What’s wrong with homework?

If you’re a parent and you tweet, it’s very likely you’re aware of Kirstie Allsopp’s (of Location, Location, Location fame) campaign against homework. And I see and hear other parents complaining about homework and saying they are homework free.

I just don’t get it. What is wrong with homework?

I always loved homework. Even when I was home-schooled for a few years, I insisted on getting homework (spellings and vocabulary, that kind of thing), though that was probably more to do with my being a bit weird and desperately yearning to be at secondary school already. Actually, by university, what I loved most was making homework or revision calendars – with lots of complex colour-coding.

Rosemary loves homework. Rosemary had been wanting to go to big school for a long time and whenever we asked what she was looking forward to most, she would say ‘Homework!’. She was a little disappointed that the homework she got came in the form of looking for the number 3 and the letter S around and about or finding circles in your living room. She wanted worksheets dammit. Which I can totally understand. Worksheets are great. You can sit down and do a worksheet and you have concrete evidence that you’ve done it, plus you can colour it in and make pretty doodles on it. And stuff. I used to make worksheets for myself to do at uni, because they didn’t tend to give them out.

These days, she gets some phonics flashcards to practise the letters they’ve learnt at school, and a reading book. We also get a letter at the start of each week telling us what they’ll be doing at school with suggestions on how to support them at home. They’re just suggestions and there’s no obligation to do them, or testing them on them or anything. Examples include finding out about Spanish artists Goya and Dali and talking about 3D shapes. Still no worksheets, sadly, though Rosemary has a number of books with those kinds of activity in them, so she gets her fix in another way. I’d be happy for more homework, as would Rosemary. We tend to do letters, reading and numbers in the morning, while having breakfast or after getting dressed, while Chris often helps her investigate things further on the internet or in the library after school. And, of course, there’s plenty of unplanned, spur-of-the-moment learning that happens, too – spotting letters and numbers on signs, counting the cutlery, doing science experiments with dissolving things in liquid, and so on and so on.

I think one of the points that people have against homework is that there are far better individual ways to learn and that it should just be down to the parents to bring learning opportunities into family life (like those unplanned, spur-of-the-moment things I mentioned already). But can’t you do both? And does every parent have the ability and know-how to spot those learning opportunities?

I think homework has many benefits:

• helping tie school and home together – providing a sounding board for the child to discuss what they’ve been doing at school
• introducing children to time management
• increasing self-esteem – the pride and joy in a child’s face when they accomplish a homework task is evidence itself
• keeping the TV off for a few more minutes
• showing that learning doesn’t only happen in school
• helping parents to be involved with their children’s education.

I also think it’s a little like vaccinations and if a bunch of parents abstain their children from homework because they feel they can do better at home, the children whose parents do almost nothing at home (whether through lack of time, knowledge, education or desire) will lose out. They’ll see that their friends don’t have to do homework and they’ll get out of it and then they’ll have no link between school and home left and their learning will be predominantly limited to school. If you feel that strongly about being able to do better yourself, why are you sending them to school at all, really? Why don’t you do it all yourself?

But maybe I’m only pro-homework because Rosemary happens to like it too and because I liked it so much? If she struggled with it and hated it, perhaps I would too?

What do you think? Are you a homework junkie or an abstainer? Do you love those worksheets and want more and more of them, or do you want to shove them on the fire and run out and learn by jumping in muddy puddles? Or a bit of both?