I FIND in this generation of grade school and high school students a general lack of supervision from their teachers.

Assignments and projects are rolled out without thorough briefing, worse, without the teacher’s complete understanding of what the assignment or project entails. For instance, why would grade one students be asked to make a “bolo” as a school project?

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My friends who have children in all levels of education have come to me countless times in the past with sordid tales of stupid assignments. For instance, would it be appropriate to assign 20 pages of homework to a grade one student to be submitted the following day? And this is just for one subject.

What schools should realize today is that, almost always, both parents work outside the home. The time they are able to spend with their children is limited and should thus not be reduced to stressful shouting matches in regard to homework. Homework should be kept to a bare minimum, if at all, they are given.

I find that most schools these days seem to be passing the buck to the parents. As if it were not enough to require parents to fork over a hefty sum for tuition to give their children the best education money can buy, schools now have to pass on additional work to parents. Homework, after all, can actually be schoolwork with enough political will and proper time management.

There seems to be a relegation of responsibilities here from teacher to parent, from school to home. Parents should not have to be additionally burdened with tons of assignments. After all, this is precisely the reason why parents send their children to school. If parents had wanted to undertake the education of their children themselves, they would have homeschooled them and saved a hefty sum in tuition.

I find the practice of having term projects due right after Periodical Exams inane. At a time when you want all the child’s energies to be focused on the term exams, why ask the child to divide his time between exams and projects?

Projects, in my opinion, should be done in school with the supervision of the teacher. This will also ensure that the project has been accomplished in its entirety by the student himself with no outside help.

How many times have I heard parents hire carpenters, draftsmen, engineers and architects to come up with their child’s school project. Who is being tested here? The child or the parents? It seems to me that it is not the child’s skills that are honed here but the parents’ ability to harness all their resources to come up with the best project possible—-one made by a professional.

But schools are in constant competition with one another. They are constantly keeping up with one another in the guise of raising the bar. If X School requires these types of projects and reports from their students, Y School must outdo X. And who are the casualties here in this mad competition for false standards? It’s the children who fall into the cracks.

We are doing the children a disservice by not giving them the education they deserve.

(sunstarcebucolumnist@yahoo.com)