Homework is something that just about everyone is familiar with. As long as you went to school as a child, you definitely had to do homework. For some, being given homework didn’t mean much. They either refused to do it on their own or they preferred to copy it from their classmates. For others, they have parents and elder siblings who would do it for them. Not teach them how to do it.
So, however it goes, homework has come to be a major part of our culture. As it stands, coming home from school without having homework would feel odd and weird, even your parents would suspect that the school, or the teacher, is not doing their job right. As if the homework is proof of a job well done.
And to an extent, I understand this mindset. Most schools don’t allow their pupils to take their books home for safekeeping. So, many times, the parents can’t have first-hand access to how exactly their pupils are performing in the school. However, with the assignment books, you can know just how well they’re performing. If your child is consistently getting top marks in their assignments, then you’re sure that they’re on the right track. And this is somewhat better than relying fully on the promises of the teachers or waiting until the results for the term are out.
However, this does not mean that I’m all for it. I can fully understand homework during my time. Back then, it was basically as if the teachers were giving us notes to go and write at home. In Maths, sometimes we’re given nothing less than twenty equations to solve. And on and on it goes. Yeah, during that period, it helped us a lot, but is that still a method that should be employed today?
In this day and age, I don’t think giving pupils voluminous assignments would do anything to make them better. Especially with the AI and the internet being able to solve whatever problem may arise. I’ve mentioned this before. Things like multiplications, additions, and subtractions shouldn’t be the focus anymore because, whether we like it or not, a lot of people don’t even bother themselves to make calculations in their heads anymore.
We have calculators in phones, computers, and even in smartwatches. You have computers that can solve complex equations in seconds. Teaching students to learn how to solve such equations would be a waste of time. Are they trying to compete with the computers? No! Instead, what can be done is to teach our students how to adapt to the fast-changing world. How to use said computers in a way that will benefit our society.
Whether we like it or not, technology is taking over. A lot of things that we were taught to do as kids, we thought that we would need them as adults, but we’re not using many of them. Assignments should be given in a way that even if they have the textbook open before them, they still won’t get the answer if they don’t know how to solve it. That’s how to build minds.
So, my dear friends, I really hope that we can do better. This calls for a revolution, a way to change the education system. No more voluminous assignments, and let’s see assignments that will actually challenge the pupils so that when they’re done solving them, they’ll actually be more intelligent. Anything else besides that, we’re simply repeating the same things that have been done to us since we were born.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat!
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