Destroying summer vacation

I ran across an opinion piece today, in the New York Times, which introduced me to the notion of "vacation homework" during summertime:

Last summer, for example, students at one charter school in the Bronx were assigned 10 book reports, a thick math packet, a report on China including a written essay and a handmade doll in authentic costume, and a daily log of their activities and the weather.

These were kids who'd just finished first grade.

And that daily log of activities-- yeah, so the school can snoop on your family all summer long. I don't think I could stand it. Possibly I'd keep a parody of a log myself, and have my kid turn that in:

June 23. Had a lovely breakfast with Father before he departed for work. Studied spelling words until 11am, tidied my room, made sandwiches for lunch. Took darling little brother out to the sandbox to give Mummy a bit of a rest. Jogged, did a few math problems, and set the table for dinner (delicious and healthy-- thanks Mum!). Read Dickens until 8:30 and then off to bed. Another blissful day!

I mean, what happened to privacy? Do the parents all get to read the teacher's daily log for the summer, too?

The NYT piece goes on:

And what about high schoolers — just a little light reading to ease teenage angst? One ninth grader we know was assigned a packet of materials on the Holocaust. Another must read a 656-page book on genocide, on top of three chapters of a science textbook followed by a 15-page take-home exam, prepare a 20-slide PowerPoint presentation and complete an English assignment involving three books and essays.

The authors point out that kids need vacation time to reduce stress, but even if we restrict ourselves to purely academic goals, kids still need down time for "consolidation." Consolidation is a psychologist's term for the period when recently acquired information gets woven in with what we already knew, linked up to our prior knowledge, and is therefore retained. If you never get a resting period where consolidation can occur, all you have is short-term memorization. In my opinion most of school relies on short-term memorization. Possibly this is why the "skills" students supposedly learn are so fragile and transient that they don't make it through the summer: because they keep you so ludicrously busy that there's no time to ever consolidate the new data. In any case, more homework isn't the solution.

Actually, homework is highly dubious even during the school year:

In fact, there's serious doubt about whether homework has any benefit at all. Most studies have found little or no correlation between homework and achievement (meaning grades and test scores) in elementary school or middle school. According to Harris Cooper of Duke University, the nation's leading researcher on the subject, there is a clear correlation among high school students, but he warns that "overloading them with homework is not associated with higher grades."

. . .

In fact, most experts believe reading is the most important educational activity. Yet a poll released last week by Scholastic and Yankelovich found that the amount of time youngsters spend reading for fun declines sharply after age 8. The No. 1 reason given by parents: too much homework.

Yes, it's hard to get an education when you're living with ever-present schooling.

It seems to me that parents should band together and refuse to have their kids do any of the summer homework. If even a quarter of the class did that, they'd have to make some radical changes, and those kids would get a real summer.

A good old-fashioned work stoppage is what's in order.