So they tell me the topic is homework this week...I have so many feelings and opinions about homework as a student. First of all, I will say that I am 70 days aways from never having to do homework for a class ever again. I feel the need to repeatedly declare this outloud because as someone who went from high school directly into college and from undergrad directly into grad school, homework has always been a part of my life. Looking back on all of the homework I have completed in my life, I feel that now I can objectively say that homework as a whole is busy work.
I will probably hear some defense against that statement coming from my family of educators, but I stand by it and I have examples. I can think of three ways in which homework has increased my skills or knowledge on a given topic. The first is homework for mastering a concept. This kind of homework is seen in math classes, foreign language studies and grammar lessons. For this application, I understand the purpose of homework. This is mainly the kind of homework I would get throughout elementary school.
Another type of useful homework I have done is homework that helps me better understand concepts that will be on important exams. This is the kind of homework I had in high school, specifically in AP classes and ACT/SAT prep courses. While some of this type of work felt tedious at the time, it helped me understand the foundations of each subject and it played a huge part in my academic success.
The last type of useful homework I have done has been in college. What I have appreciated about my college homework, especially for graduate school, is that a lot of the homework and projects I do for my major are things that are directly applicable to my career or can be placed in a portfolio of work for interviews. This kind of homework is highly transmittable to success outside of school.
While I can understand that those three categories of homework have helped me a lot throughout all of my schooling, I also have done a lot of homework from which I have seen no direct benefit. Typically, this is busy work type homework that oftentimes isn’t even graded. This is the kind of homework that makes me angry because it wasted my time. One thing that I have learned through graduate school is that everyone’s time is valuable and should be respected. When I am given homework that is neither useful nor educational, I believe that teacher/professor is telling me with their actions that my time and effort is less valuable than theirs.
As students, we cannot refuse to do homework because we don’t see why it’s necessary. We can choose to prioritize homework that will benefit us over busy work and spend more time and effort on the useful homework. This will prove more beneficial because you are investing in what matters, and most of the time there is a better payoff to working hard on the more useful homework because the teacher assigns more weight to that project. These will also be the projects that receive more thoughtful and helpful feedback from teachers/professors. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t care about all of your homework; I just want to tell you to value what will improve your knowledge and skillset and devote more time to that kind of homework.
- Bria