Episode 68: Homework - To be or not to be?

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

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Welcome back to another School of School Podcast. Here with the regular gang, myself Adam, Andy and Robin. Hope you two are both well. I want to ask about a topic that, if there's one topic, I think, everyone has a strong opinion on in schools, including parents, teachers, governors, the works, it's homework, right? It'll either fill your heart with joy or you resent it to bits. Robin, where do you stand on the sliding scale?

Robin Potter

Oh, where are my kids? Where are my kids on this one? Well, I'm finding nowadays, so remember I have one who would be still in elementary school, I guess, age, and I've got one in high school. The younger one never seems to have homework unless it's a project, and the older one also doesn't have enough. When I say not enough, doesn't seem to have a lot, though he claims he has time in class to do it. And this is the trend I've been noticing is, it's not actually homework anymore. It's just school work, and the schoolwork seems to get done in classroom time, so they come home without any homework. My daughter would say the same. So is that good, bad or other?

My whole thing about homework is, I don't need them to have extra work to do just for the sake of having work to do at home. They've got enough on the go when they're outside of school but, the one thing I do think about homework is, it gets you in a habit of being able to focus, to sit down and do something that's part of the learning, where now you've learned something, now you're doing some work to remember how to do it, or help to learn how to do it. So I don't know. I'm really torn on this.

I used to be more about, "Well, couldn't they just give you a bit of homework, so you get into that pattern of coming home, doing your homework, and then you're done." I don't know so much these days. We seem to have a change in how things are done, at least in my little world on the planet, of, it's school work, not homework anymore. And really, as long as my kids are doing well and understand, that's really, for me, what's most important.

Andy Psarianos

Interesting. Interesting. Well, look, I mean, I think there's different ways to look at this. If I go back with the lens of, how did I respond to homework when I was small, I suppose, all the way through to the end of my education. I always, always, absolutely despised and rarely did my homework, right? That's the honest truth. All it did was, for me anyway, and not that I should be a model for what people's experience in schools should be, but for me, it was just a reason to hate school or a reason to hate the courses, especially the ones that I didn't particularly gel with. If you sent me home with biology homework, if I did it, which I don't think I ever did, but if I did do it, I would resent it so much that it would make me cringe, and I would torture anybody who was around about this ridiculous requirement asking me to do extra work at home. That was my response to it. I see the same things percolating in my own children.

Now, by the time you get to university, if you do go to university, there's a lot of work to do on your own and you need that discipline, so I understand what you're saying. Somewhere, you need to develop those skills of self motivation and finding it within yourself to do your homework instead of going out with your friends or whatever, right? Is that why we give them homework when they're small? I don't know. It's a tough one. It's a tough one. I don't think there's a lot of benefit, from a learning point of view, to give children lots of homework, but Adam, you're the wisest of the group. What do you think?

Adam Gifford

First of all, I'm not the wisest of group. Secondly, I aspired, Robin, to have that set up and that habit forming that you talked about, because that wasn't my experience in my house. One of my children, I was about to say she, that gives the game away. I've got a boy and a girl, so there's no anonymity there.

Well, homework, what it becomes was, brace yourself for conflict. So I knew the learning had gone out the window, right? I knew it because, at that point, mentally, her head was not in. It didn't matter what was put in front of her. It didn't matter at that point, because now it's about, "Right, this is between you and me, Dad." Or Mum, or whoever it may be with. "This is no longer about whatever's in front of me." And so the whole, I mean, I won't get into it, but the chemistry of the brain changed, to a point where, if you walked into someone's classroom and they were having that same argument with the teacher, oh man, you'd be like, "Call in the troops here, because something's not right here. These children are not learning if that's the space that they're in."

So I can sit with one hat, the dad hat, and say, that with complete honesty, that if I had my way and I've always been pretty consistent with this, I'd ditch homework, but I would encourage reading. I would say try to read something and try to vary what you read, but try to read every night. Just try to read, because reading's great. Full stop. You can't really go wrong. If it's something that you enjoy, whatever. You're learning and you're learning skills, but for the rest of it, I don't know.

