“When students at Dover-Sherborn High School break for Thanksgiving later this month, there’s at least one thing they won’t have to worry about: homework. In a change from holidays past, the suburban Boston school district has declared Thanksgiving vacation a “homework-free weekend.” It’s the first of several planned for this academic year …”
This is quite interesting and something I think is needed at the high school level. It reminds me very much, on a smaller scale, of when my daughter was in high school, she initiated the development of a homework policy to address many of the things mentioned in the program in the article, such as no homework over holidays/vacations and coordination of due dates on major papers/projects/tests among teachers, and so on. She researched policies at other schools and in other states. Our school had no homework policy. She drafted a new policy and presented it to faculty in meetings and so on. She was not able to get it passed before she graduated. And there was reluctance on the part of faculty. The previous two years, she had worked on initiating and developing a weighted grade policy which our school did not have. She went through the same steps and all the way to presenting before the school board and her policy was passed and enacted (though she didn’t benefit from it as it applied to students who came after her). Unfortunately, she did not get as far on the homework policy. I’m glad to now read of such measures at other schools though!
The Boston Globe link requires the reader to sign up in order to read the article. Is there another option? And the teachers get a break from reviewing all the homework too. It reminds me of the “aha” awakening I had as a kid when we had snow days, and I finally realized the teachers liked it as much as the kids!.
I was able to read the article without signing up.
Not to be cynical – but my kids’ HS tried to have some homework free days. The teachers just shifted the assignments around to give them more work on other days.
I prefer assignment schedules to be given out well in advance. Let the kids manage their own time in a way that makes sense for their family. I’d usually rather have my kids do some work over vacations and have less stress and more sleep when school resumes. But if we paid for a special vacation or something, I’d rather they complete the work at another time. Why do schools have to micromanage people’s lives?
How do you coordinate due dates when the same classes may be taught by different teachers and meet on different days? When students aren’t all in the same classes? In our school you could take for example AP English and APUSH, and some students in the class will have both classes on Tu Th, while others may have AP English MWF and APUSH Tu Th or vice versa, or both MWF. And that’s only two classes. The possibilities are enormous. And because of this, assignments due on F in one class might not even be due until the next week in another section of that class. And with different teachers for some of these classes, the assignments and test schedules are not even the same. Impossible to coordinate.
At my DD’s HS (a charter), there was 1 weekend / month that was R&R. Teachers were not allowed to give out homework on that weekend. If the month had a holiday, that was the selected R&R weekend. That meant no homework during Fall Break, Thanksgiving Break, President’s Weekend, etc. I loved it! My DS’s HS, they don’t do this. So, every weekend, there is homework. I’m sure he’ll have a bunch over Thanksgiving when we have lots of relatives coming from across the country.
Having had a number of long weekends/vacations ruined for all of us by our kid’s excessive homework, I’d be all for this idea. It is healthy not only for the students but for the entire family.