It should not be stressful since stress blocks learning almost 100%.
For third graders, probably 15 minutes is enough. By high school, about an hour is all that should ever be required.
Susan Bauer asserts that homework in primary school has not been shown to be useful, and should be discontinued. When you figure that four hours per day of homeschooling is all it takes, an hour of homework on top of a 6 hour school day (plus commute) seems kind of exorbitant, doesn’t it?And if you take seriously the Caplan critique of the actual utility of what is taught in schools (he says that the problem is not that “Them as can, does - them that can’t, teaches” but precisely that what teachers are teaching is what they can do. And only that) . . .
. . . and then there is the Khan Academy theory that students should view youTube lecture videos after school, in lieu of homework - and that what would otherwise have been “homework” should be done in the classroom. You gotta admit, that would sure look good to any parent who found themselves hassled by the need to get her/his child to do homework which is couched in Common Core terms instead of English.
I would add that in Engineering School I found it impossible to effectively read the text and then do the problems. Just wouldn’t penetrate until I tried to do the problems and understood what I didn’t know. Only then could I read the text, and then be able to do the assigned homework.If I look at it that way, the best thing for me might have been to have the homework questions assigned in advance, and have tried to do them before the lecture. Then I would have absorbed the lecture better, and needed the textbook a little less, but been more efficient in reading as needed.
So the prof would lecture on the subject of the homework he had assigned the night before, but expect the homework he had “assigned” two classes earlier, not in the previous class. Lastly he would assign the homework due two classes hence. I think I am making sense . . .