Sunday, 7 May 2017

Fun VS. Homework

Hi guys!

Today we are going to talk about homework, a topic that could affect negatively the health of children; they could impede children's physical and psychological welfare.

“In our country, since the age of 11, there are a high percentage of children (25%) who feel overwhelmed by the excess of exercises they have to do at home”.(Bailén y Polo, 2016). With these evidences, we can observe that afternoons and weekends consist on being at home, studying and doing homework. In this way, they haven´t got any free time to carry out playful and creative games, or to practice extracurricular activities, like some sports, which are essential in the physical and mental children’s development. Everything they could live in these activities is positive: the interaction with their peer group, with a team, the experience of having a coach (who becomes an important figure in their lives), etc. 
In addition, homework affects the harmony of the home; the relationship between children and parents could become irritable. Parents are working during the day and when they arrive at home, their children are doing their homework. They haven´t got enough time to interact between them; they need to talk about how the day has gone and carry out activities together.

However, there are authors who are in favor of the assignment, and they consider that homework, if they are well programmed, makes children more responsible, and that they allow a review of the contents, which children have previously learnt in the school. (De toro, 2014)

Therefore, it would be a good idea to reduce the amount of homework or to leave free periods, in order to motivate children, and giving them time to enjoy with their families, interact with their friends… With this method, we could achieve that students arrive each day with enthusiasm to class, taking advantage of the hours they spend at school.

Finally, we think that is important to achieve that children have a balanced life. That is, they have to be responsible to do their tasks, and at the same time they need free time to enjoy with their friends and their family.

In our own experience, we remember that we arrived so tired at our home, and we had to do a lot of homework, and even we had to do some copies because of we were very noisy or something like that. In this way there were a lot of things we could not do: play with our friends, visit our grandparents, watch films with our family…

On several occasions, we did not know how to do our tasks, perhaps because teachers didn’t explain what we had to do, they only told us that it was compulsory to do the homework, and if we did not do it, we had a negative, or maybe two…


We remembered that if we did not finish the tasks or activities that the teacher had ordered the day before, we stayed at breaks in the classroom finishing them, taking away the time that we had to enjoy with our friends. This action made us hate our homework more. Sometimes, we felt that the teachers’ worry was if we had done the activities, and no if we had understood it.

References:

Bailén, E; Polo, I. (2016). Deberes escolares/school homework: the reflection of an educational systmen. El reflejo de un sistema educativo. Avances en supervisión educativa”, (25), 36.

De toro, I. (2014). Deberes de calidad Vs deberes de cantidad. Universidad Internacional de la Rioja, 53. Extraído de: http://reunir.unir.net/handle/123456789/2589

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