Grading is a pain, so English head teacher cans homework

[Zaia]

Homework is history, head teacher tells his students

ALL 12-year-olds at an English comprehensive will be told today that homework is being scrapped because teachers have better things to do than mark it.

Dr Patrick Hazlewood, the head teacher of St John's in Marlborough, Wiltshire, who has already scrapped subject teaching, will not put it quite like that, of course.

He will tell them that, to make their schooling more "relevant to life in the 21st century", they are to be given responsibility for "managing their own learning".

Parents, who were told on Monday, are confused because, according to school policy, "regular homework is an essential element of learning and contributes to the development of sound study habits". They are also asked to say if they think their child has been given too little.

St John's sees itself as at the forefront of radical educational change and Dr Hazlewood is testing a futuristic project devised by the Royal Society for the Arts which rejects the notion that a teacher's job is to transmit a body of knowledge to pupils.

The project aims instead to encourage pupils to "love learning for its own sake" and the project is intended to replace the "information-led, subject-driven" national curriculum with one based on "competences for learning, citizenship, relating to people, managing situations and managing information".

The point of schooling, the RSA says, is to acquire competence, not subject knowledge. It believes that exams only impede pupils' progress. At St John's, which has 1,450 pupils aged 11 to 18 - 250 of whom are 12-year-olds - replacing first-year subjects with "cross-curricular projects" of the kind that used to be popular in primary schools was the first step.

Allowing the pupils to mark each other's work was the second. Scrapping homework is the third.

"Homework, like the national curriculum, is a dinosaur," Dr Hazlewood said. "It is repetitious, generates marking that is often just a load of ticks and causes conflict at home."

He added: "The time has come to let sunshine flood through the classroom window and place the learner at the centre of all endeavour."

A mother who asked not to be named said: "My daughter has always taken pride in her homework. It gives her the push she needs. But Dr Hazlewood told us that it is a waste of time. Of course, he knows more than me but I am very worried about it." (© Daily Telegraph, London)

John Clare
in London

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[Boyish-Tigerlilly]

Just sounds like lazy teachers. Don't give the kids homework and make them do it, they most likely won't learn anything.

All the classes that never gave us homework in highschool...no one did anything, but the teacher didn't care.

[Enforcer Talen]

in high school, the kids hated busywork.

in college, they dont hand it out, and you pass or fail on tests.

I dont know if minors have the discipline for it

[Fire Fly]

Kids growing up lack the skill, discipline, and habit of doing school on their own for the most part. Only in college do you really have the skills, motivation, discipline, and habit of doing homework because now you're paying thousands of dollars. In grade school to high school, kids could care less, to be honest, because they aren't paying for much themselves. Sounds like someone just wants to be a lazy teacher.

[Mayabird]

Not only are they lazy, but they're cheap. I've had lots of profs who didn't want to grade papers, so they hired some half-starving grad student to do it for them. Hell, there were even teachers in high school who had students grade the papers for them (granted, they always picked stupid students who changed the answers on their own papers so they could get A's, but we're talking about Bumblefuck, Georgia here. You all know about the issues I had with that place.)

[Wicked Pilot]

I personally hate busy work, and a lot of the homework that I did in high school was such. If you have students that are eager to learn it would be much more effecient to simply give out study assignments such as reading over the next day's materials. Design it so that if you do the work it shows on the test, if you don't then you're up shit creek.

Of course in the end you should try to customize your cirriculum to your students as much as practical. If you've got a bunch of self motivate honor roll kids then you can take the free self study route, on the other side of the coin if you've got kids who don't give two shits and three cents then you may need the mandatory graded homework to get the knowledge through.

[White Haven]

The main issue with unmotivated students is a simple one: The assumption that schools have a responsibility to PASS students. If a studen't too much of a lazy bastard to learn the curriculum via in-class work, well, he's SOL, unless he studies on his own. If he can't handle it in class and doesn't study on his own, that's what the 'F' grade and the 'McDonalds' paycheck were designed for.

[Pick]

Another case of using an extreme when going somewhere in the middle would be best for everyone...

