school tries no homework weekends to relieve stress on students teachers

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STAFF ED: Got Homework?

The Globe comments on Kirkwood High School’s experiment with a new “no weekend homework” policy as an attempt to alleviate pressure on student and teacher mental health.

April 8, 2018

Michael Melinger

Photo of a CHS student doing homework.

On the weekends following February 19 and March 9, Kirkwood High School students had one less worry due to a newly enacted no-weekend-homework policy. These two weekends functioned as an experiment as part of an initiative to improve both student and teacher mental health.

In order to enforce this policy, students could report teachers who attempted to assign homework over the weekend. In addition, teachers were not allowed to front-load or back-load, meaning that they could not assign homework due right when the students return from the weekend or assign a large amount of homework right before the weekend.

KHS principal Mike Havener explained that this policy arises from the recent increase in the number of kids seeking counseling and the increase in the number of kids dealing with anxiety and depression.

Although Havener believes that homework has a purpose, he also recognizes the need to respect students’ extracurricular activities, after-school jobs, and responsibilities at home. KHS students, parents, and faculty are hopeful that this new homework policy will relieve stress and consequently reduce the level of anxiety and depression the students feel.

This homework policy also aims benefits teachers, as it hopefully lightens the load that the teachers must grade over the weekend.

KHS’s steps to improve students and teacher mental health not only demonstrates the Kirkwood School District’s advanced actions, but also highlights the lack of action taken at CHS so far to improve its members’ mental health.

Although CHS has attempted similar homework policies in the past in an effort to allow students to dedicate themselves to different activities for a brief period of time, these efforts have rarely had a beneficial effect on student and teacher mental health. The school’s attempt to lighten students’ homework load during Homecoming Week in order to encourage more participation in Homecoming activities, generally results in a disregard for this policy and a normal week of homework for students.

The Clayton School District has also taken some initiative to benefit student mental health, by hiring Dr. Sheila Powell-Walker as a school social worker for CHS and Wydown Middle School.

Despite the benefits of no-homework weekends, KHS senior Claire Lin observed that the policy merely repositioned the stress of homework, rather than alleviate it.

“Over the weekend, I definitely felt that students were more relaxed, just because we didn’t have the pressure of having to work on homework all the time, but at the same time, the weeks bookending the weekend of no homework were kind of extra busy, because I feel like teachers were trying to wrap up stuff before the weekend and trying to catch up after we had the no-homework weekend,” Lin said.

Still, Lin appreciated the positive effects of having a homework-free weekend, and was grateful that the policy allowed her to dedicate more energy and focus to her other passions.

Given that the first of the no-homework weekends fell on the MSHSAA Girls’ Swimming and Diving State Championship, Lin was able to swim at the meet without thinking about her schoolwork.

“It was really nice to be able to focus on the things that I was doing that weekend 100% rather than having homework hanging over my head the whole time,” Lin said.

While a realistic and efficient homework policy may still be in progress, we, the Globe, strive to prioritize mental health. We hope to encourage all CHS students and staff to place their own mental health at the forefront of their lives. Although schoolwork can often become overwhelming, we aim to initiate conversations about improving mental health.

*91% of the Globe staff agrees with the content of this article.

Your donation will support the student journalists of Clayton High School. Our goal is to ensure every student and faculty member receives a print copy, and that we can continue to explore interactive storytelling mediums on this platform. Your donation also helps provide us with necessary equipment.

Michael Melinger is a Senior at Clayton High School.  This is his fourth year on the Globe.  He currently serves as the Chief Multimedia Editor for the Globe.  This is his third...

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Josh Ettinger • Apr 30, 2018 at 10:26 pm

To the writers,

Thank you for creating this wonderful article. As someone who deals with sports, APs, and other extracurriculars, I never have a free weekend. I’m disappointed that Clayton has not made any serious strides to address this problem since numerous of my fellow Juniors and I feel that our mountain of work has caused us to LOSE our drive, rather than fuel it, in addition to making us feel beaten down. One classmate recently said that she wants to actually “do” things but can’t because her workload hinders her free time, energy, and frankly, her overall sense of importance to her community. So, Globe staff, what can we do to get this message across to our administration, and what will it take for them to care?

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The Trailblazer

The “no homework” policy is not real: an editorial.

This year, the school has implemented a new policy called the “No Homework Weekend.” This means that every long weekend, students should not be assigned homework from their classes that will be due the day they come back.

