Did you do your homework?
Otto’s and Herman’s wives both worked in the same elementary school. Lina, Otto’s wife, was a 5th grade classroom teacher, whereas Minna, Herman’s wife, was a teacher’s assistant in 6th grade. Minna had a child in Lina’s class. Outside of school, they were friends and often got to talking about school issues. Today’s discussion was about “homework”.
——————————-
Minna was annoyed. “I can’t understand why teachers give students so much homework? Kids work all day in school. Home should be a time when they can turn off their school heads and relax and be just kids!”
Lina replied, “School time only gives you a short period of time to impart skills necessary to become lifelong learners. If they are only allowed to think in school, then when they go out into the real world they will be unprepared to deal with it.”
“That may be true,” answered Minna, “but teachers are not consistent. Some teachers give 
students the same work that they have done in school. That certainly is not teaching them anything new. Other teachers give them totally new things that they will discuss the next day in class. They call it the “Flipped Classroom”. I call it the “Flipped teacher.” How can they do work that they’ve never seen before if they have no experience dealing with it? And then there are those that give piles of homework because they are told that is what they have to do. Half the time they don’t even go over it.”
“Teachers work with what works best for them and what helps reinforce the work that they are doing,” said Lina. “Homework is meant to help solidify the work that they are doing. Flipped classrooms rarely require much work done on things they don’t understand. It usually involves videos and lessons that teach a skill. Students that do have difficulty with understanding, at least have a framework of the knowledge they are supposed to have so that they can ask relevant questions when they are re-taught and reinforced in the skills the following day.”
Minna thought about that for a while and thought about her own daughter. “Why is your method of assigning homework so different from most teachers?”
“In some respects, I’m more concerned about the life-learning skills my students leave my class with than the content of the material they learn,” replied Lina. “My homework policy is time-based, not content-based. My students, as you well know, have to do 45 minutes of homework a night, whether I assign it or not. They are not to work more than an hour on anything unless they desire to. A note from you is all they need to tell me that they worked an hour. In this way, the hope is that they become self-directed. If they finish my assigned task in 15 minutes, they need to think of what they can do for rest of the 45 minute homework time. Practice math, start a project, do some writing or reading (within limits), be creative. It’s up to them. Your daughter can never say to you “I have no homework”. Your reply is simple, “So, what do you plan to do for your 45 minutes.” If a lot of them are working more than an hour or stopping at an hour, that is an indication to me that I need to adjust how I’m teaching the material.”
“And what does this teach them?” Minna questioned again.
“I hope it teaches them that next year when they go to 6th grade and get a lot more work and long-term projects, they can think ahead and plan their own time to do things on time because they’ve had the practice in 5th grade.”
Minna still looked frustrated. “That sounds good, but unless everyone is doing it and the next grade teachers follow up with it, it’s like everything else in teaching. You teach the students to be self-directed learners and the next year instead of building on those skills they learned in previous years, they just wait until their new teacher tells them how they are to think and learn that year.”
“Sadly, that’s the way of education,” Lina agreed.
—————————————-
Author’s note: Homework was always an issue in all my years of teaching, at a teaching level, parent level, administrative and Board of Education level. Homework policy was constantly being looked at and changed. Only in my last few years of teaching did I adopt the method that Lina was doing in her class. Sadly, if I was teaching today, that method would be more difficult to use, given the number of mandates in curriculum and testing that are being placed on schools.
A to Z Blog Challenge
This is a very cool idea. I think it would’ve been helpful for my middle child because they weren’t able to keep their butt in the chair unless they had to. So if a teacher handed them a sheet that took ten minutes, BAM, they were done and wanted nothing more than to rush on to the next thing, but I feel like having them required to do more than rush through something could’ve benefited them into learning structure, if that makes sense. That could’ve helped model them into the real world where there aren’t people saying, “Do this, do that” every moment of every day.
I homeschool my daughters. They enter college at age 16, in place of their 11th and 12 grades. So, 10th grade is their passion year. I let them have more control over what they study, but they need to become more self-directed in preparation for college. My oldest told me this was the best thing I could have done for her. She did well in college while others struggled to keep up, in the beginning. Up to that point, everything is homework 😉 They joke about that since they do all of their work at home.
The problem with this is when the teacher the following year doesn’t have that mindset. You need to have a method like this ingrained over the span of a few years before it actually takes hold. At least that’s my guess, since I’ve never been able to test the theory out.