WHEN CHILDREN reach secondary school, they should be independent enough to do their homework without parents constantly looking over their shoulder. However, again it is important to know the school’s homework policy – the time it is expected to take and how the load from different subjects is structured.
In first year, when pupils are adjusting to the big leap from national school, they will probably need more help and supervision. Running up to exams, students of all ages can benefit from parents helping with revision.
“What you want to do is take an active interest,” says the director of the National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals, Clive Byrne, “and then try to wean off until you may realise there is a difficulty and you may have to come back in again.”
You can expect about one to one-and-a-half hours’ homework a night in first year, he says, building to two-and-a-half hours to three hours for the Junior Cert. “Certainly by the time you get to fifth and sixth year and you are doing serious study for Leaving Cert, you would hope the students would be independent enough and focused enough to structure three-and-a-half hours routinely.”
They need somewhere warm and comfortable to study, but “the jury is out” on whether music should be playing in the background.
Byrne, who is on secondment from St Mary’s College in Rathmines, Dublin, used to advise his Leaving Cert students to examine their lifestyles, look at the pressures of the various subjects and then agree a weekly programme of homework with their parents and stick it up on the fridge.
He would tell them: “If you sit down and agree that, then your parents are quite entitled to nag you about it. If you said you were going to commit to do something and you’re watching EastEnders, it’s not fair.”
The biggest challenge for parents of secondary school children is getting them to apply themselves, especially boys, says Rose Tully of the National Parents’ Council Post-Primary. But you do need to avoid it becoming a battleground.
Encourage your child to do it as soon as they come in the door, she says, so they can have the rest of the evening free. She also suggests that sometimes a parent may need to resort to bribery to encourage an unmotivated child.
Ultimately, pupils have to answer to teachers for not doing homework, and Tully believes that schools are much quicker now to contact parents to let them know if homework is not being handed in.
If children say they have no homework, they may mean no written work. Check that there isn’t just oral work, which is equally important, she stresses.
That is a point also highlighted by Byrne, who says it is essential that parents understand that homework is not just of the written variety. Reading and research play a vital part – and some of this is likely to involve the computer.
The point at which the use of computer for homework strays into being either a total distraction, through social networking, or a route to plagiarisation, is difficult to predict. No doubt it depends on the personality of the child but it is an issue to keep an eye on.
Teachers are always on the lookout for chunks of text which don’t sound like they originated with the pupil. And while they like parents to take an interest in projects, they don’t want them to take over.
However, Byrne advises parents that boys often need encouragement to make their projects neater.
“Twelve- and 13-year-old boys are less mature than 12- and 13-year-old girls and are often inherently disorganised and untidy in the way they present work. Often times, the content is there but the presentation suffers.”