The policy was implemented in an effort to aid the amount of homework students receive. According to a survey taken last school year, students claimed that the workload they receive from classes is way too much. This makes it stressful for students to keep up with assignments, so the school believed that this policy would help resolve the issue.

However, regardless of this being the case, the policy is not being utilized and many students are still being assigned homework over long weekends. Many teachers for classes such as OnRamps and AP do not follow this policy because they claim that it does not apply to college-level classes. In reality, the policy applies to every class whether it be college-level or not. Teachers have been getting in trouble for not following it.

A benefit that students would gain if teachers followed the policy would be that it would allow them to relax, spend time with family and friends and go over topics they learned in classes. Above all, one major benefit they would gain is getting more sleep.

Sleep is the number one priority for a student to stay motivated and do well in school, so they will be able to catch up on sleep they missed throughout the week. It will also help them think clearly and improve their physical and mental health.

In conclusion, although the “No Homework” policy is not being followed properly, it should be followed in order to make students’ lives easy-going, balanced and most importantly, less stressful.

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The end of homework? Why some schools are banning homework

Fed up with the tension over homework, some schools are opting out altogether.

No-homework policies are popping up all over, including schools in the U.S., where the shift to the Common Core curriculum is prompting educators to rethink how students spend their time.

“Homework really is a black hole,” said Etta Kralovec, an associate professor of teacher education at the University of Arizona South and co-author of “The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning.”

“I think teachers are going to be increasingly interested in having total control over student learning during the class day and not relying on homework as any kind of activity that’s going to support student learning.”

College de Saint-Ambroise, an elementary school in Quebec, is the latest school to ban homework, announcing this week that it would try the new policy for a year. The decision came after officials found that it was “becoming more and more difficult” for children to devote time to all the assignments they were bringing home, Marie-Ève Desrosiers, a spokeswoman with the Jonquière School Board, told the CBC .

Kralovec called the ban on homework a movement, though she estimated just a small handful of schools in the U.S. have such policies.

Gaithersburg Elementary School in Rockville, Maryland, is one of them, eliminating the traditional concept of homework in 2012. The policy is still in place and working fine, Principal Stephanie Brant told TODAY Parents. The school simply asks that students read 30 minutes each night.

“We felt like with the shift to the Common Core curriculum, and our knowledge of how our students need to think differently… we wanted their time to be spent in meaningful ways,” Brant said.

“We’re constantly asking parents for feedback… and everyone’s really happy with it so far. But it’s really a culture shift.”

It was a decision that was best for her community, Brant said, adding that she often gets phone calls from other principals inquiring how it’s working out.

The VanDamme Academy, a private K-8 school in Aliso Viejo, California, has a similar policy , calling homework “largely pointless.”

The Buffalo Academy of Scholars, a private school in Buffalo, New York, touts that it has called “a truce in the homework battle” and promises that families can “enjoy stress-free, homework-free evenings and more quality time together at home.”

Some schools have taken yet another approach. At Ridgewood High School in Norridge, Illinois, teachers do assign homework but it doesn’t count towards a student’s final grade.

Many schools in the U.S. have toyed with the idea of opting out of homework, but end up changing nothing because it is such a contentious issue among parents, Kralovec noted.

“There’s a huge philosophical divide between parents who want their kids to be very scheduled, very driven, and very ambitiously focused at school -- those parents want their kids to do homework,” she said.

“And then there are the parents who want a more child-centered life with their kids, who want their kids to be able to explore different aspects of themselves, who think their kids should have free time.”

So what’s the right amount of time to spend on homework?

National PTA spokeswoman Heidi May pointed to the organization’s “ 10 minute rule ,” which recommends kids spend about 10 minutes on homework per night for every year they’re in school. That would mean 10 minutes for a first-grader and an hour for a child in the sixth grade.

But many parents say their kids must spend much longer on their assignments. Last year, a New York dad tried to do his eight-grader’s homework for a week and it took him at least three hours on most nights.

More than 80 percent of respondents in a TODAY.com poll complained kids have too much homework. For homework critics like Kralovec, who said research shows homework has little value at the elementary and middle school level, the issue is simple.

“Kids are at school 7 or 8 hours a day, that’s a full working day and why should they have to take work home?” she asked.

Follow A. Pawlowski on Google+ and Twitter .

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