I don’t mind when a teacher assigns homework. When an English class has to read a chapter of a book over the weekend, it’s understandable; it would be nearly impossible to read the entirety of “To Kill a Mockingbird” during a few 83-minute classes. But what I can’t stand is generalized busywork.
On top of all the pressure to be a well-rounded student, many teachers at our school seem to think that more work is better than less. For example, there are better things I can be doing with my time than blindly filling out multiple worksheets about the same topic, and I cringe when a teacher tells us to cut pictures out of a magazine and glue them to a poster. Please explain to me how a roughly cut-out picture of a shovel contributes to my education and understanding of North Korea. (No, I have never been given this assignment, but it’s not a far stretch).
Instead of being treated as children, students need to be held accountable for their own education. I understand that the goal is to accommodate every type of learning style, but teachers should be giving us more flexibility with the assignments that are supposed to help us learn material. Instead of forcing everyone to spend an hour coloring a map with crayons, give students the option to do that or copy down their notes on another sheet of paper. Within a few years, the students at this school will be in college, where no one will tell them how to study. No one will call our parents if we fail a test and no one will force us to fill out a study guide.
We will, however, need to know to take the initiative ourselves. We will need to know that, if we are a read-write learner, we need to rewrite our notes before the test, and if we are an auditory learner, we need to read them out loud. We will need to know that we, not our teachers and not our parents, are responsible for ourselves. We will need to take ownership of our own lives and decide how to spend our time to best benefit ourselves instead of relying on teachers to give us busywork and tell us how to study.
