Contrary to popular belief, teachers aren’t keen on setting homework. It has just taken me an hour to set homework for all my classes for this week, which doesn’t sound like a very long time, but that’s not the end of it. There are photocopies to be made, an electronic version needs to be available for those who misplace the sheet or who have hungry dogs. When it’s due in you have to check that everyone’s done it (very rarely does this actually happen) and then mark it, either as a class or by taking the books in.
I reckon a single piece of homework takes up about 90 minutes of my week, certainly if I mark it personally, and if you multiply that by the 6 classes I take – that’s 9 hours! You may question why I don’t mark everything personally, and this is mainly due to the latest educational fad that is “peer assessment” / “Assessment for Learning”, or in English: the students mark each other’s work and point out positives and bits their peers need to work on. It does work in general, but very few teachers actually know how to peer assess properly, probably me included.
What purpose does homework perform? The traditionalist will say that it gives the students to practise what they have learnt in class without access to the teacher, forcing them to totally understand what’s going on. I would buy this argument if the students in general actually did this. What tends to be the case now is one of the following things:
· A note at the bottom of the homework sheet saying “Sir, I didn’t get it”, “No idea” or something along those lines.
· Just a load of answers with no working out, clearly copied off a classmate.
· A note from a parent or carer saying something like: “Please excuse Johnny for not doing his homework, but he was unable to log onto the computer, and his gerbil was feeling off-colour, and we were in Basingstoke this weekend, and Johnny needs some downtime at the weekends to stop him from being so stressed etc”. Computer?! It was a sheet! What’s his gerbil got to do with it? I set the homework a week ago, the fact that he left it until the last minute is his problem, so being away at the weekend is irrelevant. Stressed – do me a favour!
I heard Irish TV presenter say something along the lines of this recently: “Homework – they should ban it. The kids don’t do it, it’s the parents who actually do the stuff whilst their children look on non-plused.” The fact that parents end up doing the homework isn’t a problem if the child is learning how to solve the problems at the same time. But how many parents just do it to keep the school off their backs? I don’t reckon that many, but I couldn’t give you any statistics on the matter.
In my view homework shouldn’t be compulsory. It should be set, but only done by those who want to do it. I think you’d be surprised as to how many actually completed it – about the same as do now. The reason for this is that the amount of time it would save chasing up and detaining those who simply refuse to do it would lead to far better teaching in the classroom as teachers won’t be stuck in a silent room with the non-doers. They could be producing resources that would make kids go deeper into the learning, consolidate their knowledge and hopefully make them enjoy their education a bit more.
I know what you’re thinking:
· Lazy teacher can’t be bothered to mark books. Not true (although marking is really boring, it’s part of the job), the homework would still be planned and those who completed it would get it marked. Ask a student how useful they find their teacher’s marks – even if you put the most insightful comments down, a lot of the children totally ignore it.
· How do you assess how they’re getting on? Nowadays you have to assess students all the time – we’ve got data coming out of our ears on all students, so that wouldn’t be a problem.
In fact, teachers could give far better feedback to the few that actually handed the homework in and those whop couldn’t be bothered haven’t wasted any time doing school work and get down the local park and hang around with their friends even quicker. It’s a win-win people!
No comments:
Post a Comment