An update on the Great Canadian Homework Ban
Well, it’s been over a week since I linked to Alex’s post and unwittingly started a movement. For those of you following along, I was interviewed for a National Post article on the weekend and since then the phone has been ringing off the hook. I’ve done some talk radio and I have CTV Edmonton chasing me around BC, trying to get me on camera. This week I’m in Prince George, working at my real job, running a World Cafe and an Open Space meeting for the Urban Aboriginal Strategy in British Columbia.
But many people are calling and emailing about this homework ban thing, and we seem to have struck a nerve. What has been really interesting to me is that without exception, every journalist and producer that has called (and we’re talking twelve or more at this point) has started out by talking about how much they hate what homework does to their kids and families. Usually when they call they get interviewed by ME, for the first ten minutes or so, so keen am I to hear their story. It has really strengthened my confidence in our decision to unschool, although I appreciate that that isn’t for everyone.
Some of the nicest emails I have received have been from the authors of the two books that were recently published and which started this all off. Alfie Kohn, author of The Homework Myth wrote to lend his support to whatever was going on, and I told him I’d send people to his site, which is a rich source of material about learning and working. So go read Alfie’s stuff, especially if you are thinking seriously about what is going on in school with respect to teaching, learning, testing and evaluating and you are wondering how to make a case for change.
And then on a more practical level Sara Bennet, co-author with Nancy Kalish of “The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It” wrote today and told me about the blog she is starting up at stophomework.com. For those of you that have written to me asking “what can we do?” Sara is the person to get in touch with. Their book even gives examples of emails to use with teachers and principals to get a homework ban going in your school.
And if you are tired fighting with the education system, you have many many options. If you are interested in unschooling as an option, which is what our family does, you can visit my own set of unschooling resources for some reading to get started.
This whole “Great Canadian Homework Ban” is actually just a provocative way to get people to really think about learning. We take so much for granted about the way the school system operates, and there is so much fear connected to success and failure in school that I believe strongly that we are creating a culture that blindly accepts some cultural story about what works and what doesn’t. The bottom line, in my own experience, is that every child has their own learning needs, and every parent can help meet those needs by keeping a few basic questions at the top of mind. Think about the school system, and what it teaches. Read John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, David Albert and others and think about the kind of learning environment that will best serve your kids.
And for all those who say “if kids don’t do homework they will just play video games” (which seems to be the last line of the crumbling defense) I challenge you to do three things: get rid of the PlayStation, cancel your cable subscription and intentionally spend time with your kids co-creating a list of things you could do together. Like any drug, it’s hard to kick, but you’ll be glad you did. Tell them that the deal is, you’ll support them NOT doing homework if they will engage with you to create real learning experiences outside of school, together. And then take all the free time you’ll have and enjoy one another. It’s not THAT hard to do.
PS…and because it’s a movement now I made a little seal (up above there, with the busy beaver as our mascot, too busy for homework) which you can steal and post on your own blog. Better yet, print out a sheet of them as stickers and plaster them on unfinished homework assignments. Now THERE’S an activity guaranteed to get kids and parents working together!
[tags]homework[/tags]
Hi Chris…
Can you believe it..I’m surfing blogs!! Just wanted you to know I was on your case…sounds like you’ve become an overnight celebrity by just being who you are.
Hugs to you,
Juanita
Yeah…that’s me. And here I am responding to blog comments as I’m taking a break from typing up the harvest from a Cafe we did today here in Prince George…and look who drops by. A celebrity blogger who herself is famous just for being her.
Thanks for leaving a note Juanita!
[…] Friend and colleague Chris Corrigan is in deep, again: […]
funny thing is… i went to lathrup elementary school, in lathrup village michigan, and our mascot was a beaver. i could be right at home in this movement!
of course, you have a picture of a real beaver and we had a puffy-cheeked, shingle-toothed, 6′ tall paper maché icon in our lobby that looked more like the michelin man or an overgrown pillsbury spokesman.
now do we lose points for straying from an image of a natural beaver or gain points for generating our own version, free of corporate influences?
You see, schools have a hard time getting things right.
I think that’s the lesson here.
🙂
i dunno… it really was an inspiration… right there in the lobby… clearly this wasn’t a place where we HAD to get things right… it was about creativity and arts and having fun and making our own version of busyness!
I have started tacking your seal onto all school related e-correspondence, subtle, eh? A friend suggested making them into temporary tattoos for that special effect on parent-teacher interview night.
I have been discussing with both the middle and elementary schools here in Sackville about homework. The middle school has promised that only “necessary homework” would be given. Apparently this included the 200 word french compostiion on that orignal topic….. what I did on my summer vacation. I have requested a definition of “necessary homework” from the school. To me, necessary should indicate that the student had a chance to complete the work at school but couldn’t or ran out of time. This was not the case in this example.
