Transcript of AE 1293 - The Goss: Should Aussie Schools Ban Homework?

G'day, you mob! Pete here, and this is another episode of Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So today I have a Goss episode for you where I sit down with my old man, my father, Ian Smissen, and we talk about the week's news; whether locally Down Under here in Australia or non-locally, overseas, in other parts of the world, okay.

And we sometimes also talk about whatever comes to mind, right. If we can think of something interesting to share with you guys related to us or Australia, we also talk about that in The Goss. So these episodes are specifically designed to try and give you content about many different topics where we're obviously speaking in English, and there are multiple people having a natural and spontaneous conversation in English.

So it is particularly good to improve your listening skills. In order to complement that, though, I really recommend that you join the podcast membership or the Academy membership at AussieEnglish.com.au where you will get access to the full transcripts of these episodes, the PDFs, the downloads, and you can also use the online PDF reader to read and listen at the same time. Okay, so if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast, get the transcript, listen and read at the same time. Keep practising and that is the quickest way to level up your English. Anyway, I've been rabbiting on a bit. I've been talking a bit. Let's just get into this episode guys. Smack the bird and let's get into it!

G'day, dad.

Hello, Peter.

Am I in trouble?

No. We just. We just raise the. Raise the level of decorum. Yeah.

Formality?

Formality. Yes. Sorry, your cat's harassing me.

He wants some affection.

He is getting affection. I'm scratching him on the neck. But that's not enough.

He's such a pest. But he's a good pest.

He is.

He always sleeps with me. Kiss my feet. Warm at the moment.

Uh oh.

Under the covers.

You sleep under the covers between your feet.

Yeah. It's great. It's cold at the moment, and we're trying to keep the heat off so that we save money. Last electricity bill was, like, 700 bucks.

Holy moly.

I know. Winter. It's brutal.

Yeah.

So. Go on you, Scraps. Good boy. So, "Education researcher calls for primary schools to have courage to rethink homework."

Yes.

And you were like, 'fuck yes'.

Well, 'rethink school', but 'homework' in particular.

Yeah. That's it. So let's, this article again is on ABC news. Um, "When Estelle Truman was growing up, homework was par for the course. But now her two daughters are in primary school at Townsville in North Queensland, homework isn't mentioned. There's no purpose. Ms Trueman said." Um, "If we get home and want to prepare a meal together or spend time together outside before bed, we can and don't have to hope that we won't get in trouble tomorrow because we haven't done the reader."

Yeah.

So yeah, it was an interesting article talking about, I guess, the research related to, um, levels of homework at primary school age and whether or not it's beneficial. And effectively, this, um, Professor John Hattie had done a study with 130. It was like a meta study of 130,000 other studies, saying that there was no evidence that it was really useful at primary school age. And you used to work as a high school teacher, and..

I did.

In the education industry. So how did you,, how did you feel about homework in general, but also obviously at primary school versus high school?

Well, I think there's a, there's a difference between, you know, the distinction between primary school and high school is an artificial one in a sense that, you know, we they're very different forms of education, but that's a consequence of the way that life is taught at both ends. You know..

How did we end up with this division between primary school and high school? Because it seems arbitrary, as you say.

I- do you want the historical thing to it?

You go to town.

Um, two generations older than me. Most people did not go beyond what we would now call Year Eight.

Yeah.

At school. And in fact, that was, you know, a lot of them wouldn't have gone past Year Six or Year Seven.

So they would have finished effectively primary..

They would have finished it effectively at what we call primary school.

Yeah.

High schools were considered for higher education, to go on to professional careers, university study, those sort of things. Um, now that has been completely diluted and changed over four generations.

Yeah.

Um, so we're left with this artificial construct of primary schools are structured in a particular way that, you know, you start off as a five year old in Australia, five year old or six year old, and you go to school. Um, and then seven years later, you progressed to a high school. And instead of being in effectively one class with one teacher, except for maybe art and sport and music, um, to being in ten different classes with ten different teachers.

Yeah.

Um, over one summer, you know, so that's an artificial change. Um, but it's just it's a result of, you know, the history of the development of schools 150 years ago.

One, I guess in the West, we pretty much developed these schools to get people to be factory level workers, right?

Yeah. Well, a lot of the times, the way we structured schools, you can go back even further than that. You can go back to agricultural times. The way we structure school was we didn't give people a summer off because they wanted to go on holidays and things. We gave people summer and early autumn off because they had to go home and be at home to harvest the crops and do those sort of things. So.

So that's really where we get, you reckon the summer holidays from and everything. It's all about that.

