You'll notice in this research the conclusion is that well-designed homework as you pointed out, can lead to about five extra months of progress in subjects like math and English for our upper grade students, well-designed.

Most of the homework that I think we're looking at and seeing is not well-designed.

Um, and Don't be afraid of the dark.

Be careful with stars.

Not every light is gonna guide you, So Dr.

Kathy, today in the Celebrate Kids podcast in this daily segment, Face of the Dark, I want to look a little bit at homework, partly because my kids are getting it and I want to know, should I go and talk to the teacher about this?

And what I'm finding in a lot of the different research is that especially secondary school students, when they have well-designed homework, it can lead them really to have about an extra five months of progress in the subjects that they would get their homework in, especially subjects like math and English, that would naturally have a lot of homework.

But in primary school, the school that would be probably grades first grade, kindergarten on through about sixth or seventh grade, the impact's a lot smaller.

They end up getting around three months of additional education where it's kind of still useful, but not to the same degree as the secondary school students.

Now, homework does help us practice what we've learned and helps us remember and build skills.

But some of the research that has been really found and is being continued to be developed really shows a few things.

If you find homework is boring, it's probably because the activity that we've been doing with the homework is actually pretty boring.

And so, ultimately, what they're finding in this research, Dr.

Cathy, is that not all homework is created equal.

So when we look at this, Dr.

Cathy, it makes me wonder, what do you think we should do with homework?

I mean, there's teachers that listen to this podcast, and I would even say that there are homeschool families that might be at a place where they bring school home, if I could put it that way, when they have homeschool, that school comes into their house and now they have additional things, like they might have additional reading, or they might have to work on a math assignment outside of the normal quote unquote homework time.

How do you think this impacts kids?

What should we know about that?

How it impacts kids as parents?

What do you think we should Well, I'm going to start out with a very clear statement.

I'm not a fan of homework.

You'll notice in this research, the conclusion is that well-designed homework as you pointed out, can lead to about five extra months of progress in subjects like math and English for our upper grade students, well-designed.

Most of the homework that I think we're looking at and seeing is not well-designed, and it creates not just boredom, but frustration.

I haven't read research recently, Wayne, but in the days in the past, the number one fight in the homes in America was homework.

Number two was money.

The arguments that take place in the evenings are over homework.

Why haven't you started your homework?

What do you mean you haven't finished it yet?

What do you mean you're sitting there waiting for the ruler?

You know where the ruler is, go get the ruler.

And it just becomes a very tense situation if you have one kid, but some of you have more than one kid, and it's a lot to keep track of.

And there's sports and there's jobs for our older kids after school, and there can be a blessing in that.

There's chores, there's fun, there's sibling relationships.

There's visiting grandma and grandpa, there's going for a walk.

And I wish we could just read to our children and let them read to us.

The majority of the homework I would assign would be read out loud, read to your teddy bear, read to a friend, read to a sibling.

And then writing, most of our children are not writing as well as they could.

Um, and that's partly due to AI and partly due to the technology.

So I would, if I were a teacher today, I would assign fun writing, real writing assignments, not boring, uh, practice your sentences for spelling words, but write a persuasive paragraph that will convince me that living in a cold climate is a good idea and use five of your spelling words.

That's not boring in comparison to.

write out your spelling sentences in some impactful way.

So busy work is not good, drives parents nuts, destroys Dr.

Cathy, that makes me wonder a little bit.

Kids naturally are going to struggle with homework.

That's part of growing.

I don't know if anyone You know, it thinks about it like this, but I do that growing really is a bummer.

You know, if you're going to grow and be taller and you're going to be stronger, you have to break things down in your body.

If you're going to have bigger muscles, your muscle fibers have to break, which is painful and annoying.

And oftentimes requires you to do a repetitive thing over and over again to build new muscles, right?

Homework can be that way, or it really is a struggle.

And so I could see whether a family might be homeschooling or it might be a traditional school.

Their kids are going to struggle with it, a little bit on purpose.

