Episode 177: Put the pen DOWN! Is it right to dish out homework over the summer break?

Andy Psarianos

Hi, I'm Andy Psarianos.

Robin Potter

Hi, I'm Robin Potter.

Adam Gifford

Hi, I'm Adam Gifford.

Andy Psarianos

This is the School of School podcast. Welcome to the School of School podcast.

Adam Gifford

Welcome back to another School of School podcast. It's a podcast. It is a podcast, right? We're doing another episode. Is that the story? Yes, this is the plan.

Andy Psarianos

I thought we were on summer three.

Adam Gifford

I'm feeling slightly left out because I'm here on my own, which is slightly unfair because the two likely suspects, Robin and Andy, whilst split screen, but you're actually in close proximity, you're sat next to each other. How are you both?

Robin Potter

Yeah, I'm great. Yes. Thanks for asking.

Andy Psarianos

It's nice to see people face to face, right?

Adam Gifford

Yeah, it is. It's important.

Andy Psarianos

It's different. Yeah.

Adam Gifford

Now, the topic that I want to talk about, we've sort of mentioned this just in another episode, but it's something that's always, I don't know if it's so strong, it's a regret, when I was a head teacher that I wasn't strong and I just didn't do it, I wasn't brave enough. That's probably what it came down to was things like homework, but I think that the other conversation that you guys were talking about with summer school, and I suppose both of those things, and there's probably other things that fall into this, is the continuation of school once school finishes. The brave part for me that I didn't quite explain there is that I wish I had been braver and got rid of homework. I think that let children just do whatever they do after school. I just wanted to know your thoughts on this because I do know that you two have spoken before about summer school, which I think falls into a similar sort of category. Just get your thoughts on it. What do you reckon? Homework, yes, no, summer school worth it? Over to you.

Andy Psarianos

I think there's cases where homework is appropriate, but I don't think that you should burden children. It shouldn't be like, as a teacher, you shouldn't be thinking about what homework can I give them? A lot of it can end up being busy work, right? What's the learning that's going on? If you can't answer that question, is it about evidence gathering? Is it about children learning stuff? Why are you even giving them homework? What's the reason? If you can't answer that, what are you doing it for? Is this torture or what? What's the point?

Robin Potter

Yeah, I agree with that. My daughter does her homework. I think we've talked about this before, but in class, she doesn't have any homework and that's fine. She seems to do just fine, not coming home with any homework. As you said, Andy, there are times where maybe children do need extra work just to learn the concept-

Andy Psarianos

Another good use case is a project, right? Where you got, it's not like I'm going to give you these sheets, you got to do this, bring it in tomorrow, but it's like, okay, over this period or over this term, over this next three weeks, whatever it is, I want you to do a little research project on XYZ or an essay or you need to read this book, or something like that, where that I think works. I think asking children to read, like, hey, you need to read this chapter, next week we're going to talk about it in class or something like that, I think that's appropriate because they can fit it in and it's good for them to have things that they need to do and deliver on. That's because they're good habits and you need to pick those habits up, but this idea of sending home worksheets, for example, of mind-numbing stuff, because a lot of kids are really busy anyway, right?

Robin Potter

Yes.

Adam Gifford

This is the problem. This is the part that I've got an issue with. I agree with you. I mean, look, you can construct homework well, so it's something that is beneficial. The problem that I've got is, when it is around task completion, the children are already tired, you come home and you've got to go through drills or a bit more around it. The problem that I've got is that if you really enjoyed something else... Both of you know by now how I feel about this. If you've got your own pursuits, whatever it might be, whatever it is, you want to have something in reserve to be able to do that and learn about it and do it well.

I've talked to a number of parents, I'm sure you have, and I've seen it in my own kids where it's kind of like, you do a full day at school, you're tired, and then you're doing an hour maybe more in primary school when you're getting home and you're absolutely shattered at the end of it, so the idea of doing something that requires, I don't know, thought or thoughts, just to sum it up, I think then becomes very difficult and perhaps we don't do it. That's where I see it being really problematic is when it doesn't leave room for those pursuits that allow you to be interested and curious about stuff.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah, and it doesn't even need to be structured stuff, right?

Adam Gifford

No, not at all.

Andy Psarianos

Look, if I reflect back on me, especially as a teen or a young teen, I was really kind of a hyper kid. I had a lot of energy, and I got home... If it was wintertime, when I was young, I got home, got my skates, there was an ice rink across the road, because I grew up in Montreal, it's like, they had ice rinks, hockey stick, ice rink on the ice, by four o'clock goes on the ice, I'd be home probably eight o'clock, playing hockey, just full on ice hockey every night. When I was older, it was skiing, we used to get on, there was a ski bus and it was really cheap in those days and you just hop on the bus after school, they pick you up at the school, just outside the school, it had nothing to do with the school, but it was just like they just knew kids would come from high schools, and you just hop on the bus and they'd drive you to the ski hill and you'd be night skiing and then they'd bring you back for eight or nine o'clock at night.

