Have You Hugged Your Pencil Today?

Have you hugged your pencil today? One of the greatest inventions of mankind. Remember pre ball point pens days? Where would you have been without a pencil? Your school career depended on it. And I guess for some, your school career ended because of it. How did they do the 12 x 12 tables without a pencil? Pebbles, match sticks? I dread to even imagine.
The classroom would have only one sharpener. Up there, you could look over the whole class and make faces at the teacher behind her back. Your best friend could come up and it would be the equivalent of the water cooler. But soon you would have to return to your seat since your pencil was now only a nub.
Every year, you could count on getting a pencil box for a gift, at least once. Armed with a pencil box full of pencils, you could write an amount your brain could never remember. Homework, shopping lists. Well maybe not shopping lists. Olden days shopping lists wern't that hot. What would you see on them? Coffee,sugar, flour, bullets? Some people had pencils behind their ears to show how busy they were. And do you know what was best of all, pencils never ran out of ink.

Too Much Homework ?

Homework is an accepted part of children’s coursework, starting as early as first grade. But how much is too much?

Homework -- the traditional bane of a school-age child's existence -- is once again coming under fire. Some influential researchers say homework does little to improve a student's academic abilities. Others believe homework is excessive, and doing more harm than good.

The National PTA suggests children in kindergarten through second grade receive 10-20 minutes of homework each night. In grades three through six, that recommended amount increases to 30-60 minutes nightly. In middle and high school, the amount depends on the number and level of difficulty of classes a student takes.

At the turn of the century, homework was actually outlawed in some areas because it was considered child labor. The theory was to simply let kids be kids. But Sputnik and the space race changed everything. Almost overnight, educators were scrambling to fill the "education gap" with the Soviet Union.

Nine-year-old Andrew has so much homework that his stepmother, a teacher herself, says, “at times it is overwhelming.” Every day, including weekends, the fourth grader has at least 1½ hours of work to do. Some days it takes him two hours or more to finish up. Not surprisingly, this workload has dampened his enthusiasm for school.

A retired school teacher is spreading a message most students would agree with – kids in Alberta have too much homework.
“There’s huge amount of stress on families. And I see homework as the icing on the family stress cake,” said Vera Goodman, a Calgary-based author with more than 30 years of teaching behind her.

Some teachers sometimes overdo the work load. All factors need to be considered and sometimes teachers forget to do that.

And for every parent who thinks there's too much homework, however, there is another who feels her child needs more.