I had a college teacher that did homework right. It was a math class. You know how some math textbooks have the answers to the odd number problems in the back of the book? She would "assign" those as homework, and every morning at the beginning of class she would ask if anyone had any questions on the homework. "Yeah could we work number 15 on the board?"

She never took up "homework" for a grade, it was our opportunity to practice on our own time. This was optional, if you were keeping up you weren't required to waste your time.

I'm also 100% fine with reading assignments for homework. "Read chapter 7 of the textbook before our next class." As a flight instructor I NEVER had trouble getting students to read their textbooks. There was a bit of an eyes glazing over issue with the FARs because a lot of it is written, well, like federal laws. So we'd start going over Part 91 in class, we'd get about a page in before we hit the rule about jettisoning objects from an aircraft in flight, have about 5 minutes of fun talking about when and where you can just randomly chuck a brick out of the window, and from then on I could trust their ability to read the FARs.