8th October 2010 9:00
By Harriet Boulding
It is a hard task for tutors these days to prepare homework assignments which cover all assessment objectives whilst remaining fun and engaging. The use of media such as tv adverts and newspaper articles helps to make work more interesting , and a context which they can relate to such as ‘adverts appealing to the teen- girl demographic’ allows students to draw on their own knowledge. However, no matter how much effort tutors put into making work accessible, there will always be students who are harder to reach.
Whilst most of my students put in an admirable effort, in the past I have received a rushed homework assignment or two in which there were multiple unfinished sentences and spelling errors. It transpired that in these cases the student had been doing their homework with the TV on in the background. I am fairly sure that many more students complete homework with music playing or the radio on, and regularly stop to answer texts and instant messages from their friends. Now, social networking sites present an added distraction, especially as many teenagers have their own computer without parental controls.
On the surface, this should be good news for a tutor, because the student’s work can be improved dramatically simply by turning off the distractions and concentrating. At least that’s how it works in theory. In practice, the multitudes of distractions that permeate every teenager’s life are as big an obstacle to a student’s learning as conditions such as Dyslexia. It’s all very well saying ‘turn off the noise for a bit’ or ‘nothing drastic is going to happen on facebook while you spend an hour on homework’, but the reality is that students are so used to being ‘plugged in’, that their brains crave the distraction after as little as 10 minutes.
This, like other learning problems, is not an issue with a quick fix. It is a problem that has snowballed as a result of years of being used to multiple forms of entertainment being readily available. Further, students are better than ever at ‘multitasking’, a rather dubious skill which allows them to watch tv, text their friends and read their set text for school, without any of it really going in. Tutors can and should encourage students to devote a small but committed period of time to school work with no other distractions. However, this is a problem that must be tackled systemically, with parents and teachers alike collaborating to send the message that one task at a time is often more productive.