I did that every day. If I wasn't doing that every day, I don't think I could function. I needed to be super active. In the summers it was like, I was riding my bike. I'm talking about as a kid, I was riding my bike and I was walking. Everybody counts their steps now, but how many steps did I put in as a kid? Unbelievable. We were just wandering around all day, we were never in the house. It was nothing to do in the house. It was one TV-

Robin Potter

Yeah.

Andy Psarianos

Black and white, I think I was 15 when we got our first colour TV. There were four channels. It was like, children's programmes only came on on Saturday morning. You didn't watch TV, so it was like you're out, boom, wandering the neighbourhood, cycling or walking or whatever. I probably did 30,000 steps every day when I was a kid. I wouldn't have probably coped with my life, I would be having breakdowns and all kinds of stuff if I wasn't burning those kinds of calories as a kid. If I was at home, someone forcing me to do homework, I would lose my mind.

Adam Gifford

I think this is the problem, it's that, I'm just thinking about some schools and some parents that I've spoken to, and like I said, to a certain extent the school that my kids went to, there would be an expectation that's done, and so I could see a really sort of vicious circle that what you've described, I'm sure there's loads of children and loads of parents out there going, you've just described my son and my daughter, that you need to go out there, whether it's kicking a football or doing whatever, it doesn't matter, pick anything. That means that it's their release, it's what they do. Then you don't do your homework, you get in trouble at school, so you need to do more, and it just becomes that cycle of, I'm sure that what you did had the potential to make you better at school, right?

No question, you've already talked about you needed it just to function because you needed... Exactly. This is the thing, I think that the danger is that the importance that gets placed on completion of homework, and of course it's always that funny thing too, because if you start to dig into it and you ask a few more questions like, what happens if you don't know what to do? What happens if your parents don't read? What happens if they're on night shift? What happens if? Sometimes maybe we think, well, I'm not quite sure, but we'll just keep doing it and you just have to get it done. You just have to.

I'm doing scores of disservice there because you do know your community and those sorts of things, but I just kind of think, yeah, these are the really important parts that help those individuals that when you get them back together, 30 in a classroom and you see them in front of you, these are all the parts that differentiate them. It's the other bits that they're doing and how they need to manage what they do in order to be better in the time where you are most stable to support learning with the subjects we cover in school because there's a teacher there, that's their job, that's their role.

Andy Psarianos

Let's just take it a step further. One, I'd be interested in knowing what our guys' experience was with this, but this idea of summer school, we talked in a previous podcast about summer breaks, so the threat was if you didn't do well enough at whatever it was, subject X, you'd have to go to summer school and spend your summer in summer school doing course X, maths or English or French for us, whatever it was, right? One of the core subjects usually. I mean, that was my experience as a kid, which was like a terror, right? Going to summer school. I never went to summer school.

Adam Gifford

Eventually, you just didn't get a summer holiday, you just basically stayed at school.

Robin Potter

You just went to school all year round. Yeah.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah. That was the threat.

Adam Gifford

Is that a more North American thing, do you think? I don't know. I mean, listen, I imagine any advantage in schools now, I imagine there will certainly be on offer here because there will be subject specific camps and those sorts of things in the UK, without question, because there just will be.

Robin Potter

Yeah. I think summer school has taken on a different look now because I was just talking to two teenage girls, friends of mine and they were telling me about one of their friend that's in summer school, but she's online with it, she does it when she can fit it into her schedule. Maybe an hour or two, not necessarily every day. It's very different than the threat Andy had of, you will go to summer school and you will do school throughout the summer. This sounds like a much more casual, not too pressured, minor inconvenience in your summer because you could also do it from anywhere. You could be on summer vacation elsewhere and still get online and do an hour or two of a subject.

Adam Gifford

It still sounds like you don't get a chance to sort of switch off from school, though.

Robin Potter

I'm not saying it's perfect. It's a little better if you're actually doing summer school.

Andy Psarianos

There's a couple of things about this that's really... I can give you a bit more context about my experience. When I was in school, I went to school in Quebec, it's different in Canada, in each province, I don't know what it was like, you went to school in Montreal, I'm not sure what the system was like over there, but let's say, elementary school and high school in Quebec, what you had... Let's say high school, okay? What you had was, you had the core subjects. Let's say it was maths or English, you had an advanced course for the real high-flyers and then you had the normal course, the average course, which was usually the sort of provincial standard if you want, and then you had the remedial course and they were all in the same year and you could be in any one of those three, but there were basically kind of level.

