Is Homework a Waste of Time? What I Learned After Ditching the Packets
The timer was set for twenty minutes, which felt generous. My daughter was nine, sitting at the kitchen table with a spelling packet that required her to write each word three times, alphabetize it, and then use it in a sentence. She had done this sort of thing since first grade, and every week it got a little harder to watch. On this particular Wednesday, she had been staring at the word “necessary” for two minutes, pencil poised but motionless. When I asked what was wrong, she said, “I don’t know why I have to do this. I already know how to spell the words.”
I didn’t have an answer for her. I had been a teacher for six years before staying home with my kids, and I knew the research. I knew that for elementary students, homework has almost no measurable effect on academic achievement. I knew that the connection between homework and test scores only really shows up in high school, and even then it’s modest. I knew all of this, but I still made her finish the packet because that’s what the school sent home, and I didn’t want to be the parent who questions the system.
That night, after she finally finished at 7:45, I looked at the packet: fifteen minutes of copying words, five minutes of alphabetizing, and then a few sentences that read like “The necessary pen is on the floor.” She had worked hard, but she hadn’t practiced spelling in any way that would stick. She had just mechanically copied letters. When I tested her on the words the next morning, she spelled them all correctly—but she had also spelled them correctly the week before, before the packet. The only thing the homework did was make her hate the word “necessary” a little bit more.
A few weeks later, I decided to stop making her do the packet. I didn’t announce it loudly or send a note to the teacher. I just quietly let it slip. When she asked if I forgot it, I said, “I think we’re going to try something different for a while.” She looked at me like I had just cancelled bedtime. That’s how conditioned we all were: homework was homework, and you did it because it was assigned.
What I replaced it with was embarrassingly simple: fifteen minutes of reading something she chose, and then a quick conversation about her day. No worksheets, no writing from a list, no parent signature. The first week was shaky. She kept asking if she was “in trouble” or if I was “mad at the school.” I wasn’t mad. I was bored. Bored of sitting next to her while she cried over cursive practice, bored of the negotiation and the timer and the resentment that built up for no reason other than someone in a district office had decided that busywork was a virtue.
I also started paying attention to what the homework was actually doing to our evenings. We used to have about an hour after dinner before bath and bed. Half of that hour was spent arguing about assignments. The other half was a rushed game of cards or a quick chapter book. After I stopped the packet, we suddenly had real time. Time for her to build a marble run that kept collapsing. Time for her to help me make biscuits without me checking the clock. Time to just sit on the couch and listen to her tell me about the girl who wasn’t invited to a birthday party. This wasn’t idyll—days still had plenty of moments of whining and reheated battles. But the specific, manufactured struggle of homework was gone.
Here’s what surprised me: within two weeks, she started asking me for work. Not because she missed the packet, but because she saw me doing a crossword puzzle and wanted one of her own. We found a kids’ crossword book at a yard sale, and she started bringing it to the table while I did mine. She would ask how to spell “giraffe” and I would tell her, then she’d write it in the little boxes, messily, with her tongue sticking out. She wasn’t learning spelling through repetition; she was learning it by needing to recall the word, make an error, and correct it. The mistake was part of the process.
None of this is revolutionary. Teachers know that rote work is not effective, but they are also stuck in a system that demands a paper trail. I reached out to her teacher, not to complain, but to explain what we were doing at home. The teacher, a tired woman in her fifties, sighed and said, “Honestly, I only send the packet because the last parent emailed asking for more homework. I don’t have time to differentiate for thirty kids.” That’s the real issue. Homework is often less about learning and more about habit, or about proving a school is rigorous. No one sits down with a planner and says, “Let’s think carefully about whether copying spelling words is the best use of a nine-year-old’s evening.”
I still don’t have a clean answer to the question “Is homework a waste of time?” Because sometimes, in small doses, it can be useful. A few math problems to review a concept can help solidify a skill. Reading every night is the only homework I’ve ever seen that actually matters. But the kind of homework that smothers a child’s natural curiosity—the packets, the fill-in-the-blank sentences, the chapter summaries—that is probably a waste, not just of time but of goodwill. When a child spends the whole week dreading the packet, the packet isn’t teaching discipline. It’s teaching that schoolwork is something to get through.
We’ve settled into a rhythm now, eight months later. My daughter still gets assigned homework, and she does most of it. But I’ve become pickier. If an assignment is clearly busywork, we talk about why she might not need to finish all of it. She knows that some teachers send homework to communicate with parents or to check off a requirement, and that doesn’t mean she has to sink three hours into something that takes twenty minutes. We’ve also kept the fifteen minutes of reading. She chooses the books, and sometimes she reads to the dog, who has never once complained about the pacing.
The other night, she brought home a fresh packet—a long division review, ten problems, all the same skill. She looked at it, then at me, and said, “Can I do half and you sign the rest?” I said no, but then I sat down and did three problems with her, explaining a shortcut. She finished the rest in ten minutes, not because she was rushing, but because she actually understood it. I still don’t know if that packet was a waste of time. But I know the timer is gone, and so is the tears. What we do with the evening is our own call now—and that feels like a small lesson worth keeping.
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