Fahrenheit 451 Research Paper

Should middle school students be forced to complete homework? No, they should not! There are many obvious reasons in this essay that will prove homework isn’t needed and the evidence brought will change the minds of people who believe homework is necessary. The novel Fahrenheit 451, a futuristic book written by Ray Bradbury, and other sources will help to prove that middle schoolers homework. Homework is not necessary or beneficial to middle school students for three specific reasons: 1) it uses up time that should be spent with family, helping the community, playing sports, or just being a kid; 2) homework does not make or break a student's performance in school; 3) even though it is debatable that homework can improve academic achievement,

it also been shown to cause students to become disinterested in learning.
The time that a student spends completing homework should be spent with family and friends, helping the community, or having fun. Harris Cooper, a professor at Duke University, wrote in his article,
Opponents of homework counter that it can have negative effects. They argue that it can lead to boredom with school work, since all activities remain interesting for so long. Homework can deny students access to leisure activities that also teach important life skills. Parents can get too involved in homework- pressuring their child and confusing him by using different instructional techniques than the teacher.
In other words, this quote means there are negativities to homework and leisure and recreational activities can teach other things that homework can’t and can also cause the students to become disinterested in learning and create extra pressure and confusion from parents. This suggests homework takes time away from students who work slowly and they speeds up the time it takes for learning to become a disinteresting and they lose a lot of time that could be spent doing recreational or fun activities that everyone has a right to because they are stuck doing homework. The following quote from the book Fahrenheit 451 (61) is a perfect metaphor for the thesis:
Chock them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change.
The word ‘data’ in the quote is a metaphor for homework, in that it means stuffing one’s head with worthless information. From this observation, the inference made is that doing a bunch of homework isn't beneficial while doing leisure activities is beneficial. This would be better to do than learning a bunch of random facts. Homework in middle school isn't as beneficial as spending time with family, helping in the community, or having fun. Furthermore, homework proves to be unnecessary in terms of retention.
Homework isn't necessary because completing homework will not make or break a student's performance and grade in school.

For instance, Robert Roy Britt States, “A comprehensive review of academic performance around the world gives bad remarks to excessive homework.” in his article “Too Much Homework = Lower Test Scores”. According to studies done by David Baker and Gerald LeTendre, countries that assign a profusion of homework such as Thailand, Greece, and Iran score low and the US may do just as much or more, but only for the international average, yet countries like Denmark and Japan that assign minimal to no homework have students who score high.That evidence highlights the fact that not just individual schools, but whole countries are finding that when a teacher assigns more and more homework their students won't score as high while teachers who assign little to no homework end up with students who score really high as the majority. Also to illustrate this idea Ray Bradbury states in his work Fahrenheit 451, “This age thinks better of a gilded fool than a threadbare saint wisdom’s school.” In this quote, Bradbury compares a gilded fool and a threadbare saint and just like the society today, people look at the ones who look good or what the models do, but they can be wrong. Just like with person type, doing homework will get a student as far as a gilded fool will get while someone who doesn't do homework with complete many great things because they aren't foolish and use wisdom to see that homework is pointless. The evidence from the studies done by David Baker and Gerald Letendre and the quote from Fahrenheit 451 is enough to prove that homework doesn't improve students’ grades, and society looks at the people who do homework and think they are great even though they're wasting their

time.
Homework causes students to become disinterested in learning because they feel that they are learning impractical knowledge and have no freedom to learn what they want, even though it may help to improve their academic achievement. Steven McMullen, an assistant professor at Hope College, illustrated this point when he stated,“Finally, in order to compare policy instruments, I estimate the cost-effectiveness of increasing student achievement by assigning more homework, a decrease in class size, and increasing teachers’ salaries. For a given monetary investment, increasing the amount of assigned homework improves achievement almost three times as much as increasing teachers’ wages, and 11 times as much as decreasing class size.” Even though that quote shows that homework can improve achievement, that quote also states that there are other ways to improve achievement like decreasing class size. From this students can infer that the school district makes teachers give a bunch of homework because it is the easiest way to try to improve their achievement because they don't want to spend any extra money on the student's’ education. Yet the previous quote didn't say how long or how much homework the student had to do to get that boost of achievement, nor what kind of homework the student has to do. But within the quote made by Zawn Villines is,“The overwhelming majority of homework assignments force children to sit down and memorize facts rather than experience their world. Not only does this make information more difficult to learn; it can also decrease your child’s motivation to learn. When learning is made miserable, children associate the thing they’re learning with misery and want to avoid it,” says that homework, rather than improving their academic achievement, homework causes the students become disinterested in learning. Also, the quote proves that homework causes disinterest because the student has to memorize worthless facts rather than learning about life and because of those facts can be hard to learn the student doesn't want to do it. Both sides prove their point, but really, what is the better option, having homework and disinterested students who may have a higher achievement or no homework and interested students who may have lower achievement, but in the end because the students are disinterested they don't want to do homework, resulting in low achievement while the interested students have fun in school and can easily end up having higher achievement than the disinterested students. Because of both quotes, homework can be taken as something positive, but it comes with a heavy negative effect, a once eager to learn students that now does not have to learn or you can get can get rid of homework entirely and have eager learners to teach.
Homework isn't beneficial because it wastes time, doesn't change soon as that evening, and even though it is debatable that homework improvement, homework has been shown to cause disinterested students. Homework proves to be time-consuming and creates a wider gap smarter than average kids. And wouldn’t students feel and do better without homework?