Homework- a Boon or a Bane for the Young Minds!

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“Mom,I need help with homework!” This has become a very common statement made by students in almost every home today.What is meant by homework? Yes, as the name suggests, a work which has been assigned to do at home by the school. It is believed that the history of homework dates back to 1095 in Venice but it could have been started before that as well.

Whatever is taught in school, later the teacher/instructor assigns some work which is related to the subject of the children so that they remain in touch with the study topic and do a thorough revision of it.

In general, there are seven subjects in a regular day in school and getting homework done in all the seven subjects leads to a very busy schedule after school gets over in finishing them which leaves a child with no option other than staying at home and studying and sometimes askingI need help with homework.

  1. It is meant to improve the performance of kids but however now- a- days the meaning of homework has completely changed.It has become a very stressful situation for the parents because the type of homework given to the student is nowhere related to the academics and becomes a financial as well as a psychological burden on parents when they always come home with “I need help with homework”.

 

  1. Homework has reduced the time a kid used to spend outdoors playing which increases the physical as well as mental health of the child. As it is the competition now has increased three or four times than which was there earlier when we were kids and everyone has got into a rat race of getting the first rank in their classes, this has killed the innocence of a child.

 

  1. Now- a- days due to technology advancement and easy availability of gadgets a child gets more engrossed in them and becomes more depended on them rather than the books. During our times it was said reading books is the best hobby a person can cultivate, a very simple instance of our times and today’s life is that for understanding the meaning of a word we used to refer a dictionary but now the system of a physical dictionary has completely vanished which astonishes me a lot.

 

  1. Two people can never be the same, their learning power, retaining power, grasping, and themethod of learning would be different but the homework given to them in class is always same. Student A might not necessarily be requiring help in math in the same manner as student B but they would be given the same set of problems to be solved as homework.

 

  1. Type of homework given is also a very big factor, if it is related to studies it is still good but in schools now the type of homework given for students is more of homework for parents. One day, my 4- year- old child came back homevery gloomy and told me “Mom!I need help with homework, tomorrow I have to become Earth and go to school,” I was clueless, how can I make a child earth, I fail to understand what is the learning in this and the mental stress and money invested in it was a separate matter of concern.

 

  1. There can be a situation where a child is good at math and weak in history,as a parent everyone would want him to give more time to history rather than learning math which he already knows but the homework given would not let him study what he is weak in and also his regular rants “I need help with homework.” It becomes a forced kind of study, ‘Study what the teacher wants you to study’. This also sometimes kills the creativity in the child.

 

  1. A child, in general, spends seven to eight hours in school which is more than enough for him to learn the syllabus and then when he comes back home and doing the same thing again which is kind of forced will kill all his creativity and decision making powers, let him decide, what he thinks he should study.

 

  1. Finally, for a child, the time he wants to spend with familygets killed too as he keeps himself busy in all the homework he gets and once he finishes it, he will have to study the subject which requires his attention more than any other subject, killing his own personal time which sometimes harms the child a lot.

 

To summarize this, I or anyone is not totally against the system of homework but the only suggestion I have as a parent is that the homework given should be constructive and not just a way to keep him/her busy. It should be helpful for the child in a long run and at the end of the day, should make him learn something. It should be something which a child can do on his own with little help from parents and not coming back always with I need help with homework. This can be a self- learning procedure as well.

A school is basically a place where he gets to learn new things and is being taught the way of life where the point is to learn to balance the life inside and outside the home. Indulging a child in just studies will hamper his physical and mental health both which is not at all good for him.

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