Why Homework Matters: Building Discipline and Accountability

Accountability: anything or anyone that helps us gain mental leverage to achieve the results we desire. — The Accountability Stop

An old joke asks, "how do you get to Carnegie Hall? — Practice, practice, practice."

Larry Bird was known for shooting 100 free throws after every practice. In the 1989-1990 season, he hit 93% of his free throws. The average NBA free throw percentage is 78%.

We know that mastery of any skill requires practice. We wouldn’t expect to be a master at glass-blowing the first time we try it. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of repetitions are needed to master anything. When we speak of practice, we associate it with discipline. We employ patience, energy and focus to keep repeating and improving our skills.

Another way to look at practice is to say that we’re accountable to ourselves. We have the mental leverage to prompt ourselves to practice, often through one of the many accountability techniques we’ve discussed, We continue to practice even though our improvement is slow and incremental.

Finding Discipline

How do we learn discipline? How do we develop the internal drive to persevere at something difficult and improve our skills?

Some of us are born disciplined. You may know children who love something so much that they’re single-minded in becoming better at it. Most children, though, are single-minded about play and activities we don’t consider “productive” in the adult world. 

The cult of “find your why” seems to suggest that we only need sufficient desire to achieve our goal in order to create discipline. 

I would argue differently. While some of us have innate discipline, most of us must learn discipline. We learn it by doing things we don’t want to do. We learn it by seeing the positive results that can be achieved when we slog through the tough part. We learn it because parents, schools or bosses make us learn it. In the modern age we don’t like to admit it, but we usually learn discipline by force. 

What’s School Got to Do with It?

This brings us back to practice. We learn the benefits of practice hand in hand with discipline. We may start with what seems impossible—multiplication tables, say—but after lots of practice, mistakes and incremental improvement, we become good at them. You may start to get the picture of where I’m going … homework.

Homework has a bad rap lately. Often we’re told that homework can make students feel bad about themselves. Wholesale jettisoning of homework, in my opinion, is not the right answer. Personally, I see multiple benefits to homework, some of which don’t show up in the immediate learning goal of any one assignment.

• Homework gives us time to repeat information on our own. We consider it and understand it in our minds. We internalize the information rather than just hear it.
• Homework teaches indirect lessons: that repetition is the key to mastery and that perseverance is needed to achieve goals. 
• Homework lets us learn by making mistakes. We don’t learn or improve at all if we get everything right. (As a brainiac child. I got lots of answers right. But I learned when I got answers wrong. It made me re-evaluate what I thought I knew. Being wrong was upsetting and gave me an emotion to associate with the correct answer and the error I made.) 

Spend the Time

We understand implicitly that if we want to defeat a video game, we need to spend many hours playing and mastering it. Why have we lost sight of the importance of repetition in school work?

If ever I’m asked my opinion of homework in schools, I’ll say I’m in favor of it. Can it be poorly used? Yes. Is it sometimes ineffective? Yes. But the long-term peripheral benefit—the discipline we learn—is an important lesson for all of us to carry through our lives.

What’s Your Account?

Do you think I’m overselling the importance of homework? How did you learn discipline?