Reverse Psychology

I went to my class today to work with my counterpart and the students were working on a translation assignment in the computer lab.  My cp told them not to do the translations at home or out of class because they would be using a special translation program in class (by the way I do not agree with translation assignments because not much learning is taking place).  Anyway, when I was walking around helping some students, I noticed that some had typed a few sentences into the computers and were just coping from other notebooks.  Some students had translated the reading before class and they passed it around to copy.  Wow, even less learning taking place.  I talked to my counterpart about it and he said he told them not to do it before and then made a funny comment "but they never do their homework when I give them that to do at home."  Ha!  Why would they waste their outside free time translating a boring reading when they knew they were going to have time in class to do it on the computer?  Because they want to get it done and goof off in class?  I don't know, but whatever the reason, they did it.  My cp and I joked about tricking our students into doing homework by giving them an assignment and telling them not to do it at home, but that we would work on it in the next class to see who would actually bring their "homework".  It might not work out as well as we would hope though haha 

It's a funny situation here because I feel that there isn't sufficient class time anyway, and then students don't really study because they usually don't have quizzes or big exams (at least for English--and the grades don't really matter), and they never do homework.  Teachers don't really ever assign homework because they know students won't do it.  I think the students have a little too much rule of the school here...