Christina Chambers ’16: As homework plays a major role in a high school student’s life at the Episcopal Academy, Scholium has recently spoken to teachers from different subject areas to get a better sense of how departments approach the issue of homework. Scholium has also conducted a poll serving student views on homework from different departments.
Homework can consume enormous amounts of time, energy, and leave students exhausted the following day. However, history teacher Anna McDermott believes, “It depends upon the student, for some it is a lot, and for others the work is very manageable.” Chair of the history department, Charles Bryant, commented, “The school’s standard time limit for homework is thirty to forty five minutes for each subject.” Christopher McCreary, chair of the English department also expressed that the homework time limit should be about forty minutes.
“We are aware of how much homework students have, and try to avoid giving work just for the sake of giving work,” said McCreary. “The English department knows that we don’t give the most [homework] in the upper school, but the fear is always that we end up as the students’ lowest priority because they know they have so much for other classes that they will bump you, and that does not benefit anybody.”
Marc Eripret, Chair of the Modern Language Department, believes shares McCreary’s opinion.“Language is usually not the top priority because of all of the other subjects,” he explained, “A half an hour a day would be nice, but I know that it doesn’t happen, and that’s why I suggest we don’t give homework every day.”
Grace Wingfield, Chair of the Mathematics Department, said “Ideally each night there would be time for reviewing as well as doing the homework.” She added, “In Math, similar to languages, you need the reinforcement time and practice to discover what you understand or not. “
The department chairs realize that EA students are busy, having to play sports or do a fitness option, but all believe in the phrase “student athlete” because work should always come first. When asked if the history department takes extraciricular activities into account, Mr. Bryant, Chair of the History department, answered, “We understand sports are a part of school life, and we try to keep things manageable.” However, “there is an expectation that on the way back from a game, students should do their homework.”
Bryant continued, “There is always that expectation of a student athlete that when the athletic event is over, they have to be a student too.”
McCreary spoke on behalf of the English department when he remarked, “There are so many events with sports and plays that if we tried to form the homework calendar around all of them, students would never get homework.”
Although goals for homework assignments throughout the departments vary in what the teachers wish to convey, they are similar in that most teachers want their students to attain a higher realm of thinking. “The goal of history homework is to get a full understanding of a slice of a unit so students can help facilitate a discussion,” revealed Mr. Bryant.
Leslie Trimble, Chair of the science department, said, “[Homework] is meant to be practice to prepare for a test, so students don’t have to cram.” McCreary referred back to time limit when speaking about objectives because “each homework assignment is going to have a different goal, but one of our major goals would be to not double up homework on kids.”
One factor that the chairs agree on unanimously is that there is not any formal collaboration between departments on homework loads. Eripret commented, “There are not any real official discussions about homework times between departments.” He went on to add, “There are five days in a week, so there has to be a way to split homework evenly between each department into those days.”
Students responded to the expectations and workloads of departments in a poll above. Each class was survyed for a total of 275 votes for which class they felt gave the most and the most effective homework.