Originally it was done that and then and the legislation in European countries, you know, was not everyone was the same, but legislations around the amount of time that people had to spend in school in terms of hours a day, days, a year, and so on, was created based on the expectation that we'll just do what we currently do.

Yeah.

Now that's a different story around. We're talking about homework, but um, the reason I'm talking about that distinction is that I think homework for primary school students is a complete waste of time. Um, except..

Hence I'm wanting to talk about this article. Yeah.

Except for Reading.

Yeah.

Uh, because there is an enormous amount of educational research that suggests that children who read at home are going to be better learners than children who don't.

Well, I guess it's cross.

In fact, it's even..

Disciplinary, right.

It's even more bizarre..

Than every..

It's children who have books in their house are going to be better learners, even if they never read one.

Well, we just have loads of books and don't actually show the kids.

Yeah.

Like well, yeah.

Well, they're screwed both times.

We just leave them in..

The money gets spent on the books and the kids don't get to see them.

We just know by having them, the kids are going to be smarter.

Exactly.

That's how it works, right?

Exactly right!

We just have a garage full of books.

So, I think reading practice is a good thing to do. It's also if you treat it the right way and don't make it a task. It's also a social thing to do with kids.

Yeah.

Let's sit down and read a couple of pages of a book.

It's funny. I feel bad a lot of the time because we don't do a great deal of reading. We do from time to time, but a lot of the time they want to watch videos of things on YouTube and everything. So Noah at night will be like, when we go to bed, Can you show me how black holes function? How they work? And you're just like, what the fuck, man? How did you learn about that? And he realised he's been watching Transformers or something. And there's been a black hole and.. Or he'll be like, Can you show me how trains were invented? And the cool thing is, you can just get YouTube up and be like, show me how trains are invented, and they'll have a description, you know, on a video and everything, so you don't have to pull it out of your butt.

I know.

But at the same time I'm like, how useful is this compared to, say, sitting down and trying to read? Is this the same quality time spent with your child in terms of education?

It can be.

Yeah.

It can be.

As long as he's interested in asking questions, I imagine.

But at that early stages of educational development, kids have to have to be able to read and write, or at least be able to communicate in a in a language. Now, now, you don't have to because you can. Just as long as you can find a Google app on something, you can search just by voice.

Yeah. You wonder how much that's going to be a hindrance to kids in the future. Because I remember being at school and every now and then you would hear of children somehow making it through to like Year 7 or 8 and being illiterate. Yeah. Not being able to read. At all.

I taught, you know, I was a high school teacher and I taught kids who couldn't read.

Yeah.

You know, couldn't read when I left teaching when you were. And I'm trying to think when I was 94. So you would have been about seven years of age, and you were. And your sister were as good a readers as some of the kids that I was teaching in Year Seven at school.

Really?

12 year olds. So, um, so so that I think that that sort of engaging kids in learning experience is a good homework and setting tasks. You know, as in saying your homework tonight is to do some reading is fine.

Yeah.

Setting them, you know, sending them a sheet of arithmetic to do.

Yeah.

Is a complete waste of time.

Yeah.

And it's..

Well, I think that was part of the the argument in this article, but then also the whole that steals time away from family time of engaging and having conversations..

It is worse than a waste of time.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

But yeah, but it was interesting. I wonder how much having the ability to use things like AI and Siri and phones and all that sort of stuff, and being able to just talk to them and then getting answers back will help or hinder kids at high school, like, because I'm obviously not in that world, so I have no idea. I assume it's affecting it now.

Well, I haven't been in a high school classroom for 30 years/

But I can imagine that if you had a smart phone and you were one of these kids that you were talking about, who was, you know, at the level of reading of a seven year old in Year 8 or 9 or whatever they're going to be able to hide a lot easier.

In a sense of just Google it by voice.

Yeah, but also, I guess it allows it's on the flip side, it's allowing them to function a lot higher at a higher level despite their illiteracy.

Yeah.

But, um, yeah, it's it's mind blowing. Those thinking about those things that there are kids that slip through the cracks and just can't, and go on to adulthood.

I think the other the other part of that is, and I'm not suggesting that all education as opposed to learning and there are two they're quite distinct, but that all education only happens in the classroom for five hours a day.

Mhm.

Um, that's not what I'm saying because but I, and certainly where I, other than maths homework, I used to set maths homework for high school students.

Mhm.

Um and the homework was finish up to this point with the expectation that the kids who were good at it and quick at it could finish it in class.

Yeah.

