Homework

Over the last few months I have been getting increasingly hacked off  with the amount of homework that our kids have been bringing home. I have expected our elder boy to be receiving more homework as he is now in high school and is getting to the stage where his work is being assessed but I would expect the younger two to be getting some basic “practice at home” type stuff. However, whenever I get in from work, the first thing that happens is that a piece of A4 is shoved in front of my face because they have been told to “Ask Dad”. With the high school work this is fair enough and I can point him in the right direction for information on trigonometry, the periodic table, the slave trade or whatever it is he needs help with. The problem I really have is actually with the two younger children.

When I was at primary school we didn’t get homework as far as I can remember: at least not formal written homework. We may have had lists of words to learn for spelling tests or times tables to memorise but nothing that would require written proof of the work being completed and nothing that would require my parents to have a diploma in education to assist us with. The problem I have with primary school homework is that it more often than not relies on some piece of educational jargon that I have never heard of.

The latest example of this was a request to perform division using the “Bus Stop” method. I have never heard of this and as far as I am concerned the “Bus Stop” method is the technique for boarding and alighting from public transport. As far as I can recall, there were two types of division when I was at school: short division, which was effectively using the times tables in reverse, and long division, which was some convoluted method of iterative arithmetic that requires half a page of notation. Long division is a pain in the neck as it really doesn’t scale very well and in reality there are two methods of long division that most people use in real life: guestimating to get a working, order of magnitude, ball-park figure and the pocket calculator method whereby one actually wants an accurate figure without the dodgy misaligned columns. That’s all well and good but it doesn’t really help with teaching division so what is the “Bus Stop” method?

It turns out that the “Bus Stop” method is actually what I used to call “long division”. I haven’t been able to find out why this is now called the “Bus Stop” method but at least I now know what it is. I even managed to find a decent website that explained the technique. The problem is that I still have trouble trying to explain this to the children. The simplest introductory problems are so simple I can do them in my head but if the child can’t see why this is I have no scope for explaining it. The main reason for this is that I am not a trained teacher and even though the problems are very easy it is a very specific skill to be able to explain this to a child who doesn’t understand. In fact it is this kind of skill that marks out why primary school teachers are qualified professionals and not merely glorified child minders.

What gets me down about this stream of homework is that it cuts into the amount of time that it is possible to do activities with the children that are unrelated to schoolwork but still, hopefully, of educational value. Each evening, we have to decipher the educational jargon for all three children to determine what it is they are meant to be doing, only to discover that they actually have no recollection of being taught this or simply didn’t understand it in the first place. Unfortunately, if they didn’t  understand it when explained from a professional teacher, in the morning, when they are fresh and alert, then what hope do we have trying to explain things in the evening when they are tired, bored and would probably prefer to be playing outside or watching the telly instead? After all three children’s homework is sorted it’s time for tea and after that it’s a case of getting everyone sorted for the next day and off to bed.

I’m not entirely opposed to homework but I really can’t see the point of giving work to children that they can’t complete unaided. It also seems to fall into the modern mind-set that if it isn’t on the curriculum then it isn’t worth knowing. At the moment I’m doing quite well at getting the younger children to go to the library and take books out on a weekly basis. Unfortunately, I am now experiencing them turning down what should be interesting books because they are “boring” and “we do that at school”. I’m also worrying that they will start to turn up their noses at day trips to museums and castles and the like. Having too much schoolwork is going to start being detrimental to a child’s education if they end up not wanting to learn.