Homework

School folklore in families counts as a good parent the one who saves the child from a bad mark. As a result the homework improves the adult’s skills, while the pupil gains early experience in managing contractors.

Michelene Chi and her colleagues watched students work through solved physics problems. The more successful learners did not simply follow the example. They stopped and explained to themselves why each step had been taken, how it related to the principle, and what in the solution they still did not understand. The researchers called this the self-explanation effect.

Useful homework does not have to be long. Sometimes one example taken apart down to its reasons teaches more than ten copied out mechanically. The pencil should leave behind not only the answer but a trace of thought.

Independence does not mean help is forbidden. It means help must not stand in for your own work. In the age of AI that distinction has become more important: the contractor is now available round the clock and never tires of solving things for the pupil.

A sensible sequence might be this:

1. try to understand the question and start solving it yourself;

2. name precisely the place where the difficulty appeared;

3. check the textbook, your notes or another reliable source;

4. ask the AI for a hint, a different explanation, a counterexample or criticism of your line of reasoning — not for a finished answer;

5. check the explanation offered against a source, a calculation or an experiment;

6. close the assistant and do the task again;

7. explain the solution in your own words and declare the use of AI where that is required.

“I don’t understand anything” is usually too broad to answer. Far more useful:

I get as far as this step. Here a variable appears and I have no idea where it came from.

In its 2026 review the OECD draws a useful line: generative AI can raise the quality of the work handed in, but without pedagogically considered use that improvement does not necessarily turn into learning. A handsome answer can hide the absence of a skill right up to the moment the tool is unavailable.

The internet and AI have widened access to explanations but guarantee nothing about their quality. An answer you cannot reproduce and explain in your own words has not yet become your own knowledge.

The test is simple and unpleasant: close the exercise book and say the solution out loud. A pupil who has understood it speaks coherently and stumbles only over details. A pupil whose solution came from somewhere else reproduces the first two lines and then switches to the order of operations: move this across, then divide, then you get the answer. He remembers the sequence well. There is nothing to say about the reason for each step, because nobody ever established it.

For the parent the same distinction costs ten minutes instead of an hour. The hour goes on solving the problem together. The ten minutes go on listening to an explanation and finding the place where it stops.