I have a very evolving relationship with homework. As I student, I tolerated it; as a teacher, I enforce it; as a parent… a little bit of me dies whenever I get something home that requires me to spend my weekend doing something supposedly interesting and creative.
Daily reading, spellings, times tables – that’s all kind of par for the course, and fits into the schedule. But baking things and then slicing things to demonstrate fractions, bird-watching, making things in shoe boxes, taking and printing photographs? That takes effort, parental effort. Like driving round to pick up shoe boxes from friends because I never had a spare shoe box to hand whenever the homework dictated that we used one.
Well done, to my primary teacher friends, who make up these creative, fun activities, to extend a child’s learning, and to develop links between home and school learning. It’s a shame I can’t be bothered.
There are even homework menus, vast charts of interesting and varied challenges to choose from, whilst I try to steer the boys towards the least effort-filled option. “Look – you could do a poem. Let’s make it an acrostic – that’ll be quick.”
The Egyptian homework menu nearly tipped me over the edge because it involved things like making Egyptian jewelry and mummifying a tomato and baking Egyptian cakes. Now, I love baking with the boys, but I couldn’t find half the necessary traditional baking ingredients, like rosewater, in Aldi.
“Just make a cake and cut it into a pyramid” suggested my husband. I said I didn’t think that was the point.
“Just cut out a human shape and cover it in white fondant icing and use an edible ink pen to draw bandages on it, then make it a sarcophagus - bingo!” suggested a helpful friend on Facebook.
“Just?!” I laugh-cried.
So we settled on making basbousa, two massive basbousas in fact, so that the whole class and teachers could have a slice. And then when we were admiring our golden-brown, coconut-y, almond-topped creations, I realised the brain glitch that had overlooked the nut-free policy. I could have cried! I even phoned the school office to ask if they could make an exception (they couldn’t).
Hooray for our allergy-free homegroup who enthusiastically received the big cakes at our shared meal, and (prompted ahead of time by an email with an emotional appeal from me) all the ladies made a big fuss of the baker boy, who later told me it was more fun than taking it into school anyway. Phew! (We sent in photos, and the teacher told me next time to send them in anyway and the teachers could eat it all in the staffroom. Ha! Next time?!)
So we ploughed on with homework, which was basically really all about my pride and how my family appeared to the teachers – how diligent we were, and how I was helpfully and knowledgeably supporting their studies. I barely restrained myself from going over their colouring in to tidy up their scruffy-looking things. Meanwhile, I’m sure we did more actual learning in activities like foraging and catechising and watching plays, but these don’t appear on the menus, and so don’t count.
But here is something I’ve learnt this year: when you don’t do the homework, nothing bad actually happens.
It started with the work being sent home during lockdown. We couldn’t do it, didn’t upload pictures of it, and nobody told us off. Then this academic year, I clearly missed the info that homework was being set on Teams rather than sent home on bits of paper, so I was blissfully unaware of it, and nothing was said when we didn’t attempt any of it. Even this term, middle son has gone back to a piece of paper with a menu of tasks on it, but as the finished work cannot be taken back in, and all the tasks are about minibeasts and we accidentally did them last year (bugs out of playdough, etc.) I felt brave about not giving it too much thought. You’ve drawn a scrappy looking life cycle of a caterpillar? That’ll do. Your teacher won’t ever see it, and you did a lovely one in your homeschool book last year, anyway.
Then there’s the reading books. (This goes in a separate box in my head from the homework). We have slaved over the reading books. They get one a week which they are meant to read every day (bit boring!) and sometimes the boys are less than keen. But this year, reading books have been mostly set online and as I am a Luddite I have sourced books elsewhere. The boys are doing great in their reading, and it turns out they are more enthusiastic reading their own choice of books than working through the school schemes. We recently got a letter from school explaining that teachers are able to monitor online which books are being read, and I had a little wobble at how it looked that we literally never read a school set online book. But then I remember that the teachers are pleased with the boys’ reading progress and decided not to worry about it.
I’m all for children having enriching tasks and educational activities at home. I appreciate that for some families having a list of well thought-out relevant tasks is an exciting opportunity. But with three children who all require parental input to complete three different weekly tasks, forgive me if I now take the pressure off us all and resolve that it just doesn’t matter so much if it doesn’t all get done properly. And sometimes I'd rather prioritise other stuff, like going to a concert or trying out the activities in Five Minute Mum's 'Time for school.' I hope this doesn’t come back to bite me once they’re at secondary and things get a bit more serious. Study skills and the habit and rhythms of completing homework are fantastic disciplines to cultivate. But when you’re seven, having a mum who doesn’t stress and pester about the quality of your homework is probably important too.
Now, isn’t that a shocking thing for a teacher to say?
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