Many of us know what it feels like, sitting with our children doing homework together. Children get fed up with parents talking about stuff in ways that don’t make sense. Sometimes parents get fed up with children who they think aren’t trying, aren’t concentrating or — fear of fears — aren’t bright enough to get it.
Here, in time for the new school term, are my tips on how to help with homework when you know little about it.
As parents we have a tendency to keep thinking we have to know everything, and that’s not the case. Your children will not lose respect for you and your family won’t fall apart if you tell them: “I don’t know.” Say to yourself: “I certainly don’t know about this homework question, but I do know how to find out things when I don’t know about them.”
Ask your child questions to find out more. When one of my children comes to me with something I don’t remember from school, or never knew, I say: “Can you explain to me what you have to do? Were you shown how to do this by the teacher or given a piece of paper / book /website where it’s explained? Can you repeat anything of what the teacher said? Or if it was on a worksheet or on a website, can we look at it together?
You don’t have to be able to do homework as well as your child. You are the bridge over which they will travel to be able to do the work. It’s absolutely fine not to understand it all yourself; you just have to help your child take it step by step. Ask your child to try to explain it to you as they’re working through. This means that they are putting the process into their own words, which helps them to understand the whole thing more.
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Through questioning and looking things up together, things will start to make sense to you and your child. Lots of homework can feel like gobbledegook to parents. More often than not, though, your child will have been briefed by a teacher or have notes, and by looking things up together, things will start to fall into place.
You’re there to offer support. Support by listening to your child trying to explain what the difficulty is, and how to do it. Support by offering them the importance of sticking with it. Support by introducing them to what’s available “out there” that enables all of us to find out and learn things. Support by showing them strategies for what to do any time it seems as if they can’t understand something.
Homework and DIY are much the same. Usually, in difficult homework there are stages in the work — you can do the second part only when you’ve completed the first. It’s the furniture self-assembly principle, and one of the key things you can show your children is that many of the kinds of problems set in homework involve exactly the same method.
If you do know the answers to homework, act like you don’t. The strong temptation when you have ready answers is to start lecturing. More often than not this doesn’t work — in a matter of moments, your child isn’t listening. This is because . . .
. . . there’s a huge difference between knowing something and being able to explain it. For your child to not just know, but to understand, you need to go back to how you act when you don’t know something. Wait for your child to come up with words and questions of their own, then you can ask: “Can you answer that question yourself?” and look for places where there are answers other than from you.
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There is never one fixed way. Let’s say your child gets it and it’s sorted. At that moment, you can offer an observation that takes a slightly different view. At first, this might seem like it will wreck or confuse everything that’s just been learnt. But you will be offering something vital about knowledge and learning: there is never one fixed way.
My parents showed me that questioning and debating is the way to learn. I recall an essay called “Why Chartism failed”. I had my notes from the lesson, I had the piece in my history textbook that said “Why Chartism failed”. All I wanted from my father was some help with my opening paragraph.
“The essay is ‘Why Chartism failed,’ ” I said.
“Failed?” he said. “Chartism didn’t fail.” And then he went through all the things the Chartists called for and that we now all live by and take for granted. In that one moment, he showed me that history is not a matter of learning stuff; it’s being able to debate stuff and in the debating you learn the stuff.
Good Ideas: How To Be Your Child’s (And Your Own) Best Teacher, by Michael Rosen, is published by John Murray on September 11, priced £16.99 and is also available as an ebook