I could rant wildly about this subject forever but will try and keep to the point. My daughters school has a weekly 'learning log' as homework. The book will contain some vague and subjective notion about what the homework should be and the children are encouraged to present it in a creative way, using art, photographs, models, home video, powerpoint presentations or whatever they like. A recent example being "We have been learning about fractions in class, creatively show what you have learned". Sounds lovely and I understand that it gives each child the scope to complete the same homework task within their own ability level.
The problem for me begins in the fact that myself and my girls are not naturally creative people. We are rather boring actually and although we are imaginative enough we would all rather get lost in a good book or film than do arty stuff and as a result we have little arty crafty materials in the house. We complete the homework, always being sure to have fulfilled the task set out and almost every week get comments like "you could have been more creative with your presentation", "You could have used more colour in your diagrams". We do try and vary our ideas and push our very limited creative boundaries and yet every single week my daughters homework is found wanting, despite being factually correct, just because it is not presented through the medium of dance or something.
To be honest I find that the tasks tend to be a bit of a waste of time because they are never the type of thing that will actually re-enforce what they have done at school, and they rarely involve researching or learning anything new. I never learned anything about subtraction by making a poster about it. I just hate hate hate the whole concept of it and find it so hard not to let on to my DD about what a load of old shit I think it is. Anyone else??????