In “My Daughter’s Homework is Killing Me,” Karl Taro Greenfeld goes into detail how is daughter Esmee is drowning in homework and she is only in eighth grade. Greenfeld attempted to do Esmee’s homework for a week after continuously finding her up after her her bedtime hours trying to complete all of her homework. She does about 3-5 hours of homework everyday and gets about 6 ½ hours of sleep each night just to wake up the next day and do the same thing all over again. “She wakes up teary eyed and exhausted” each morning and it kills Greenfeld to see his daughter like this.
One thing that surprised me was how much homework Esmee was actually assigned each night. She had to read about 79 pages for english while annotating on the side, she had algebra homework every night, and she had multiple tests to study for, and that is only for three subjects. When Greenfeld attempted to do his daughter’s homework, he often fell asleep while trying to complete her work that was expected to be finished for the next day. School is like a job for children, they go all day long, come home to complete 3-5 hours of homework, go to bed and repeat the same stressful cycle for the next five days.
One interesting fact that Greenfeld used in his article is how “it turns out that there is no correlation between homework and achievement. According to a 2005 study by the Penn State professors Gerald K. LeTendre and David P. Baker, some of the countries that score higher than the U.S. on testing in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study—Japan and Denmark, for example—give less homework, while some of those scoring lower, including Thailand and Greece, assign more.” I like how he used that information because that is very strong evidence that supports his claim that there is too much homework being given. Instead of piling homework for hours every night, teachers should cut down the workload and then see how students do instead of drowning them in unnecessary homework everyday. Also, I liked how he tried to do all of her homework and was honest about how much it was and admitted that it was very hard and strenuous to complete. I enjoyed this article a lot because it was different and very interesting to read.