The “free homework book” – our “homework-free life”

When I was in Year 4, we had a very brave teacher. She never “gave” any homework. The tedious task of giving pupils homework was delegated to us, pupils.

Like Wikipedia which calls itself “the free encyclopedia”, each us in her class had a “free homework book”. It was up to each one of us to give ourselves homework. For example, if I felt like doing some maths questions from the textbook, then I would set myself questions, and complete them on my free homework book. The next day I would hand the notebook to the teacher, who would read it, mark it, and offer her comments. However, that would be the most boring homework imaginable. Most of us would do a few questions like that, but only as a “starter”. The “main course” would be more like “publishing” our own newspaper, turn some textbook contents into a cartoon, or maybe write a poem.

All of a sudden, homework turned into fun-work: we all tried hard to come up with some new, creative “tricks” for our homework. To make things more rewarding for us, our teacher made our homework books into a proper book, once we complete five notebooks. She was great at making them: the books she made looked so cool and getting a book made by her was a great incentive to keep writing homework!