Are your kids bearing a heavy burden of homework? Do they have endless homework to do every day? Do the teachers have some good ways to lighten students’ heavy burden? On May 18th, a seminar on “Effective teaching---The Improvement of Assigning Homework” was held in Gongshu District, and a number of principles from primary and middle schools of Shanghai and Zhejiang Provinces were all presented. Zhou Jianren, the deputy director of the Bureau of Education of Gongshu District said, “Now all the primary and middle schools in our dictrict is promoting the reform of students’ homework, and we sincerely hope that this can indeed help students get more happiness from study.”
Many students dislike one subject just because of the too much homework.
On the seminar, the Bureau of Education showed a group of data from a survey. The objectives of the survey were 145 students from two primary schools of Gongshu district, with students in grade three and five as the main parts.
According to the survey, the pupils like math homework best, while P.E., Chinese, Information & Technology, science, art, music, labor technique course, English and moral education lesson follow one after another. 45% of the students said they hated a certain subject just because of its boring homework and 40% said they did so just bacause of its over amount homework.
The heavy homework burden partially comes from parents. Besides the homework assigned by teachers, 62.76% of the students have to do the extra tasks given by their parents, and nearly 60% of them had to spend at least one hour on those tasks.
Teachers themselves are supposed to do the homework first before they decide to assign it to the students.
Then, how to help the students learn well in an easy way? Those teachers from Shanghai and Hangzhou expressed their views towards this question during the seminar.
Mr. Sun, principle of Wu Ning Road Primary School, Pudong District, Shanghai, said that teachers themselves should do the homework before they assign it to the students decide whether it’s suitable or not for their students. For example, if students in lower grades are required to copy some phrases, they just need to copy at most one line of each phrase. And for those who have already gotten a firm mastery, copying each phrase once is enough. As for math homework, students just need to solve one problem per day, on the basis that the problem is a flexible one. For those who have won prizes in the Mathematical Olympic, they are suppoesd to have no homework anymore. As for English, it is just necessary o assign some listening and speaking practice.
Apart from the above, another means is also worth popularizing. That is, every stuednt should have his/her own collection of mistakes. Thus, they will have fewer questions day by day and it’s just necessary for them to focus their attention on the mistakes in the collection book.
Wang Yifang, principle of Mai Yuqiao primary school, said that a high-leveled teacher should help students of all levels learn something from one problem raised by himself.
Shenguofeng, a math teacher from Hemu primary school, told others that she had a “personal problems collection”. It has collected all the problems that students are likely to have difficulty with. Seizing those difficulties, students can be released from “thousands of problems tactics.”
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