Is This Worksheet a Waste of Time? A Teacher’s Honest Look at Homework That Feels Pointless
My son was stretched out on the kitchen floor, one cheek pressed against the cold tile, his pencil hovering over a laminated page. The assignment was simple: circle all the “ai” words that make the long A sound. There were twelve words in a grid, and he’d already circled rain, snail, and train. Now he was sitting on said, tapping his pencil on the letters.
“Mom, this one’s wrong,” he said. “Said has an ‘ai’ but it doesn’t say ‘ay.’ It says ‘eh.’ So I shouldn’t circle it, right?”
I leaned over. He was right. The worksheet had included said as a decoy, but for a six-year-old who was just learning that vowel teams sometimes follow rules, this was not a clever trick. It was a trap. I had two choices. I could explain that English is full of exceptions, or I could just tell him to skip it and move on.
Instead, I heard myself say, “Let’s just finish the page. It’s for homework.”
He circled said anyway, because he thought that’s what the teacher wanted. And I let him.
That moment sat with me for a while. I’m a teacher. I spend my school days handing out similar packets, telling parents that these exercises build pattern recognition and decoding stamina. But standing over my own child’s shoulder, I felt like the worksheet was a lie. It wasn’t teaching him anything except that his instincts were wrong.
The next day, I brought the paper to school and looked at it more closely. The top read: “Vowel Teams Review: ai, ay, ea.” Underneath, in fine print, were instructions for the teacher: “Students should identify words where the vowel team makes the expected sound before encountering exceptions.” So the said was supposed to come later, maybe in a different column. But the copy that went home didn’t have that nuance. It was just a grid, and my son had been asked to make the same judgment call that many adults still struggle with.
I thought about the parents who email me with photos of worksheets, asking politely, “Is this really necessary?” I always write back with something about spiral review and automaticity. And I mean it. But watching my own kid color in a word that was clearly an exception, I understood the question from the other side.
The thing is, the worksheet wasn’t entirely a waste of time. After he finished, I put away the paper and asked him to say the words aloud. He nailed rain, snail, train without hesitation. When I said said, he made a face. “That’s a silent person word,” he told me. He’d learned something about the ai pattern, but more importantly, he’d learned that patterns have limits. That’s not nothing. But he learned it in spite of the worksheet, not because of it.
That evening, I did something I normally avoid. I went into his backpack and pulled out the rest of the week’s homework. There were three more pages: a math sheet on place value, a spelling list, and a reading log. I sat on his bed and looked at each one, trying to see it with a mother’s eyes, not a teacher’s.
The math page was straightforward. Show the number in tens and ones. He could do it, and it would take him seven minutes. The spelling list was fine, too. But the reading log asked for twenty minutes of reading plus a parent signature. That was the one I always felt guilty about. We read every night, so it wasn’t the reading part. It was the log, the pressure to count minutes like pennies.
I remembered a conference last fall with a dad who said his daughter hated reading logs because they made reading feel like a chore. At the time, I’d smiled and said, “The log is more about building a habit than tracking exact time. You can adjust it.” I meant well. But that night, looking at the empty boxes my son would have to fill in, I realized I had never actually adjusted my own homework policies.
So I decided to try something small. The next day, instead of dumping my son’s packet on the kitchen table, I pulled out one page at a time. I read the instructions out loud. My son and I talked about what the purpose was. Then I let him cross out the words that didn’t make sense to him. He crossed out said and wrote said? in the margin. That was his comment. He felt heard.
The math sheet we did as a race. I drew a tiny timer on the corner of the page, and he gave himself a star. The reading log we filled in together, but I let him be in charge of writing down the minutes. He rounded up. That was fine with me.
None of this was revolutionary. I didn’t email the teacher and demand a change. I didn’t write an angry blog post about busywork. I just stopped treating the paper as a sacred object and started treating it as a tool. And that changed the whole mood of our evenings.
The deeper lesson for me was that the question “Is this a waste of time?” is almost always the wrong question. The real question is “What is this asking my child to do, and is that thing worth doing?” Sometimes the answer is no. I’ve thrown out worksheets that were too easy or badly designed. I’ve let my son skip problems he already understands. But other times, the paper is fine, and the problem is the way we’re using it—urgently, rigidly, or without any explanation.
I still hand out homework packets to my own third graders. I still see the same grid of words and the same blank reading logs. But I’ve started adding a one-line note at the top of each page: “Just read the first column” or “If your child knows this, try the challenge side.” It helps me feel less like I’m sending home busywork. And on the reading log, I changed the box from “minutes read” to “book or chapter we enjoyed.” Parents haven’t said much, but I noticed fewer signatures on nights that look like they were a fight.
As for my son, he still has homework most evenings. Some nights it feels completely pointless, and I let him slide. Other nights, we end up bickering over a pencil, and I wonder why we bother. But the other day, he came home with a worksheet about the silent E. He looked at it for a second and said, “I know this one. The E makes the vowel say its name.” Then he grinned. “That’s like a little cheat code.”
He did the whole page in five minutes, no tears, no circling of exceptions. And I found myself thinking that maybe the time we spent arguing about said actually taught him more than the lesson ever would. He learned that worksheets are fallible, that parents can admit when things are confusing, and that sometimes you just circle the wrong answer and talk about it later. That’s not a waste of time. That’s just school, rubbing against real life.
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