The more I tutor, the more aware I am of how much school settings vary.
Some of my students get so little homework that the most valuable thing I can set between sessions is exam practice. Others have so much that we’ve agreed on something different: enrichment.
Recently, one student and I got into a debate about how we ought to read literature in the first place, and what is truly valuable when analysing a text. She made the case for New Criticism: that language itself is worthy of study, without collapsing literature into history on the one hand or theory on the other.
Her task before next lesson? To defend that position in our starter.
These are my favourite tasks to set, so much so that I’ve decided to stop calling them homework. From now on, it’s ‘Enrichment’.
They’re the kind of tasks I think we all wish we could set more of in the classroom. Teachers, what would you set if time allowed?
