Introducing I Demand a Meeting: A New Video Podcast on Christian Education

🎙 Big Announcement: A New Podcast Is Live

I’m excited to share something with y’all for 2026.

I’ve teamed up with Jesse, a fellow Christian school administrator and longtime friend, to launch a new podcast called I Demand a Meeting. Jesse and I share a similar journey. We went to the same college to become teachers, taught for several years in public schools, and later the Lord called us into Christian school leadership.

Our first episode, “The End of Homework,” is now available.

The I Demand a Meeting podcast is a playful jab at the realities of private school life and an honest attempt to challenge some assumptions in Christian education while sharing real successes and failures along the way. There aren’t many open conversations happening in the private school space, and our hope is that these episodes help spark thoughtful discussion on your campuses or in your home.

🎧 Listen on: YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts
📄 Full transcript and videos will also be posted on ChristianEdLeadership.

If you find it helpful, please subscribe, share with a colleague, and let us know what topics you’d like us to discuss on the show!

Thanks for listening, watching, and sharing. May God bless you and yours this year!

Jared

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Summary

In this episode of ‘I Demand a Meeting,’ Jesse and Jared explore the deeply rooted tradition of homework in school culture. They discuss the emotional attachment to homework, its intended purpose, and its varying impact on families. The conversation delves into the effectiveness of homework, the balance between academic achievement and holistic child development, and the evolving perspectives of parents and educators on homework’s role in education.

Jesse:

This is I demand a meeting, a podcast where two educators in private schools talk honestly about leadership, teaching, and the things we don’t usually say in faculty meetings. I’m Jesse, and that’s Jared.

Jesse:

Here in today’s episode, we’re going to examine why homework is so deeply embedded in tradition and in school culture. We’re going to clarify what homework is actually meant to accomplish, and we’re going to explore how homework impacts families differently.

Jared:

You know, Jesse, this conversation about homework we’ve had probably a billion times homework has a deep emotional attachment and also is rooted in tradition for sure. And I think there’s some confusion there between what maybe research says and what we’re actually doing as practitioners. So it’s gonna be kind of fun to see how this all irons itself out.

Jesse:

Yeah, it was a good pick for episode number one.

Jared:

It’s interesting because you have a background and knowing you for so many years when you were teaching and doing the traditional practice of planning units and assigning homework and so on. I know you did even in your master’s program, your first degree at the graduate level, you did actually a lot of time and research on this topic. I’d love for our audience to know what did you learn in that process, especially when you were in the seat of a teacher practitioner?

Jesse:

Yeah, great question. I learned a lot, experienced a lot. It’s something that I am really passionate about and I care a lot about even now as a, as a principal. I look at it from a certain angle based on my own experience in the research that I’ve done and just looking at the whole child and the whole person, starting with the end goal of what kind of person do we want to produce from this work that we’re doing in schools and then working backwards to how do we need to get there?

Jesse:

And so going all the way back to my graduate work, which I did during my second year of teaching, I my graduate studies on the impact of homework on holistic child development. And that’s a fancy way of saying, how does it impact all of the child, not just academic achievement? So that was the lane that I came from, and I learned a ton.

Jared:

You were talking about holistic education even before you got into the private school world which is a hallmark of a lot of Christian schools. So you started with kind of the reverse engineering the whole conversation versus just looking at kind of homework in a vacuum so to speak.

Jesse:

Yeah, pretty much. And it worked out. You know, I was I wanted to, to not just like I said before, not just focus on academic achievement, but the impact on the whole child. And so I made some assumptions that I felt like were important about homework. And you referenced earlier, I was really impacted by a book, it’s called The End of Homework. I just recently within the last week or so had the book in my hand, because I walked down the hall and lent it to another administrator in the building.

Jesse:

Who I was sharing some thoughts and she was wondering like you know kind of what the genesis of some of my thoughts were and I said well this book was really impactful to me and again I used it I referenced it over 15 years ago and it was old then and so it’s been around a long time. So this idea of taking a more critical look at homework culturally and academically has been going on for a long time and I’ve enjoyed my time in it. But looking holistically means how does it impact all of the child and what cost benefit analysis needs to be completed around while there may be academic data to support the idea that homework is helpful for learning.

Jesse:

It has to be taken into consideration with the rest of the child and how much learning and school is healthy and appropriate for the whole child.

Jared:

So you made me think of a just a quick little testimony to help set frame up the tradition and the emotional attachment to this topic. I remember sitting in a conversation where some new parents came. This is a private school and some new parents that were coming to basically an orientation. So their first time on the campus kind of thing. And they were all talking about the fact that at their or daughter’s prior school, the homework load was nothing and how easy the school experience was. And so what they were essentially looking forward to at this particular private school is kind of getting their kids butt kicked, you know, by hours and hours of homework. And so let’s talk about the tradition piece because a lot of things in education that we’ll talk about in this podcast series, they’re not necessarily rooted on what we should be doing or maybe what the research says, but they’re just rooted based upon what people are used to.

