The Schoolfield

Why Homework Is Pointless- The Answer To A Popular Question

This is a question that so many students ponder over. What purpose does homework serve besides giving the teachers some more papers to grade? There is a purpose to having homework. It is probably really hard to understand but it wasn’t just designed to make you suffer outside of school too like many students think.

Why do we have homework?

The main reason why teachers give homework is to give the students a chance to get some hands-on experience with the concepts that they learned in class. You only retain about half of the information that you hear and see. It isn’t until you apply that information that it becomes knowledge or something that you retain. So the idea is to make you retain the information but doing the problems and creating that hands-on experience.

Why doesn’t it work like it should?

The main reason why this concept is flawed is because if the student doesn’t know how to do the problem when they get home or they do it wrong, they are actually training their brain incorrectly. Have you ever drove somewhere for the first time and went the wrong way? You may find that you go the wrong way a couple times after that time as well because you trained yourself to think that that was the way to go. It isn’t until you get to that same point that you think to yourself, darn I did it again.

What is a more effective way?

It may be more effective to have the students do the homework in class with the teacher so that if they don’t understand the concepts, they can ask. This will be a hard thing to implement since we cram so much into a school year but I bet we would find that the lesson lengths would be shorter because the students would be able to move more quickly between tasks because they would grasp the concepts quicker. Let’s utilize the senses and have the students read about it, see it being done, hear how it is done, and then have them do it right there correctly a few times.

It would definitely take the busy out of the “busy work” because the students would actually benefit from the homework because it is being done correctly and in conjunction with the other sensory information.