Ricardo Morales shares some of his early experiences with setting homework as a teacher.
My first job as an ESL teacher was one of the most gratifying experiences I have ever had. Not only was it an eye-opening experience, but it also revealed my true passion in life: teaching. I’m not here to bore you with stories of my early days as a teacher, which were so long ago that Old English was still considered Modern English. Neither am I here to describe how I discovered that I wanted to be an ESL teacher. However, I need to refer to my early days as a teacher to talk about something that, in those days, I always found hard to understand as part of my teaching: homework.
“As part of your teaching duties, you must assign your students twenty pages from their workbook every Friday. They have to turn in their workbooks with the homework assignment first thing on Monday. You can choose to take the workbooks home or stay in the teachers’ room after class to correct and mark the assignments. Homework has to be returned to students before Thursday; that is the day when you give feedback to students. Then on Friday, you have to assign another set of twenty pages and follow the same routine. Any questions?”
This was said to me as a part of a lightning-fast introductory speech by Mr. Villa, the Academic Chair of the institution where I took my baby steps as a teacher. I replied in the negative, without knowing what I was getting into, because I was certain I had no other choice – after all, teaching was my newly-discovered passion. The homework assignment system in that institution turned out to be a disaster, and I am sure you have guessed why.
As the course of my career took me to several kinds of teaching-related institutions in different parts of the world, I had the opportunity to share experiences and teaching beliefs with teachers from many different latitudes. I found out that other colleagues, too, were familiar with the homework assignment situation that I described earlier; even more worrisome, other teachers had worse stories to share. This issue raises a few questions, the main one being: What do we assign homework for? This is a question with many possible answers, all of them equally valid.
One answer that might find common ground is that we assign homework so students can practice what they have learned in class. That is true – homework provides a golden opportunity for extended practice – but if a student is not properly supervised during the time he is practising, the time invested in homework may not achieve its primary objective. So how are we going to solve this problem and make homework a really meaningful activity? Are we going to spend our afternoons calling parents to ask about their children’s homework? Or, in a more absurd scenario, are we going to start spending our afternoons visiting students to check their progress?
Why not share your thoughts on the topic – what do you assign homework for?