A student is showing off his winter vacation handiwork (Photo by Li Ke)

Taking photos with his room, breaking branches to learn flower arrangement, purchasing handwritten newspaper assignments... Recently, some homework assignments left by teachers in primary schools and kindergartens have attracted public attention and heated discussions. Parents did not understand the content and called it "weird". Some of the homework was "over the top" and had to be completed directly by parents. Why do homework often change?

Pick tree branches to take photos of your room. The "weird" homework arouses parents' questions

Mr. Zhang's child is 3 years old this year. Not long ago, the teacher of the early childhood education class held up a peach branch and asked each parent to pick a similar branch after class and bring it to the class for their children. "The teacher didn't say what his intention was, and the parents were puzzled, but they had no choice but to do it for the sake of their children," he said. Mr. Zhang selected the broken branches that best met the teacher's requirements, picked off the peach blossoms, and let the children bring them to class. As a result, the teacher actually asked the children to use colored clay as petals to decorate the branches and learn about the peach blossoms in spring.

“Pick off the real peach blossoms and put on fake peach blossoms. I don’t understand what the teacher thinks.” Mr. Zhang said that watching two or three-year-old children running and jumping in the classroom with branches, he was worried about their children’s safety. He was even more worried that this approach was a disguised way of telling children that branches can be broken at will.

This kind of weird homework is not an exception. Ms. Sun from Hangzhou told Ban Yuetan reporters that not long ago, the teacher told parents in the class chat group: Let their children take photos with every room in the house and send them to the group. "This is equivalent to making my private space public. No parents have any intention of asking the teacher about homework in the group, and for the sake of my children, I don't dare to ask more questions." Ms. Sun said.

From taking 100 million grains of rice to taking photos with his own car, these weird things have also caused heated discussions online. Although some schools responded that the original intention of the homework was to train children's divergent thinking, netizens still believed that the content of the homework "lacked common sense" and even "invaded personal privacy" and "encouraged children's comparison thinking."

Schools leave homework for parents to complete, and "innovative" homework makes parents miserable

In primary schools, kindergartens and other classrooms, some homework has become a burden for parents.

Ms. Liu’s younger brother attends a key primary school in Changchun, and the school often assigns handwritten newspaper homework. Since my younger brother cannot draw, Ms. Liu completed the handwritten newspapers for him. What puzzled Ms. Liu the most was that the teacher required her to pay for "plastic sealing" after drawing the handwritten newspaper.

Many netizens expressed their experience of drawing handwritten newspapers. One netizen said that the teacher asked first-grade primary school students to publish a handwritten newspaper on illegal religion, and the children did not even know what religion was. Another netizen said that some handwritten newspapers require computers to be produced, but in the end adults do it for them.

"Innovative" homework makes parents miserable. Some parents said that during winter and summer vacations, kindergarten teachers will require parents to take their children to travel, get close to nature, and take photos as proof. Some parents said that every time during Children's Day, National Day and other holidays, the private kindergarten where their children attended required hand-made special clothing, and the parents were so annoyed that they transferred their children to other kindergartens.

In order to give their children satisfactory homework, some parents even go online to buy handwritten newspapers and handicrafts. A Banyuetan reporter searched on an e-commerce platform and found that some merchants advertised that "hand-written newspapers are purely hand-painted." Some merchants can do handicrafts for kindergartens and elementary schools, such as handmade cartons and cars, etc. The price is based on the difficulty, and they also post the certificates from the buyer's children's kindergarten.

School parents should perform their duties to prevent education from deviating from the original intention

Why should schools leave "innovative" homework? Some teachers explained that currently the first and second grades of primary schools are not allowed to assign written homework, but if homework is really not left, some parents think that the teacher will increase the burden on the parents in disguise, causing anxiety that "the children will not learn anything." Therefore, teachers should assign some innovative homework that exercises divergent thinking. Some private kindergartens, in order to highlight the characteristics of running a school, will also assign educational development homework.

However, during the implementation process, individual teachers may have ignored the feasibility of the assignments, resulting in problems such as some questions lacking logic, some questions having a biased value orientation, and some questions exceeding the outline. When faced with some creative tasks such as making handicrafts and hand-written newspapers, some parents have not corrected their mentality and have developed the mentality and behavior of comparing, following the trend, completing tasks on behalf of their children, and even purchasing on behalf of their children.

Xiong Bingqi, deputy director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, and others suggested that schools should establish and improve teachers’ committees and parents’ committees. Teachers’ committees should make scientific and reasonable arguments for open education, and parent committees should remove communication barriers between parents and teachers to prevent education methods from deviating from the original intention.

Regarding the phenomenon of handwriting assignments and handwritten newspapers purchasing on behalf of others, Zhu Cuiying, a partner at Beijing Yingke Law Firm, said that the organizer of the agent writing assignments did not obtain a business license and violated the "Measures for the Investigation, Punishment and Banning of Unlicensed Business Operations", and the industrial and commercial administration department may impose severe penalties based on the circumstances. Internet platforms should promptly block relevant information sources, and Internet regulatory authorities should strengthen supervision. (Meng Hanqi Jin Jinxiu)