If you failed, because remember in these days people were held back and stuff and you could fail a course. I don't even know if they do that anymore. If you were in the medium course and you failed, next year you had two options, you could either do summer school and then stay in the medium class next year, or next year, you could go into the remedial class if you had failed, but if you failed twice, you had to go to summer school to go back to the remedial course the next year or you had to repeat the whole entire year.

Adam Gifford

It's almost like, when they have speed awareness courses, it's almost like you've been caught speeding. If you don't want points, you've got to go to this thing. It's like-

Andy Psarianos

It's like punishment, right?

Adam Gifford

Yeah. Not as hard as blackmail, but it's close. It's kind of like, well, that's really heavy. If you are a child... Because what are you? 15, 16 when this is taking place-

Andy Psarianos

Or younger.

Adam Gifford

So you are thinking, man, am I going to get a summer holiday or not? That's really heavy.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah. For me, I got held back a year in high school because I failed too many courses and so there was no way I was going to go to summer school, so I just decided to redo a year. I'd rather redo a year of school than go back to summer school.

Robin Potter

Than go to summer school.

Andy Psarianos

Also, it was kind of a tricky year because I got kicked out of school that year and blah blah blah and whatever. It's interesting, how did I get into this spiral of destruction in school? A lot of it was based on this idea of stuff that we started talking about, which are things like homework. What would happen to me? Well, I wouldn't do my homework because I'd go play hockey after school or I'd go skiing or whatever, so I wouldn't do my homework, so then it was like, next day I'm supposed to hand in my homework and I don't have it. I don't want to be publicly shamed in the classroom so I don't go to class. Right?

You see this whole spiral of destruction starts and then they try to stack on more and more punishments and you just become more and more defiant and get pushed further and further out of the system. It didn't really work for me. Some kids, I guess, would be scared and they would just conform, but I think there's a whole group of kids that do the complete opposite, and that's how you get dropouts and all that kind of stuff, which doesn't really happen so much in England and it doesn't happen so much in mainstream Canada, but if you look at the First Nations schools, the numbers are shocking. The number of First Nations kids that don't even finish secondary school, high school in Canada is shocking. It's probably equivalent to what it was like in the 1920s and the western world.

When you actually talk to people about it, it's these spirals, that's what happens. This school system doesn't work for them so we try to punish them to get them online and they're just like, yeah, I'm not having any of that, and they drop out. Okay, there's that side of it and that's how it worked back then. I don't think it works like that anymore in Canada. I'm pretty sure it doesn't. My kids were never that. I wasn't faced with that with my own children ever. They didn't do spectacularly well, but they didn't do that bad, but now what's happening is, you got the opposite.

I see kids, like in my daughter's secondary school, my youngest daughter's secondary school, you got kids who are taking summer courses that are the next year's material. They are in year eight or year nine and by the time they're in year eight or year nine, they're already doing year 10, year 11 and year 12 courses, and in some cases by year 10 they're even doing university level courses, they're doing what they call, in North America we have these AP courses, advanced placement courses like first year of university.

My daughter's friend, last year, she's gone from grade 10 to grade 11. High school finishes in grade 12 in BC. Going from grade 10 to grade 11. She did pre-calc and calculus in summer school, both courses in summer school, so then in grade 11 she went and she did AP, advanced placement, university calculus in grade 11. Two years ahead of time-

Robin Potter

That's a 16-year-old.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah. She's doing university calculus. This summer, she's gone to some super kid camp at Harvard. She's there right now. It's this thing you pay for. It's run by Harvard University and it's super advanced courses. I'm just talking about math, but she's done the same thing for physics and chemistry and biology. She's already doing her university courses and she still got a year of high school to go, and she's going to Harvard for the summer. This kid has no life.

Adam Gifford

Yeah, and this is the hard part, isn't it? Because I know education on the whole becomes increasingly competitive. We can look at other countries outside of the UK, Canada and New Zealand that literally education separates out the life chance and possibilities and all those sorts of things, but I really do, I worry that it becomes so narrow in that perceived competition element to education that I've got to do more faster before anyone else, I've just got to totally focus on this.

When I think about some of the people that I just know personally, that have been very successful in lots of fields, I mean outside of education, and I'm not convinced it's down to them going to the equivalent of a summer school or being able to do something that's very complex at 16 versus 18 or possibly not at all. I'm not trying to do those subjects a disservice, but I just think to myself actually some of the other things that these people did, like getting a job, going in and working for very little an hour, sweeping the floors of a shop or something like that, it all sounds very nostalgic and whatnot, but actually some of the stuff that they learnt there, like turning up to work, dealing with adults, those sorts of things actually made a massive difference.

Andy Psarianos

Right, if you can't go to the party, you've got to go to work.

Robin Potter

Yeah.

