![]() It gives them a real sense of ownership.” “We encourage students to pursue things that they are interested in and they’re passionate about,” says Annie Giovino, a teacher at PS 118. An EYB can be anything: a traditional researched report, a science experiment, a video or even an original song performed in front of the class. Instead, it encourages students to partake in optional, open-ended projects, called “Exercise Your Brain” or EYBs. One local public school, PS 118 in Park Slope, is making over its homework policy with that in mind.Īs of 2016, the Brooklyn elementary school, which has pre-K to fifth-grade classes, no longer doles out mandatory homework. “Most people know the downside of homework, the way it can kill kids’ excitement about learning, create frustration, exhaustion and family conflict,” says Alfie Kohn, author of “ The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing.” “But what most people don’t realize is the lack of evidence supporting the conventional wisdom that homework is beneficial.” He says that most teachers don’t assign take-home work that helps students consider “questions that matter, as opposed to cramming forgettable facts.” The anti-homework camp claims that take-home assignments infringe on family time and prevent kids from developing their own interests outside of school. Liat Tamam ceremoniously dumps homework with her daughter Rosa. In New York, the debate has reached an institutional level, and public elementary schools from Brooklyn to Long Island to Rockland County have all recently made moves to eliminate mandatory take-home assignments. But now, parents and teachers are rethinking the wisdom of sending children home every night with backpacks bulging with textbooks, worksheets and flashcards. Once upon an old-school classroom, homework was accepted as a crucial, if unpleasant, part of a student’s life. ![]() She’s “very happy and more carefree,” Tamam says. Today, Rosa and her 3-year-old sister, Astrid, attend a homework-free school in the East Village. The 42-year-old says that Rosa was so resistant to doing her assigned math and writing worksheets that she was “having anxiety and stress and crying every day.” So last January - after Rosa spent just four months at the local public school - Tamam and her husband decided to pull her out. “It was very challenging for me personally to get her to sit down and do homework,” she says, “but I also didn’t want her to be behind her class.” “It just became this huge drama,” the Bushwick-based mother of two tells The Post of the heated fights between her and her 6-year-old daughter, Rosa. For Liat Tamam, the daily, tearful battles over homework started soon after her daughter entered kindergarten.
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