Mom Criticizes Daughter's Kindergarten Teacher For Assigning Her 10 Pages Of Homework For A One-Day Absence
The 5-year-old has an hours-worth of work to complete because she missed one day of school.
fizkes | Shutterstock After her daughter missed a single day of kindergarten, a mom posted on TikTok lamenting that her child's teacher assigned a "ridiculous" amount of makeup work.
She criticized her daughter's kindergarten teacher for assigning her 10 pages of homework for a one-day absence.
"She missed one day of school with an ear ache and now she has like 10 pages to do before she goes back to school tomorrow," the mom, Chrissy, wrote in the caption of her video.
Chrissy showed off the pages of homework, which consisted of math and spelling worksheets.
The mom argued that it was absurd that her daughter was forced to sit down for over an hour to complete these assignments when she only missed one day of classroom instruction. Her grievances highlight the frustration that many parents, especially those of young kids, feel about the amount of homework that is assigned in school.
Kindergartners should not be expected to complete an excessive amount of homework.
The National Education Association and the National PTA recommend that homework does not get assigned until the first grade.
According to the "10-minute rule," students should be assigned roughly 10 minutes of homework a night per grade level beginning in first grade. So, children in second grade would have 20 minutes, those in third grade would have 30 minutes, and so on.
Dragon Images | Shutterstock
Yet many students, even kindergarteners, are being assigned far more work than is recommended by experts, despite studies consistently showing that homework has minimal academic benefits for children in the early elementary years.
“It is absolutely shocking to me to find out that particularly kindergarten students [who] are not supposed to have any homework at all … are getting as much homework as a third-grader is supposed to get,” Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman, the clinical director of the New England Center for Pediatric Psychology, told CNN.
At the end of the day, a child shouldn't be expected to spend hours during the day sitting in a classroom only to return home and be stuck at the kitchen table completing even more work. While homework makes sense for older students, the benefits are insignificant for 5 and 6-year-olds, like Chrissy's daughter.
Still, Chrissy received an abundance of criticism on her TikTok and ultimately disabled comments. In a follow-up video, the mom clarified that she "absolutely loves" her daughter's teacher; however, she stands firm in her belief that the amount of makeup work she assigned was unreasonable.
“I don't think any 5-year-old, any kindergartener, should have to do 10 pages of makeup work for one day,” she insisted. “I just don't think it needs to happen.”
Nia Tipton is a staff writer with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and journalism who covers news and lifestyle topics that focus on psychology, relationships, and the human experience.