Busywork's pointless, like doing one hundred similar math problems. If you could do it the first 50 times, you shouldn't have to do it a hundred times, and if you can't get it in 50 times trying to do another 50 times WRONG makes no sense, either.

At the same time, having kids do no homework seems to be a bad policy. Why can't we settle with "some homework but not too much?"

Uh oh, I'm calling for something which requires judgement again.

[Petrosjko]

Busywork has its place in school, especially at the earlier portions. One has to learn the discipline to do repetitive crap that one doesn't want to deal with.

I'll admit that I ditched most homework in junior high and high school and made it up on the tests, but looking back that made for a very bad habit, and the fact that I could get away with it didn't do me any favors.

The simple fact is that busywork constitutes a large portion of many jobs in life, and one has to have the discipline to be able to approach it and get it done. This touchy-feely 'inspire kids to learn' crap does have a place as well, but it's a cop-out to use it because teachers don't want to grade the work.

(See above reference to having the discipline to do annoying, menial paperwork. This is a prime example.)

The jackass should be canned, straight out.

[Medic]

Busy work is a life-training event, agreed.

In my experience, doing a hundred math problems helps if you do it right. That is, put the time in, don't cheat, and check the back of the book for the the ones you missed and then re-work the problem until you get it.

Of course if you're just not smart enough then it won't do shit most likely. People I've seen who just aren't good at math but have terrific work ethic really burn themselves out.

[Mr Bean]

Busy work is a life-training event, agreed.

In my experience, doing a hundred math problems helps if you do it right. That is, put the time in, don't cheat, and check the back of the book for the the ones you missed and then re-work the problem until you get it.

Of course if you're just not smart enough then it won't do shit most likely. People I've seen who just aren't good at math but have terrific work ethic really burn themselves out.

See here is were I'm a tiiny bit sad that I admit I said when I was sixteen fuck the school and spent my afternoons in the garage and the workshop(And running my own computer business on the side) and Not spending 11th and 12th grade doing homework

[fgalkin]

NO HOMEWORK!!!! YAY!!!!!!!!!!

Err...sorry, that was the student in me. I don't think ditiching homework is a good idea.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Petrosjko]

Raising and/or mentoring young kids gives you a whole new perspective on these sort of matters. When they're griping about school, you're just shaking your head and thinking 'Wait until you get into the private sector, young'un.'

All this touchy-feely bullshit they're selling these days does precisely jack shit for preparing kids for dealing with real jobs, where they don't hold your hand and they do expect results.

Hell, it doesn't even prepare them for college, where the professors aren't going to weedle for one to behave, and many of them could care less whether or not any given student passes or fails.

[Keevan_Colton]

Homework is history, head teacher tells his students

ALL 12-year-olds at an English comprehensive will be told today that homework is being scrapped because teachers have better things to do than mark it.

Dr Patrick Hazlewood, the head teacher of St John's in Marlborough, Wiltshire, who has already scrapped subject teaching, will not put it quite like that, of course.

Er Z, it's in an Irish paper, but it's an English school.

[McC]

I'm of two minds here. On the one hand, some homework is just kind of retarded. On the other hand, how can you not have Math homework? I learned Calculus from a combination of homework and good instruction. History homework or something I can understand. But it seems like math homework (even if it's only 10-20 problems a night or something) is something you can't ditch.

I don't buy any of this "busy work is a good life skill" crap, though Nobody should ever learn to be satisfied doing busywork, and it's a terrible sign of the times that people think that learning busy work is a good thing.

[White Haven]

A large issue here is volume. Once you get beyond a certain length/number of problems, you hit a point of diminishing returns, where adding another thirty or fifty problems doesn't actually help the student learn, just pisses them off and wastes both their time at home and your time in class going over it. The idea is to help the student LEARN, not to take up time for the sake of taking up time. Math (and related science courses, physics, statics, chemistry, etc) are about the only courses I can possibly justify busywork homework for, and even then it's fairly silly. Word problems and the like that actually encourage critical thinking will make the person doing them actually reason through the problem, and in my experience that makes the concept stick far better. English? Please, if you can't understand basic grammar from in-class lessons, go work in corporate America, you apparently don't need it there

[Zaia]

Er Z, it's in an Irish paper, but it's an English school.

