They are never given the opportunity to discover the pleasure of reading because they spend every waking moment in front of books studying and doing homework. By the time they get to high school, it is almost impossible to get them to read for pleasure. If it isn’t homework, they don’t have time to do it.
School administrators and parents should read author and lecturer Alfie Kohn’s work about the usefulness of homework. They will be very surprised. There is no point in having special writing and conversation classes. It is not going to fix anything. If you want to write well, read more. If you want to speak better, watch more TV. Homework isn’t going to get you anywhere.
If your students are paying attention in class then there is no need to assign more homework than 10 minutes per hour in class. Any more than that and you are just making your students negative.
If this is going to be fixed, then read more and watch more TV as opposed to spending more time in class and doing more homework.
GERHARD ERASMUS
Yonghe, Taipei County
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