A Fish Hoek school has come up with a revolutionary idea to improve the academic performance of its pupils – no homework. The school conducted a six-month trial to determine the effects of no homework on the standard of academic progress, with surprising results.
Rather than pupils falling behind and marks nosediving, the results were positive. Children were happier, there was less stress for children, teachers and parents, and sport took centre stage as an after-school activity. Parents reported that there was more family time with more meaningful discussions around the dinner table and parents enjoyed the more carefree evenings.
What a wonderful idea. I think homework was the cause of the most stress in my family when I was a child. The major problem was that I kept losing my homework notebook and not even the traditional story about a naughty puppy chewing it up could elicit a smile on the face of Miss Meany. Detention was invented for the likes of me, to mend the ways of youngsters who lost their homework books or never did their homework.
There was lots of detention, but it never cured my lost homework notebook problem, and I went through those little blue books as often as I lost the ribbons that secured my plaits.
Then the school came up with a devious plan: something called ‘homework notebook inspection’, whereby every little scribble in the dreaded book would be scrutinised by Miss Meany and the signature of the parent closely examined.
But children are ingenious and resourceful. When there is a boulder placed in the path of their escape from detention, they will find a way to sidestep it. The solution was to borrow a friend’s meticulously-maintained notebook and spend a Saturday transcribing everything into the latest new homework notebook. The next hurdle was to present the evidence of my carelessness to my exasperated mother.
Her reaction to having to sign a few months’ worth of homework could possibly be worse than detention. As luck would have it, some of us had rebellious big sisters who had perfected the parent’s signature so well that only the parent themselves could tell the forgery from the authentic.
When I became a parent myself, the little homework notebook came to torment me again – three times over – and the stress and anxiety of homework and understanding the new maths and trying to remember things long forgotten was as if I had entered the classroom all over again. By son number three I was able to recite by heart Roy and Carol, The Little Red Hen, Jip the Cat, Ben the Dog, Sam the Fox and all the other characters that have been used for more than half a century to teach children to read.
And that’s the point. Society has changed. Children have different challenges to those experienced in the classroom 50 years ago. So should we be still sticking with an outdated, outmoded education plan that is no longer suitable, simply because that is the way things were always done?
What has become apparent as I write this is how much anxiety is created in children by the homework bogey. Learning should be fun.
Headmaster of Sun Valley Primary, Gavin Keller, said in a radio interview that the school had made sure that the seven-hour school day was ‘so focused, so on task, so full of fun that after school there’s still time to play sport, have friends around, and in the evening they can go to bed and read’.
What remains to be seen now is how the education departments will react to this refreshing approach to school, or whether they will stick with the status quo and breed more generations of stressed, anxious children overburdened with homework.
