to it. But she is not without sympathy: "What we have are parents so pressured, so scattered, that they do it just to get it done."

 

The scene is the same in bedrooms and dining rooms across North America: Parents, especially working parents, caving in to exhaustion when 30 minutes becomes two hours and there's no end in sight. These parents envy the home-schoolers who are spared the nightly drudgery of long division. They have a name for the time the worst of it strikes -- the "arsenic hour," when dinner needs cooking, the math needs checking, the kids are all whining and a dose of poison sounds pretty good.

 

As one New York mom recently told The Wall Street Journal, she finally, reluctantly gave her son the answers when they faced still more Grade 6 homework at 10 p.m. "You have to get up at 6:30," she told him. "I have to get up at 5:30. I can't do this any more."

 

Many parents say it is hard to figure the line between guiding homework and putting too much of their stamp on it. Last December in Britain, Cherie Blair, wife of Prime Minister Tony Blair, caused a stir among indignant parents when it was reported that she had asked Ministry of Defence officials for information to help her son, Euan, with a school project on nuclear deterrence.

 

Sylvie Carpentier, an Ottawa translator with a son in Grade 6 and two daughters in Grades 3 and 6, feels guilty even changing a sentence, she says, but it's hard not to step in when her older daughter has to do long assignments on the computer. "Now I realize that she might take some advice, just to get rid of me. Just to avoid the discussion," Ms. Carpentier says. "Maybe I am too close to the homework."

 

When parents do go too far in offering shortcuts, though, they impart an unintended study habit: The end justifies the means. But what justifies the end? Harris Cooper is a psychologist at the University of Missouri-Columbia. A leading expert in the field, he has assessed the mass of homework research and found that the benefits plummet with grade level.

 

In elementary school, especially the earliest grades, in-class study is superior to working at home. In junior high, Dr. Cooper found, homework helped only if it were contained at two hours. Not until the later years of high school did doing more homework seem to translate directly to better performance.

 

Parents see the harmful effects of early homework for themselves. "My son was a fabulous reader at Grade 2, and now it's just fizzled away," says Sandy Moon, a Toronto mother whose son Quinn calls his Grade 5 homework "torture." Long division can take him up to 21⁄2 hours. And then there's spelling: Every time he gets a word wrong in class, he has to write it out five times at home. Last year, it was 10 times. "When it's shoved down their throats," Ms. Moon says, "you can see how it's not enticing."

 

Lori White, a single mom in Toronto, says her son Matthew, now in Grade 2, treated homework as "an affront" last year. "Some nights, he would just stare at the page and yell at me and cry." Matthew had a book report to do each night. A keen reader, he would plow through the books assigned, but refuse to write even a few sentences on their contents. "The only way I helped him," Ms. White says, "was to sit there and prod him along. . . . I couldn't even spoon-feed him."

 

Ms. White tried everything: They did homework sitting up and lying down, at the kitchen table and on the living-room couch, after dinner and in the morning before breakfast. She even arranged her work schedule to meet him after school to try it in his classroom. She met with Matthew's teacher and the principal. She worried he had a learning disability (he didn't), though this year has started with more promise, and a lighter load.

 

Ms. White is amazed today to realize that the first homework she remembers from school was in Grade 5, when she fashioned a cardboard dog sled with a picture found in National Geographic. She can't recall doing any homework in the earlier grades, she says -- which is probably because she didn't.

 

It was not always like this. The history of homework makes a fascinating social study. In the decades before the Second World War, politicians and educators crusaded against homework: "Drill and kill," ran the motto. In the 1930s, the American Child Health Association classified homework as child labour; extreme cases were said to cause crooked spines and night terrors.

 

That all changed in North America with the space race, and fears that the Russians might be winning. Homework became a patriotic duty, and "is it done yet?" was the perennial June Cleaver question. This pressure eased a bit in the more permissive 1960s and 1970s, but then homework returned full force in the 1980s -- when parents and politicians, concerned about a lax education system, began heeding global test scores and fretting about the next generation's competitive edge.

