Does Your Child Have Too Much Homework?

Virtual and/or distance learning is a new frontier for many children and their parents. Parents have a lot of extra work that they need to do when they’re overseeing their child’s distance learning. Some parents remark that the workload is too much for their child, that their child has too much homework. For example, in one evening, a child might be assigned a few chapters to read in a book and then asked to write a five-hundred-word report on what they’ve read. Now how can a parent know what their child can reasonably do, especially if they have a learning challenge? And how can they communicate their observations to the teacher?

I recently conducted a Zoom video interview with educator and reading specialist Faith Borkowsky. I thought I’d share some highlights from the video interview here on my blog. This week, Faith offers some words of advice to parents who wonder if their child has too much homework, and a few thoughts about what parents can realistically expect from this school year.

The following information is from the video interview with Faith Borkowsky. You can watch the whole interview  below or on my Don Winn YouTube channel.

Don: Faith, can you tell us your thoughts about what a reasonable amount of homework might be?

Faith: All right, so, a couple of things going on. First let’s talk about the word reasonable. What does that really mean? Reasonable for grade level—you know, appropriate grade-level work? Or just reasonable in general?

I’ll give you an example: when my son was in elementary school, I remember that he came home every night with lots and lots of math problems for homework. He did not have any learning problems, but he was being given about fifty long division problems. At his age—I think it was about third grade—that to me was unreasonable. I wanted him to go outside and play; he was an active kid, he needed to get out and move. He was having a hard time just sitting there doing the work, and he understood long division. When a teacher can see that a student has mastered a skill in five to ten examples, it’s not necessary for the student to complete fifty examples. That’s unreasonable in my mind. And that has nothing to do with a learning challenge.

Sometime there’s just busy work. I think a parent needs to sort out what is busy work and what is reasonable for a typical learner at grade level, and then decide what a parent can do when a child struggles, a child with learning challenges.

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