Homework is not just about school

Two congressmen filed a house bill prohibiting schools and teachers from giving homework to students from kinder to high school. A similar bill has been filed in the Senate prohibiting homework during weekends. Up to last week, modifications were proposed, deleting the penalties on the teachers and depositing school materials in the schools during weekends.

I don’t necessarily agree that this is a matter that should be prioritized by our congressmen and senators as surely there are more pressing and important issues. An administrative order from the Department of Education would probably suffice to resolve this matter. But from the comments of the secretary of Education and the teachers, I believe parents, educators, the academe, and responsible competent persons should comment before this becomes a law.

The legislator’s rationale for the bill is to give the students more quality family time at home and not burden them with time-consuming and difficult home assignments especially on weekends. Considering the current lifestyles of middle/upper class families and the pervasive information and communication technologies that provide entertainment to school children, this rationale is debatable.

Teachers, as voiced by their association ACT, oppose this bill asserting that teachers are trained educators who knows what and when homework is important, and that homework is about discipline, responsibility, and continuity of learning.

There are new teaching/learning methods particularly in the kinder and primary grades that don’t assign homework. Montessori and other progressive schools do this to foster creativity and individual paced learning, thereby allowing students to find their own interests. Most of them allow this up to the primary grades and start giving homework in the 4th grade. I have seen this in my younger children and grandchildren and they don’t seem the worse for it.

While I went through the old school with daily homework and assignments, my opinion on this issue has more to do with time constraint and lifelong learning. Given the six-hour classroom time in a five-day week, homework has to be assigned to speed up the learning process.

When the students get homework, they are already familiar with the lesson and somewhat prepared for additional class discussion to improve further their understanding of the subject matter. Arithmetic and mathematics are subjects that have to be understood and practiced and practiced more to gain mastery, and the more reading you do, the more you expand your vocabulary which enables you to grasp/understand ideas and concepts. To excel in any endeavor is to practice, and homework is additional practice outside of school.

Homework in the elementary and high school is training for the enormous homework one will be doing when one is in college. In the University of the Philippines, one is expected to study more outside the classroom than in it. Most professors don’t bother or care if you attend classes or not as long as you pass the course, which means you must have studied outside the classroom.

When you graduate and go to work or do your own business, you will be doing more homework if you are to succeed. In fact, when something happens in your job or you bungled a negotiation in your business and it was your fault, people say that “you did not do your homework.” Homework is preparation and preparation, is important for success.

Evaluating our current world leaders and politicians, it seems a lot of them are not doing their homework and just “winging” it. Economics, international relations and trade, nuclear disarmament, global warming, world poverty, and terrorism need a lot of consultation and homework. So, it’s understandable why the world is such a mess and will continue to be so unless we elect leaders who do their homework.