 

In the new millennium, the debate has reached a frenzied peak. Proponents say homework promotes good study habits and gets parents involved. Critics counter that it numbs kids and, more disturbingly, disadvantages poor students, who may not have computers, a quiet place to work or parents who have evenings off and are able to help.

 

A British survey last year, for instance, found that while the average set of parents spends seven hours a week on homework, half of them don't feel up to the task -- an issue compounded for less-educated moms and dads, or those for whom English is a second language.

 

Even so, low-income families are the most likely to demand more homework, hoping to give their children a better education than their own. Most middle-class families prefer to have time for extracurricular activities.

 

But not all of them. Parents themselves have put the heat on, linking success to how many books their children tote home each night. The current batch of parents, education experts say, is the most competitive generation yet. While many parents express sympathy for teachers, whom they see as hard-pressed to get through all the subjects to be covered in the school day, teachers also point to the opposite side of the homework debate.

 

Betsy Reilly says she has actually had to tell some parents to stop assigning their own homework in addition to the reading that she gives. "They just get a little gung ho," Ms. Reilly says. "I tell them, please, don't overload."

 

Doug Willard, a veteran Saskatchewan teacher now serving a two-year term as president of theCanadian Teachers Federation, recalls a recent encounter with a taxi driver in Toronto, whose wife was giving their daughter two hours of homework a night -- when she was in Grade 1. Mr. Willard tried to talk him out of it, but the driver was firm: "We want her to makesure she gets into the right university."

 

More than wanting their children to be good, many of today's parents demand that they also be smart. "There's an angst among parents to make certain they're at the top of the class," says Mr. Willard, who observes that his B students are often the risk takers who go on to great accomplishments. "What they need to score high on tests is not necessarily the same things they need to succeed in life."

 

But the parental push for scholastic success has fed a booming business for tutors, even for children in the early grades. Ms. Reilly knows of parents who used their vacation savings to pay for extra help: "They just didn't take a holiday that year."

 

A former Toronto teacher, who now works as tutor, has a lengthy waiting list. She says it's not uncommon to spend a lesson with an elementary student who is sobbing from panic over keeping up. "I had a little girl crying her eyes out last week." She was 11 years old, in Grade 6, and she'd merely failed a test. "Unless you're very bright," the former teacher says, speaking only if her names was not used, "you're going to be in trouble."

 

Many parents feel that applies to them too. They admit to being baffled by their children's vague homework questions, or lost about how to explain the complexities of long division to their nine-year-olds. One New York school even handed out math booklets to refresh parents, and there is a fresh plethora of homework-help sites on the Internet.

 

Like many teenagers, Tara, an Ontario Grade 11 student, notes wryly that she works alone: "My homework is even mind-boggling for my own parents."

 

A typical complaint is that because of shortages, children bring home only photocopies, not the full textbook -- so parents can't look anything up, and often end up giving advice that doesn't meet teacher approval.

 

Richelle MacLaughlin of Antigonish, N.S., whose Grade 5 daughter was struggling with math, advised her to mark her thousands with a comma instead of a space. Her daughter scored 98 per cent on her next test, but came home with a warning from the teacher: The metric system uses spaces, not commas, and if she used them again, she would be marked wrong. Her mom sighs: "This isn't even calculus."

 

Larry Railton, an early-childhood educator in New Westminster, B.C., once spent an entire evening with his Grade 8 son trying to answer a few confusing questions about the Renaissance. "I looked at this thing. My wife looked at this thing. We couldn't figure out what they were asking. And we're not stupid people." The answer they decided on came back wrong.

 

"It bothered me that we sat around for three hours, when they should have been doing other things," Mr. Railton. "We have to vigorously object to that."

 

Homework, say parents such as Mr. Railton, saps what little time working families can claim together these days. It cuts into soccer practice and violin lessons. Besides turning children off school, it turns parents into nagging homework police. They stew about destroying their relationship with their kids when they lose patience over slow answers to multiplication, and because so many nights end in tears. "You cannot tutor your own kids," announces one weary B.C. father. "You'll kill them."

 

Complains a parent in Kenora, Ont., "We're teaching our kids to bring work home as adults." Which leads to the question posed by a Toronto mom: "Are we going to start getting our kids ready for university in kindergarten?"

