If a person gets to live 80 years on planet Earth, that’s 29,200 days. We would have to subtract a lot of those if a kid painfully goes through 12 years of homework-based education while growing up.
Do we really want to force kids to do something they don’t want, when they only get 29,000 days here in the only blue and green planet of them all, since the rest are rocks, grey boring ass rock.
And if there IS life on other planets, it’s probably a lot more boring than it is here. How could it not be? I can’t imagine a planet where things are as interesting as they are here. And now COVID is teaching us how valuable our time here is.
I think kids should always be able to explore the things they want to explore, things to which they gravitate, things with which they resonate. For one, it might be how to build a cathedral. For others, it might be in mastering a language, or a musical instrument, or getting seriously into the wonderful world of cooking. Can we do that for our kids?
The internet will eventually replace many forms of education – we all know that. But we are not acting on that knowledge in our field. The research is in DIRECT CONFLICT with the way we teach languages. Are we really going to resist what that means in terms of how we teach in the future?
Administrators, district officers, everyone in education now is seeing just how valuable the internet is as an instructional tool. Right now we in our field of foreign language education are looking around for ways to teach our languages online with the same kind of fervor as those looking for a COVID vaccine. We’ll find both.
So please, explain to me how homework fits into all this when we have YouTube, Google, etc., which are ways to learn something without sticking 30 kids in a room to annoy each other and us, and make us question what we are doing with our lives.
It’s all changing. Let’s get ready. Let’s be the language teachers of the future NOW. Let’s use the tech piece to really teach our kids languages, to draw them in for real, instead of giving them worksheets in some kind of BORING internet format just so we can get a paycheck. That’s selfish.
And let’s dump the homework game. It’s all bullshit and we all know it. We give it to make it look like we know what we are doing. What a sad thing that is.