Homework: A Parent Update

By Mr Pickles, Assistant Principal and Teacher of English.

“Memory is the residue of thought”

When teaching, one of my mantras in the classroom is ‘memory is the residue of thought’, put simply, the more you think about something, the more you remember it. Whether thinking about a bad break-up, a brilliant holiday or types of chemical reactions: the more we think about something, the more we remember it.  That is why homework exists, it is all good and well to think about Percy Shelley’s poem, Ozymandias in class – but to really remember it, we need to think about it more and store that learning in our long-term memories. Memory is the residue of thought.

At Worle Community School Academy, we are in constant pursuit of excellence – we are in a permanent cycle of evaluation and evolution. Over the last two years our homework system has evolved based on teacher, parent and student feedback. We have seen the development of homework books to now include a new focus on knowledge (to mimic our knowledge-based curriculum and to make the expectations fairer for all students); we have seen our nightly homework club expand to help meet the needs of our students and, most recently, we have seen the inclusion of Knowledge Organisers to help students who may have missed a lesson or not remembered some of the key information. On Thursday, at the Parent Information Evening, I was left beaming from the positive feedback regarding the Knowledge Organisers. Students and parents can now easily access all the information needed to complete the knowledge based tasks and commit the learning to long-term memory: memory is the residue of thought.

We plan on continuing with the development of our homework books, so extend an offer to our parent community. Each cycle, our homework books go through a process of quality assurance, but this time I would like to open this process to you: the parents of our students. We all have the same goal in mind: high quality education for all. So I hereby invite parents to email me at cpickles@worle-school.org.uk and express an interest in joining the quality assurance process and helping take the advancement of the homework books to the next level. Many thanks.

Let’s work together for the benefit of our community.