By Louise Flanagan
The protest against homework rumbles ever louder.
I have three children in primary school, and I’m a secondary school teacher.
I would love to see the approach to homework radically changed.
I’d be in favour of a total ban on homework in primary school, but I don’t imagine that will happen because of the link it creates with parents – and that link is important.
But I think that giving an eight or nine year old child half an hour of homework Monday to Thursday is unfair.
What’s more, while a teacher might imagine the homework should be completed in twenty minutes or so, it often drags on with snack breaks, toilet breaks, siblings interrupting, knocks on the door etc. and it is a much more prolonged and problematic experience than the teacher ever envisaged.
Evenings are so busy with extracurricular activities, dinner and what not.
Maybe there are parents who can’t be bothered to help their kids and that’s why they want homework scrapped, but the vast majority of parents would simply rather sit down and have a cuddle with their kids during that half hour instead of battling with them to do their homework.
I wouldn’t describe homework as quality time spent between parents and children.
In fact, homework creates a lot of tension and sadness in many households – tears, tantrums, raised voices.
It can be a largely negative experience where there’s very little learning done; it’s just a means to an end to get it over with in most cases.
My eldest is in 5th class and she can fly through her homework independently.
I don’t really think it enhances her learning experience though.
And on Mondays, she has guitar, swimming lessons and drama after school. (Not ideal, but that’s how the schedule for those activities panned out this term.)
She hardly has time to eat on Mondays – nevermind find words that are printed back to front and upside down in the word searches of that god-awful Spelling Workbook.
That is not to criticise her lovely teacher; my daughter has plenty of craic at school – she arrives and departs with a smile on her face but the jury is still very much out on homework.
Ideally, kids should be reading for pleasure at bedtime, but I think a lot of them are fed up looking at books due to the amount of homework they get and they see reading as a chore as a result.
I think that weekly homework should be capped at an hour max in primary school and should be given at the start of each week.
That would provide the flexibility of doing two half hour sessions or three 20 minute sessions a week to suit family life.
That would be plenty.
There are those who argue that homework helps to reinforce the work done at school.
Well, if a child spent all day in the swimming pool, would you expect them to swim for you in the evening too?
They’ve done enough and they deserve their down time.
And there are those who argue that homework at primary level prepares them for the inevitability of a heavy workload in secondary school.
Personally, I think we should let them enjoy being carefree kids while they can.
There’s time enough for them to be chained to a desk and there is so much else they could do in the evenings.
Ideally, they could help with chores, but I think now I’m romanticising what life would be like without homework.
I may dream on.
Louise Flanagan is an admin of Letterkenny Babies Facebook page and the author of the children’s book series, Dragonterra and Dream Beasts. www.dragonterra.ie
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