Jesse:

Yeah, that that is a really good point because the education that’s happening in schools now is very different than when you and I were there or the parents that we work with now in our schools. But yeah, culture and tradition drive a lot of homework practices in a school, both for the student and for the teachers, but then also for the parents. What all of us experienced and what students are experiencing now are all part of the tradition and culture. And so for me, I’ve worked in three schools now. Each of them has had a very different culture around homework with some explicit policies around homework and then others were just either laissez faire or no no tradition or no policies and So I’ve seen a lot of different ways of doing it. I have my own thoughts as well But you know as I do when you work in a system Or you when you enter into a system like like I am now I’ve been here at my current school for five years But it’s existed for 30 some before me in a certain way of operating you’ve kind of got to adapt and evolve in all those ways.

Jared:

So I think it’s fair to say that the conversation about homework, something that I’ve observed in the schools I’ve served in and just talking to other educators, is that people associate homework load with rigor. And homework load means if your child is going to a school that has an hour or two hours of homework a night, or more for maybe a high school student, maybe 30 minutes to an hour for an elementary level student, there is still in my mind an association that some parents have that the higher the homework load, the more rigorous the educational experiences. that been your take as well?

Jesse:

Yes, definitely. You know, like like you just referenced before, that idea of not being a shared definition or understanding of the purpose of homework is still important that everyone that’s engaging with it. So the educators, the student and the parent are all kind of on the same page of what we’re doing and why. And then you can get to the how much question.

Jesse:

Because that’ll determine what type of homework you do and what it looks like, practically speaking, especially for the person in the seat that’s completing it. well, let me say two things. One, I have seen there is definitely an idea for some people that more homework means more rigor, and defined by quantity.

Jesse:

But I would say from my seat as an administrator these last couple of years, especially since COVID, like the last three years, I have seen a bit of a shift of families desiring more peace and calm and family time. And I’m hearing more from families about wanting less homework lately, which is really interesting.

Jared:

If you look at any quantitative or qualitative research on the effectiveness of homework, if you’re just a researcher that has not a practitioner, you just would like to know what’s the quote unquote best practice. What you will find is a mixed bag at best of homework having some impact. And I’ll be careful the way I word it on student achievement that you can actually say it’s the homework that helped lead to that student achievement because the entanglement of the family situation, the income situation, the extracurricular situation, all of those things. It is, I don’t want to say impossible, but it’s very difficult to control for just a child who goes home and does 30 minutes of homework versus two hours of homework and saying, aha, That’s why their ACT score was 31. It’s just that’s an almost impossible task But at the end of the day the current literature out there would say this younger levels essentially benefit almost nothing from homework and there’s maybe some argument some And I’m using that word on purpose as the kids get to secondary levels in high school Maybe there’s some evidence that regular routine homework But then what we need to also talk about is that the kind of homework? for assigning is another topic that needs to be addressed.

Jesse:

And you reference the idea of little to none in the lower levels and then some at the upper levels, but there’s also a very definitive rate of diminishing return where the mind can only handle so much. And at a certain point, it becomes counterproductive to study more or to do more homework because it’s, it’s almost the equivalent. If you understand this idea of like, you can push out, push some out while you’re taking some in. And so there really is a threshold at the upper end as well of how much is healthy.

Jesse:

And productive for the for the person but also then for academic achievement how much you can store in your memory and reaccess and so there is if there was to be some value there’s a sweet spot of where it would be of of how much is good but then how much is becomes counterproductive and you know you referenced the research so you know the common language in all education or worlds and maybe it comes from Harry Wong or somebody else like that you hear all the time 10 minutes per grade level so if your child is in second grade they can have 20 minutes but if your child is in 11th grade do they have 110 minutes that’s just short of two hours but what if that rate of diminishing return is around the 90 minute mark which some studies would say that it is then that 10 minutes per grade level kind of gets skewed a little bit

Jesse:

And so like you’re saying, there isn’t necessarily a universally agreed upon research based kind of scholarly agreement on how much is just right.

Jared:

Yeah, and I think when we think about policy I would say any school private or otherwise needs to have that common philosophy that you kicked off at the very beginning of this conversation because that will drive all the direction of where you’re going with these. I want to say arbitrary, but if you’re to do 10 minutes of grade or a no homework policy or you’re going to load it on and just stick it to him, so to speak, in your policy, whatever you’re going to do just needs to be thought out and have a philosophy behind that makes sense for your faculty and staff and parents.

Jesse:

Yeah, for sure. Agreed.