How should parents or homeschool moms really look at homework, especially when kids are struggling?

Is there a benchmark that you would say, hey, you have officially reached the limit of what we should do with homework?

Or should there be a place where we kind of say, you know what?

Toughen up, buttercup.

We're going to get through this.

And you're going to build new muscles.

And that's what you're doing.

And keep going.

What should our posture be Yeah, well first, for homeschool families, most of them would never talk about homework.

They would simply have the school day long enough to accomplish the work.

If a parent decided that today's English assignment included X, Y, Z, then the children would spend quality time finishing X, Y, Z.

And there might be consequences for children who work slowly, and maybe they do get less playtime in the afternoon because they didn't use their time well in the morning.

But the advantage of homeschooling is that we learn together and we accomplish much more in fewer hours because we only have five children, not 25 children, et cetera, et cetera.

Now for homeschool families, though, I would say that reading can still be the thing that you do after school.

If your school day, quote unquote, is finished at one, then in the afternoon you have chores and exercise and reading time.

Every kid in the family reads more because you don't have time during the school period, the school day.

So that would be one thing I would consider.

So in Christian schools and public schools, I think one of the most important thing for parents to do is to give feedback to the teachers.

Teachers don't know for sure how long it's taking children to do the homework.

If you are, if your children attend a school and they do come home with a backpack full of papers in a folder, you know, practice these math facts and write out these spelling words five times and write a persuasive paragraph.

I think that, I think a very helpful thing would be for a teacher to know from the parents, Hey, it took Josiah you know, two hours, and for our family, that's just too long.

We like to do devotions, we like to have, you know, family conversations over at the dinner table, and he was so stressed that he had to start his homework, and I don't get home from work until 5.30, so I can't supervise him, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

So I do think parents need to be involved in that way.

Another way that parents need to be involved Wayne, is to pay enough attention to see if your kids are learning anything from it.

A true example, when I taught second graders, now this is a long time ago, and I sent my children home with homework, I remember one kid in particular who was working on some math, and he did every math problem wrong.

So he learned the wrong thing to do.

That's a disadvantage of homework.

If you were working on it in class, I would have been walking around and he could have raised his hand and said, I don't think I understand.

But you send kids home with something.

You think you've explained it well.

You think the piece of paper is clear.

They don't maybe have a textbook with them that would clarify it.

You've got moms and dads overwhelmed who have never taken algebra or took it forever ago.

or they don't know about today's writing policies or whatever, and then kids end up practicing something the wrong way, and that's not gonna be endearing to anybody either.

So parents ideally do pay attention, and they think about the timing, When we look at this also, I think that, you know, homework and actually studying in school should fundamentally do something.

And it makes me wonder a little bit, you know, what should their expectation be of what their kids, you know, do at school?

How can they guide their kids in Well, that's a, that's a good question too, Wayne.

What's a fair expectation for school?

That my kids would love learning.

that they would be supported to learn and not just memorize, that if my children are overwhelmed or confused, they can ask questions without being shamed, that there's not built-in comparison.

I want everyone to look at how well Jimmy did on this paper.

Like, that is so unhealthy and so unfair and way too commonly used by teachers to, I would say, manipulate children.

They might say it motivates children, and that's a whole nother episode, probably, I think that parents have a right to expect enthusiasm for learning, relevant learning, appropriate use of time.

You know, if something, and here's the thing, if a parent, if a teacher notices that the next story that the fourth graders are supposed to read is a boring story, skip the story.

Why are we going through these textbooks page by page without any thought?

Now, hear me say that some teachers are very good at this.

They'll look ahead and they'll think, okay, we haven't done fractions in a while.

Like it's a program we do fractions on the first day of every month to keep fractions alive.

And my kids haven't practiced fractions.

This will be overwhelming.

Before we do page 72, I'm gonna make up something at the whiteboard.

Like praise God for those teachers.

But there are teachers and some homeschool parents as well who just go lockstep through the program and they're not thinking about whether or not it's fair and it's legitimate, or is it gonna confuse the kids and are they gonna label themselves as stupid or incapable, which would be really sad, or, oh, school is so boring.

