Teachers call for homework ban

good stuff.

too late for my ass but still.

Never had homework at primary school. And I didn't have to do coursework at secondary school. There's a lot to be said for being old.

I can't remember having homework in Primary, except for being given books to take home.
Never did much homework in secondary school either. I see the advantage of offering it but most of it is useless because setting decent homework would require teachers to work a week half as long to allow them to mark it and offer decent feedback. My students we discuss homework answers as a group because I don't have time to mark 150 pieces of homework a week and I certainly don't have enough time to explain to the students why they've got a particular mark.

We don't have the 11 plus. I think I took SATS at 11 but I mostly ignored stuff like that.

11+ was a piece of piss, though our teacher never put much pressure on us, infact you could almost say he didn't give a fuck. We did two practice papers in school in the run up to it and that was pretty much it.

Seriously though exams are far better than coursework and homework, it's just there infront of you for an hour or so, you ain;t going anywhere else so you just do it, coursework and homework just don't get done.

Homework is mostly shit, but there's a lot to be said for coursework, as long as it's spread out over the year. It's completely unfair to kids to judge their ability on their performance on one particular day. Saying that, I'd like to see a lot less external assessment, exam boards are such a pain in the arse.

The 11+ was optional for us, I never did it, seemed like a total waste of time.

It would be fuckin brilliant for my kids and me and their ma if they got rid of homework for primary school kids. The whole thing is a fucking nightmare and turns the hour after school into a fuckin battle to get the kids to sit down and do their homework most nights.

Here, and my kids get far more homework than is in those guidelines for English schools mentioned in the article.

Victory to the ATL!

My girlfriend was telling me about someone on her team the other day, who had to take her 5 year old along to a parents evening and sign an agreement about targets. Five year olds signing what are effectively Appraisal targets. And they wonder why kids are so completely screwed up!

I don't remember any homework at primary. At junior I remember having to write out my times tables on the weekends because I had failed yet another test. Got a bit at senior but no way was it as much as they seem to get now.

Didn't the Bolsheviks ban homework at one point?

hmm ... which way does that cut ...

I never did it anyway....which meant I had to sit in dread and sweat every maths lesson in case I was actually asked a question.

i just talked to the math teacher across the hall (your man is from wicklow, btw), and he showed me an article giving 6 justifications for homework (in Journal of Educational Administration 35.4 (1997) 348 - 370, in case you're in the mood for 22 pages of educationese) (i can find no link on the web). they are:

1: "improves pupil work habits"
2: "assists in knowledge acquisition"
3: "builds student self-confidence and a better feeling about school work"
4: "improves teachers' instructional practices"
5: "increases parental involvement"
6: "sets a positive school tone and increases the credibility of the educational programme in the community"

discuss. i'll start.
i assign hw for reason 2 (my hw either reviews what was taught in class or prepares for something i'm going to introduce, though actually i rarely give it for the second of those reasons) or reason 4 (to see if i'm getting across - not the same thing as #2).

damn i woulda got all A's in school if there was no homework, as it was it was always a borderline C. I think my only A in a math class was the one with 'optional homework', because i always got 98% on the tests but could never be arsed to do homework.

In fact it made me less motivated about school, because i would often skip to avoid having to tell the teachers that i hadn't done the homework.

why not just use a scantron, lazyass
i teach language and we give stuff that requires close correction, but then i have smallish classes.

actually #4 is really important. if i teach X and then set an assignment and the smart ones blow it, it's probably me

I still get really angry when I think about how my schools told us that it was really important to do well in our SATs.

does this mean getting your parents to do it?

Fuckin' A. I scored near perfect and i'm still in junior college.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank my dad for my O-level in maths. If they'd let him sit the exam for me, I might not have got a C.

Unfair to compensate mediocrity though "continuous assessment" more like. Probably best to let people pick and choose, so the supergeniuses can attain high scores with minimum effort.

Thats crazy, i didn;t even know primary schools had any form of regular homework. I can't see any possible benefit that it would have at primary school except perhaps in modern langauges, but our education system is still too backwards for kids to be even learning french in primary schools.

Reducing the amount of homework given in secondary school kinda makes sense, but i always thought the main problem with homework was that you ended gettng homework for every subject in the week, this being more a problem with how the management structure in a school operates and/or lack of communication between departments than with the nature of homework itself. Hence why you get 4 hours worth spread over 5 odd pieces of work that all seem small and petty so you don;t spend any time doing them. Whereas if you had to spend 2 hours doing one piece which the teacher had more time to plan for, you;d probably put more effort into it and produce a much better standard of work.

See, I was at infants school in the mid-to-late 70s -- the high point of hippy shit educational theory. School was fucking sweet: we played with sand & water for the first couple of years while we were finding ourselves. If my dad hadn't taught me to read by sitting me on his knee & reading the local paper to me, I would probably be illiterate.

ffs we taught all our kids to read before they went to primary school you illiterate bumkin