Leading provider of full-time home tuition, Tutors International, today commented on the shocking amount of homework assigned to students in the US educational system in schools around the world, calling for more co-operation between teachers.
Adam Caller, an independent education consultant and former teacher, today reported that the amount of homework assigned by teachers at US schools was “shockingly excessive” and urged that something be done to remedy the arbitrary allocation of homework that he believes is causing distress to children and their parents at schools in the US educational system.
Tutors International, founded by Adam Caller in 1999, can and often do supply after-school private tutors to families who feel they need extra support in handling the excessive workload.
Private tutors help students to manage and prioritise their homework; give them extra help to understand complex and difficult topics and help to prepare them for each stage of their academic year. By ensuring children are ahead of the curve, tutors can help to relieve some of the pressures of school and ensure peace of mind for parents who sometimes struggle to keep up with the demands for help and the degree of subject knowledge needed to support their children with homework.
“While a school is developing their lesson timetables, they should also be coordinating which teachers should be assigning homework on which days, to which classes,” comments Mr Caller, who worked for several years as a teacher in a high school in California, and so has first hand experience of the negative effect of poor homework planning by schools:
“While I was teaching in California, it wasn’t unusual for students to come home from school at four o’clock and still be doing homework at eleven o’clock that night, trying to wade through the huge assignments they were given that day that had to completed for the next. And that happened every single night.”
Talking about the effects on families, Mr Caller was very clear about the negative impact that a large amount of homework has on parents and their children. “I would talk to very hard-working, intelligent families, who were struggling to give their children the academic and emotional support they needed. Night after night, parents had to juggle cooking dinner and other household chores; any work they themselves needed to get done in the evening; and helping their kids with homework. Evenings – especially in homes with two or three children – were fraught, stressful and certainly not a time for relaxing and enjoying time as a family.”
Mr Caller recounts a tale of a student emailing his teacher to ask that a homework deadline by moved to allow him to complete the assignments he had been given by other teachers that day. “The teacher he reached out to said he would only extend the deadline if all the other teachers did the same. Needless to say, this catch-22 situation didn’t work out as the student hoped, and he just had to struggle to complete all the assignments that night,” said Mr Caller. With every test and every assignment counting towards a pupil’s Grade Point Average, the pressure on pupils is extremely high.
Mr Caller encourages US-curriculum schools in America and in the rest of the world to take a close look at how teachers communicate with each other about assigning homework to pupils, and to work out a system that supports both the child’s educational goals and their need for evening down-time with their families.
More information about engaging a full-time private tutor can be found at www.tutors-international.com.
