British School Scraps Homework

When I get a CV with St' Johns school in Marlborough on it I'll file it away in the bin straight away.

Wow. Only 11 and 11 O levels and 6 A levels. But wait his letter has 23 spelling mistakes including his own name. Clearly top of the class.

In an australian primary school with good results if i remeber correctly

Sorry bag but this is actually a great idea. Most people can truly learn for no more than six hours a day, so an hour or two doing homework in the evening is really not a learning situation but more a question of a child rushing to get the work done so they can have a life. I'm sure that there will still be projects and coursework but traditional homework needs to die, as it helps no one.

For the record I have probably interviewed around fifty people for a job over the years and there were plenty of high school graduates who attended schools that gave plenty of homework who hand me resumes and cover letters littered with mistakes. Homework and education do not have to go hand in hand.

why the hell have they only done it now!

I never did homework and the teachers just never bothered in the end to give me detention!

My comments were aimed at the marking of each others work.

I can understand the homework thing and don't have any major issues...

You are right on that. My wife got sucked into doing that when she did a year at a rough school in Delaware. She proceeded to give the scary girls better grades and they were nicer to her as a result. Handy for her, but not so great for education.

they let the students correct each other's work... that is, until the schools started getting complaints from the parents of the stupid kids. With that also came the end of posting students' grades so everyone could see his/hers

in the 70's and it failed miserbly. ZCT is correct that homework and education do not go hand in hand. However, homework doesn't hurt you. Hopefully their program is modified slightly. Homework can be very useful, but I have never believed in homework for homeworks sake. As for those who don;t believe in it, look at what the Japanese do. :)

The point of homework is to make sure the child understands the day's concepts and to reinforce the lesson. These children will now go home and play video games or watch tv. They will go to school the next day and forget what they learned. As a parent, I would be very concerned if the school my chilren attended did this.

..or as a concerned parent you could, I don't know, talk with your child over the concepts they covered that day.

As a parent helping the kids with homework I quickly discovered that I That is OK with really young children but as they get close to finishing I found I had no idea what they were doing. I had to read the books to understand what was going on so I could help. Without the books I would have no idea what was going on. These are also the important years.

bring it home. There are no teachers at home to help. Not all parents can do it, my dad is good with math but I am better on my own with mom.
Personally I never did homework. Mostly cause there was never new information. My math from grades 1 to 5 was pretty much the same just more numbers per grade.
ie. grade 1 is 2x5
grade 2 is 25x5
grade 3 is 33x45 and so on.
As if by grade 4 I can't do ten numbers multiplied by ten numbers.

It boils down to the meathod they teach with. It's 3 step.
1) teach it
2) practice it
3) test it

that is flawed because it wastes time and minimizes time for subjects the pupil has difficulty with. It should be
1) teach it
2) test it
3) practice if failed

It is better for the pupils but harder on the teachers.
Teachers jobs should be to teach the pupil as best as possible.

No homework during K-12?

Boy, are kids are going to love it when they're introduced to the concept in College. Or are they going to change it for college too?

I dont know about you guys but in Australia, for the final year of school. They expect you to do a minimum of 4 hours homework per night.
When you think about it thats crazy, I mean if you had to work 10+ hour days all the time I doubt you would work in it for long, and if you did you would find that it ruins your life.

Also my 7 year old nephew gets homework, for gods sake he is in grade 2, he should be worrying about getting outside and running around being a kid rather than doing 30-45 minutes of homework per day.

My 5 year old gets homework every night and for
the parents too ....
He comes home with two sheets and has to copy
the "word of the day" a couple of times , spell it out
with flash cards with letters, talk about the word
and then the parents have to take the second sheet
cut out the word (in print) cover it in plastic along
with a photo of the object (motorbike or whatever )
and keep one copy of the word and the photo in a
special box they give them ....


It's all a pain in the arse to be honest but he seems
to enjoy it and it seems like a good idea to get the
kids into doing some work at home ...but I can't
help thinking ...he's only 5 .........

Oh one of my first jobs while studying in England
was to cut the grass at this school :-) ( I presume
this school was part of the contract I don't really
remember it was for all the public schools in the
area and I seem to remember it had a load of steep
banks which had to be done with a flymo) Now
that's useless first hand info !!

I forget everything after few weeks!