There's a "culture of low expectation" in secondary schools. Do you agree?

wordfactory, do feel free to come and teach my lessons for me. Brecht at year 9 is pretty advanced, and given that it is a performing arts lesson, I will stand by my assertion that knowing a theatre practitioner's life story is utterly irrelevant. I am very very good at what I do, and whilst your DD's drama teacher may have a different approach, it doesn't make mine any less valid. I have many years of Yr 11 & Yr 13 results to justify myself, before anyone accuses me of arrogance.

Habba, thank you for answering my question. What a shame your DC's school didn't cover the basics.

My DTDs are 6. I do not make them do homework, and agree that very young children don't really have "time" for it. I would rather they spent that hour between school and dinner playing outside at the moment. They read avidly and do their fair share of activities. There is no space in their week for worksheets. Fortunately, their (outstanding state) primary has the same opinion and doesn't set homework.

"If the school encourages the pushy parents the gap gets ever wider until at some point in the child's life, they just have to coast..."

We put our kids into selective schools. Coasting problem sorted.

"The school doesn't do much homework because up until about the age of 9 children only have around 3 hours spare time in the evening and most of that is taken up with eating and bathtime anyway"

At the age of 9 DS did 20min homework (English and Maths - happy now Evil? and 30 min music practice most days. On top of this he had football on the Monday and athletics on the Wednesday. On school nights he was allowed about an hour TV or PC (his choice which) but all gadgets had to be off by 8pm and he had to read for about 15 minutes before bed (his choice of books).

He had swimming on the Saturday. After swimming he had orchestra and a music lesson in the afternoon. Saturday evening he would alternate homes with his BF and they would play PC games or watch YouTube videos. Sundays is family day. We usually go to the park and walk over to our local Toby for a sunday roast. Afterwards the adults would read the Sundays with a glass of wine. The kids would either hang out at home or walk over to their mates. Evening meal followed by TV or some board game. Cluedo and Monopoly was quite popular.

This is with both DP and myself in fulltime jobs. And they ate and bathed daily :)

So please excuse me while I roll my eyes at the 'kids don't have time for homework' argument.

wordfactory, the GCSE results that I posted were for maths.

talkinpeace, I love 'The Life Scientific' and often sit in the car listening to the end of it .

But wondering if you felt so strongly about homework, why as a teacher didn't you just say no?

I'm still waiting for a teacher to tell me that homework is not for the parents.

Here's what happens. Your oldest starts at primary school. You invest everything you can in choice of school and want her to be very successful there. The school doesn't do much homework because up until about the age of 9 children only have around 3 hours spare time in the evening and most of that is taken up with eating and bathtime anyway. The parents push for homework, concerned that their child is somehow falling behind in the race. Over the years schools have obliged reluctantly to give homework to children, ever younger.

It works well for parents who have time but not so well for the other children. Those children are left behind by the pushy parents, who then proclaim to teachers that their children are 'bright'. They are not 'bright', they have just had more learning time.

If the school encourages the pushy parents the gap gets ever wider until at some point in the child's life, they just have to coast while the other (normal, not 'not bright', perfectly as good as everyone else's) children develop and learn at a normal and average (not thick, or underprivileged or neglected) rate. Parents get peeved and so try and blame the school, the teachers or the system. If they have time to waste they set up a free school so they don't have to put up with the horrors of averageness. Their child is 'bright', remember.

Pushy parents make a rod for their own backs. My dd did no extra work in primary school, we didn't spend whole weekends on projects like some of her friends. Her teachers liked my attitude! She's doing fine at GCSEs, with A* anticipated in most subjects. What has happened is that she has learned in the way the national curriculum is designed - at a steady rate, allowing for plenty of free time to develop her life outside school. And she is doing very well thank you.

I am bitter about this because I see many children being made to feel inadequate when there is absolutely nothing inadequate about them. And it's not because they are born 'bright', it is because they have been pushed at an early age.

You are completely missing Evil's point, Habba, and I don't think anyone has actually quoted Brecht.

Well Evil I'm quite cheered to see school children not being taught to go for the biographical approach to texts, actually - which is often quite a lazy option. In this particular case, I quite agree that that would be an example of a pointless homework for the sake of it.

Why are you seeking to derail the OP? You may feel that all the activities that you do with your DCs trumps any homework that the school might dish out but that isn't the issue in front of us.

And why do you keep quoting Brecht to me? I'm not aware that I've criticised the type of homework that you assign to your students.

Well evil it sounds like your parameters for what is successful are too narrow for my liking. And for my DD's drama teacher for that matter.

But each to their own.

Why are you being difficult? My question is pretty simple. Were you having to do anything specifically different in order to need to refer to it as "homework"?

The point about Brecht and homework is this...
The kids are doing a project. It explores the theme of conflict and introduces them to Brecht's main ideas (they are yr 9, not A Level Theatre Studies students) Any homework I set needs to enhance the students' ability to hut the success criteria of the project. Knowing about Brecht as a person will not do that. If there was an ofsted inspector in the room, he or she would need to see evidence that the homework task led to progress in the project. Researching Brecht's life would not do that in this context. It simply wouldn't. I do think I know my job better than you.

We were talking about schools and their homework policy and whether homework serves any use in backing up what the teacher is doing or whether its a time wasting distraction.

