Teachers feel homework helps to reinforce material taught in the classroom, fosters study skills, and provides review. Homework can help teach kids responsibility, independent work habits, concentration, and reading and note-taking skills. Homework provides teachers a way to evaluate a child's understanding and progress, and can boost a child's grade if he doesn't perform well on tests. Homework gives parents the opportunity to participate in a child's education by helping and setting aside a quiet time for their kids to do homework assignments.
There are many demands for a teacher's time in the classroom besides academic subjects. Administrative duties, discipline, gang education, emergency drills, pep rallies and field trips take time away from core subjects. Teachers and school systems are under tremendous pressure to ensure their students perform well on standardized tests, and preparing students for these tests takes a lot of time. Teachers may feel they have no choice but to assign a lot of homework so that everything gets covered. Homework often consists of whatever work is left over from the school day.
If your child has a number of classes, each with a different teacher, realize that these teachers probably don't work together to ensure the students don't end up with too much homework. One teacher may assign 2 hours of math homework, not realizing that another teacher may have assigned a lengthy research paper that's due at the same time.
Sometimes, children have issues that make it more difficult to finish their homework in a timely manner. There may be too many distractions in the room, they may get overly anxious about the work, or they may have undiagnosed learning disabilities. On the other hand, the homework may be inappropriate for the child's developmental stage, or he may lack the foundational knowledge necessary to complete the task. It's hard to do long division when you don't understand simple division. These factors can make an appropriate amount of homework seem like too much.
A general guide often used by teachers to assign an appropriate amount of homework is to give 10 minutes of work for each grade. For example, a first-grader should have 10 minutes of homework, a second-grader 20 minutes, and so on. If a child never has time to relax, enjoy family activities or participate in extracurricular activities--or loses sleep or misses meals because of homework--the teacher may be assigning too much. The best thing to do in this situation is to meet with your child's teacher or principal to discuss your concerns.