Busy work

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Busy work is a term for work or assignments that are felt to be time consuming, but not useful. It is typically used to refer to schoolwork which is time consuming for students but not educationally valuable, but can also refer to procedures or paperwork in a bureaucracy which is felt to be unnecessary. The term is generally pejorative.

Busy work in academics

Within academics "busy work" can refer either to classwork assigned for the purpose of keeping students busy, so that they do not cause trouble, or to time consuming homework which is assigned as practice, but is felt by the students and/or others to be of little educational value. Teachers are often forced to complete busy work in the form of maps and scales.

Some critics have charged that busy work can cause problems for teachers: "When busy work becomes 'institutionalized,' among other teachers or the entire school, it creates such an overload of work for the slower students, that they have to 'buy out' of the system. They will always have more work than they can do because the work is assigned for control and not learning". Busy work has some positive effects as well as negative effects. One positive effect of busy work could be that students previously absent have a chance to catch up on work that is 'covered' in the dull, unproductive, busy work.[1]

Army busy work

A popular Soviet-era joke about the army's way of keeping conscripts disciplined and out of trouble was "Private, dig a trench from that fence to dinner time".

References

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