Adam Gifford

Yeah, and cope with that. You said that you were going to do this, or whatever it might be. I think that when I look at those people, there might've been, some of the people that... My secondary school is not a good one to refer to because there was no mention of summer schools or anything like that because there wasn't any mention of universities. It wasn't an aspirational place, is the truth, but I look at the people, some of my peers that I went through school with, who have gone on to be fantastically successful in their fields, and a lot of the stuff that they did, I am stating the obvious here, but I think it's important, they are the sort of some of their parts.

I know that some of their parts, it wasn't like a hot housing or it wasn't like a super-duper... Maybe it's a generational thing, I don't know, maybe this generation that's coming through now, maybe this is what's needed, I don't know, but I kind of feel like you've got to have a chance at balance. You've got to have a chance at developing some of those other skills that we can't put a grade on, or those sorts of things, perhaps. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong-

Andy Psarianos

If you look at young adults and kids, it seems to me, this is not backed by research or any kind of reliable source, just my impression, it just seems to me that teenagers and young adults are suffering with social-

Robin Potter

Anxieties.

Andy Psarianos

Anxieties, in a way that is so foreign to me. Sure, we all knew kids who had issues or whatever, but I look at my kids and I look at my kids' friends and the stuff they talk about, and many of them legitimately need to go to therapy too, and they need medication just to make it through the day, and I'm like, man, I thought everything that we worked so hard to build in the world was supposed to make life better, and it doesn't seem to be happening.

Adam Gifford

It was summed up for me, and this is going back a wee way, but I think it still feeds into the same argument, is that one of the schools that I worked at was in an area of selective state schooling. It was primary school going to secondary selective state education that you needed to pass an entrance exam in order to go into it. I knew a lot of our children were being tutored a lot, and so that meant that they were doing practise mock exams after school, before school. I remember I came in and there was a boy that was in tears. I knew he was on a pretty heavy regime of tests before school, after school and maybe twice in an evening, and he was honestly distraught, close to hysterical, and I was like, flipping heck, he's reached that breaking point because of the pressure of getting into that selective education.

I said to him, I said, look, what's wrong? What's wrong? Are you okay? He looked up to me, tears streaming down his face, he said, I'm worried that I'm going to fail my GCSEs. He was in year five, he was nine years old and he was worried about his GCSE further down the track, and I think to myself, now that's quite extreme, I appreciate that. Like you are saying, Andy, I think that if what success looks like and in order to get ahead with success is this sort of acceleration and this laser focus, and it needs to be treated so carefully because they're children.

I kind of get cross with Tiger Woods, just to go completely left field on this, because I think the regime he was under, he will say it was very successful, and I always think he's the one that actually contradicts the other argument because for him it seemed to have worked, but I would argue for the majority of children, and I'll use the word children, that we need to be careful because if we are creating, this is the only way to be successful in future and all these things, and yet I'm sure lots of us know very successful adults, and that wasn't necessarily the path, and I'm not convinced that that will always be the path even for this generation coming through. We just need to be careful.

Andy Psarianos

Look, the three of us are parents. All three of us have children that are still young but not very small anymore. What have you learned? What's your life lesson? What have you learned as a parent about this?

Adam Gifford

The one thing that I know is, I don't regret a single summer holiday in which my kids, it was like what you've described previously, Andy, that we went away, we were fortunate we had a place to go away to in Europe through family, and it was a lot of time spent at the beach and swimming and just generally just a time off school and I don't regret a second of that. I don't feel like they're disadvantaged now because they didn't do additional study during that time, and I also don't regret any time where I've said, in terms of homework, just put the pencil down, walk away from it and you don't need to get yourself stressed out about it, and I'll talk to the school. I don't regret that either because I don't feel that's been disadvantaged. Now, each to their own, but that's my stance.

Robin Potter

I would say something very similar. Yes. My kids have very fond memories and still do about getting together with their cousins and having that family involvement on their summer holidays. They are a little older and they do work now and that's okay too. They seem great with that because there's still a balance. They're learning some work skills, but they are also enjoying their summers, so yeah, I am not a big, put the pen down, for sure, and avoid summer school if you can.

Adam Gifford

What about you, Andy? What about you?

Andy Psarianos

I think what you guys have said just totally resonates with me. I think that the one thing I would say is, if you can, as a parent, if you can just understand that a lot of the times the solution is, put the pen down, as you guys have so clearly stated, just put the pen down and just take the pressure off. What are you trying to win at? Just put the pen down, have a conversation, express your feelings. Just put the pen down. Just put the bloody pen down.

Robin Potter

Heard us. Put the pen down.

Andy Psarianos

Put it down, take a breath, reflect. Right? Nothing bad is going to happen.

Thank you for joining us on the School of School podcast.