Parents, Teachers Disagree On Take Home Assignments For Pupils

Parents, teachers and guardians in the South-West geopolitical zone have expressed divergent views on the notion that take home assignments being given to children amounted to transferring of teachers’ responsibilities.
They spoke in separate interviews last Monday with The Tide source in Ado-Ekiti, Ibadan, Abeokuta, Osogbo, Akure and Ilorin.
While some of the parents said that such workload of assignments were suggestive of transferring teachers’ responsibilities to the parents, others said it would enable the pupils and students to be serious with their academic works at home.
Also, some of the teachers interviewed said that the take home assignments would make the students and pupils to have better understanding of the class works.
They said that such assignments were not, in the first instance, meant to be attended to by parents, but to ensure that the assignments were promptly attended to by their children.
In her views, Mrs Olawumi Omonijo, the Headmaster-General in Ekiti, said that the assignments being given pupils to solve at home were meant to keep them busy with their studies and to be ahead of their tutorials.
Omonijo said such assignments from the teachers were not in any way suggestive of transferring the responsibilities of the teachers to parents, adding that parents were not meant to solve such assignments for their wards.
She said the tradition of giving assignments to pupils to solve at home had been on from time immemorial, adding that the ploy was part of the extra curricular activities to keep the pupils busy at home.
According to her, the major responsibility of the parents is just to ensure they attach the desired importance to solving such assignments by only reminding their wards of such pending homeworks and not to help them solve the assignments.
“It is not out of place for parents to supervise their pupils in solving such assignments and make sure they attend to them promptly, so that they can submit to their teachers at the appropriate time.