Jared:

Let me ask you about something else that I we’ve talked about with homework too, the quality of the homework. And this is where the research even starts to split because when we look at the word homework to an average person who’s maybe not an educator, you see your child in the room or the dining room table, wherever they’re doing homework, and you go, they’re doing homework.

Jared:

And we kind of put all in the same bucket. But you know as well as I do as an educator that not all homework is created equally. And so where I come from is why is that child working on that exercise at this particular time? And where I want to rewind the conversation just so people really to think about this when developing a philosophy for the school is in the classroom setting are we being very particular about what students should be able to do from an academic standpoint?

Jared:

And if I’m going to assign something for a child to do outside of school hours.

Jared:

Is there a high probability that what I’m assigning is going to either strengthen, deepen, or extend their learning on that topic? And if there’s not a high probability, so if this is just wrote something, wrote memorization, almost all literature and any practitioner would tell you throw it out the window. But unfortunately, I know you know this, Jesse, a lot of our homework looks a lot like that. We were brought up as teachers that you assign homework, whether it’s a math class, an English class, read these pages, do these math problems, whatever it is, and come back tomorrow. Make sure you have them all ready to go.

Jesse:

Yeah, 100%. And you taught math, I taught English and history. And so our homeworks looked very different, but definitely between math and English. Those are the two where you’re going to see the most assigned and different varieties and things like that. And so

Jesse:

I want to touch on math really briefly and you can speak way more to this as the math educator, but that to me seems to be the ground zero for homework where there’s just the understanding that it’s a skill that the students have to, and again, this is coming from a non-math teacher educator, but I know a lot about it, but they have to practice these skills and lock them in, whether it happens at some point in the class period or in a study hall or after

Jesse:

School in order to be ready for tomorrow’s next compounding lesson where English and history that I taught functions a little bit differently where I may assign some grammar work that they have to do that’s somewhat similar but then reading is very different but the quantity quality here’s where we get into this there’s kind of

Jesse:

Two ways of thinking about it. One would be.

Jesse:

Extend the learning which is what you said that it’s specific in order to Reinforce concepts that they learned at school lock in that skill increase the learning But there’s a whole other side of culture and tradition that needs to be taken into consideration whether good or bad and that is the idea that They’re not just completing the task to extend the learning but they’re learning essential soft skills time management organization

Jesse:

Discipline, resiliency, that by accomplishing hard things, it helps them grow as a person is another side of the homework debate. So there’s the extend the learning part, and then there’s the build resilience part and organization executive functioning, those kind of things. Again, we have our own thoughts on those, but those two things are important to consider.

Jared:

That’s well said. come back to what you alluded to earlier about the book you had read and the research you had done and how that relates to the post COVID world we’re in. you noticed you responded when I was saying that, you know, some people equate hours of homework with, wow, that must be a rigorous school. It must really have it going on. And you said, well, wait a minute, I see a little bit of a shift happening. what are you seeing in the ground level in a day to day with some of the parent shift?

Jesse:

Yeah, yeah, great question. I love talking about this too. Like I said earlier, I’m seeing a shift to families wanting more peace and more calm, a little bit more control over what goes on in their post-school hours after that 330 pickup, where they want to be more in the driver’s seat. And I can’t fault them one bit for that. I would feel the exact same way if I was in their shoes. And so, yeah, that does go right back to my graduate work. And let me just riff on this for a minute, influenced by the book, The End of Homework.

Jesse:

Okay, in my, what I was researching and kind of my hypothesis that I presented was I made some considerations that were benevolent assumptions that may be somewhat unrealistic, but I went with the idea that

Jesse:

Children were not just going to go home and veg out the entire rest of the afternoon and evening on video games, but that they or something like that, you know, some brain rot as they call it, but that they would be pursuing other hobbies or passions or interests like martial arts or sports or scouts or religious activities, music lessons, clubs, learning another language, you name it, that they would be doing something else to grow and develop as a person.

Jesse:

And then I also kind of factored in what I just alluded to that I think is really important to take into consideration. And I would almost call it like the libertarian view. And I’m not trying to, I’m not getting, this isn’t about politics, but it’s about what the role of the school is in the life of the family. And so.

Jesse:

Some people in that camp would argue that the school has influence over what the child does from eight to three thirty, which is when my bells ring. So when when they’re here from eight to three thirty, it’s school time. I can say, child, here’s the things a student, you know, here’s here’s what you’re going to be doing. But then as the parent, I can come and say, OK, school. But at three thirty, it’s now my time. And and you don’t get to dictate any more what what we’re going to do.

Jesse:

In such a way that my child would be penalized if they didn’t do on my time what you’re saying that they need to do, be it homework or otherwise. And so I kind of I tackled that in there as well. So my kind of two approaches were if there wasn’t as much homework assigned, then potentially families could do more. And it’s up to the family to decide what happens after the child leaves.

