Homework In August

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

There is a small pile of books next to my bed that has been gathering dust all summer long. The stack isn’t made up of the latest must-read best sellers: It is all the journals, books, and exercises that were given to my boys in June to help stem the tide of summer learning loss – the seasonal trickling away of the knowledge that children acquire during the school year.


The executive director of the Center for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins University, Ronald Fairchild, wrote in a 2002 paper, “Recent studies estimate that summer loss for all students equals about one month on a grade level equivalent scale … On average, all students lose approximately 2.6 months of grade level equivalency in mathematical computation over the summer months.”


Those numbers sound ominous. But so does the thought of convincing my children that they need to do homework during these lazy days of August.


Part of me wants to explain to my children that life will be harder for them in September if they don’t begin to focus now. “It’s your choice. Just 20 minutes a day,” I might suggest reasonably.


Another part of me wants to be more demanding. “You’ve got no choice in the matter. You’ve had a ball all summer long, this isn’t such a big deal, and it will make life easier next month.”


But summer was made for having a ball. These kids aren’t in high school and they need a break – even when they are in high school they’ll need a break.


When I look at that pile of books, I feel a familiar knot in my stomach – and it’s not the memory of last August. It’s familiar because I can remember the pressure of having to read “The Odyssey” and “The Iliad” the summer before I entered ninth grade. All summer long I thought about picking up the books and taking care of the required reading. Of course, it wasn’t until the week before school that I actually began.


“My kids know there’s work that needs to get done. They’ve made passing references to it all summer long,” says one mother of three. “But they just keep talking about it. Doing it is a different story.”


Another mother of two says that she feels it’s unreasonable to expect children to do homework over the summer. “Vacation is vacation. The schools send it home, but frankly, I don’t know any parents who force their kids to do the work.”


One girl I spoke to is going into eighth grade, and said that she had no problem finishing the required summer reading. “I like reading. The math packet I wish I could, like, skip. But I understand why the schools send it home. I don’t really think any of my friends are that worried about getting it done. We’ll all do it right before school starts,” she said.


We New Yorkers feel ambivalent about the amount of pressure placed on our children. On one hand, we have chosen to live in this pressure cooker and take a certain amount of pride in our children’s ability to make it here. But we also feel some guilt for placing our children in such a stressful environment. What kind of childhood are we providing for them?


“My husband and I both breezed through public school,” says a mother of three boys, aged 11, 9, and 7. “We did so well academically and felt great about ourselves. It’s a far cry from the school we’ve placed our kids in … There is already so much pressure to do well at school. Some kids have been seeing tutors during the summer when they’re not at camp. As much as I want my kids to do well and want them to have a leg up, there’s a limit on how far I’ll go. Summer is summer.”


But summer vacation in America is longer than the school holidays in almost any other part of the world. Our school year is relatively short, usually only 180 days.The world average is 200 to 220 days a year, and Japan’s is 243.


There are, of course, school districts all over America that have extended the school year. In many parts of the country, school will begin today. But for most schools in our town, the year begins next week or the week after.


That gives us plenty of time, even in September, to hit the books with our children. Time to remind them how to multiply fractions, to read “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and to review the basic conjugations in French.


From the little time I have spent trying to exercise the brains of the children in my house this summer, I can only hope that they have indeed lost only one month’s worth of material. Maybe by the fast-approaching start of school I will have whittled it down to two weeks – and then again, maybe I’ll let them enjoy the lazy days of summer.


The New York Sun

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