Holiday Homework

Prisoner of Azkaban remains my favourite book in the Harry Potter series. There are so many interesting things going on, but today I want to highlight one mundane (perhaps dreary) topic: Holiday Homework. It comes up briefly at the beginning of Chamber of Secrets, but gets more page time in Prisoner of Azkaban. Going into Year 3, Harry is able to complete his holiday homework thanks to arriving several weeks early to stay at the Leaky Cauldron. Hermione likely goes above and beyond her holiday homework. There is no mention of whether Ron does his.

What is holiday homework at Hogwarts? Over the long summer break, it seems that Hogwarts teachers assign essays, reading and possibly some practical work. Why? As a teacher, I think it’s to help students keep up with learning. It’s amazing how much chemistry students “forget” over the summer, unless they are doing research. Even the month-long winter break reveals substantial forgetting. This is problematic because the second semester sequences of G-Chem, O-Chem, and Biochem substantially rely on solidly knowing content from the semester. (P-Chem has overlap between the two semesters but is largely separable into two parts.)

One problem stems from the modular approach of U.S. higher education, increasingly aped throughout the world. There are advantages of having a modular system, but one of the disadvantages is discontinuity from one semester to another, one year to another. Students switch sections, and have different instructors with varying emphases even if the content remains largely the same. Students may not necessarily progress as a cohort as they rearrange their schedules. This is unlike the rigid cohort “old-school” system that previously existed (but is now changing) in many other parts of the world.

Hogwarts, modeled after the U.K. school system, follows a cohort model where students take the same core classes from year-to-year (with some modification going into Years 3 and 6). There is an “external” exam at the end of Year 5 (O.W.L.s, equivalent to O-Levels) and Year 7 (N.E.W.T.s equivalent to A-Levels). In yesteryear there was an additional external exam at the end of Year 3 in secondary school (the Lower Cambridge Examinations). I went through a similarly rigid system in secondary school before discovering the freedom of the modular system in the U.S. at the college level. Pre-university, all my studying was geared towards preparing for these external exams.

Being a small school, Hogwarts has few teachers and a small student body. Thus, a teacher follows each cohort from year to year as they progress in a subject. For example, if you took Transfiguration every year, you’d have McGonagall. For Potions, you’d have Snape, or at least Harry’s cohort did the first five years. Then Snape moved over to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts, and Slughorn was coaxed out of retirement to cover Potions. There’s a great advantage to continuity with the same instructor; conversely having different instructors with different styles can be disruptive – as was the case with Defense Against the Dark Arts during Harry’s time at Hogwarts.

Having a rigid cohort system and the same instructor from one year to the next allows for holiday homework. This provides continuity, not to mention smoother building on foundational work towards complex material. Chemistry education today remains rather hierarchical, for good reason. In some countries, chemistry at the university level follows a rigid cohort system; you progress from Year 1 Chemistry to Year 2 to Year 3. I don’t know if there’s holiday homework but there should be! From what I’ve heard, even though I did not experience this myself, there is holiday homework assigned at the secondary school level, certainly during breaks between terms and even between years for the A-Levels, which is run on a cohort system. What a great idea!

Could this be done in the U.S. modular system? I think so, at least at smaller schools. The small liberal arts college I attended had year-long G-Chem and O-Chem. There might have been holiday homework over winter break, but I no longer remember. At my present larger college, we run many sections of G-Chem and O-Chem staffed by many instructors. Some of my students in G-Chem 1 stay with me for G-Chem 2, but others do not; and in G-Chem 2, I get students who weren’t with me in G-Chem 1. Some might have taken G-Chem 1 more than one semester ago, or at a different institution. All this is to say that there is potentially much discontinuity.

In recent years, I have e-mailed my G-Chem 2 class a week before the semester begins, when I think my class roster is fairly stable, to let them know that there will be a quiz (covering Energy topics in G-Chem 1) on the first day of class. This serves several purposes. It emphasizes why G-Chem 1 is a pre-requisite for G-Chem 2. Yes, we will actually build on the previous material. It also helps me figure out where students are at since only a small portion may have been in my G-Chem 1 section the previous semester.

But I wonder whether it’s possible to assign more substantial and directed holiday homework; obviously I think this would be good for the students’ learning. However, besides the logistical issues of students switching sections all throughout the break into the first week of classes, it also creates further lack of uniformity unless I can convince all my fellow instructors to do something similar. Although we’re a sizable group, I’m in a highly collegial department where the G-Chem instructors meet very regularly throughout the semester and folks are willing to try new things! So I think this is worth a shot, if we can agree on a common holiday homework framework and to build in plans to motivate the students to complete the work.

Taking a leaf from Harry Potter, I also want to be fair to students for whom this might be difficult. When Harry returned to Privet Drive after Year 1, the Dursleys locked away all his school materials and he wasn’t able to complete his holiday homework. In the summer between Years 2 and 3, Harry had learned to pick the lock and do his homework in secret while the Dursleys were asleep. And after getting to the Leaky Cauldron, he could do it in the open – while getting help from others. He could even practice magic – something that would be challenging because of the ordinance preventing the use of magic in front of Muggles. Thus, depending on your family situation, your ability to do holiday homework may vary greatly. (Some of my students have to work full-time at a wage-earning job during the summer.)

It’s also good to have real breaks from work so one shouldn’t fill the time with holiday homework. Enough to keep up, but not so much that students don’t get enough of a break. Also, there’s having to grade holiday homework. Unless I resort to some form of self-grading.

In the meantime, Goblet of Fire is up next.