Homework: a Foul Imposition and a Total Waste of Time!
I always think of it like this: say a man or woman is a postal delivery worker and they arrive home after 6 – 8 hours delivering mail. They have their tea then their spouse hands them another bag of mail and tells them to go out again…what do you think the response would be? Yet we expect our kids to sit all day on those terribly uncomfortable chairs learning a dozen different subjects then once they have had their tea they have to start again…give me a break!
The thing that drives me most mad about homework is the comment you always get from the parents: well, we had to do it! How is that any justification? My grandfather had to walk eight miles to school every day in his gumboots…doesn’t mean we should make our kids do the same.
I’m a teacher, have been off and on for over twenty years and hand on my heart I can tell you that homework is a total waste of time. It doesn’t help your child’s education, it doesn’t help with their creativity and it certainly doesn’t help with their qualifications. I am biased (did you get that?) so let me say that from the day I went to Brierley Hill Grammar School back in the Sixties and was informed that I would receive two hours homework a night I said no. I never did a single piece of homework in my entire school life and if you check out my qualifications you will find them reasonably impressive. They did everything to me: I was in detention night after night, every lunchtime was spent outside the Head teacher’s study, periodically they beat me. But then they did something I have always respected: they gave up. It became the accepted thing: Nick doesn’t do homework! Neither of my two kids were allowed to do any more than the most cursory amount of homework and both flew through university, indeed, my daughter is a barrister.
Time and time again I sit in a staffroom while some teacher demands of all the others what to set 4B for homework until someone calls out: tell them to write an essay on how they would steal the Eiffel Tower. Do you know what happens to those essays? Those hundreds of hours of wasted time? Well, let’s do the maths: a teacher usually has six forms they are responsible for, averaging roughly 20 kids per set. They receive homework twice a week so that is 240 pieces of written work every week. Now, say that an essay is usually about two pages long that means every teacher has to mark nearly five hundred pages of written work every week. Do you seriously imagine they do it? Of course they don’t! Teaching is a massively difficult job…I’ve done over thirty different jobs in my life from war journalist to ditch digger and teaching is by far the most stressful and time consuming. You sure as hell aren’t going to labour through 500 pieces of badly written work every week on top. What a teacher does is to flick through picking up the occasional buzz word. Then the more conscientious ones will read a bit of the conclusion and award a mark: and that’s it folks! It’s a diversion but it’s also how exams are marked and incidentally how Booker prize judges work!
Homework is an imposition, it takes away the freedom of your child. They shouldn’t be hunched over the dining table doing some crap every night they should be out playing sport, or socialising, or reading, or even watching television, they might learn something useful then. Moreover the teacher is setting you homework. How many hours have you spent helping your younger children through some garbage? Invest your time wisely, encourage them to read books (preferably mine), encourage them to play games or how about, to have a decent discussion…something other than: How I Stole The Eiffel Tower. Furthermore it is totally sexist because although most of the girls will do it the boys sure as hell won’t! They will copy it up on the bus the following morning.
In all my time as a teacher I have never set homework which makes me very popular with the kids (not so much with the teachers though) and I have been very successful. In recent years I have mainly been called in when a bad teacher has left a trail of destruction behind them and I have been employed to put it right. I am passionately concerned with the fate of my students, for the short periods when I am working as a teacher then I will do anything for them. In Iraq when I found out that none of the kids had the Chemistry needed to read science at university I put four free lessons of Chemistry on every week at the Hilton Hotel…still didn’t set them homework though.
This is just homework I am talking about here, it’s not to say I don’t get my kids to go outside at night and look at the stars or watch a certain movie or read a particular book and obviously I strenuously encourage them to revise but anything other than that: Just Say No!
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