Leave the homework to teachers, students

Have some legislators gone nuts in trying to put every social issue or even the minutest concerns of the country into legislation — including student’s homework?

“Learning activities in the formality of the school should in fact be supplemented or complimented with the informality or the spontaneity of the home and the people around.

Learning is dynamic process, a symbiotic relationship between the student, the teacher and the home, particularly the parents. It is at once institutional but unique and situational. It is also personal and intra-personal.

I have been a student and teacher all my life. Of course, the students need a sabbath from all the academic work based on the presumption that learning is an onerous task laid on the student’s shoulders. So, what are semestral breaks and Christmas holidays for?

And who says that learning is not at all fun?

I have enjoyed school and learning ever since I stepped in the classroom at age five. Education is self-fulfilling and has its own ingrained functionality for self-realization and gratification, either in the classroom or at home.

I enjoyed doing my homework and the values it had ingrained into my education.

When I was young, the barrio community’s power supply bowed out at 6 p.m. An oil lamp could hurt my eyes and more so a candle light.

However, some 20 minutes from home would be a wooden post with a bright fluorescent lamp, the only one in the two-kilometer stretch in our barrio. With a crude stool from my dad’s carpentry storage and with at least two sizable water buckets, and my school bag, I would set out to capture the lamp and do my “take out” lessons there.

It was near the poso or the common artesian well pump. Waiting for my turn in the long queue to fill up the two buckets would afford me enough time to finish my homework.

Well, I felt good with hitting two birds, namely, doing the homework and filling up our cistern with two buckets of water!

Learning and the values encircling it are never limited to the classroom or the school ambience, such as the library, laboratory, auditorium and the computer lab, among others.

I have memorized more lessons on my way home trekking through the pitch-black rice paddy paths while carrying two heavy buckets on my juvenile shoulders.

If the proponents think that the “No Homework” Law can relieve the stress off the students, they are misled.

The school situation actually douses more stresses on the students.

What with a cramped classroom, fainted voices of mentors, students bearing the brunt of teacher biases, fixations and favorites and, of course, the bullies and snubs.

This is not including the emotional outputs of the students, in particular the adolescents, with personality conflicts among schoolmates, campus competition, both in academic and extra-curricular, and, of course, the admirers, stalkers and “crushes” or affections or relationships. These make them slump on the sofa at home, tired and spent after a day in school.

So, it is not really the homework nor the takeout research that really stresses the students, but the above-mentioned peripherals of schooling.

Learning activities in the formality of the school should in fact be supplemented or complimented with the informality or the spontaneity of the home and the people around.

Education begins and ends at home, anyway.

In my experience, a homework completes the totality of the process of learning.

The matter therefore of homework should be left to the dynamics of learning exchange between the teacher and the student and the home. It is the teacher anyway who discerns when to assign an academic overtime at home or who among the students urgently need to do some and who may not really need it at all.