By Clemence Tashaya
EENHANA – With concerns growing over how schools link good performance to academic load, this could be paying off for the schools but not to the children and parents who always struggle to enroll their kids in the best performing schools regardless of their financial capabilities.
The beneficiaries (learners) also have a series of activities that they get involved in outside school. These include doing homework, watching television, helping with house chores and playing. However, the biggest percentage of the learners interviewed by Youth Corner say they were going to be involved in the first two activities, homework and television. How much homework is enough? David Shinovene, a Geography teacher at Mwadikange Senior Secondary school at Ondobe, says too much homework has negative effects on one’s well-being and behaviour. “What’s more, the negative effects can extend to students’ lives outside of school, including family, friends and other activities,” Shinovene says
However, another teacher, Paulina Katiti in the Ohakafiya circuit encourages parents to spend some time helping their children with homework. “When parents help their children with homework, it makes learners understand that homework is not a punishment,” Katiti argues. The challenge though is that when a lot of homework is given to the pupils (especially in nursery and early primary), most parents end up doing it for their little ones, which defeats the whole purpose of home assignments. When asked who actually does his homework, Kauna Kashela, an eight – year old learner at Eenhana Primary school confesses innocently: “My mother does a big portion of my work to prepare me for school the next day, although l have to go through the work because my teachers expect some information from me the next day.”
For a child her age, much as it is important to keep her abreast with what she has learnt in school, the significance of the homework is largely evidenced by her attitude and openness about how serious she takes the homework. But is homework any worth to learners at an early age?
“School assignments lose meaning to me especially when I have to do the biggest portion of the work for my son. The only benefit is that it helps me bond with my children and opens up their weak areas to me. In turn, I help the teacher identify the weak areas and together we work on them. However, this ought to be the teacher’s work since some parents might not have the luxury of time to spend it with their children as I do,’ says Daby Lungowe Simasiku, a mother of two.
Ivan Sibalatani, a School Counsellor has his worries. “In as much as homework seeks to evaluate whether learners have grasped what is taught in class, having kindergarten learners carry a pile of work can easily hoodwink teachers into believing children actually do all this work. We, however, often encourage parents to help their children based on the premises that many times children learn better in a playful environment with their parents and this has actually proved to be one way of helping children grasp classroom work outside the usual classroom arrangement.”
While teachers encourage parents to help their children with the work, parents, most of the timesworry about the pile of work because it can be tiring. “Parents are right to be worried about stress and their children’s health says,” says Sibalatani
“A little stress is a good thing,” Sibalatani adds. “It can motivate learners to be organised but too much stress can backfire.” Katiti agrees with the Counsellor. “The more mature learners, especially those at secondary level can cope with the backlog of tasks without help as far as different subjects are concerned. So homework should be relative according to a student’s level at school,” she notes.
But as the saying goes, “Work without play makes Jack a dull boy” and that is why education experts encourage schools to cater for both class and entertainment when making a timetable. The most easily accessible form of entertainment besides sports is television. Holiday is when most students get to watch TV much more than they would at school. Television stations also air many programmes that certainly engage holiday makers during that short span of time. The ultimate control of how much TV, and what contents students should watch, is left in the hands of the parents. “Too much of anything is bad”, so they say although watching with moderation is not.
“I leave them to watch as much as they want to, [it] deter them from roaming all over the neighbourhood looking for mischief. It is easier to control them with TV while monitoring whether they have bathed and had their meals than go about looking for them in the entire neighbourhood,” says Ester Ndapanda, a housewife and mother of three boys. She adds that “letting them watch educative TV shows but yet entertaining gives them knowledge on different subjects. They name themselves according to different characters of different cartoons with whose traits they have or wish to achieve most of which are identifiably of good mannerism,” she adds,