I'm Quitting My Third-Grader'S Homework. And You Should Too.
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I'm Quitting My Third-Grader'S Homework. And You Should Too.<br>Well. Definitely the recorder.
Resting Rich Face™<br>May 14, 2026
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Let me set the scene.<br>It is 7 p.m. on a Tuesday, maybe 8, 9 if I’m being honest. I have three children, a full-time job, weekly work travel and a husband who — bless him — holds a PhD in pure mathematics from MIT but doesn’t know where to find milk. (The answer is the supermarket, Nick.) Dinner and bath time are wrapped. It’s time to go to bed, right? Nope. We have approximately four hours of Russian Math homework due in two days, on top of Harry’s regular third-grade assignments.<br>Russian Math, for the uninitiated, is an accelerated mathematics curriculum for parents who are either extremely nervous or too clever for their own good — and no, the class is not in Russian. What started as an hour and twenty minutes a week has expanded, year over year, like a slow and merciless flood, into a two-hour class every week from 5:50 to 7:50 p.m. It’s also a solid 20-minute drive from our home. For the love of God, why couldn’t you start on the hour like a normal place.<br>This, while arduous, I see as a meaningful investment in our son’s education, given that we have Nick — the pure math genius — at our disposal. But the regular third-grade homework? Nope.
So when The Cut asked this week why kindergarteners have so much homework, I felt seen — and I immediately wanted to extend the question to all of elementary school. Why are we all doing this to ourselves?
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There’s a whole system. An email login. A tracker the teacher set up specifically for Harry’s two hippy parents. Nightly assignments, reading logs, math sheets, spelling words. And I — again, two other kids, a full-time job, a serious side hustle, weekly work travel, a house under renovation — just declined to even try. There were too many instructions for something so fatuous.<br>Then we got an email. Harry had not been doing his recorder homework.<br>I quit. No one has ever made a living playing the recorder.<br>Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not a total hippy. I believe in hard work. I spent six to eight hours doing homework every night in high school, often going to bed at 1 or 2 a.m. I don’t use any of it — mostly AP math — but it made me fast at everything I do. Nick studied relentlessly to reach his goals. Do you know how long I waited for him to finish that PhD? Some days I wasn’t sure if he was getting a PhD or if the PhD was getting him.
And besides Russian Math, we spend serious time on baseball and gymnastics — Harry’s and Scarlett’s activities of choice. We believe excellence comes from practice. A lot of it. But no one needs to practice the recorder. I said what I said and the research backs me up.<br>I quit. No one has ever made a living playing the recorder.
Studies have consistently shown that homework has minimal academic benefit for children in elementary school. The National Education Association and National PTA both support the 10-minute rule: no more than 10 minutes of homework per grade level per night. For a third grader, that’s 30 minutes. Add Russian Math and reading — which we co-sign — and we’re already pushing close to three hours some evenings. A Stanford study found that 56% of students identify homework as a primary source of stress, linking it to migraines, ulcers and sleep deprivation. Fewer than 1% reported no stress at all.<br>Students in South Korea — ranked first globally in education — spend less than three hours per week on homework. Japan, ranked second, averages 3.8 hours weekly. American students average 6.1 hours per week.<br>We are doing more homework than nearly every top-ranked education system in the world. We rank 31st.<br>The recorder is not closing this gap.
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Research from the OECD also found that beyond four hours of homework per week, additional time yields little to no improvement in academic performance. Harry is already there with Russian Math alone. The regular third-grade assignments are easier, less rigorous and have produced no discernible results. In fact, researcher Harris Cooper, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University and author of “The Battle Over Homework,” found that for third graders specifically, more homework was associated with lower achievement. Take that, Reiss* and co.
In short, it’s busywork. I’m too busy for busywork. Harry is too busy for busywork. And, probably, so are you.<br>This system was designed for a household that no longer exists. In 2026, most parents are reachable by their bosses at all hours. (Frances in contrast was able to go to sleep soundly, and mean it, every night, around 8 p.m. — it’s part of why she looks so good.) As a result, most of us are working after the kids go to bed. Most of us do not have four surplus hours a week to supervise homework, which the research says isn’t working anyway. And that’s for one kid — now you’re asking me...