Why parents complain about homework
HEAVY AFTER-SCHOOL ASSIGNMENTS FOR CHILDREN AT INDIAN SCHOOLS ARE ADVERSELY AFFECTING HEALTH AND FAMILY TIME, PARENTS SAY
Excessive homework assigned by Indian schools is leaving children exhausted and stressed, with no time for leisure and family bonding, parents have complained.
Such concerns, including the health impact of too much homework, have been raised before but have resurfaced recently with the start of the new term earlier this month.
Parents told Gulf News their children are bogged down with homework after returning from school in the afternoon. It is not rare for children to spend several hours, sometimes up to 11pm, doing homework. Parents are often obliged to help children cope with homework, entrapping the whole family in a bid to finish the study load.
The parents did not wish to be named because they did not want their children to be dragged into the issue with the schools, which were also not identified.
CBSE guidelines
Last month, India’s biggest education board, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), reiterated its earlier order to affiliated schools to stop giving homework to grade one and grade two students. However, parents say there is no such respite for students in higher grades, who are already busy with revision for frequent exams, especially when it comes to preparing for grade 10 and grade 12 board exams.
Indian schools have a vast syllabus to cover each year and schools use homework, which carries marks, as a way of finishing the syllabus, parents and teachers have said before.
However, daily homework assignments are exhausting children and parents, with many students forced to take up tuition just to complete homework. The situation has led to many children spending virtually all their waking hours doing classwork and homework.
A mother of a grade 8 student in Dubai said her daughter is up until 11.30pm doing homework after coming home from school at 2pm.
‘This is torture’
“My daughter is completely exhausted by the end of the day due to the heavy workload from her school. She has no time or energy left for any other activity. What baffles me is that schools overload students with homework for non-core subjects, such as UAE social studies, Islamic, and Arabic. There is no time left for core subjects such as maths and science,” she added.
“The homework is simply killing her. I can see that she is always irritated, unable to concentrate and tired. I want to ask schools what they intend to achieve by asking students to complete all these activities in one day? This is torture.”
Another mother, who has two daughters in grade 10 in an Indian school in Sharjah, said she has raised the issue with the school but her daughters are still struggling with too much homework.
“I used to be a teacher and I know how some teachers operate. They want to finish the syllabus and giving a lot of homework is one way — the wrong way — of getting the job done. When one subject teacher sees other teachers giving homework, she [or he] also gives homework. You can’t make the children pay the price for that,” she said.
“My daughters don’t eat right, they complain of headaches and hardly get to spend any time with their father — all because of homework. I should have shifted them to another school but now the transition will be an added burden on them. They say, ‘Mom, it’s OK, we’ll manage; we don’t want to lose our friends by shifting schools’. It breaks my heart.”
Her daughters come home from school at around 2.15pm, have lunch and leave for tuition. They are back by 7pm, take a short break, have dinner and hit the books again till 10pm.
‘What is the point?’
“If the children are learning well in class — and they should be learning well in class — then what is the point of so much homework? If you have so much homework, which is graded, then what is the point of so many exams? Even in the holidays we get homework. I say ‘we’ because parents have to help their children cope with the load.”
A father in Dubai who recently moved his four children from an Indian school to a UK curriculum school said: “I used to see my children fall asleep doing homework. I would say, ‘There goes one wicket, there goes another one,’ and so on, until they all closed their eyes. They would spend almost all their time at home doing homework. Thankfully, I don’t have to see this happen as their new school only assigns normal, rational levels of homework.”
What baffles me is that schools overload students with homework for non-core subjects, such as UAE social studies, Islamic, and Arabic. There is no time left for core subjects such as maths and science.” Mother of a grade 8 student in Dubai