At Liberty every student faces a daunting monster each afternoon, but this monster is not the type with gruesome teeth and a repulsive visage; rather, this monster is a conglomeration of essays, chapter outlines, worksheets and readings that drain students of their energy—and even their health.
As any teacher will tell you, a specific amount of content needs to be comprehensively covered in a course, and covering all of it in class isn’t feasible. Furthermore, there are well-documented benefits of homework, which include better test scores and grades. Homework, then, is simply an academic necessity.
This age-old debate between over-burdened students and demanding teachers has strong reasoning on both sides, though it boils down to weighing the general health and happiness of students against the undeniably constructive effects of homework. Dropping one or the other is unrealistic, to say the least, but there are numerous plausible compromises.
One solution, which Liberty students are familiar with, is the replacement of the A-day/B-day schedule with a seven period one. This shift would theoretically increase the amount of time that a teacher sees a class per week, meaning more gets done in class, and less at home.
Alternatively, people have speculated that lengthening the school year could address the problem as well. After all, America’s school year of only 180 days lags far behind, say, Japan’s 240 day school year.
Yet curriculums still attempt to pack a comparable amount of learning in this shorter amount of time. This creates more homework for American students, but they are still outperformed by their counterparts in numerous countries around the world.
To truly determine how to improve student’s well-being without hindering their education, teachers and students need to be open to a dialogue, open to change, and open to voicing their thoughts on this issue.