As
an adult it does not matter how bad the working day has been one thing
is always guaranteed. The minute your clock card goes in that machine
you can forget the place exists until the the next day/monday
morning/the end of the holidays.
At secondary school the day wasn’t over when you left the school gates as there was also the burden of homework to deal with. I have always been 100% against homework since long before I ever started Castle Rock. At primary school we were never given homework to do, not even once. We didn’t need to since we spent better use of class time than at castle rock and had teachers that were far more in control. The official line at Castle Rock was that we were meant to have an hours homework per night. In practice we often got less than this, I don’t think I ever spent an hour in an evening doing homework in the seven years I spent at secondary school.
In the previous entries titled “Castle Rock a wasted education” I pointed out the vast amounts of time wasted in the classroom. French took 12 percent of classroom time alone or 3 hours a week. Maths in which I spent most of the time going over what I had already done at primary school was another 3 hours a week. In those two subjects alone more time was wasted in class than the time we were expected to be doing work at home. This is only the start, if I did a more detailed calculation that included other waste of time subjects like Art and music or the vast amounts of time wasted because the teachers couldn’t deal with disruptive pupils it would easily be in the 40% / 10 hours a week region.
The punishment for not doing homework like anything else varied massively from teacher to teacher. I was probably not the only person who prioritised their homework according to how strict the teacher was. The worst were Mr Miller (history) and Miss Crockford (religious studies) so you always made sure you did the homework that they set you. With anyone else if I could get away with not doing it, doing it late or only doing half of it I would do so. My parents were baffled as to why I was getting fairly good reports for History and Religious studies but getting bad ones for the subjects I was expected to do well at such as Maths and science.
After the first set of school reports at the end of 1988 I got more pressure from my parents to do homework. While I did an estimated 80-90% of the homework I was set it was nearly always substandard. I would often keep putting it off until the last possible minute sometimes even doing it in the break time before it was due to be handed in. It would always be rushed and I would do the absolute minimum that I could get away with. The attitude that it was the schools job to make best use of the time I was there and outside of school was “my time” never went away. I would often shake my head in disbelief at the amount of time others (mostly the girls) spent doing homework.
One teacher Mr Bailey wrote in a report “most of the work is done on time but to a level that only just satisfies requirements”. In some ways homework was as big a hindrance to my education as all the other problems I was facing at the time. While many others hated tests and exams I thrived on them and that was when I always produced my best academic work. Give me an assignment to do for 6 weeks time however and it would nearly always be poor. If I had been taken out of French and spent that time doing the homework for other subjects I would easily have got at least one grade higher for most of them.
My hatred for doing homework also affected my school work in otherways. A lot of the homework that we were given simply consisted of finishing off what we were already doing in the classroom. When this happened I would often rush the work (often making careless mistakes) to minimise or avoid having to do the rest for homework.
When I left Castle Rock and started doing my G.C.S.Es at King Edward VII I discovered the methods of education had changed since the old days (when my parents were at school). Back then you studied a subject for 2 years then sat an exam at the end of it. What you did in that exam determined all of your grade. This had long changed by the time I got there and consisted of a lot more coursework (Assignments over the 2 years) sometime the final exam would only count towards a small percentage of the final grade. With the above factors in mind it’s hardly a surprise that my grades were nowhere near as good as they should have been.
At secondary school the day wasn’t over when you left the school gates as there was also the burden of homework to deal with. I have always been 100% against homework since long before I ever started Castle Rock. At primary school we were never given homework to do, not even once. We didn’t need to since we spent better use of class time than at castle rock and had teachers that were far more in control. The official line at Castle Rock was that we were meant to have an hours homework per night. In practice we often got less than this, I don’t think I ever spent an hour in an evening doing homework in the seven years I spent at secondary school.
In the previous entries titled “Castle Rock a wasted education” I pointed out the vast amounts of time wasted in the classroom. French took 12 percent of classroom time alone or 3 hours a week. Maths in which I spent most of the time going over what I had already done at primary school was another 3 hours a week. In those two subjects alone more time was wasted in class than the time we were expected to be doing work at home. This is only the start, if I did a more detailed calculation that included other waste of time subjects like Art and music or the vast amounts of time wasted because the teachers couldn’t deal with disruptive pupils it would easily be in the 40% / 10 hours a week region.
The punishment for not doing homework like anything else varied massively from teacher to teacher. I was probably not the only person who prioritised their homework according to how strict the teacher was. The worst were Mr Miller (history) and Miss Crockford (religious studies) so you always made sure you did the homework that they set you. With anyone else if I could get away with not doing it, doing it late or only doing half of it I would do so. My parents were baffled as to why I was getting fairly good reports for History and Religious studies but getting bad ones for the subjects I was expected to do well at such as Maths and science.
After the first set of school reports at the end of 1988 I got more pressure from my parents to do homework. While I did an estimated 80-90% of the homework I was set it was nearly always substandard. I would often keep putting it off until the last possible minute sometimes even doing it in the break time before it was due to be handed in. It would always be rushed and I would do the absolute minimum that I could get away with. The attitude that it was the schools job to make best use of the time I was there and outside of school was “my time” never went away. I would often shake my head in disbelief at the amount of time others (mostly the girls) spent doing homework.
One teacher Mr Bailey wrote in a report “most of the work is done on time but to a level that only just satisfies requirements”. In some ways homework was as big a hindrance to my education as all the other problems I was facing at the time. While many others hated tests and exams I thrived on them and that was when I always produced my best academic work. Give me an assignment to do for 6 weeks time however and it would nearly always be poor. If I had been taken out of French and spent that time doing the homework for other subjects I would easily have got at least one grade higher for most of them.
My hatred for doing homework also affected my school work in otherways. A lot of the homework that we were given simply consisted of finishing off what we were already doing in the classroom. When this happened I would often rush the work (often making careless mistakes) to minimise or avoid having to do the rest for homework.
When I left Castle Rock and started doing my G.C.S.Es at King Edward VII I discovered the methods of education had changed since the old days (when my parents were at school). Back then you studied a subject for 2 years then sat an exam at the end of it. What you did in that exam determined all of your grade. This had long changed by the time I got there and consisted of a lot more coursework (Assignments over the 2 years) sometime the final exam would only count towards a small percentage of the final grade. With the above factors in mind it’s hardly a surprise that my grades were nowhere near as good as they should have been.
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