μεταcole

I was reading a blog post by Trisha (a teacher in Singapore) entitled “Why I Hate Teaching“.

She doesn’t really hate teaching – her post is a rant against the system under which she teaches, where she has to do everything else in addition to her teaching.

Like photocopying handouts and worksheets, collecting school fees from students – totally absurd!

Anyway, one of her complaints was that teachers have a perpetual backlog of student work to grade:

8) I hate having to keep a red pen in every one of my handbags, because I am constantly having to mark something. I hate bringing scripts with me everywhere I go. I hate it that my marking is never finished, even on the last day of the school year, because there just isn’t enough time for teachers to mark their students’ work, and because we have to do so many other non-teaching-related work.

A bulk of this grading work is a result of giving students (too much) homework.

I was never a fan of homework when I was in school. Well, most normal and mentally-sound students probably feel the same. But unlike most of my classmates, I didn’t do most of my homework. In fact, I used to get into a lot of trouble with my teachers because of that. (But that’s another story.)

But I did alright for my examinations, at least most of the time.
Not because I’m some kind of genius (I’m not), but perhaps the recent TIME article “The Myth About Homework” can shed some light:

[H]omework does not measurably improve academic achievement for kids in grade school. […]

Too much homework brings diminishing returns.

I wish I knew all this when I was a student, so I could have a more sophisticated reason (excuse?) rather than “I forgot” or “I didn’t have time” or more recently “the computer virus ate my homework”.

And perhaps if more teachers know this, they would have better reasons to give less homework and thus lighten their already-hefty loads.