The constant pressure of school that children have to deal with can be very taxing on developing minds. With the average school day being around six to seven hours long, burnout is very common in school systems across the country.
In my opinion, one of the greatest attributes for student burn out is busy work. Busy work, according to the Oxford dictionary, is defined as, “work that keeps a person busy but has little value in itself.” As someone who has grown up in the public education system for 12 years now, I would say I am credible enough to give my thoughts on the practice.
When a teacher constantly overloads a class of students with junk work for no other reason than to keep them busy while the teacher attends to other matters, it only carries negative effects. The students feel overworked and unsatisfied while the teacher fails to push themselves to teach a finer, more engaged class setting. I know this is not for all courses, but in my experiences I’ve had classes where I do an assignment that fails to reinforce any ideas or tie into any future content.
Getting loaded with busy work does not feel good for a student. It serves as unneeded stress and weighs down upon them. It also takes away from quality time that could be used to strengthen a student’s character. For example, if a student is assigned two assignments that have no real take away from them, the amount of time that is spent completing those two assignments has been wasted. That precious time could have been spent doing more productive activities such as sports or another passionate hobby.
If one were to look at how assigning busy work is detrimental to the teacher themselves, they would notice how it fails to build a connection with students and builds lazy teaching habits. In my opinion assigning busy work, especially online, can make someone a lazy teacher. A teacher having a computer grade all the assignments could result in a teacher failing to make a strong connection with students.
Grading papers and assignments are one of the best ways in my opinion for a teacher to understand their students. This has led me to feel lost and confused in classes that I was struggling in. When I am struggling with a concept in class, I would much rather have a thorough breakdown of the matter instead of a computer assigned grade along with a handful of assignments used to practice an idea that I already don’t understand.
During the third of the day where children are at school, time should be used efficiently. It should be used to grow great young minds to carry our future instead of being wasted filling out mindless drone work for teachers.
