This Is What Kids Doing Homework Looks Like Nowadays…

Rockstar’s classmate needed a good printer for their assignment, and her parents had rented a Cyberport “Smart Space” for a finance-related startup on the side, and that’s how my mum friend had the proverbial keys to the castle… So on playdate after church and lunch, we find ourselves up here for the first time – so Rockstar’s friend can use the office-grade printer for her homework (and we can bum a couple prints ourselves :D)…

Smart space main lobby

Love the octagonal felt seats and greens behind the wall...

Love the ~~octagonal~~ pentagonal? trapezoid? felt seats and greens behind the wall…

They have meeting rooms and phone booths…..

They have some really cool chairs in the pantry, and I notice wine glasses in the sink!

They have some really cool chairs in the pantry, and – and – I notice wine glasses in the sink!

Swoon!

Double Swoon!

*Crickets chirping*

Rockstars about to start work…

(And no wonder she needed a good printer, look at that thing on the screen)

Some of the kids used the silk weaving program in school as well; the assignment was about materials – silk, metals, plastic etc and the kids were supposed to come up with questions about textures and uses and techniques for manipulating the various materials, bring in samples of their chosen materials to talk about, and use child-safe search engine Kidrex to research points for their fact sheet assignments…

(Each assignment the links or required modules are often either emailed to the kids’ mailboxes, later on also to the parents… For some homework like math, they have their own individual logins and the teacher can go in and check who’s done the homework, who hasn’t, how many wrong answers they got, how much time it took them to complete it….. All against the child’s login.)

Re some of the homework, Rockstar has always come home from time to time mentioning who’s been asked to get on more difficult modules, or who didn’t complete the required modules that week. I really like this – HANG ON – BECAUSE THERE IS A VERY GOOD CHANCE THAT THE KIDS REALLY ARE ATTEMPTING ALL THIS ON THEIR OWN. One of the things I like the most about Rockstar’s schooling environment is they fiercely encourage independence. There are many things parents need to support yes, but it’s not parents being given homework.

I really respect that, because I remember being in environments sometime during my own schooling days before, whereby the expectations felt so unrealistic and the pressure to complete (or perfect) all the given stuff so great that 1) there was just no way kids were doing that without lots of parent/ tutor help – which means that you are basically giving the parent or tutor lots of homework – ever think about that, at what point does the work get so demanding that kids end up doing less because the parents end up hiring a tutor (and then the next thing is whether the tutor just does the assignment for them) and 2) peer pressure is so great to do everything perfectly that EVERYONE always completes written work PERFECTLY. Now I look back and I remember a time when the fear of not getting everything right and perfect (chances are not a few of you out there also have had memories of this) outweighed any wish to do it on your own or even to give something other than a textbook-memorised answer.

So, again – listening to Rockstar chatter about whatever he wants to chatter about at the end of the day, when he says oh yeah these friends were reminded to finish, or those friends were reminded to move to more difficult modules (the names mostly change every few weeks he mentions btw, it’s not like the same kids all the time – and he thinks things like they simply hadn’t thought to check out the more difficult ones and that when they do they will understand why IXL Math is in fact “not boring” :D:D:D)

I marvel at how nowadays kids are constantly encouraged to be “risk takers” in their assignment answers. To not fear attempting different answers. Parents are often reminded to let the kids write assignments in their own words and not allow them to simply copy off websites. (Well it idly also occurs to me how that also improves reading comprehension since they don’t place a value on simply reading without understanding text, but really – can you imagine how different schooling is nowadays, compared to what we used to have??)

“Did they do it themselves?” I think the stigma appears to have shifted – instead of the stigma being on the one who doesn’t hand in the perfect model answer, now it’s on the one who produces some assignment that is very obviously not done by them 😀

So anyway Rockstar didn’t pick silk, so he wasn’t doing that silk weaving thing on the computer, but I was surprised he’d come home and not picked metals or plastic either – I assumed a lot of boys in particular would pick metals because of Iron Man and Captain America’s shield… Plastics of course allows you to bring to school…………. Legos! Disney Princess dolls! All in the interests of a good assignment, you understand 😀 But no, Rockstar didn’t come home and tell me he wanted to do plastic either. Hmm. Well at press time he hasn’t finished yet, he just did some research and printed a couple pics together with his friend who had chosen to work on silks, but he only writes a little bit each day (has to be in his own words right….)

But anyway, the best part – after work play!