In 2017, I was living in Ohio and writing for the Dayton Moms. When we moved to Tennessee in 2019, I was welcomed to the Knoxville Moms with open arms. I have quite a bit of experience with writing at this point. The other thing I am pretty experienced at? It’s being a mom. My “kids” will be 18- and 20-years-old in the next month or so. I will have officially raised two kids into adulthood. This has me thinking about all the choices I made for them and like everyone, questioning if the decisions I made were the right ones. I read some of my past blogs and one caught my eye: The Great (Homework) Debate: How much is too much? You can read it here.
In 2017, my kids were in 4th and 6th grade. I felt like I had done a pretty good job with their education. I had taught both of them to read when we did an online school for kindergarten through second grade. Both kids loved school, were in the gifted classes, and were respectful to their teachers and treated their classmates the way I had taught them. And both kids rarely did any homework, because I believed it took away from our family time and was not needed. Fast-forward to now, do I still believe that I made good decisions by limiting their homework?
ABSOLUTELY!
Obviously, as they got older and hit high school and college classes, homework was a little more of a necessity, but we still did not want it taking up all of their “extra” time each day. By not getting in the habit of sitting and doing homework for hours each night when they were younger, both kids got really good at using extra time in class, trips in the car, or other snippets of (usually wasted) time to finish the work they needed to. We live outside of Knoxville and it’s an hour drive to do most things, and an hour and a half to appreciate all that Knoxville has to offer. Both kids would take their laptops and get their homework done in the car if we had a family night out or medical appointment.
They had enough free time to play multiple sports, help with our big organic garden and raise livestock, redecorate their rooms, spend time with friends, and play games online. I’m sure you’re thinking “yes, not doing a lot of homework and playing online sounds great and all, but what did that do to their grades and education?” I’m ecstatic to report that my 20-year-old son graduated high school as Salutatorian, with an Associate of Science degree. He entered Tennessee Tech on a full scholarship as a Junior and currently has a 3.8 GPA after his first semester there. My 18-year-old daughter is set to graduate high school as Valedictorian, also with a full AS degree.
In saying that we very much limited homework for our kids, I want to stress that I wholeheartedly believe that each parent has to decide what is best for their own kids and work with their kids’ teachers to achieve that goal. Some parents want homework and believe it will help their kids learn. I’m not saying they are wrong; I’m saying that I know my kids and I knew they did not need to spend hours each night on homework. I also have no issue with a teacher deciding what they think is best for their classroom and I respect them for the enormous task of educating a large group of children.
