If you care to work, it's play
A recent NYT op-ed lamented the increase in summer homework, by turns also questioning overloaded homework during the school year and the pedagogical value of homework at all. The article is pretty thin, relying on anecdotal evidence to infer that summer homework is widespread and excessive, and, it will soon become obvious that I think, misses the more important point. Granted, it is an op-ed piece, and the authors’ upcoming book will likely, one would think (hope), have greater substance, but their shallow and barely-warranted claim that the argument against summer homework amounts to “kids need playtime” really got under my skin.
OK, disclaimer here. I was an even huger geek growing up than I am now, and my family moved a lot, often at the end of a school year. Summer wasn’t always unadulterated joy; sometimes it was sucky and lonely. I would have welcomed directed academic activities during those summers, and would have learned much more than I did in calculating each day how many hours I had to play outside before my mother wouldn’t bitch when I parked myself in front of the TV watching reruns of Get Smart and Hogan’s Heroes.
Like I said, even huger geek.
But, here is what I feel like I missed out on: the chance to equate intellectual pursuits and play. That is how I view English study now, and the experience I embody in my classroom – we have language, we have texts, we can do whatever the fuck we want with them. Just the idea that I could have sniffed that earlier, to engage intellectual activities in the air of warm weather and freedom from the atavistic social Darwinism of public school... damn. It is a mistake to insist that here is play that is fun, and over here is school that is work.
Because, here is the really important thing that these two “educators” completely missed in this piece: when a student doesn’t care, the completion of an assignment doesn’t matter. If student A cares and works across the summer to finish homework at their own pace, and student B doesn’t care and knocks them all off Labor Day weekend, even if the quality of the finished product is the same, only student A got something out of the experience. So, yes, summer homework may in fact fail, but not because it is an inevitable failure, but because the school has already failed any student that doesn’t care.
That is what I have imagined my job to be when I’m in the classroom (and I do understand the limitations and privileges of the fact that I have only taught and only plan to teach at the college level): my job is to entice or encourage or bully or cajole my students into caring, into having some kind of sense of purpose beyond “do the work, pass the class, advance.”
It isn’t particularly instructive to say too much homework is too much. It is always about the why. Homework activities that aren’t scaffolded into the curriculum are just the kind of busywork and knee-jerk pedagogy that the authors lament, but it is the design of the activities and not the existence of homework that they should be targeting.
Oh, our kids need time to play! Well, yeah, no shit. But they also have to be instilled with the belief that there are ways to bridge what they already care about with the things they are told to care about, and that it is possible for work and play to be the same thing.
Think about those few people you have known for whom work and play really were the same thing, or those moments in your life when it is true. Those are sublimely happy people and moments, worthy of our children and students.
OK, disclaimer here. I was an even huger geek growing up than I am now, and my family moved a lot, often at the end of a school year. Summer wasn’t always unadulterated joy; sometimes it was sucky and lonely. I would have welcomed directed academic activities during those summers, and would have learned much more than I did in calculating each day how many hours I had to play outside before my mother wouldn’t bitch when I parked myself in front of the TV watching reruns of Get Smart and Hogan’s Heroes.
Like I said, even huger geek.
But, here is what I feel like I missed out on: the chance to equate intellectual pursuits and play. That is how I view English study now, and the experience I embody in my classroom – we have language, we have texts, we can do whatever the fuck we want with them. Just the idea that I could have sniffed that earlier, to engage intellectual activities in the air of warm weather and freedom from the atavistic social Darwinism of public school... damn. It is a mistake to insist that here is play that is fun, and over here is school that is work.
Because, here is the really important thing that these two “educators” completely missed in this piece: when a student doesn’t care, the completion of an assignment doesn’t matter. If student A cares and works across the summer to finish homework at their own pace, and student B doesn’t care and knocks them all off Labor Day weekend, even if the quality of the finished product is the same, only student A got something out of the experience. So, yes, summer homework may in fact fail, but not because it is an inevitable failure, but because the school has already failed any student that doesn’t care.
That is what I have imagined my job to be when I’m in the classroom (and I do understand the limitations and privileges of the fact that I have only taught and only plan to teach at the college level): my job is to entice or encourage or bully or cajole my students into caring, into having some kind of sense of purpose beyond “do the work, pass the class, advance.”
It isn’t particularly instructive to say too much homework is too much. It is always about the why. Homework activities that aren’t scaffolded into the curriculum are just the kind of busywork and knee-jerk pedagogy that the authors lament, but it is the design of the activities and not the existence of homework that they should be targeting.
Oh, our kids need time to play! Well, yeah, no shit. But they also have to be instilled with the belief that there are ways to bridge what they already care about with the things they are told to care about, and that it is possible for work and play to be the same thing.
Think about those few people you have known for whom work and play really were the same thing, or those moments in your life when it is true. Those are sublimely happy people and moments, worthy of our children and students.
posted by JJisafool at 3:36 PM
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