My mistake.

[Mayabird]

Math problems, science problems - they are not going to learn math and science without doing problems. Writing papers - people are getting practically illiterate. They don't know how to write a simple paragraph or even a couple coherent sentences. Punctuation? Capitalization? If they don't do it, they might only be getting experience from instant messanger (*shudders*). A few of the kids will be reading on their own, but how many of them would rather watch TV? Granted, a lot of homework is pointless busywork (like some coloring assignments I had in high school - color the maps all pretty colors! I gave that teacher so much hell for that one), but some of it is very necessary and useful.

[Medic]

I don't buy any of this "busy work is a good life skill" crap, though Nobody should ever learn to be satisfied doing busywork, and it's a terrible sign of the times that people think that learning busy work is a good thing.

I'm not apologizing for the bullshit that goes on in the workplace nor do I particularly care for busywork. I prefer to sham (fluff work that presents the appearance of being busy/productive ).

[White Haven]

Maya, that is true, some of the work has a purpose. But you've got an hour and a half of class time, there's more than enough room for at least some of that stuff to stay /at/ the school, rather than bleeding over into a student's free time.

[Mayabird]

Maya, that is true, some of the work has a purpose. But you've got an hour and a half of class time, there's more than enough room for at least some of that stuff to stay /at/ the school, rather than bleeding over into a student's free time.

It might take me five hours to write a good ten page paper and proofread it, and I'm faster at it than a lot of people. Let's say they write and edit a page an hour. That's ten hours of essentially wasted time when a teacher could be actually teaching something. I read fast; I can do between 60-100 pages an hour, depending on the reading material. A lot of people can't. So we sit there in class very, very slowly creeping through a book while nothing gets taught. While there are some books that are better read out loud (Shakespeare, for instance) most of the time it'll just be wasted class time.

And math? A teacher could sit there doing problems for them all day, but most of the students will tune out and stop paying attention. They won't be getting much out of it unless they do some work themselves.

[brianeyci]

Now I finished high school just a couple years ago, and still in school now.

Homework is usually a waste of time. Assignments are not. There should be three or four large essays and a large number of assignments, but you should not be *forced* to do it for marks. Either that, or there should be a spot check in the beginning of class to give "check" marks on done or not done for people who did it.

It is unreasonable to expect a high school teacher to mark daily assignments, given that each teacher probably has eight classes 8 x 30 is 250 assignments.

You are expected to have reached a certain level of maturity by the time you get to high school to do your homework on your own without someone prodding you. That's what primary school was for, for the teacher to give out stickers and hold your hand and teach you how to be a good friend, not high school.

Sadly, many do not learn this. Oh well, too bad so sad checking homework everyday is the best that can be done, marking daily homework would be far too painful for even the best teacher, imagine if YOU had to take home two to three hours worth of paperwork home from work a day you'd go insane.

Brian

[Alyeska]

School is for learning and teaching of new principles. Homework is for repetition to ensure better understanding and memory of the principles taught in school.

Homework is critical in the proper education of students. Teachers who refuse to give out homework only hurt the students.

And for those who say schools don't have a responsibility to pass students. Total fucking bullshit. People need a basic education and knowledge to properly get through life. It is the schools responsibility to make sure that its students get the education they need in life.

[White Haven]

Maya, that's why I said SOME. No, you can't fit it all in. That doesn't mean homework gets to be the ultra-copout. As for a responsibility to pass students...call me a nut, but I've always believed that failing is an option. If a student can't hack it, fine, you don't need to pass high-school lit to flip a burger.

[Pick]

On the slightly OT tangent: I would just personally like to say, in my general school experience it takes a lot of work to actually -fail- high school if you show up half the time. Homework or no.

And though I do think everyone deserves an equal shot at an education, there's some kids who just won't do it. They don't have the most basic initiative to get anything done, or care about the consequences of their actions. On the same token though, this has bread a lot of teachers who will fail kids without even caring, which is not good either. They stop even offering the semblance of help, which is, if anything, even worse.