Those that couldn't, I expect them to have a go at it. And I would always give them time at the beginning of the next lesson to say, all right, who hasn't finished? Let's have a go and work through the stuff that you were struggling with. It was a way of identifying what they were struggling with, but giving them the opportunity to go and just spend longer doing it. Because sometimes everybody has variable times that they take to do things, regardless of whether you're good at it or not. Um, so giving kids more time to do things, um, but with teaching Science. Um, I- and Health, which are the two other subjects I saw taught it, you know, not, you know, the Year 11s and 12s, but 7 to 10. Um, my homework was implied, and that was I used to teach mostly project based work. And if you get kids interested in something, they will spend an inordinate amount of their own time afterwards investigating finding things out, trying things, getting people's opinions and whatever. And that's what learning is about, you know. And to me, it was it was getting kids excited about learning was implying that they will do homework because they would do it just because. Sorry, the cat's just gone mad. Um, it was they would do it because they were interested, not because you told them they had to and that they were going to get marked on it. Um, you know, if it's just another task for kids to do, then it's pointless. So.

So what are your sort of criticisms of the schooling system in Australia, whether it's primary school or high school?

It's not just Australia.

But I mean, in the Western world, right? Yeah.

I think most of the world now.

Um, well, because a lot of it is built on what the Western model is, which is..

It's all built on the old European model. Well, it was it was never designed for learning. It was designed..

To teach people rote tasks, right.

Exactly. Um, and that's. Look, the problem is that we force kids into saying that you're going to spend now. Almost everybody does these days. You're going to spend 13 years at school.

Yeah.

And in those 13 years, we're going to structure it the same way for everybody. Um, and we're going to structure it not based on the best way for you to learn, but on the best way that we can administer it.

It's funny too, to pause you there. I remember someone I can't remember who it was, but I remember them saying, isn't it weird that we send kids to school for 13 years and they come out being able to do fuck all?

Yeah.

Like they can't get a job the next day as a waiter. They don't have any of the. They couldn't cook basic food. They don't have all these skills that you would get you a low level job anywhere at the end of high school, effectively, like you would have to do on the job, learning and all that. So it is one of those things where it's ironic that we have this, this system in place to teach kids to be employable, effectively.

We could say that, you could say it's not just school. You could say the same thing about universities. Other than professional degrees like, you know, engineering, teaching, nursing, medicine, law, those sorts of things where you are being an actual you are being- it's it's it's an academic apprenticeship to being qualified to do a job.

Yeah.

You go into a science degree and an arts degree. The science degree is designed to create science researchers. About 1% of people who do science degrees go on beyond maybe an honours or a master's program, um, to actually do research. Um, you're not being taught to be a lab assistant. You're not being taught that. So you've got to learn that. Here's your degree. Now go and get this job and learn how to do it.

Yeah.

Is very different.

Well, and that would be the majority of-.

Commerce degrees. Arts degrees, you know, just generic degrees, are not teaching people how to get jobs. Um, but universities were never set up to do that. You know, in the last in, in my lifetime, you know, when I went to university, it was academic.

Yeah.

Even if you went and studied arts or commerce or whatever, or medicine or law or anything. It was an academic program. And only about 5% of people went to university. Now more than 50% of people go to university, and more than 50% of the rest go to some other form of higher education or tertiary education. But they're still operating the same way. But getting back to schools, it's it's just this conundrum of we, it's $1 trillion industry in Australia that we cannot pause to change it for a year to get it right, or two years or three years to evolve it into something that will be much better.

What's the fallacy again? It is that thing of like, you just have to deal with breaking the system for a short period of time to then improve it and be able to move.

I call it the touch typing thing. I have never learned to touch type. In order for me to learn to touch type, I would have to slow down and be a bad typist for months because I can type badly, much faster than I could by learning, so I'm never going to do it.

Well, what it's like. I remember where evolutionary biologists would talk about like, adaptive landscape, and this is probably a bit esoteric and hard to describe, but effectively you have like these mountains of adaptation where you adapt to be able to do a certain thing, but you can't jump from mountain to mountain.

No.

You would have to go down into the valleys..

.. are completely different.

Yeah. And then come back up the next mountain. And it's effectively you can't evolve backwards, right. You end up evolving a certain series of traits to be able to do a certain thing. But even if..

And you've lost the traits, the generic traits, to be able to do other things.

Yeah, exactly. And so it's very difficult to, even if it's very close by, get from one peak to the next peak. And that's what it would take, with education. You would need to go backwards for a short period of time.

