Is Homework a Waste of Time? A Teacher Explains When It Helps and When It Doesn’t
Wednesday evening, 8:15. My son is at the kitchen table with a worksheet that has twenty multiplication problems on it. He’s done seven. The eraser marks are so heavy in the corner that the paper has started to pill. His little sister has already finished her reading and is stacking crackers into a tower. The dog is lying directly on my feet. My son looks up at me and says, “This is a waste of time.”
I don’t answer right away, because part of me agrees.
He’s in fourth grade. The worksheet asks him to find products like 7×8 and 9×6. We all know he can do this. He’s not stuck because the material is hard. He’s stuck because he already understood the concept, and now he’s being asked to prove it twenty times for no reason he can see. And honestly, there is a reason, but it’s not a great one. The reason is mostly “we’ve always done it this way.”
I’m a teacher myself. I’ve sent home worksheets that looked exactly like that. I told myself I was building fluency, and maybe I was, for some kids. But I also know the truth: a lot of homework is assigned out of habit, not because it’s genuinely needed. Schools rely on it. Parents expect it. Some teachers feel like they haven’t done their job if they don’t send something home. That doesn’t make it useful.
That night, I didn’t force him to finish. I told him to do five problems—just five, the five he felt were hardest—and then he could stop. He did them in less than three minutes, checked them himself, and put the paper in his folder. I wrote a short note to his teacher: “He completed five. The rest weren’t necessary tonight.” I felt a little nervous sending it. I was a parent stepping on a teacher’s toes, and also a teacher who knew the note could sound lazy or entitled.
His teacher handled it better than I expected. She emailed me back and said she’s been wondering about the homework policy herself. She said she would rather see students read for twenty minutes than finish a worksheet they didn’t need. For the next unit, she started offering a choice: twenty problems, or ten problems plus a drawing that shows the concept. Some kids chose the drawing. Some chose twenty problems, because they liked the routine. Some parents complained that the options were confusing. But my son stopped asking me whether his assignment was a waste of time. He still didn’t love homework, but he knew the teacher had a reason for it that she could explain.
The problem isn’t always homework itself. The problem is that nobody explains why we’re doing it.
I see this in my own classroom too. A kid raises her hand and asks, “Do I have to do all of these?” My first reaction is usually to say yes, because I’ve planned it that way. But sometimes I stop and think: what am I actually trying to accomplish? If the goal is to make sure she can convert fractions to decimals, she doesn’t need fifteen practice problems. She needs to do it correctly a few times and explain the steps to someone. If she can already do that, then sending her home with more of the same is not teaching. It’s just time.
Parents can ask this too, but it’s better to ask it in a specific way. Instead of “the homework is too much,” try saying “My child already knows how to do this. Do you have an option for extension?” Or, “Would it be possible for him to show what he knows in five problems instead of twenty?” Some teachers will say no. Some won’t. But the conversation is worth it, because it gives everyone a chance to think about what the assignment is for.
At home, we also made a few small changes. We stopped calling it “homework time” and started calling it “practice time.” That mattered more than I expected. Homework sounds like something you have to get through. Practice sounds like something you do to get better at a skill, even if you’re already okay at it. We set a timer for fifteen minutes. When it goes off, he’s done, unless he wants to keep going. Most of the time he doesn’t. But he does stop fighting the clock.
I also started asking him a different question when he said something was pointless. Instead of “Is this actually pointless?” I asked, “What’s the skill you’re supposed to be learning here?” Sometimes he couldn’t answer, and that told me the teacher hadn’t made the goal clear. But sometimes he would think about it and say, “I guess it’s to know my multiplication facts faster.” Then he’d do the work without enthusiasm, but without the big argument. He was still doing it, but at least he knew why.
Not every assignment needs to be defended, of course. Some things are just practice, and practice is kind of boring. I don’t think every minute of school needs to be thrilling. But there’s a difference between “this is boring” and “this isn’t teaching me anything.” Both are real feelings, but they need different responses.
The other week, his school had a math night. There was a table with dice games, a table with number puzzles, and a table in the corner where parents could sign up for tutoring. My son spent almost the whole time at the dice game. When we left, he said, “That was actually kind of fun.” Then he said, “But it’s not homework, so it doesn’t count.” I laughed, but I also wondered: why doesn’t it count? A game where you roll two dice and multiply them is practice. It’s just practice that doesn’t feel like school.
We haven’t solved this. There are still nights when he has a page of long division and asks me if he has to do every problem. There are nights when I make him finish something I’m not sure he actually needs to do. And there are nights when I let him stop early and wonder if I’m making it harder for his teacher or if I’m teaching him that he can get out of things he doesn’t like. I don’t have a clean answer.
What I keep coming back to is this: the question “is this a waste of time” is usually not lazy. It’s a diagnostic question. When a kid asks it, something isn’t adding up. It could be that the kid is looking for an escape, and that’s worth noticing. But it could also be that the assignment really is busywork, and the honest response is to say, “You’re right. Let’s figure out what you actually need to practice.”
The worksheet that night didn’t get finished. My son did five problems and went to the kitchen to build a cracker tower with his sister. The next morning, I found the worksheet in his backpack. It was crumpled, but the five problems were correct. That was enough. That was probably always enough.
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