The term "Homework" itself is a contradiction from my point of view. Home - a place for family and friends with interesting and creative activities, play, sharing, etc. Work - for too many of us is viewed as interesting, minimal creativity (I work for the Government) and top-down hierarchies. Between Home and Work there seems to be a clash... I agree with some self-development at home (I don't like to use the word "work" when I am talking about learning). There is lots of very interesting stuff a student can do at home to learn - actually, I would argue that school does not provide sufficient "fun" opportunity for learning.

Schools have to adapt and if they don't, learning will not happen -see the YouTube 5 Minute University. I used to teach computer science in a High School from grades 9 to 12 in Ontario. The curriculum was calling for me to teach word processing, spreadsheet, presentation software, and database concepts. Boooooorrring! So, I did teach those "essential" topics, all covered in the very first month of the year - most kids knew it already. Then, I presented the kids with programming - we had access to a PASCAL and a BASIC compiler on our computers. I made links to their other subjects - geography, math, history, languages, etc... I ended up putting together a Computer Science Club for after class activity, and a programming contest. I had less absences in my courses, kids were learning how to control the computer, play with it, create their own programs, etc... Some kids even prgrammed very complex games - monopoly, wheel of fortune, and even a 3D generating program. The feedback they gave me is that "we thought this course was to be an easy one - mickey mouse course - but man did we have fun, even though we had to "work" harder than expected! That was 15 years ago.

Two weeks ago, my son and I prepared a presentation for his computer class. My son is learning how to use a 3D modeling software (www.blender.org - freeware). He wanted to show is classmates how cool it was to use this software. I communicated with his teacher and my son presented to two groups from grade 8. Before, he started, the teacher had a few housekeeping stuff to communicate to the kids. The first one was about a small project - Guess what! The teacher was distributing them a task which involves learning about MS-Excel - but everything was to be done at school - survey, data collection, analysis and reporting. No too bad, but same old curriculum.

Then my son presented Blender 3D to his classmates. You should have heard the oooh, aaaah! coool! wicked! coming from his peers. They asked why they couldn't be learning Blender in class? Obvious response - it is not part of the provincial curriculum, and we are not allowed to install the FREE software on our computers at school - yet!

My son's teacher asked if my son could present to other groups from grades 7 and 9... I know that this teacher would love to teach that rather than teaching Excel... Don't get me wrong though, the basic business tools are very good to master,but there's more to spreadsheet and wordprocessing to learn.

My son found something he wanted to learn, his teacher is encouraging him, my son is doing this on his free time at home, and loves to show and teach his peers. Now that's learning! No homeworks!

Guy L Levert
Consultant en apprentissage / Learning Consultant

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. William Butler Yeats.