Incoherent Scribblings

The Homework Problem

I have now been back at language school for two full weeks and though we had another person join our class, one of the “original” students dropped out because she got a job. We are therefore still five people and in all honesty I have mixed feelings about such a small class.

The positive side to such a small class is that we get quite a bit of individualized attention and are able to speak much more frequently than if the class is a large one. The flip side, however, is that since we are small and pretty much at ease with one another it is easy to stray away from the topics that the lessons are trying to cover.

The other problem with such a small class is the homework.

I will be the first to admit that once I got away from “mandatory” school sometimes I didn’t do my homework. In university level classes where you are simply expected to read something in preparation for class and attend lectures, it is easy to do. However, I never turned in any assignment such as a paper or project late and I would have never ever considered skipping such an assignment all together.

Fast forward to language school:

My previous language classes met every day as does my current language class. In the past when I attended language courses it was not completely unheard of to be assigned three to four hours of homework every night. Granted, three or four hours of homework a night is a lot of homework and much of it was “busy” grammatical work, but it was also an intensive course.

Until I reached Mittelstufe III (M3), I faithfully did my three to four hours of homework every night. It was exhausting, but I learned a great deal. Nevertheless, somewhere around the middle of M3 though I still did my homework, I started getting lazy and didn’t put as much effort into it as I should have. (Which might explain why I am repeating M3 now…) Even so, I still managed to retain plenty.

In fact, I am constantly amazed at how many things I learned two years ago that were just lying dormant in my brain. They are mostly grammar-related, but as soon as we review them the proverbial light-bulb goes off above my head and I think, “Oh yeah! I remember that now!” There are, of course, a lot of things that I didn’t spend sufficient time on before to thoroughly learn, but the basic concepts are there: They just need dusted off and practiced.

Anyway, in my previous classes that usually had roughly 25 people in them you could count on about 5 of us to faithfully do our homework every night. Now, if you do the math, you can easily see that comes out to 1 in 5 people that did their work.

Enter my current class of five: I won’t say that no one in the class except me does their homework… BUT in the past two weeks I have been the only person that has completed all of the homework each day. And in comparison to what I had before, my current teacher is a bit more relaxed: She only gives us one to two hours of homework a night.

Now I know that the other students claim in one form or another that they have a “life” outside of class, but I do too and I still manage to get my homework done. Perhaps I just have better time management skills or take my studies more seriously, I don’t know.

What I do know though is that we go over our grammar exercises every day first thing in the morning and I don’t think it is fair to me, the other students, or the teacher that I should be the one to answer all of the questions because I am the only one that has done the work.

Would I like to chastise the other students and tell them to get their asses in gear and do their homework? Sure I would. Would it make any difference if I did? Of course not.

So, I will just continue to do my homework and answer if called upon and whenever else I see fit: After all I am the one that is done with my homework. The others can sit and squirm in the uncomfortable silence