Well, why is it boring?

Because we're reading really boring stories, you know?

or we're working on, you know, essays that nobody wants to write.

One of the things that when I was a professor, I had a reading school on the side with friends of mine.

So we tutored students.

Most of them were boys after school in reading and comprehension skills and study strategies.

And what's so interesting when we wrote our own curriculum and guess what I did.

The curriculum that I wrote was the Green Bay Packers versus the Chicago Bears.

No joke.

So I'm a professor in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

And on the side, I write this curriculum and we're teaching especially boys who don't like to read how to read better and how to study even stuff they don't like to study.

And I'm not going to use boring like alligator crocodile.

Who cares?

You know, if I'm in a river one day, I don't need to know which one it is.

I just need to know both are dangerous and I need to get out of the water.

But the students that we taught, they loved learning about the Chicago Bears.

No, they love learning about the Green Bay Packers.

So as an example, I would teach cause effect with the punter and the holder.

And I would teach cause effect with the quarterback and the receiver and the offensive line and the defensive line.

And we would teach comparison contrast.

We would teach sequence.

We would talk about all the things that they needed to apply in a biology book that they didn't care about.

We talked about it first in something they cared about, which was football.

And then our goal was to show them that that skill that they just used as they were comparing the Bears quarterback to the Green Bay Packers quarterback, they can now use in biology the next day in school.

So when you use content that they care about, they're capable of You know, as Dr.

Kathy and I were talking today, it reminded me of a passage that comes out of John chapter six, and I'll begin reading at verse five.

When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming toward him, he said to Philip, where shall we buy bread for all these people to eat?

He asked this only to test him, for he already knew what he had in mind that he was going to do.

Philip answered him, it would take more than half a year's wages to buy enough bread for each one to have a bite.

Another one of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, spoke up.

Here's a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will that go among so many people?

Jesus said, have the people sit down.

There will be plenty of grass in this place.

And they sat down.

There were about 5,000 men there.

Jesus then took the loaves and gave thanks and distributed them among those who were seated there as much as they wanted.

He did the same with the fish.

When they all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples, gather all the pieces that are left over, let nothing be wasted.

So they gathered them all and filled up twelve baskets with the pieces of five barley loaves that were left over by those who had eaten.

You know, in first century Galilee society, schooling was really local.

It was informal, and it usually centered on memorization of the Torah.

Children were often taught practical skills from really their earliest moments in life.

They were taught to contribute to their family's livelihood.

So this unnamed boy in John 6 is actually practicing things that he's been taught at home.

He brings what he has, and he brings it to Jesus, and it actually becomes a miracle.

This historical account of what happens in the Bible here really reflects the power of participation.

The boy didn't have a lot.

He had what he had to offer, and Jesus used it.

I think that sometimes homework and school can feel like the five loaves and the fish.

It can feel really small and insignificant.

But when it's offered with obedience and even builds curiosity, it becomes more than enough in the hands of a faithful teacher.

Jesus doesn't demand perfection.

He asks for participation.

And I think that when we look at this through the lens of the Bible, we can see that this mirrors the Christian life.

God multiplies faithfulness, not performance.

And homework and schooling, when done right, engages a willing heart that has really a spiritual act of formation and trust.

So I think as parents and those that love our kids, we can help guide our kids to shift from this attitude of I have to do this to what can I bring to this thing that we're doing?

It can create a culture at home and at school that often celebrates effort with small contributions.

Your presence as a parent and somebody that really is working with kids, asking our kids what they're working on, and even showing interest, praying over all of their efforts, I think that teaches them that faithfulness matters more than the grade.

And I think that that can be a bright light, especially when kids are in the middle of school homework, that can cut through some of the darkness that they might be feeling in the daily work that they have to do.

So I want to thank you for listening to the Celebrate Kids podcast, this daily segment Face in the Dark.

On behalf of Dr.

Kathy Cooke, my name is Wayne Stender.

So glad you're