Giving homework makes no sense in many SA schools

Homework is a middle-class concept. It does not work, I discovered, in working class schools where I spent my mornings over the past year.

Like so many “common sense” ideas about schooling the world over, the routine issuing of homework makes no sense at all in many South African schools.

It hit me like a heavy textbook on my head this week as I finally pieced together a puzzle that had a missing piece that I had long struggled to find. Got it, finally.

The case for homework is compelling. Teachers use it to reinforce a key idea or method in the subject.

Old fashioned teachers might teach a class during the day on how to add and subtract decimals and then give the poor children 20 examples of the same thing to practise at home. Ouch.

Imaginative teachers might have done the same lesson but then find ways of stretching the pupils intellectually, giving them more complex applications of the topic to try out on their own. Nice.

Teachers who feel the pressure of compliance from department officials might use homework to catch up on work for which they did not have enough time in school. Real.

Overall, we are often told, homework is good for the academics and confidence of young people. Maybe.

But what does a homework policy of a school assume is in place? It assumes that the child has a safe and secure space at home in which to do homework.

It assumes there is light and food and drinks to sustain after-school learning.

It assumes the child has the concentration capacity to do schoolwork again after six or seven hours in a classroom.

It assumes there are other adults that might help with some of the homework tasks. And so on.

So, when one of my colleagues complained, like many do, that the children are not doing homework and that this is one reason for their poor academic results, I asked myself the forbidden question: what if there is a rational reason for why children do not do homework?

Having listened carefully to working class youth for more than a year, it suddenly dawned on me that our assumptions about doing homework were all wrong.

So, let me pose the corresponding questions (all drawn from real cases) to the ones above.

What if irresponsible parents have their friends over every night for never-ending parties?

What if there is food insecurity in the home? What if there are no strictures on children for when to return home from visiting friends or go to bed — because there are no parents present? What if ...

Whatever advantages homework might offer, the conditions under which many (not all) children live, with dysfunctional families, erase any of those benefits.

So, what is to be done?

First, accept that homework is not going to happen but for a few.

Second, make the homework part of the daily class routine.

One of our highly skilled mathematics teachers uses the first five minutes of every class to review what he did the day before and adds some additional tasks to enrich what was already covered.

This week, I revised the life sciences (grade 11, the role of micro-organisms in symbiosis) I taught earlier in the term by reteaching the lesson in a different way that included in-classroom tasks that consolidated everything I taught before.

At the end of the revision, a girl in front of one of the classes said unexpectedly, “thank you for doing that, sir”.

What was she referring to?

I believe she signalled that she would not have had this opportunity to learn were it not rehearsed in the classroom.

That this second chance meant doing the consolidation of earlier work with other pupils rather than on her own.

That there was real-time feedback on errors that could be attended to in class.

Or to put it crisply, that there was no homework to do away from or outside this more productive learning context.

The problem for teachers is that they are under enormous pressure to deliver on what is called ATPs (annual teaching plans), broken into smaller units of specified teaching content that must be covered in a relatively short period of time.

The more teachers consolidate, as in the examples above, the more they fall behind with the ATPs.

There is a way around the pressure for compliance.

The first is to learn how to use time optimally.

If lessons start on time with every single turn of period; if revision is structured, as in the example above, in short bursts at the start of every lesson; if a 30-minute after-school lesson can happen every second day — then both goals can be met, compliance with officialdom and competence in learning.

What is completely unhelpful, however, is throwing up our hands in despair as teachers and announcing “they don’t do their homework”.

That kind of resignation is not only misguided, it solves nothing at all.