 

The Toronto tutor has, for her part, given up entirely on monitoring her teenaged son's homework, after years of battling his resistance to coaching. "I just said, 'It's your responsibility. Good luck.' " He is now in Grade 12, in the year of the infamous Ontario "double cohort," when spots for university are expected to be scarce. She doesn't even know if he's doing the work any more.

 

But she had no choice. "It was just constant fighting," she says. "And it's done terrible damage to our family. Now we're just trying to get it back."

 

The same story is told from other homes: In high school, the tears over early homework explode into real rebellion. "It sounds like an innocent enough thing," says Ms. Jones, the spokeswoman for the parents group, "but it actually creates tremendous hostilities at home."

 

This is what happened to Jean, a Toronto-area mom, whose daughter's homework would consume the entire evening. The struggle to get the work finished would lead to screaming and door slamming. One night, in a rage, her daughter yanked a knife out of a kitchen drawer, and in the tussle get it back, her mother accidently gave her a black eye.

 

At 16, the girl packed her bags and moved in with her boyfriend's mom. "It was the pressure of homework. That's where things went wrong," Jean says.

 

Her daughter, now 25, works as an marketing administrator for a computer company; her relationship with her mother is on the mend, though they don't talk about the years behind them and the stresses homework exacerbated. Jean says she would handle it differently now: "I would speak to her as an adult."

 

Other parents have already learned their lesson, refusing to let the homework ruin an evening. When the night drags on too long, they simply pack it in. Like Ms. MacLaughlin in Antigonish, they send a note to school explaining why the work didn't get done, sometimes sparking panic in their children -- Ms. MacLaughlin's daughter predicted she would be kept in at recess for coming to school empty-handed, so her mom had to make clear in the note that this was not to happen.

 

Another family, at a Calgary school, has gone so far as to announce that it is boycotting all Grade 3 homework.

 

According to Dr. Cooper, homework trends go in 30-year cycles, which puts the current crop of parents and students at the peak of a 15-year demand for more. He predicts the workload is about to drop. In the debate over whether homework should be assigned at all, he comes down in favour of useful, age-sensitive amounts. In elementary schools, where healthy homework can help develop study habits, it especially needs to be short and successful.

 

Most educators agree in principle to a 10-minute rule: 10 minutes of homework multiplied by the numbers of years in school (though it can be a hard guide to follow if a student struggles with a subject). Many schools have started writing homework guidelines, controlling the load and often banning assignments on weekends and holidays. Parents and teachers piling on more homework than the standard, Dr. Cooper cautions, should be alert "for signs of burnout in their children."

 

In Kenora, with one son in Grade 2 and her youngest only four years old, Judy Major is bracing for the battles to come -- not just over getting her kids to do their homework, but finding time for it in evenings when the family likes to read together or play a game. These things matter to her more than pages of math and spelling. "For a society that says it values family time," she says, "I don't believe this is the message we are sending our kids."

 

Building better homework

 

Former industrial-arts teacher Malcolm Welch has been out of a high-school classroom for years, but he can easily recall the worst homework assignments he ever handed out. They said: Read this chapter, and answer the six questions at the end.

 

Dr. Welch, who now lectures the student teachers at Queen's University on, among other subjects, homework, says that kind of assignment is dull and pointless. Healthy homework -- the kind parents should praise -- might be this: Measure all the people in your family, and figure out the dimensions you need to build them a comfortable chair.

 

"Much of the homework we give," Dr. Welch says, "is ill-conceived and a total waste of time. The classic project has the student building a volcano and chucking baking soda down the hole -- I'm not sure what they learn from that."

 

Other teachers agree: The homework they are most proud of is not drill work or spelling lists, but projects that had student learning before they even realized it. Doug Willard, a science teacher in Saskatchewan, tells of the "international science conference" he organized in his class one year. Teams of student, wearing ties to fit the occasion, had to present different experiments around one simple question: What affects the length of a pendulum's swing?

 

Betsy Reilly, an elementary-school teacher in London, Ont., boasts proudly of her school's math kits, which were developed and paid for by a group of parents and teachers. Every weekend, students go home with a different family project in their kit, such as measuring a room in the house.