It all comes down to simple things like, um, we assess kids and adults. And, you know, everything from young primary school age to university students. We assess them based on a standardised test, whether that test be a paper test or a task or whatever else, and you will be deemed as achieving the appropriate thing.

Success or failure.

If you meet a standard in that test, and we give you a certain amount of time to do that in. So in the case of high school, it's you've got a year, so 40 weeks of school to complete, an amount of work to be deemed to have done. Year 12 Biology, I used to teach Year 12 Biology. At the end of year 12, students would be assessed. You got a mark from 0 to 100. Um, now it's slightly different the way the scoring gets done. But effectively you're testing people and saying if you get more than 50%, you're okay. Now what you're saying is, if you can do half of it, that's a win. Because we assume that there's a limited amount of time.

Yeah.

If we had criterion referenced, proper criterion referenced assessment in schools, that says you have to be able to demonstrate your capability to do these things. If you can do them in three minutes or three weeks or three months, that's what it takes.

Yeah.

But the, the, the engagement of teachers to be able to handle kids doing things at, you know, if you've got and the way that it is structured is purely numerical. It's just about a financial thing to say. We'll have 25 students in a high school class. And because that's what we can finance, we can put one teacher per 25 kids. Um, it would be impossible for a teacher to have 25 kids all operating in completely different time frames. But also we would say, well, you know, Pete finished Year 12 Biology, met all the assessment requirements for Year 12 Biology, demonstrated his learning on all of the concepts, and all the practical tasks and everything, in three months. Now, what do we do with him? He can go on and do something else. No, he can't, because that would mean you have to be in another class.

Yeah.

And that class hasn't started yet and so on. So we, we've structured this the way of learning around administrative ease that everybody does the same amount of stuff, the same amount of time. And then at the end of that we say whether you achieved or didn't achieve.

I remember being mind blown by certain people at school who would were academically really intelligent, but then just like socially stupid, right, like or it would be the street smarts versus book smarts type thing. Because I remember there would be a few of my friends who got like 98 into score 99 and you knew, okay, they get it. They can study really well. And they, they memorise things incredibly well. But then you would just be mind blown by how stupid they were in terms of just completely other..

Common sense.

Other usual things that would just be so simple, like in interactions with friends or..

Yeah.

It's just so many other areas of life. But they would be seen because they had a good memory and they knew how to study, and they were, you know, put a lot of energy into that. They would be seen as functioning well. And the rest of you not functioning well, people who weren't like that.

Yeah.

I remember it being like, this system doesn't feel like it. It supports other areas of intelligence.

But we also, we don't tend to teach, um, meta skills like problem solving.

Yeah.

The people who are..

It's memory based.

The people who are good at problem solving do well.

Yeah. But it's, the people of it..

Yeah, yeah, but the people who are not good at problem solving never get taught how to do it. It's, I say never. It's, you know..

It's not the focus.

And look, we used to teach I mean, mathematics teaching has changed. So even over the time that I was teaching and certainly since then, that there is more and more on, you know, problem solving and so on, not just rote learning how to solve an equation.

You used to talk about this with me, right? And me and my sister learning a lot differently from one another. And I would be just like, give me the answer so I can work it out backwards.

Yeah, you were a problem solver. She was a recipe follower.

Yeah.

Um, and providing I showed her the recipe, she could just plug all the things in and do what do you like? Your brain just didn't work that way.

Well, I preferred to, for you to. Yeah. I would be like, give me the final answer. And then I'm just going to keep doing this equation until I get that answer, and then I'll be like, that's how I know how to do it. Exactly. That was my, I need to just, I'm going to go through multiple different paths and I'll get the wrong answer multiple times, but then I'll get the right one. And I want to be able to just confirm.

Yeah.

But yes, obviously you can't do that on any exam.

Well, the thing is you should be able to.

Yeah.

Um, but it's yeah, it's. It..

The resources required to be able to manage students like that, though, would be, um, too expensive, right? Because you would need to. Yeah.

Well, it's more changing to be able to operate that way would be too expensive. Because we could operate that way. It would require more, you know, a higher staff-to-student ratio to be able to do it.

But it's already..

Hugely!

Isn't it?

It is, but not 'hugely' more. It would require 'more', but in order to change it, you basically have to throw the entire school structure out and start again. Uh, and then, you know, it's pretty radical to, to suggest that I remember having an argument with I was, you know, when I was, I was teaching science education at, um, what is now the University of Melbourne. It was the Institute of Education at the University of Melbourne straight after. It was the College of Advanced Education at Melbourne, and I was teaching science education there when the national curriculum was starting being developed. And I was asked to comment on the science curriculum that was being done, and I went through a 10th of it and just sent some preliminary comments back saying, this is a complete waste of time. Because you're not teaching science. You're teaching scientific content. It's, science is not memory.

