New Age of Homework @Solsticepublish

The other day my twelve year old wanted help with her homework.  My schedule is pretty hit and miss so this job usually falls to my wife. (Thanks)  When my daughter pulled out her homework I could not believe the volume.  Her backpack was bursting at the seams.  She’s in 6th grade and had homework in every subject.  We worked on it from before dinner till bedtime.  What surprised me most was that most of the answers were not in her textbook.  We were expected to go on line to find the answers.  Social studies and history both required internet work.  I was exhausted by the time we were done and I was only helping.  Even in college, the answers for the homework were always in the textbook.  Isn’t that what a textbook is for in the first place?  The only times we needed to consult outside sources were projects or papers where we did research at the library. I freely admit that I didn’t have a resource like the internet so handy but this seems like a bit much for 6th grade.  I talked to my wife about it and she said that the homework is like that every night.  My daughter’s attention span is short but such a daunting mound of work for one night is ridiculously difficult to accomplish.  She often has a hard time finishing.  In sixth grade I rarely had homework that took more than a few minutes.  Is school harder now?  Are they trying to teach more than we learned?  I don’t have the answer.  Maybe the school she goes to is harder.  Maybe all schools are like that now.  What I know for sure is that there is an awful lot of homework for a young age.  I admit this would not be an issue to me if I wasn’t affected.  I was mostly blind to the matter until I was confronted with it.  Now I see the volume of work being dropped on my child and I become agitated.  It would be one thing to have the students combing through the text but they are expected to find outside sources for their answers.  That seems a bit unreasonable.  My older daughter in high school doesn’t have anywhere this amount of work.  She usually can do her homework in about an hour.  It was like that for me as well.  Looking at it objectively, maybe the teachers are being hard on them early so they will develop good study habits that will benefit them down the road.  Maybe that is the case.  All I know is its Saturday night and I have to help with social studies so there isn’t so much work to finish tomorrow.  You can bet the answers aren’t in the textbook.