The Reading Log, the Worksheet, and the Tears: Is This Homework Actually a Waste of Time?
Tuesday, 6:15 p.m. My son is lying across the kitchen table, forehead pressed to the math worksheet, pencil hovering but not moving. The problem asks him to find the perimeter of a rectangle. He knows what perimeter means—we practiced it last week—but tonight he’s decided that knowing it is irrelevant, that this entire page is a personal insult.
“This is stupid,” he says. “When am I ever going to need this?”
I could give him the standard lecture: you need it for next grade, for tests, for your brain to grow. But I’m tired. He’s tired. And a small voice in my head whispers the same question I’ve been avoiding: Is this thing a waste of time?
I’m not just a parent asking this. I’ve spent eleven years in classrooms—six teaching elementary, five as a reading specialist. I’ve assigned homework. I’ve collected it, graded it, chased down missing assignments. And I’ve also sat in parent-teacher conferences where a mom told me her daughter was crying at 9 p.m. over a word search I thought was a “fun” extension activity. In that moment, I knew it wasn’t fun. It was just more.
There’s a lot of talk about busywork versus meaningful work. Teachers know the difference. Parents can sense it. But the line between them gets blurry after a full school day, when the backpack comes home bulging with three worksheets, a reading log, and a half-finished spelling packet. We ask our kids to spend another hour so their brains can “stay warm.” But what does that hour actually do?
Last month, I watched my daughter lose her mind over a reading log. For those unfamiliar, a reading log is a piece of paper that asks kids to record the title, author, pages read, and minutes spent. My daughter reads voraciously—she reads in the car, in the bath, at dinner, which drives me crazy. But the log turns reading into a chore. Every night, she has to stop reading to write down the book title, which she already knows, and calculate how many minutes she read, which she already tracked. She’s ten. She’s not learning time management. She’s learning that reading is a task with a side of paperwork.
So I decided to test something. I told her to skip the log for a week. Just read. If she wanted, she could tell me about the book at dinner, but no writing. She looked at me like I’d offered her a day off school. Then she read an entire graphic novel and a chapter of Harry Potter without once asking me for a pen.
That week was illuminating. But I also know that not every teacher assigns reading logs to be cruel. Many are trying to build a habit. When I taught third grade, I checked reading logs because parents asked me to—they wanted accountability. One dad told me his son would “forget to read” without the log. So the log wasn’t the problem. The problem was that we were using a tracking tool for kids who didn’t need tracking, and a compliance tool for kids who needed something else entirely.
The homework question isn’t really about homework. It’s about whether the task respects the child’s time and energy. And that’s a hard question to answer from a curriculum guide.
I remember a morning when a student named Marcus walked into my classroom with a completed packet of twenty math problems. The packet was my decision—reinforcement, I told myself. But Marcus’s mother wrote a note in the corner: “He did all of these in ten minutes. He says they’re too easy. Is this necessary?” I felt a pang of defensiveness. Then I looked at the problems. They were indeed too easy. Marcus needed to be challenged, not busy. The homework wasn’t supporting him; it was just filling a slot.
Instead of assigning another packet, I started sending home a single problem that was slightly above the level we’d worked on in class. No packet. Just one interesting puzzle that required some thinking. The first week, Marcus’s mom texted me a photo of him explaining his reasoning to his little sister at the kitchen table. That homework wasn’t a waste—it was a conversation starter.
The difference, I’ve come to believe, lies in three things: purpose, choice, and time.
Purpose means the child understands why they’re doing it. Not “the teacher said so,” but “this lets me practice a skill I struggled with” or “this connects to something I care about.” When my son asked about the perimeter problem, I could have said it was for the test. Instead, I said, “If we ever want to build a fence around our garden, we’d need to know this.” He rolled his eyes, but he did the next problem. It wasn’t magic—it was a tiny shift from “because I said so” to “because it’s actually useful.”
Choice is trickier but just as important. For the reading log, the choice could be letting the child write a sentence response instead of filling in minutes. Or letting them pick the book and the format. When I taught, I had a student who hated any writing task. I gave him an option: for your reading log, draw a comic strip of the chapter. He drew six panels. He also wrote captions—not because I asked, but because the comic needed them. That wasn’t a waste; that was a loophole that worked in his favor.
Time is the most practical piece. A homework assignment that takes twenty minutes when the child is focused will take ninety minutes when they’re hungry, tired, or fighting a sibling. That’s not a moral failing. That’s reality. I’ve learned to set a timer. When the timer goes off, the homework goes in the folder, done or not. Not because I’m a pushy parent, but because sleep and family dinner matter more than one more row of subtraction.
And here’s the thing I’ve had to remind myself as a former teacher: I don’t need to defend every assignment I ever gave. Some of it was busywork. Some of it was just maintaining order. The best I can do now is decide what my own kids bring home—and what I insist on.
Last Tuesday, after the perimeter tantrum, I sat down next to my son. I didn’t lecture. I just looked at the worksheet. “You already did the first two,” I said. “What if we only do three more tonight and then leave the rest for playtime tomorrow?” He looked suspicious. “Is that allowed?” I shrugged. “Who’s checking?” He did the three problems. He was right—they were tedious. But he also learned something small: that his time had value, and that an adult noticed when something wasn’t worth his effort.
I’m not sure that’s a lesson in any curriculum. But I’m starting to think that sometimes the real learning isn’t the perimeter or the reading log. It’s the quiet negotiation—the moment a parent says, “I see you. This might be busywork. Let’s get through it together, but let’s not pretend it’s more important than you.” That’s not a waste. That’s the actual homework.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » The Reading Log, the Worksheet, and the Tears: Is This Homework Actually a Waste of Time