THE IMPORTANCE OF NOTHING

Considering all the classes and activities our kids are exposed to and involved in, we should be in awe. The dance classes, music lessons, team sports, visual and performing arts instruction, etc. have become a part of a routine smorgasbord of activities to keep them active, growing and tasting what the future may hold for them. We are giving them just about everything there is possible to give in an environment where they are free and safe to test their talents and explore their interests. In stark contrast is my own rather dull childhood, unadorned by an abundance of extracurricular activities or structured programming. I remember my father being home for dinner each night and helping me with Hebrew reading. The reading wasn’t half as important as the two of us just being together. What we had back then is precisely what our kids don’t have: free time. And I wonder if that isn’t a form of deprivation.

What in times past would have counted as free time has today been chomped away by the homework dragon. Our kids are doing a lot of homework, probably too much. Part of this sad state of affairs involves a political intrusion into education in which government sets academic standards that schools must meet. The schools in turn compel teachers to shelve their own creativity in favor of teaching to the test. I cannot remember a time when so many teachers have expressed disillusionment with a profession they entered into out of love. Knowing their students’ performance will determine their own professional fate, and paycheck, they pile homework assignments on the kids, further diminishing everyone’s free time. I cannot remember a time when parents and kids have felt so overwhelmed. There are serious questions in pedagogic circles whether homework assignments work, whether it actually helps children improve academically. (For studies questioning the efficacy of homework, see the citations at the end of this article). And as schools become more focused on standardized tests, they become less focused on the talents, passions, aptitudes and interests of the individual students. No wonder we give them so much structured programming in the after-school hours.

Recently, our Plainview parents, teachers and administrators responded by creating a homework-free night, when the school would cancel all extracurricular programming and pledge to give the kids a night off. The reviews, not surprisingly, were quite good. The program directly addressed a critical need in our lives—free time to just be with the family with no deadline hanging over our heads. Now that we are walking in the right direction, we need to take this journey a few more miles down the road.

Politicians really do have a tough job, and I have great sympathy for them, given the pressures they face. But when it comes to education, I stand with those who have degrees in pedagogy and experience in the classroom. Standardized testing has provided certain benefits, but not nearly as many as intended. That’s probably because it forces square kids into round holes. Let’s wrest academic oversight from the hands of politicians and place it back into communities and schools, where it belongs. Educators need some breathing room to wield their craft creatively. When that creativity is crushed in the interest of standardized testing, we hurt teachers, and we ultimately shortchange our kids.

Moreover, let’s remember the original homework-free program: Shabbat. Shabbat is an obligation-free, deadline-free, extracurricular-activity-free 24 hours (really 25). The fact is that in our hectic , frenzied work lives, we are not going to ask our teachers, or our managers, for a night off due to exhaustion We are being asked to work 24/7, if not 25/8. We need something stronger than all these people telling us what to do and we’ve got that in Shabbat.

Here’s a good rule for your family: On Friday night, 6:00 PM, everyone is expected at home. No homework, no business, no bills. Light Shabbat candles as a family and for as long as they burn, just be together. You don’t need a fancy Shabbat dinner. You can as easily recite Kiddush and hamotzi and eat pizza. The sanctity of this time revolved around the idea that no one could interfere with it—not a boss, not a teacher, no one. It’s a time to hang out with family, to relax, to throw work worries out the window. It’s sacred; it’s inviolable.

Over the years, as people drifted away from Shabbat holiness, their vulnerability to outside forces that wanted to keep them running and doing and occupied increased dramatically. They were stripped of the power to say, “No.” And so here we are today, exhausted, spent, overwhelmed. If that is the kind of behavior we are modeling for our kids, shame on us.

More than ever we all need a very important something: nothing. There is no better place to begin than by creating sacred time on Shabbat.

CITATIONS QUESTIONING THE EFFICACY OF HOMEWORK

The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning by Kralovec and Buell, 2000; The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It, Bennett and Kalish, 2006; The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing, Kohn, 2006.