Projects

[Alouiseg]

It seems to me that "projects" are being used by schools under the guise of "independent learning" to avoid teaching the pupils properly and letting the onus fall onto parents and/or plagiarism.

My year 7 son was recently set an independent learning task about Non Decimal Number Systems. How on earth can a child independently research that, then come up with their own without any formal teaching? My husband luckily could help him after several hours of hand wringing and googling by me. We had no text book just a suggestion that the internet was to be used with no direction as to which sites would be appropriate or relevant. This is a big ask for an 11 year old and i am beginning to think that all these independent tasks have been set by the school to get the parents used to chipping in for coursework at gcse level.

The pupils are not being taught they are being sent home to Mum and Dad to cover a curriculum that we have no idea about the structure or content of.

Every project has resulted in huge amounts of help from us as parents and frankly i've had enough. Every evening, holiday and weekend is doomed by the spectre of homework.

Somebody give me a perspective on this as i have fired off a stinging email to the head of year.

"Ds will be the only child who has completed the question and answered it properly"

How on earth do you know that!

It can't be as hard as you stated, I did binery in primary school back in the 70s. My DD is year 7 and I don't see a problem with her doing a project like this.

well done Alouiseg, 3 hours ridiculous.
There are more important topics than hexadecimal division, and they should take priority, but they probably wouldn't earn any smiley faces.

Alouiseg, apparently they can't concentrate for 30 mins, but they are expected to do homework that lasts more than 3 hours.

Bruffin, I did Binary back in primary school in the 70's too but i don't remember how it works and I could never multiply or divide in it. Can you do the sum i posted further up this thread?

Im just wondering(as its all going waaaaaay over my head) if this was just a research request from the teacher to help the students understand?

To clarify....Ds was asked to write an essay about, why as humans we are the superior race?

He was struggling to understand it and so we looked at it together and he wrote an alternative view as in how do we know we are a superior race? how do we know that animals dont think they are a superior race? what about other life forms just because we dont see them doesnt mean they arent around and they might be superior?

What actually makes us superior? and many years ago we thought we were wonderful with the invention of the wheel etc ,many inventions have since been ridiculed.

How do we know that what we say about genetic engineering is true? only time will tell.

And what is superiority and why do we want it?

His teacher phoned me up very impressed and said it really was an off the cuff homework due to the fact that some students seemed to think they were 'supeior'....and he hadnt expected such great depth but could he use it for an assembly piece.....

Id say support schoolwork but only to your sons understanding.

Youve had your time at school let the teachers get a fair assumption of your childs capabilities not his Dads.

nickschick, what a fantastic piece of homework, and what a brilliant answer by your son. That is top quality education. That required real thinking, no need to spend hours googling, just pure thought. Your son needed a little help to start him off, but after that he was away. I bet he really enjoyed doing it, and I bet the teacher really enjoyed reading it.

I'm not surprised the teacher phoned you up, s/he must have been flabbergasted. I doubt the teacher could have done a better job. The amazing thing was that the homework was totally unintentional, just off the cuff. I bet the teacher has learned from that and will throw in more homework like that. That's the type of stuff that really develops minds.

Unfortunately the homework that Alouiseg's son received pales in comparison to the worthwhile homework that your son's teacher set. The sad thing is that the "Head of Maths who tells me that a code of one smiley face plus another smiley face equals a laughing face" probably can't see that.

Maths is objective and methodology has to be sound before understanding can take place. Opinions have no place in maths at this age or stage.

Writing an essay is a lovely expression of freedom and expression with plenty of room for opinion.

Nickschick, how old is your DS may I ask?

That's a really good essay by the sound of it! I love tasks like that, the teacher will learn so much more about students than with worksheets.

Can you tell, I REALLY hate worksheets. My DSDs have had no end of them (even in yr7) and are no wiser about the subject when they've handed them in.

When I was in yr5 we were each given a scrapbook and told to do a project on whatever we wanted (I chose cats). We were just told to add to it as and when we wanted. It was a great way for us to follow our own interests. Mind you this was before the internet really took off, probably nowadays there'd be some kids who just printed a load of web pages and stuck them in

3m

"Binary, octal, hexadec are all NDNS but they want bloody emoticons!"

No, what they want is the children to do the homework.

They want the children to see what they can come up with; exploring, experimenting and being active and involved in their own learning for 3 hours. Far more beneficial, I would suggest, then lecturing a group of year 7's for 30 minutes. There are studies on things like attention spans and retention of information and skills, but as that would take independent learning I guess we'll have to agree to differ.

My ds is now 16 he was about 13 when he did that essay.

He did enjoy doing it but I dont think a lot of his classmates 'got it' that was in our v early days of having a home pc so we were used to using our imagination lol.