Month: June 2008

Homework – enough is enough

Some good news from the front line in the battle against academic overload. The Toronto School Board has voted to roll back the homework juggernaut. In Canada’s largest city, children will no longer be assigned work over Christmas, Spring Break and other important holidays. Kindergarten pupils will not face any more take-home assignments apart from reading or chatting to parents. Up to Grade 2, homework will largely consist of playing games and family activities such as baking. There are also strict limits in the later years. Kids in Grade 7 and 8 will get no more than one hour a day across all subjects, high-schoolers a maximum of two. The Toronto School Board’s aim is to shift the emphasis from quantity to quality. As well as cutting the hours, that means making sure homework assignments are clear, purposeful and engaging rather than just box-ticking busy-work.

There is much to applaud here. In schools around the world, homework has become a millstone slung around the neck of teachers, pupils and parents. Yet research shows that it is of limited value up to the age of 11. Even for older children homework is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Some experts think is should be abolished altogether. If it is to have any hope of being useful, homework must be assigned in reasonable amounts to avoid crowding out time for rest, play, and socializing. It also needs a clear purpose beyond keeping kids busy. More and more books are making this point. One of the most compelling isThe Case Against Homework, by Sara Bennett, who writes a splendid blog that has become a lightning rod in this debate. I also devote a chapter to homework in Under Pressure.

Much of that chapter explores how schools across the world are taking steps to free children from the tyranny of too much of the wrong kind of homework and finding that they learn better as a result. The bold change of heart in Toronto is just part of a larger trend that includes a recent decision by the Education Board of Shanghai, China to abolish homework for all first and second graders.

Of course, beyond the academic reasons for keeping homework on a tight rein lies the deeper question of what childhood is for. If we want it to be a time of play, freedom, and wonder, then piling on the homework is not the way to go about it. What are your happiest memories of childhood? I’ll bet they don’t involve slogging through pages of fractions and spelling lists. Mine are of long afternoons playing road hockey with friends in our driveway, and leaving the garage doors covered in a permanent Jackson Pollock of tennis-ball marks. Or war games in the backyard with elastic-band guns made from scraps of wood and bent coat hangers. Or playing Maze Craze, a battle game that we invented using Lego and marbles. Many of the boys with whom I shared those afternoons are still friends today. None of us can remember a single homework assignment.


Snail Mail…

All around the world artists are grappling with our addiction to speed – hardly surprising given the intimate link between slowness and the act of creation. I know of at least oneSlow Art Manifesto. And every week seems to bring the launch of another exhibition exploring the tension between fast and slow. A few days ago it was the turn ofNo Time To Losein Aberdeen, Scotland. But today I want to draw your attention to a charmingly eccentric slow art project at Bournemouth University in the UK. It’s called Real Snail Mail and its aim is to make us rethink our impatient relationship with time and technology. It works like this: Three genuine snails have been placed in a tank and fitted with devices that send emails on behalf of visitors to awebsite. When a snail slithers past one of the transmitting nodes in the tank, it collects a message that has been downloaded from the site. It then slithers away at a very unhurried 0.03mph (0.05km/h) . When the snail passes within range of another node, the email is dispatched to the recipient. The whole process can take hours, days, weeks, or even longer. One snail, Austin, has emerged as the fastest delivery boy of the three: he has sent 10 messages with an average delivery time of 1.96 days. But his pal, Muriel, has so far failed to dispatch a single email. Anyway, I’m wondering if I can file my tax return this way.

Hitting the Buffers

A BBC Radio 4 programme investigating the pitfalls of our addiction to speed.

Warrior girls

Last week I shared a stage in Chicago with Michael Sokolove, the genial but sharp-eyed author of a compelling new book called Warrior Girls.It explores the same terrain that I look at in the Sports chapter of Under Presure, but in greater depth (it’s a whole book on the subject, after all) and with the focus on girls. Our insistence on treating children like professional athletes, with punishing training regimes, long seasons, win-at-all-costs competition and early specialization is taking a heavy toll, but in some ways the damage is worse for girls because their bodies are simply not as robust. Less testosterone means less muscle and more oestrogen means laxer ligaments. That makes girls more prone to chronic knee pain; shin splints; stress fractures; ankle sprains; concussions; hip and back pain. They are five times more likely than are boys to rupture an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). Just look at the roll call of female athletes hobbled by over-training in their youth. Katharine Merry, the fastest girl in the world at 14, was laid low by a series of knee, achilles and foot injuries. Martina Hingis hit the pro tennis tour at 14 but was forced by foot and angle injuries to retire at 22. Foot trouble ended Anna Kournikova’s tennis career at the same age. Of course, sports are wonderful for girls and we should be encouraging more of them to take part. But this needs to be done in the right spirit – that means without turning sports into a fight to the death. Like boys, girls need to learn to push themselves hard without pushing themselves over the edge.

Summer’s out…

Another thought to add to my May 24th post about the demise of the summer vacation. One of the rites of passage for teenagers used to be working a summer job – usually something menial like washing cars or bagging groceries. I waited tables, worked on a construction crew, ran a photocopying shop and mowed lawns. None was ever going to be a career choice but I had fun and learned a lot. Today, though, teenagers are turning their back on the dead-end summer job in record numbers. Manydon’t want to work – and don’t have to because their parents are happy to keep paying their credit card bills. Others prefer to burnish their résumés by attending summer school and college-prep programs or by doing volunteer work. Some are setting up their own businesses. All of these are worthy pursuits, but maybe something is getting lost along the way, especially for teenagers from affluent families. Though it may not glitter on a résumé, a menial job can teach some important lessons – that not everyone is as rich as you,that life can be tough and unpleasant, thatsometimes you have to keep on working when you’d rather stop. In arecent article inUSA Today,leading CEOs explained that doing menial summer jobs in their teens gave them a solid grounding for later success. As parents we want to give our children the best of everything, which tends not to include flipping burgersat McDonald’s or cleaning out the toilets at the mall. But maybe it should. After all, nothing punctures that sense of entitlement, that feeling that only the best is good enough, more than getting bossed around at a dead-end job. Instead ofgetting our kids accustomed to the best of everything, perhaps we should be helping them to learn a much more useful skill: how to make the best of what they’ve got. I hear Burger King is now taking applications for the summer…

Postcards from the edge…

I’m in the US right now touring forUnder Pressure, which means a parade of interviews with radio stations around the country. I love the call-in shows especially because I get to hear from parents, teachers, social workers – all those people on the front-line of child-rearing. And it really seems that there is a growing consensus that we have collectively lost our bearings. Callers often share amusing and/or horrifying examples of hyper-parenting. A few minutes ago someone in Milwaukee said that a friend in New York has sent her infant to mastication classes because she’s worried he’s not chewing well enough. Another story: When a child in Chicago uttered his first word, his mother called in speech therapist to accelerate his language development. Or the parents who papered (literally) their hotel room with bubble-wrap to prevent their toddler from hurting herself. I could go on but I have to go give a talk now….