Homework can ‘exacerbate and create family tensions, according to a report from the Institute of Education.

[image credit to telegraph]

Do you believe in this?
Well, I also believe in this matter because I can feel how hard and how difficult to monitor our kids. Like what I said in my previous post “It’s parents who need to grow up fast, not children” , it clearly showed that parents need to understand what actually happen in this modern life.

There are many joys to having twins but overseeing exactly the same maths homework twice over is most definitely not one of them. Recently we had to estimate, then count, the number of dog biscuits in a variety of jars (as I’m not a baking-blind sort of mother, I didn’t have the suggested dried beans). The week before, we had to measure every member of the family (including the dog and cat) and plot the results on a pictogram. I can’t help feeling that most seven-year-olds know already that the cat is smaller than his brother.

Admirably, most primary school children have a deep-seated fear of making it up or, in our case, cribbing off a twin. “Counting traffic drove me round the bend,” recalls fellow school mum Helen, somewhat bitterly. “We live on a quiet street, so, fool that I am, I ended up going out and standing in the bitter cold on the corner just so we could count a single motorbike and three cars with my exhausted six-year-old. He absolutely would not be persuaded that he could make up a few extra vehicles. When the homework came back, there was a tick and a chirpy comment, ‘You don’t have much traffic in your street’. I could have cheerfully wrung the teacher’s neck.”

A report from the Institute of Education in London concluded that homework can “exacerbate and create family tensions”. No kidding. But a key feature of the Government’s National Numeracy Strategy is to involve parents as much as possible in a bid to reinforce and extend children’s numeracy skills. I’m sure most parents are happy to count apples in the supermarket; we just can’t always see the point of then persuading an overtired child to write down the number of apples and plot a graph with bananas and oranges too.

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