Homework in primary school

[Ellen Cools]

Hello,

As a belgian teacher to be, I'm currently investigating why Finland scores very well in the Pisa tests. Even though the schooldays are shorter, there is no homework .... students seem to get a very good education.
However, a lot of comments on the internet state that students in primary schools do have homework, just like in most countries.
How are your experiences? Do children in primary schools in Finland get homework? If so, how much time is spent daily on the homework more or less? Does it depend on the school the children go to?

Thanks a lot.

Ellen

[irnbru]

My boys in second grade. Since the first he gets homework every weeknight (not weekends) maths, writing and reading. Takes about 10-20 mins at the moment. The schooldays are shorter because compared to my primary school experiences the fun things you used to do in the afternoons (arts and crafts etc) are outsourced to after school clubs. These after school clubs can be good to terrible depending on who is running them and in some cases a bit dangerous for the kids IMO.

[onkko]

You shouldnt be asking in here, small minority of finns are foreigners so 2 answers before me are irrelevant. Sorry.

Tummansininen everyones loved ones are "bright and special". i wont say finnish system couldnt do better but its tuned for finns and does good job on that.

irnbru school is for school, not for after school entertainment. They do let lot of different non profit associations or county/city use school property for different stuff tho. We had "youth place" in our local school where we were responsible for it. Imagine about 20-30 teens/preteens responsible of school property. Suprise, it went well till one of us angered his mom who was responsible about that stuff and she retaliated for all of us And by responsible i mean there were no adults, one elected kept keys for week or two and kept place open everyday (i dont remember time, 17 to 20? but i do remeber that i had cycle or walk 3km way to school and back 4 times a day).


Ellen i think homework is irrelevant.

Its more about culture of "education and information is good and needed" than any homework. School helps but i think its about culture.
You should visit old finns and tell them that you are priest or have doctor/master or something like that and look how their face brightens "shes educated"
Remember that priest in finland is educated and not self appointed like somewhere. Masters in theology is needed.

[betelgeuse]

How are your experiences? Do children in primary schools in Finland get homework? If so, how much time is spent daily on the homework more or less? Does it depend on the school the children go to?

It depends on the teacher. One feature of the Finnish system is that the state level guidance is very high level and the teachers are given a lot of autonomy. I did have homework in primary school and would guess that most people do.

[Rosamunda]

My 3 children went to a state primary school and they had homework quite regularly. In the early years it was mostly reading and some basic maths but not a heavy load by any means. As mentioned before, the general consensus is that time out of school can be spent doing so many other things like hobbies, sport, music etc.

Things are changing now though and the "flipped" classroom is becoming more popular especially with older children. I haven't seen it used in primary yet but, as already mentioned, the teachers are free to choose their own methods provided they get through the National Core Curriculum each year.

In reality a lot of schoolwork is still text-book driven (there are Finnish publishers who specialise in producing text-books and a big move towards e-books is in the pipeline). Quite often homework is just completing some exercises from a textbook or preparing for a test (yes, there are informal tests in schools, even though national testing is still a no-no at primary level).

I would agree that homework is a topic that needs to be revisited, Teaching older "kids" I am conscious of some basic gaps in competence levels (eg producing written texts, critical analysis etc) which I think could be addressed from the early years. A lot of changes are currently taking place and a new Core Curriculum will be published next year....

[CH]

I have no idea where the "no homework" myth has come from... I've seen it elsewhere stated, too.

Anyway... I'm native, my daughter is 11. She has always had homework, from first grade (7yo) onward, currently about half an hour and up to an hour. Perhaps the "no homework" might be that daycare & pre-school doesn't have homework, dunno. There is no "busywork" type of homework, homework that is more or less just given to have some mandatory homework and is just fluff, that I see some US parents complaining about.

One thing one must remember is that the language is phonetic (Finnish) and or almost phonetic (Swedish), so it's easy to learn to read and write. The student base is also pretty homogeneous, although that is slowly changing.

[Pursuivant]

I remember when I was in school we always had to do compositions or then those workbook fill-ins. Or "read textbook pp 127-134", and maths and physics calculations. Highschool was all tests and essays - basically to prepare for the matriculation. Its about similar as the one in France, lot of stress and hand-written essays, and if you don't do well you need to work double hard to get into any good school. Actually, the 9th grade report card already puts ypu in rank into which high school you go to - if you go to a hogh school. Fortunately these days at 16 you have a choice also for vocational school, college or then one combined with high school so you can get both a profession and a matriculation. Also adult education is encouraged, so you can "grow up" and then study when you know what you want.

[Pursuivant]

Its about as "true" as the corruption statistics. Only the "stupid foreigners" think it is so - theres things "locals know" (and nobody tells you)

[irnbru]

I work with a lot of Finns and most of them are cleverer than me. MOTWYW

[CH]

The homework here is basic fill-ins, regurgitating the work they may have touched in in class that day. No critical thinking or thinking outside the box type of stuff.

Isn't the majority of homework anywhere more or less this? Or as far as I have understood the pedagogic idea behind this is that the children's learning is reinforced by repeating the things they have learned in school. But I wouldn't want to see homework just for the sake of having homework, if the children are given work to do at home there should be a reason for it (I understand that parents in the US at least start calling the teacher if there is no homework, so the teachers feel they have to give a lot of homework even if there is no reason for it... don't know if this is an issue in other countries, though).

