27th July 2018

speech practice

Is home work a waste of time?  By waste of time I mean, doing homework does not help me learn. It is frustrating and makes me angry.

Students and teachers have had this same argument all over the world.  Here are some of the reasons for this argument.

A  At the end of a 6 hour school day plus 1.5 hours travel on the bus, my brain hurts and I am too tired to open up books and go over the whole day all over again. Any learning I do when this tired is sub-standard.

It is boring enough to sit through academic subjects people tell me I have to do all day at school without having to spend more time at home on this boredom. I have other things to do that interest me more.

C School and home should be separate. School is for necessary academic learning. Home is for real life learning. Taking care of animals, doing laundry, cooking family meals, working outside to do things that contribute to our family business.

Also why so much focus on academic learning, especially after school, when the world needs people with practicle skills who are willing to do the grunt work, like plumbers, builders, cooks and dish pigs

 D It’s not just me, who else really learns from homework? – It is too easy to fake.  A student can quite easily go home and just google the answers, or if you are smart enough you can con a parent, sibling or friend into doing the homework for you. How would the teacher know it was my work?

E Homework can be just as much of a problem for the teachers as the students because they have to mark it and check it to make sure it isn’t copied or faked. This takes a lot of time, probably more than the homework.

Some times to get homework marked on time teachers  have to take students’ homework home with them and do this after paid working hours. This does not benefit the student or the teacher. The teacher could have spent the extra time working with the student in school hours instead.

F There is real world evidence that homework does not achieve the teacher’s goal to improve student learning.

Four high schools in Sweden decided to run a test for 1 year with 3 classes in each year group.

Group 1 got home work. Group 2 got no homework and the third group got an extra hour of school. 

When the results came in at the end of the year the third group got the highest grades. Go figure . this was the group that did not get homework.

The home work group and the non-homework group got the same grades as each other, proving that homework did not improve their learning.

Other schools in the USA and Europe have undertaken the same test and gotten similar results.

Homework interrupts a lot of after school activities such as sports, hobbies and hanging out with friends. I have spent 12 years at school, 6 hours a day for each 32 week school year – that’s 2,304 hours of my life . If we could not be taught what we need to know in this amount of time the NZ education department need to re-think the school curriculum.

Let’s face it , it would seem teachers give us home work because they don’t want to deal with us in class, It’s a way of getting rid of us and that says a lot about student  

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