So that's my dad hat. Professionally, that's a lot harder. I may have said this before. I didn't have the guts to do it when I was leading a school. I didn't have the guts to take that fight on, because I think a lot of people, anecdotally, but I did talk to a lot of parents, I think they'd feel like it's too big of a risk not having it. But I'm not sure if I could really weigh up the benefits, because those children that did their homework incredibly well, all the time, and maybe the only complaint was, "My son or daughter is spending too long on their homework. How do I reign it in?" I'm thinking, "I've never felt your pain, so I'm not quite sure I'm qualified to answer that."

Andy Psarianos

Does that actually happen?

Adam Gifford

I think maybe there was probably some other children who, if you wanted to have something additional in their learning, that would benefit them, it wouldn't have been those children, if you like. I hope you understand what I'm saying there. So I don't know. I don't come from a place of any sort of great wisdom when it comes to homework. I think what I saw, personally, but also more often professionally when homework was talked about, is when it wasn't going right.

Robin Potter

Yeah.

Adam Gifford

I just think that breakdown in relationship when you've got this finite number of hours between your child coming home and them going to bed, I just didn't want it to be a bun fight every night and that's what it had the potential to become. I just thought, I'm not sure how beneficial that is.

Robin Potter

Right.

Andy Psarianos

Well, it's not really fair, is it, if you think about it? Could you imagine if you went to work and, at the end of the day at work, they gave you a bunch of homework to do, right?

Robin Potter

It happens to me all the time.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah. Slave driving bosses. Anyway. No, but I'm serious though, right? Obviously, we probably, all of us bring work home. Well, we all work from home so it's hard to make that distinction. But there's always an element of... But you do that from a sense of responsibility, right? And I think that's what you want to really build in people, is you want to say, "You need to be able to measure yourself. You need to be self-aware enough to say that, 'If I don't get this done today, this is going to be a problem for lots of other people.'" So there's a responsibility there that, "Today I will do it."

But then there's the flip side of that, which is, and the more important one and the more difficult one, the self-regulation thing and say, I'm tired and I'm not at my best right now, so I'm going to put my pen down, and tomorrow, I will pick up from where I left off." That self-regulation is very difficult.

So if you put that in a context of homework, homework doesn't teach you either of those things, right? Homework is like, "You must do.." All it does is, it makes you obey and perform, marching to the beat of somebody else's drum. "Today you will go home and you will do these things and then tomorrow you will have them done." So what's the life skill that we really want to teach people?

Because, look, in my work, in my professional career, I've had times where I've just overworked myself almost to a ridiculous point, and I've learned those lessons the hard way. "No, no, no." Because there's always too much work to do so, at some point, you have to say, "I'm done for today. I'm now done." And the measure of whether you're done or not is not because there's no more work to do. That never happens, right? It's just like, "This is it today. I'm going to stop," and it's not by the clock. I don't work by the clock. I don't think most people do, right? Not anymore. If those are the skills we want people to learn, homework isn't really doing that. Maybe it'll help you in university because in university... I don't know. I don't even know that that's true. I think it's-

Adam Gifford

Because I want to jump in there, Andy. I want to jump in there, because here's the other part to homework, right? Is that when you were talking about it before, Andy, and you were saying you either don't remember doing it or it wasn't done or you didn't like it, right? I think the other thing that we need to consider is, what type of homework do children get most often? Is it English based, and say, maths based? Now, let's just say, that I'm an aspiring guitarist, let's just say. And I come home from school and it's a long day. It's a long day, and all I want to do is sit down and play my guitar or paint or do whatever, but I have to get this other stuff done first and I just haven't got it in me. I just don't want to do this other stuff. And it's like, "Well, you're not playing the guitar until you do it."

