Homework… an everso rough guide.

By the time a child is in senior school, they might start needing some help with their homework, particularly as they move up the year groups and the work gets increasingly difficult.  Sometimes you may find that the work they are doing is inexplicably a lot harder than the work YOU remember doing at a similar age.  Sometimes this can be accounted for by changes in the school curriculum over time.  At others it can be due to failing memory…. or the fact that you were reading Jackie magazine under the desk during that lesson.

In any case, with the (unwitting) help of my own children I have put together a useful list of sites they can turn to when parents just don’t have the answers to some of those trickier questions.

Wikipedia – as everyone knows, Wikipedia is the ultimate, all-in-one-place site for absolutely everything in the world.  It is important to remind your child that Wikipedia, a form of ‘communal knowledge building’, cannot guarantee total accuracy and reliability.  Your child is unlikely to care very much if their assignment is due in tomorrow.

Facebook – primarily a social networking site but, as every 15 year old knows, an essential while you’re doing homework so that Becci can tell you what you were supposed to be doing for French and Joe can tell you what Becci was doing in Costa with Mad’s boyfriend yesterday lunchtime.

Google+ - similar to Facebook but not quite the same and Iz only uses Google+ now and she’s the only one who knows when your Shakespeare essay has to be in.

Snog,com – so that you can get a really good idea of how Joe (along with 20,000 random strangers) feels about you while you’re doing your homework.

Twitter – essential so that you can tweet exactly how you feel about your homework while you’re doing it.

Tumblr – similar to Twitter but allows you to create a kind of virtual mood board giving the world a visual representation of how you feel about your homework while you’re doing it.

Flickr – so you can post pictures of your art homework so that Joe can get a really good feel of how he’s supposed to be doing it.

MySpace – duhhh, no-one even uses MySpace anymore and it’s only open because someone left you a message on it.

Bebo – what IS Bebo?

I hope you find this useful and that it goes some way to explaining the array of tabs on the taskbar during a particularly arduous homework session.  It is by no means an exhaustive list and you may feel an overwhelming urge to add to it.  Or not.