Posted on 01/01/2025 6:10:38 AM PST by Libloather
(KTXL) — Many Californians can look back at their time growing up and remember spending hours after school bogged down in homework, but one lawmaker hopes to change that for the next generation.
When the bell rings and the school day is over, for students like Sofia Johnson, the day is nowhere near over. The sixth-grader blames that on hours spent doing homework.
“Homework is exhausting. It’s overwhelming,” Johnson said. “It’s depressing that my whole day from when I wake up to when I go to bed is taken up doing school work.”
That’s why Johnson’s mother, assemblymember Pilar Schiavo (D-Santa Clara) says she authored AB 2999, also known as “The Healthy Homework Act.” It was signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom earlier this year to take effect in 2025.
The legislation will not ban homework, but it formally encourages local school boards and educational agencies to establish homework policies that consider impacts on students’ physical and mental health all with input from parents, teachers, and students themselves.
“It’s addressing homework, which is the top stressor for kids,” Schiavo said. “It’s often number one.”
The new law comes as a survey of more than 300,000 American students conducted by Stanford University and the nonprofit organization Challenge Success found that 45% of students say workload and homework are their number one source of stress. The average time spent on homework each night was 2.5 hours across the 13,000 California high school students who took the survey.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
God forbid that this generation of kids has to do anything like work for something.
I had almost no homework in the 60s/70s. Still managed to take calculus in high school. Modern teachers don’t teach IN class so they assign homework and hope the parents will teach during the evenings.
My grandkids have far more homework and are getting far less of an education than I did. The problem is the TEACHERS, not the homework per se.
Yeah, lets reduce stress on kids and treat them like fragile marshmallows. That is sure to make them better, smarter adults. [/s]
Methinks this is mostly about making it easier for teachers.
And here in the US many of our high school "graduates" can't even read their diplomas...even when they're in English.
Figures. The dumber the children are, the higher the number of applicants for future journalism and studies majors.
I'm waiting for the day a Valedictorian can't read the speech someone else wrote for him.
My grandson is in 8th grade, he never has homework. Coppell ISD, a highly rated school district in Texas.
I had homework in HS, but I usually did it in the library before or after school. College was an eye opener, it was common to spend two hours outside of class for every hour in class.
Right.
We must free up their time…for important stuff.
Like video games 🤨
I had Mrs. Jones in 4th grade - she would take her ‘break’ and go sit in the teacher’s lounge with her thermos of coffee during our math class, leaving us with our books to work on our own for the entire year.
Yep - math was always a struggle afterwards.
I did all my homework in other classes at school.
2.5 hours spent on homework a night? By high school students? In California? I’m skeptical.
Putting that aside, that’s probably more than I seem to recall back in Ye Olden Days, long before the modern edjookrats starting messing with the traditional curriculum.
I know that there are some hothouse environments in which students routinely put in those kinds of hours, and I know that in China and Japan, parents can drive their kids to suicide.
And I know that aspiring NBA players spend more time on the playground working at their sport than any students who are not clinically on the spectrum do at math or history or Latin. So do kids with a passion for dance or music — and I don’t mean the aspiring hip hop artists whose idea of practice is to get stoned and riff in the garage; I mean the kids who aspire to be world class on the piano or violin or French horn.
Two and a half hours for homework for the average student in California high schools? Well ... it may be appropriate for the serious students who are AP-everything and on track to have half their college credits banked before they graduate high school, but the kids headed for the skilled trades, most office jobs, most of the professions? I dunno.
But bottom line: my underlying thought is that if California students were spending more than 30 minutes a day during regular school hours doing serious academic work, this wouldn’t be needed.
This may be a matter of the public schools defaulting on what they are supposed to be doing, and then sending their kids home to learn on their own. Waste eight hours a day in school, and then go home and homeschool to make up the difference.
That’s how I feel. I took calculus in high school too.
My kids went to public and private school in California starting in early 2000s.
I can remember them getting coloring homework when they were little.
They had to put boxes around spelling words. I was told it helped them spell, but my kids were good at spelling.
I think the appropriate homework until high school is reading (maybe what they will be learning in class), a list of spelling/vocab words, a little math.
Calculus was not even offered in our high school. I had a drunk for math all four years. If you caught him before lunch he did pretty well. He actually was a smart guy. If you had a class after lunch pretty much forget it. That room had a downspout near the corner window. On pretty days with the window open ai slipped out the window and went my own way usually out to the Voag building to work on a project. I paid for it when I went to university and began studies in engineering. I had a lot of catching up to do.
Physics, Chemistry, Biology and History were completely different conditions with unusually good teachers for our small mostly rural community. Back then teachers were qualified in their subjects and had a background in them and not just the supposed qualification to "teach". My teachers in these subjects actually had majors in each subject. Teaching was not what they did because there was nothing else left for them to do. It was what they wanted to do and it showed. Amazing isn't it?
Our kids did virtually no work outside school hours. (Homeschooled)
One is an Astronautical Engineer if that tells you anything.
I’ve spoken with friends who had kids in government schools who spoke of 6-8 hours or homework every night.
That’s not education. It’s a form of forced labor.
Teachers are nothing but overseers on their power trips telling families who the real boss is.
How many of us do an eight hour workday and bring another six hours of work home every night?
I support this legislation.
Poor Sofia......all that homework is probably cutting into her time to make TikTok videos........
Because Pilar wants her kids growing up stupid doesn’t mean other students have to.
Also the curriculum.
.
That was definitely NOT the attitude that my father had in getting me to
memorize the multiplication tables. Not at ALL. He was ADAMANT
that I learn them. Out to 12x12.
He was a loving father, but in many respects he was a tough parent.
He expected certain things of me. (He was a WW2 era US Marine, after all,
and did NOT treat me like a ‘fragile marshmallow’.).
In December of 2025 it will be ten years since he passed on.
I miss the old guy. I wish the two of us could go surf fishing for
striped bass one last time.
They never let go of mamas apron strings they live with the folks until they die so they don’t have to earn money for a house on an on .............................................
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