What has that got to do with what you or I choose to do at home with our respective kids?

If you want to know what I do with my kids, homework or otherwise, start up a thread and I'll meet you there.

Evil no one mentioned reciting anything!!

You're deliberately trying to make any homework sound pointless...

But if you can't see that anyhting outside of your lesson (what do they get? One or two a week?) would braoden and deepen a pupil's understanding of Brecht then that is actually very very sad!

Habba, my point was that a great many parents do stuff with their kids because that's the kind if stuff parents do with their kids. It was your insistence on referring to it as "homework" that made me My question to you (which you haven't answered) was is the "homework" you did with your DC any different to the "activities" I do with mine?

Researching Brecht would not be deemed an appropriate homework by ofsted because it does not add anything to their learning in my lesson. Being able to recite his life story doesn't come into the success criteria for the project so it's pointless. Whilst I would never prevent a child from a) doing that research and b) sharing their findings with the class, I would not set it as homework. Ditto watching YouTube clips of Mother Courage.

Talkin - I only got round to reading your latest posts.

You caught a glimpse of some kids doing homework at your gym and that is the basis for your generalisations about private schools and homework???

You have a number of parents describing to you what kind of homework their kids get (researching WWI at home so that the class could discuss how that gave rise to Soviet Russia and Nazism is not 'padding').

Yet you choose to ignore this and instead you prefer to generalize based on what you saw down at the gym and from this you extrapolate to to cover all private schools??? Nice to see that you came to the thread with an open mind.

talkin - I know that you like to wheel out your DH whenever someone questions your opinion on education. You've probably mentioned it in the past but what does he actually do? All I recall reading is that he 'visits hundreds of schools each year'.

If he sells supplies to schools or service their PCs then that hardly makes him an authority on education matters. In any case, I visit hundreds of shops a year but it doesnt mean DP should be citing me as an authority on retailing or merchandising issues

Evil - I said that our primary school wasn't particularly academic so I had to step up and make up for this. What has that comment have to do with what you do with your DC? So right back at you.

What extrapolations have I made?

I have not said all homework is great and purposeful. Quite the opposite.

I have not said all private schools and selective schools only give homework that is great and purposeful.

I have simply said that your gross generalisations are silly. And as you can see teachers have not flooded on to support you or refute what I've said. So...

wordfactory
as you stated yesterday that you did not know what KS3 was
I'll take DH's extrapolations (which I merely post on here) as being rather more accurate than yours.

Time to go to work.

As for Brecht, I can only think that putting him in contect would hugely deepen a student's undertanding of his work and importance.

As would watching some of the wonderful clips on YouTube. There are clips of Meryl Streep on there, the National Theatre etc etc etc

With all due respect talkin I suspect the students you see in the gym attend one or two of your local schools.

To extrapoltae from that that all private and selective schools only give out HW to please the parents and it is all pointless is plain silly.

I think the difference is that if you're in a school, as evil clearly is where HW becomes divisive, then you work around it. You have to! Wheras if you work in a school where HW will get done (generally) then you can use it to its best purpose.

The only problem that I can see is that the motivated DC in evil's school may miss out because she has no laternative but to run things to accommodate those who wouldn't do it...

Which I guess brings us full circle to the OP.

DS gets very little "homework" : but I have him working gradually through the whole of bitesize before he's allowed on the x-box and our house is a BBC2/BBC4/Radio4 house so the learning is seeping in and round constantly.

My (GDST) school used to set lots of homework that came back with a tick at the bottom and a grade.
Which was fine but the homework grades bore no relation how I did in my Os and As
because - now I'm married to somebody who visits staff rooms a lot - I realise that that sort of homework is pointless.
The online maths stuff is GREAT as it self marks and just sends the teachers the moderation information

but the homework I see kids from the private schools doing in the bar at the gym is quite clearly padding that will only be cursorily marked
or even "peer marked"

Habba - with regards to setting your DCs homework because their school wasn't academic... Is that the same or different to what I do - reading a range of books with them, taking them to plays, concerts and galleries, playing maths games, doing science experiments, creating pictures of the solar system and letting them stay up late to look through our telescope, playing spellings games in the car on long journeys...

It would never occur to me to refer to that sort of thing as "homework".

senua, because that would be homework for the sake of homework, which ofsted frowns upon and I believe us pointless. Read a review of what? Read his biography for what purpose? Watch a YouTube clip of what? Knowing when Brecht was born will not extend their understanding of verfrumdungseffekt.

I am not saying I never set homework. I teach GCSE and Level 2 & 3 BTEC as well and they need to do things out of lessons so that we can focus on the practical stuff in lessons, but at KS3 I will only set homework if it actually has a point.

beatback - I totally with your comment about people adapting to the norm.

In primary school I would set homework for my DCs because their school wasn't particularly academic. DD was ok but DS would often have a moan about how no one else gets given homework by their parents.

They are both at selectives now. It is the norm to do regular homework and to revise for the regular tests so I don't need to be a helicopter parent anymore.

I've retired my subscription to Pushy Parenting Monthly for the time being :) No doubt I'll renew my subscriotion as they approach their next milestone ie GCSEs but for the time being, peer pressure has negated the need for pushy parenting.