Is Homework a Waste of Time? What This Teacher Noticed When She Stopped Nagging Her Son
“Please just do the first three problems,” I said for the fourth time.
My seven-year-old had one subtraction problem finished. The second was half-erased. His pencil was now making a small hole in the margin of the worksheet. The timer I’d set had gone off twice. The rice was cooking, the baby was crying, and my voice had moved from normal to that low, tight sound I hate.
My son looked up. “This is a waste of time.”
It was the same phrase I’d heard from parents in conferences, except usually I was nodding along and gently suggesting a consistent homework space. I teach third grade. I have a drawer full of fidget toys, a peace corner, and a folder of executive function strategies. At school, I can get twenty-four kids to settle into a routine. At home, I couldn’t get one seven-year-old to write the number 43 on the right side of a line.
So I sat down across from him. “Maybe it is,” I said.
He didn’t expect that. Neither did I.
I wasn’t agreeing with him completely. I still think a little practice after school can be useful. Math facts, reading stamina, vocabulary—those things grow when kids touch them outside the classroom. But in that moment, I saw what he saw. A worksheet with eight problems, a tired kid, a parent hovering like a flustered supervisor. If someone handed me that assignment after a full day of work, I’d call it busywork and shut the folder.
The truth is, a lot of elementary homework is assignable but not especially meaningful. The research on it has been mixed for years. In the early grades, the academic benefits are small. What can matter is the routine: learning that some tasks are boring, still need doing, and can be done with a little effort. But that lesson doesn’t land when the child is exhausted and the parent is annoyed. It just turns into a nightly power struggle.
The next night, I tried something different.
I didn’t announce it. I didn’t say, “Tonight we’re going to try a new system!” I just took the worksheet, placed it on a clipboard, and set a small timer for twelve minutes.
My son looked at me suspiciously. “What are you doing?”
“I’m starting the spaghetti,” I said. “You can do this before dinner or after dinner. Your choice.”
He thought about it longer than I expected. Then he said, “After.”
The whole evening, he knew it was waiting. I didn’t remind him. He found me after dinner, dug the clipboard out from under a couch cushion, and asked for a purple pen. I sat next to him reading a book—not watching, not correcting, not counting the remaining problems in my head. He did four problems in about eight minutes. Then he told me the timer must be broken because it felt like two minutes.
It wasn’t a miracle. The next week, he cried over a reading log. But something shifted, and I think I know what it was.
I stopped making the worksheet the main event.
For a lot of kids, the task itself isn’t the real problem. Neither is the difficulty. The problem is the way homework becomes an emotional test. Will I do it? Will I do it fast enough? Will I do it correctly the first time? Will my mom or dad have to ask me twice? Every yes or no feels like a verdict on whether they’re a good kid.
So one small change that worked: I gave him a real choice, not a fake one.
“Do you want to do your sheet before or after dinner?” is a low-stakes choice, but it gives a child some ownership. “Do you want to start now?” is not a choice—it’s a command with a question mark attached to it.
Another thing that helped was giving the worksheet a physical edge. A clipboard made the paper feel less like a giant mountain. It was just one board, one sheet, one small rectangle of work. I also started telling him to do only the first three problems. If he wanted to keep going, fine. If he stopped after three, that was fine too. Most nights, he kept going anyway, because the pressure had been taken off.
I also sat beside him instead of across from him.
This sounds like a tiny detail, but it changed the whole feeling. When I sat across the table, my eyes were on his paper. I could see every mistake as it happened, and my face must have done something. When I sat next to him with my own book, I was modeling focusing on my own boring task. He wasn’t being watched. He was just doing work near someone else who was also doing work.
That alone didn’t solve everything, but it made the evenings quieter.
People often ask me whether I still assign homework now that I’ve seen this at home.
I do. But I’ve changed what I send out.
I keep the packet short. I don’t assign new content as homework—only things kids already know how to do. I write it on the board and say, “This is twenty minutes. If you’re working hard and you’re still not done after twenty minutes, you’re done.” I tell parents the same thing. I want kids to practice sitting with a slightly boring task, but I don’t want them to hate coming home because they know the worksheet is waiting for them.
I think, in a way, my son was right that first night. That version of homework—the nagging, the erasing, the pencil poking through the margin—was a waste of time. It wasn’t teaching subtraction. It was teaching him to dread it.
But the act of starting something you don’t feel like doing? That’s not a waste. That’s a life skill. We just need it to be small enough, specific enough, and somehow connected to a pen color or a choice about dinner.
Last night, he still moaned when he saw the reading log. I still raised my voice once, and I’m not proud of it. He still claimed the clock was wrong. But then he picked the green highlighter, wrote two sentences about a dragon book, and showed me his work like he’d built something himself.
Maybe that’s where the value is. Not in the worksheet itself. Not in the perfect routine. Just in the moment a kid decides to pick up the pen instead of waiting for someone to force it into his hand.
I’m still not sure how to get there consistently. But I’m getting closer than I was when I was standing at the kitchen table, watching him poke holes in the margin and wondering whose idea this whole thing was.
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