I am wondering if anyone has experience trying to arrange a parent forum or group to deal collectively with the homework problem. I have dueled with the principal and my child’s teacher about it, but nothing has resulted from this approach. Any ideas?
A
M: Oh yeah…well if it was about inspriation, that’s a whole different story. THAT’s the thing that they were trying to get right. Sounds like they did it.
Amanda: try Sara’s website at http://www.stophomework.com. Great fun that you are spreading the seals around!
well, the thing that schools really get wrong, i suppose, is that they suggest ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ based on external, usually majority rules, or majority are able to accomplish, sorts of standards, underweighting individual, internal sensings of things. i also went through school, right from the beginning in kindergarten, having teachers and principals who created special programs for me to go faster in all sorts of ways, skipping grades here, extra help there, special reading programs, whatever. i had a lot of room to go faster, right through undergrad at a major big ten type university in honors seminars of eight students. lucky me.
I also got lucky in high school with some good teachers who got me out of trouble. But much of the significant learning I did in high school, and that which laid the groundwork for the rest of my life, came from mentors and teachers outside of school.
Schools, as Alan Watts once said, are excellent for producing PhDs. Indeed, a PhD is the ultimate pinnacle for a student. But the external standards, the tests, the measuring up against an average – these things are really damaging. And worst of all is the fact that schools grade you on your “learning”, and what you do poorly in, you have to focus on. It’s a depreciative worldview.
I see Amanda asked whether anyone has any experience with getting parents together to deal with the homework issue. I’m a Brooklyn, New York parent and the co-author of The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It, and I spent 9 years talking to teachers and administrators at my kids’ schools. In 2004, I finally put out a call to other parents to form an ad hoc committee to discuss homework and we ended up pushing the school to survey other parents, to hold a public forum, and ultimately (actually all in one year), the school changed many policies. Some of the things we won were no tests on Mondays, no homework over vacations, and the appointment of a curriculum coordinator.
For years, my husband and I had been told that we were the only parents who were raising concerns about homework, but once I discovered other parents who were also vocal, I felt pretty empowered. As a group, we were much more successful than we ever could have been on our own. On our own, though, we were able to have assignments scaled back for our own children and often the assignments ended up being scaled back for the whole class.
I don’t mean to plug my book on Chris’s web site, but in the book you can find the specific how-tos of organizing parents and approaching teachers.
If you have a specific question in mind and post it here, I’ll be checking back to contribute more.
Don’t worry about plugging the book here Sara. I’ve been directing folks to your site all this week!
[…] Chris was then contacted by a national canadian paper and was on the front page last weekend. He wrote more about it here and here. […]
I am really enjoying the discussions. There are many things that I regret as a parent, but I think the worst is that I so often felt powerless against the monolithic school system. There were far too many times that I knew, felt in my bones, that things were wrong, but the teachers either were also powerless or didn’t listen. There is unfortunately an attitude among too many teachers of their superiority to all sorts of people, a prejudice that allows them to blame the kid or the parent for their (ie, the school system’s) failures. All that said, I met and have a great deal of respect for many of the teachers my kids did have.
Sorry this is long-winded, but one of the special ones was a teacher with a greying brush cut who taught the kids Square-dancing when my oldest was in Junior High! The kids loved it! Teachers out there know how hard it is to get Junior High aged kids to participate in anything that has even a whiff about it of “un-cool”, but little bow tie, white shirt, brush cut aside, this teacher had them all begging to do-se-do! Homework wasn’t an issue. My daughter was delighted to learn her Nana knew how to square-dance, and they “practiced” together, although if you could have heard the giggling you would have sworn no Learning with a capital L was taking place…but you would have been wrong.
[…] Well, it’s a bunch of unanswered questions at this moment, but I guess if I start writing about it I may find answers a bit faster. The bottom line is: in a year Alexander is supposed to go to school and I am not sure that it’s a good idea. Not because schools are necessarily bad, but because I tend to question things that are taken for granted and to distrust external authorities, especially when they try to tell me how things should be. We take so much for granted about the way the school system operates, and there is so much fear connected to success and failure in school that I believe strongly that we are creating a culture that blindly accepts some cultural story about what works and what doesn”™t. The bottom line, in my own experience, is that every child has their own learning needs, and every parent can help meet those needs by keeping a few basic questions at the top of mind. Think about the school system, and what it teaches. Read John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, David Albert and others and think about the kind of learning environment that will best serve your kids. [Chris Corrigan] […]