 

But if the teacher's job is to give good homework, and reasonable amounts of it, educators say the parental role, even if it amounts to cheering from the sidelines, is just as essential. A positive push from mom and dad, the experts says, boosts academic success. But parents might be surprised to learn that this doesn't mean coaxing and prodding your child through every long-division exercise.

 

The best results, one study concluded, are produced not so much when parents help with homework, but when they encourage it -- by giving time and space, and by congratulating achievement. A U.S. school began sending answer sheets home when another study found, for instance, that math marks went up when the work was corrected by parents. A new book on the subject by three professors at the University of California at Berkeley, called Spark Your Child's Success, cautions parents to stay positive about homework, no matter what they might be thinking privately.

 

"Be vigilant about inadvertently discouraging or shutting down your child," the authors caution. They give the example of the father who declines to help with a science project, saying he was never any good with geometry; to a child, the writers say, this can send the message that science isn't worth the bother.

 

Parents should also guard against homework their children aren't able to complete or appear to be seeing for the first time. Homework, Dr. Welch says, should be used only to advance elements a teacher has already taught.

 

"If a student takes home a piece of homework and doesn't know how to do it," he tells the future educators in his class, "something's gone wrong with your lesson."

 

Some other pointers:

 

Set the stage. Give your child a quiet, well-lit spot to do the homework, says Harris Cooper, a psychologist at the University of Missouri-Columbia. And establish a regular pattern for when the homework gets done.

 

Be a consultant, suggest the authors of Spark Your Child's Success,not a tutor. Be there to answer questions, but don't get over-involved. "It's really the parallel of teaching a person to fish rather than putting a trout on her plate," they write.

 

Share in the experience. One of the best family practices that Betsy Reilly recalls is the parents who every night would bring their own work to the kitchen table, reading or doing the bills while their children finished their homework. They could show interest and troubleshoot -- two essential ways to support schoolwork -- without micromanaging the assignments.

 

When problems persist, teachers like Ms. Reilly and Mr. Willard say, parents shouldn't grumble each night about the load, but seek out solutions at the school. Parents often note marked difference in homework policies from one teacher to the next. They need to push for clear rules on homework and parental involvement, Dr. Welch says. Like many other districts across North America, the school board in the Windsor, Ont., area has crafted guidelines to set out punishments for students who don't do their homework -- including suspension for repeated lapses in high school -- and restrictions on when teachers can assign it: No homework on the holidays.

 

Both schools and parents need to get away from an inflexible approach to homework, Dr. Welch suggests. In the early grades, parents need to be clear about setting time limits; later, there needs be more latitude for students to concentrate on the subjects they have trouble with. "If you're good at math and know your fractions," he asks, "why do you need to know more?"

 

In the end, though, says Ms. Reilly, a fan of pure reading as homework, families and schools both need to learn to slow down. "Kids need to be breathing a bit more."

 

Homework helpers

 

The Internet is brimming with Web sites designed to help students (and their parents) in all grades on just about every subject you can imagine -- from boning up on their multiplication tables, to finding when the dinosaurs died, to the proper format for a bibliography. Here are just a few:

 

Science Net. This site, complete with funky kid-friendly graphics, was set up by the Toronto Public Library. Students can search through a number of science categories -- botany, paleontology and astronomy among them. The site includes age-specific information, tells users which links require time to download, and notes which ones are Canadian. http://sciencenet.tpl.toronto.on.ca

 

The Canadian Encyclopedia. A full-text Internet version of the encyclopedia of Canadian facts, information and history.http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com

 

KidsClick! Asearch engine created by librarians, on everything from poetry to spacecraft, with reading levels to help guide parents and students. http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/KidsClick!

 

The Internet Public Library. Dictionaries, almanacs and links to maps, as well as search options for a broad range of topics, from anthropology to history. http://www.ipl.org

 

Math Forum. This Web site allows you to ask specific questions of "Dr. Math," who sends an email reply and also posts many of his answers. It contains helpful info on all levels of math from kindergarten to Grade 12, and an archive of frequently asked questions on geometry, algebra and calculus. http://www.mathforum.org

 

 

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