It's time to settle how much homework is the
right amount for students of all ages

It could have been a major misstep by Premier Dalton McGuinty when he pooh-poohed the idea of less homework early in the election campaign.

A video shot during a campaign stop and posted on YouTube shows McGuinty saying: "Mr. Tory says our children have too much homework, so he's going to reduce the homework load." Big cheers from the kids. Whoops.

Homework has become a heated subject, and not just among students (check out www.stophomework.com). When I was in school we got next to no homework until we approached high school. Then the drive for a tougher curriculum and standards hit in the mid-1990s and the load went up, sometimes due to teachers struggling to cram everything into class time. These days even kindergarteners bring home worksheets for the weekend.

A friend whose five-year-old takes weekend Chinese classes says between homework from Chinese school and kindergarten, she and her son are busy most nights at the kitchen table.

Toronto District School Board trustees are awaiting a review of the board's homework policy with the possibility of an end to weekend and vacation homework assignments.

on error resume next ShockMode = (IsObject(CreateObject("ShockwaveFlash.ShockwaveFlash.6")))

Retired teacher Vera Goodman also says "enough." The author of Simply Too Much Homework, will speak next Saturday to the annual People for Education conference at York University.

The 73-year-old grandmother of three and reading consultant calls herself "The Raging Homework Granny.

"It's a huge discussion across North America ... I think the whole thing has got out of whack," says Goodman on the phone from her Calgary home. "I love children and I love families and I see what homework is doing to them."

As a language arts teacher Goodman assigned her students "minimal" homework, such as reading novels.

"I think there's homework you can assign that's really fun and really interesting," says Goodman, such as getting kids to interview their family members or neighbours.

BUSY FAMILIES

What she sees now are kids receiving too much homework, poorly-designed homework that sucks time away from busy families that need time with each other, results in kids getting graded on assignments their parents have done for them, does not contribute to true learning and overburdens kids to the point they hate school.

She calls vacation homework "an oxymoron," mentioning the time she was at a family cottage for Thanksgiving and watched her grandson trying to do math homework on his laptop.

"Kids need a break too," she says, adding little will change until parents start banding together to demand it from government.

There is no Ontario government policy on homework. Some guidelines -- such as those at the TDSB and what John Tory proposed -- are based on 10 minutes per day of homework per grade, so Grade 3 students are doing 30 minutes, Grade 6 an hour and Grade 12 students two hours.

While Goodman and other critics say there is no research proving homework improves learning, a review of studies on homework effectiveness in the U.S. said 14 out of 20 studies done between 1962 and 1994 showed homework did improve achievement, but only starting in middle school and increasing through high school. Limited homework in elementary school was valuable only for getting kids ready to do more demanding homework later on. The best homework were assignments where students practised concepts they had learned or prepared them for new lessons. And the researcher agreed with Goodman that homework should not be graded.

Homework is important. But when so many of us complain our lives are already too busy, we need to ask what we're teaching our kids when we dump piles of it on them for the sake of homework -- and not learning -- and take away time for them to just be kids.

"Time is a coin we have to spend and that is the most precious thing we have," says Goodman.

A grandmother ought to know.