Jesse:

Leaves the school. And we still didn’t get into yet if homework is going to be assigned, what good homework is and what constitutes a good amount of good work. But that’s kind of my research emphasis and really a passion of mine in this subject.

Jared:

I would tell you from my experience that again, the philosophy of the school obviously weighs into this. There’s probably not a wrong or right answer to this question, but Homework is an extension of what goes on in the classroom. And I think in a traditional view, somebody would say, well, if a child doesn’t learn how to have effective homework habits,

Jared:

They won’t pay their bills on time or they won’t, you know, learn how to work independently in life because there’s this timestamp that I get something, I do it, I give it back. So it’s this timeliness and this order that’s just built in the educational system. So I would say it needs to be an extension of what happens in the classroom, meaning what is the learning objective that you want the students to learn? And then ask yourself,

Jared:

Is what I’m assigning need to be there for everybody or do I also recognize that some of these students are very different paces in their journey of learning whatever that thing is. So for example if you’re in a unit and you’re doing a project on something we all know you and I know this well there’s maybe half of that class or a third of the class depending on your population that’s already good. They don’t really need a lot of extra time to do the same thing that the next kiddo next to them is doing. So I think we need to be careful to not be dogmatic about

Jared:

How much we’re assigning in terms of the number of problems, especially as the kids get older. I think there’s some wisdom that would come in and say, maybe the skill we need to teach with homework, I’m using that in air quotes, is do I need it? Does it help me learn what I need to learn in the classroom? And if it’s not helping me learn what I need to learn in the classroom, I probably shouldn’t be doing it. But that’s a skill that has to be taught and modeled for our students. They will always revert to the least amount of work, of course,

Jared:

But if we built in natural consequences of what’s going to be taught and assessed, I think they will quickly rise to the challenge.

Jesse:

Well, that was good. And to use one of our the words of one of our favorite philosophers, you use the word everybody in your sentence earlier on. And that is a big curveball that we can go and we’ll need a whole other episode about assigning homework to everybody. I don’t think there is a best or worst amount. I would say I always like to say

Jesse:

Less is more or as little as possible in order to achieve what it is you’re trying to achieve or want the student to learn or whatever skill you want to reinforce. And so take math, for example, if you can’t, if the teacher can find or craft or pick five really good problems that are thoughtful and require some

Jesse:

Complex problem solving and creative thinking, that is much more impactful, I feel like, than doing 50 problems or 25 problems. The same would go in other homework. But I would say whatever that minimum is,

Jesse:

That is necessary for them to achieve what needs to be achieved. That should be what you’re shooting for and no more. And definitely, like you said, you use the word kind of rote memory activities. I would say the parents would refer to this as busy work. And so I would say never busy work, you know, like a word search or, you know, something that’s that’s just really

Jesse:

Just an activity to check off to say they did a thing that doesn’t extend the learning or reinforce a concept whatsoever. You’ve got to always steer away from that.

Jared:

As we come to close here, Jesse, give me your hot take on homework for today’s episode.

Jesse:

Hot take, like I said.

Jesse:

Less is more, fewer is better, so long as the fewer is really good quality, complex problem solving, critical thinking, not busy work. But more than anything, for the educators that are listening, just know your students, know your class, know your clientele of the families that you’re serving, know your school’s culture, take all that into consideration, and then balance that with scholarly research backed as much as there is.

Jesse:

Information to determine what’s going to be best in your own class because it’s going to vary subject to subject Season to season in the flow of a school year, but my last hot take would be Just for the educators listening to not just assign homework just because every day it’s just what you do

Jesse:

Gotta be a little bit more thoughtful, gotta be a little bit more intentional with a specific objective that you’re trying to achieve and hopefully linked to the standards and learning targets that you’ve set. How about you? Hot take. Close us out.

Jared:

When you go down this road if you choose to continue with having some level of homework I would

Jared:

Have you really deeply consider how that impacts the teaching and learning side as it relates to assessment. If you’re going to include homework, and I wish we could just retitle this episode practice, but I think somebody would think this is a basketball podcast. Homework is practice. If homework is practice, you’re not, you have not mastered anything. You are working towards a goal. So if you’re going to assign it, especially on a regular basis, I would challenge consider either not including

Jared:

That weight of assessment at all in your grade book or at least a very small amount. And if you rebuttal to say well Jerry you don’t understand if I don’t give any points for homework we’ll never do it you have to build other consequences for not doing it again if it’s meaningful and productive and all the things we talked about earlier. So at end of the day have a philosophy if you’re going to have homework yes that’s fine but I would challenge you on what you’re going to do with the weightiness of that homework.

Jesse:

Yeah, that’s a great take. Really, really kind of chucking a grenade right there. We’re going to leave people That’s that is a nugget, I think, for them to chew on a pebble in the shoe that when they are in their classrooms that to think on that as they’re considering in their practice.