I don't agree that the homework would only be this kind of stuff here... at least when I look at my daughter's math homework I'm quite surprised about how much of it is "figure this out yourself" kind of problems. Perhaps not much of critical thinking in homework, but my daughter is still in lower grades. I have no experience of school work elsewhere, other than a year in a US high school and the homework there was more or less the same as what I was used to in the high school here... can't say there was much of thinking outside the box or critical thinking stuff there, either.

[irnbru]

If your kid has a few hobbies like mine I don't think you want them getting hours of homework every night. 20 mins is fine IMO.

[Rosamunda]

The homework here is basic fill-ins, regurgitating the work they may have touched in in class that day. No critical thinking or thinking outside the box type of stuff.

Isn't the majority of homework anywhere more or less this? Or as far as I have understood the pedagogic idea behind this is that the children's learning is reinforced by repeating the things they have learned in school.

Not so much any more. Some teachers are starting to use "flipped" methods which I mentioned above. This means children do the "classwork" learning bit at home (on a computer or out of some kind of a book) and then do the "homework" bit in class. The idea is that this encourages active communication in the classroom where the teacher organises practical workshops which may involve some peer teaching and groupwork. Learning at home means the students can self-pace their learning (you can rewind a video, reread a page in a book etc) or even connect to other friends and work together (eg over Skype) which is harder to do if the teacher is doing all the talking in the classroom. In a traditional classroom some gets just drop off, get lost, retreat into themselves... Flipping also means that in the classroom the teacher can see who is managing and who is struggling in real-time and then differentiate ie: give more demanding practical tasks to those who are fast learners and more support to those who are struggling to grasp certain concepts. Flipped learning makes the classroom more active, dynamic and fun and encourages children to participate rather than sit and listen.

OK, I don't imagine for one minute that all teachers will be trying out these methods, but I know for a fact that it is being actively encouraged in some schools.

I'm starting to use it myself (with much much older "kids") simply because I don't get much satisfaction out of lecturing to groups of immobile, mute students. If they want to sit & listen to lectures they can go online.


And just for info here's a speech given by Pasi Sahlberg at the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair yesterday (FInland is guest of honour): http://finnlandcool.fi/finnlandcool/hal ... erg_EN.pdf
The parallel he draws between Nokia and Finnish education is interesting.

[macora]

Its more about culture of "education and information is good and needed" than any homework. School helps but i think its about culture.

^ This. Absolutely amazing culture.

I always wonder why no one mentions the library system, when talking about Pisa or the widely educated average Finns. Children from the earliest age onwards, and grownups until the end of their lives are literally *lured* into the library. Huge amounts of really good, and appealing non-fiction books, and media for all ages are widely used. Same goes for many museums (not all). It seems to me, many museums around the world like to show off flashy exhibitions, awesome items they own, along with intellectual texts showing their expertise, etc. I have the impression, Finnish museums have another aim. They very often show The Incredibly Awesome Way to Get Knowledge Across, often less in an intellectual but a more practical way. Of course, they have the same expertise as any other museum, they just choose to make learning fun, and interesting. There probably are more examples, those are just the two "institutions" of that culture, that strike me the most.

[onkko]

Its more about culture of "education and information is good and needed" than any homework. School helps but i think its about culture.

^ This. Absolutely amazing culture.

I always wonder why no one mentions the library system, when talking about Pisa or the widely educated average Finns. Children from the earliest age onwards, and grownups until the end of their lives are literally *lured* into the library. Huge amounts of really good, and appealing non-fiction books, and media for all ages are widely used. Same goes for many museums (not all). It seems to me, many museums around the world like to show off flashy exhibitions, awesome items they own, along with intellectual texts showing their expertise, etc. I have the impression, Finnish museums have another aim. They very often show The Incredibly Awesome Way to Get Knowledge Across, often less in an intellectual but a more practical way. Of course, they have the same expertise as any other museum, they just choose to make learning fun, and interesting. There probably are more examples, those are just the two "institutions" of that culture, that strike me the most.

Oh, i was lured by fiction books. Edgar Rice Burroughs, any science fiction, Jean M. Untinen-Auel (they (librarians) tried to ban those from me, fail , im not sure if explicit descriptions were good for teen/preteen but anyways), Enid Blyton, some girl books (yes i had 3 sisters and library car only came fortnight). Today wi do read Grisham, Ludlum, Koonz, Forsyth, Lovecraft, shampoo bottles, King, well anything i can get my hands on and find interesting but those are what i choose if i have to. (i probably forgot someone because i dont remember names, i remember what happened + faces not names)

When i were 12 i counted, yes i were bored, pages from our bookshelves and those were over 100 000 pages red. Yes i had actually red most of our books atleast once exluding some 1970s this is how you make hippy things quides, red some of those too tho. And those books were drip in the ocean compared what i had loaned.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel) this i red when i were about 10, have red atleast 2 times and of course what Huovinen wrote, especially Havukka-ahon ajattelija what i red multiple times. I normally read book once.

ps. I had to google most of names, im not good at names

pss do i use read, red, red correctly?

[Pursuivant]

I can say I was reading from age 10... From age 12 or so on Saturdays I'd take the bus to Töölö library and spend the day... Like Onkko I read everything and anything. My sister's books and whatever I laid my hands on... My dad had a whole lot of "boring" books, but I think the "Steam Engines" and a car school manual from 1948 were quite exiting. There was a couple on boating as well. At some point I found "Papillon" that I'd dismissed as boring as it had no pictures there was also a book on the Andrea Doria, Hitler's autopsy and some spy documentary of Finnish ex-commandos doing naughties in the 1950's