It's like, "Right, at this point, yes, a mature head would say, 'Right, I want the reward, so therefore I will sit down and be very disciplined to get this done.'" But I'm sorry, 7, 8, 9, 10 years old, that takes a level of maturity. Are they going to understand that? I'm not convinced, but more than that, are we missing a trick? Because if we want that sense of balance, if we want children to explore and coming back to when you're talking about university then Andy, or whatever people do, I know a lot of people who what they loved in primary school they've gone on to do.

I think that you have to have that space to explore that at some point, so where does that come from? If we are not careful with homework, if we just have that... I don't know, a sense of, homework equals success, more homework equals greater success, then where do we find time to... I've just folded my arms, like I'm grumpy. Where do we find time to explore all those other things that give people happiness?

Robin Potter

Okay. I'm fully in there with you too. That's it. My kids aren't listening to this episode, but let's just throw homework out the window, because I never did my homework either. Don't tell them that though.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah, and we all ended up all right.

Robin Potter

Yeah. We all ended up all right, and we made it through and the whole bit. I think the question was discipline really. That's what it fell back for when I started this conversation was more about getting those skills.

Andy Psarianos

Routines.

Robin Potter

Routines. You don't need homework, I guess. You can develop routines and discipline in other ways, other than just getting a page of homework done for the sake of creating a routine.

Andy Psarianos

Well look, this is the subject we were talking about with Katriona not that long ago, where effectively, this is Katriona Lord-Levins, I think it was episode 63, why do we send people to school? At the heart, that's really the question, and it used to be because we needed automatons way back when. When the school system was set up, we needed people who would do what they were told, but I don't know that we need that many people... I mean, obviously people need to be able to work in a social environment. That's different than being told what to do, right? So if you're giving kids homework, it's like, why are you giving them homework?

Is it so that they will conform to your work ethic? Is that really what you're trying to get them to do? To say, "I want you to behave this way. Get into these routines that I'm going to set for you," or, is it about getting them to learn more stuff? Because I don't think the learning more stuff actually works either. I don't think we want people who just follow rules so much anymore. I think we need people who are better at making decisions and are better problem solvers in general, right?

If you look forward, what's society going to look like when those kids grow up? I don't know about your kids, but my kids sometimes struggle with making decisions, and I, as a parent, have willfully tried to force them to make decisions. So again, maybe that's me trying to regulate what my belief system says they should be like. But what is homework helping with? I guess that's the question. Is it about learning more stuff? I don't know that kids learn more stuff by doing homework. Is it about following routines? I'm not sure that's what we want.

Adam Gifford

We want children to have the space and time to... They form discipline because they choose to do things on their own. I absolutely guarantee that, Andy, when he was saying no to his homework, way back when, there was something else that he wanted to do and he needed no encouragement to do it. I think some of those things, as long as they're positive and legal, then these are good. These are good things that we need to provide the space and time for, so I think that we cannot turn it into an argument, that's one in which, the only place to be self-regulated and to be self-motivated comes through the construct of homework, because I think that when children are given that space, and the one criticism I have is what I see a lot, is that children are structured to do so much now. Give them some space to be bored and to do their stuff.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah, and also be mindful that homework could, for some children, be the catalyst to their downfall. Because if I go back and evaluate, by the time I was in secondary school... I know we've talked about this before, but I got kicked out of one secondary school, and I can directly relate some of my behaviours to homework, because I would be given homework and then I wouldn't do it. Then what would I do? Well, I wouldn't go to the next class where I was supposed to hand in the homework, because that would just be like, "Well, where's your homework?" And I'd be, "I don't have it." So the best way to do that is just avoid the situation and not go to the class.

Where did that lead? Well, that led to me being kicked out as a school and then was that... Now, fortunately, that happened to be the best thing that ever happened to me, because that was the thing that made me change my patterns. I found something. But I could just as easily have never found something. That could have been my down. That homework could have been the thing that led me away from a formal education completely, right? It could have been. It was very close to being, so just be mindful. You can break stuff with homework too, right?

Robin Potter

That's for our next topic. How to break stuff with homework.

Andy Psarianos

How to break stuff. Okay. How to destroy children. Thanks everyone.

Andy Psarianos

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