Yeah.

Science is not just tell me the periodic table. Just, you know, fill in the, you know, 100 and whatever it is now, elements on the periodic table. Um,

This is just memory work. Could be colours, could be anything.

It could be anything. It could be history. You know, it's, um. Science is a process. Where in this are we teaching? Scientific process? Where are we teaching the scientific method? Where are we teaching children to create hypotheses, to understand what is a legitimate test of a hypothesis?

It was funny that I didn't really understand much of that until I got to university.

I know!

And you just sort of like I've been doing biology since probably, what year?

It used to drive me nuts, and I used to teach science like that when I. And you try and squeeze the curriculum into a way of teaching. It's actually teaching children to ask questions, to work out. How are you going to know the answer to that? You know, you you did this thing once and you got this result. How do you know that? That's not a mistake.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, we have to do it again. Correct. Replication. What does that mean? Well, how do you. But in this experiment that you did, how do you know that those three things weren't affecting the result? Oh, we have to work out what the effect of that. Exactly. All of those sort of things. We don't teach that in science. We still don't. And it drives me nuts because if you did that, science would be more attractive to everybody..

Well, because you're learning the basic concepts..

Because you apply that to learning problem solving.

Yeah.

You're learning. Yeah. It's the same thing about Scientific literature. Literacy is not about how much science do I know? It's about how much science do I understand? When somebody tells me something, I've got the ability to go. I don't believe you. Prove it. Show me the evidence. And that's true for everything. When you see the news at night on TV, you go. How do I know that's not just complete rubbish? That's somebody's opinion. Show me the evidence. And that's, that's just..

To pause you there, that's one of those interesting things with the internet and with AI and everything. That's all the more important now. It's the being able to verify, um, information that you receive online because and it's going to be interesting to see what happens in the next few years, just based on ChatGPT and all these other AI things. Because so much of the information you're going to see, it's going to be like, how do you know that's actually real? How do you know that's a real person? How do you even know that? That's exactly you know, that was really said. There are these deep fakes that all this sort of stuff. So I hope you'd hope that it's going to be that scepticism and that logical, problem solving..

It's information literacy combination is really what it comes down to. Is it? How do you believe what you see, hear or are told? And we don't teach enough of that.

I remember always having my mind blown with a lot of that. Like people get told something and they would come and tell you about it and you'd be like, why? Why would you just assume that's true? Like, it sounds good. It's something you would like to be true. But how do you know it's true?

Well, that's, that's more often than not that people will believe what they want to believe. So your cat's gone mad over here. He's.

Ah, he's a pest. He gets into the sink and just licks things and tries to. He's just. Yeah, it's his name. Scraps, I guess. Damn it. Scraps. Anyway, cool. So how do we fix the system?

We can't.

Yeah, so it's just fucked. Good luck.

Pretty much.

Yeah.

Yeah. And and that's. Yeah. Well, you know, you've got children. I've got grandchildren who will be, you know. Well, one of them is..

We need to move to Finland.

Yeah. Well the Finns have sort of got it right.

Or at least they're trying.

Least number of hours. Least number of years in school. And the highest accomplishment.

Best results. And the Polish, I think in this article was mentioned the Polish have started to abolish, um, primary school homework and everything too, working towards, you know, a system that's more efficient and better for, for kids.

Yeah.

Yeah, I imagine. It's funny though I find myself so often just being like, almost irritated at how hyperactive my son is, and wondering, is there something wrong with him? Like, why can't he just sit down and concentrate? And I wonder how much I've just been programmed by society to think that is what a child is.

A good child.

Yeah, exactly. But.

No, he's inquisitive.

Yeah, yeah. And that's. Yeah, that's really..

Well that's, school is almost a war on boys to some extent too, from what I understand where it's just you're constantly trying to put young boys in a certain 'sit still, don't ask questions, be quiet, listen to the teacher' box and you're like, they're not like that at such a young age.

They're not like that at all.

At all.

And most girls aren't either. But girls are, um, are much more likely to comply. Girls are compliant.

They just sitting there going..

There's a complete generalisation, but they're much more likely to comply with rules.

And resent you for it.

And resent- and then..

It'll come back later.

And they're not driven by testosterone either, so that helps.

But when they're trying to impress anyone.

Well, they impress them in other ways.

Yeah, exactly. Anyway. All right. Cool. Thanks for joining us, guys. We'll see you next time.

See you!