Homeworkin'

[moominmolly]

this article from mzrowan got me thinking about homework -- one of my favorite things to hate. The article details one father's attempts to do his 8th-grade daughter's homework every night for a week, and it gave me chills. 3 hours! a day

Comments

[gosling]

I know parents who have decided to homeschool their kids because the homework load on top of a long day at school was just too overwhelming. Their children were not getting a chance to do anything else (much as the article describes).

We aren't there yet. We could get there. It wouldn't surprise me at all if we did. Already we don't do anything after school, because then Benjamin just doesn't have the cope left to fight his way through over an hour of homework. (At age eight...) He asked me a few days ago if he was "allowed to read for fun". It was pathetic. He does read as much as he wants though, because I refuse to stop him from reading to do all the busywork. (It is all busywork too, at least for him. His spelling homework book even *has* a provision for alternative homework for kids who can already spell all the words, which so far he can. When he did the alternative homework *listed in the book as the correct thing to do* he got in trouble for "not doing his homework".) He has done almost no art since school started, and has stopped generating and solving complex math equations for his own entertainment, both of which he did quite a bit all summer. At age eight he is already pretty much too exhausted by it all to do anything else. I just hope he goes back to creative enthusiasm again next summer the way he did by mid-July or so this summer.

[rosefox]

This is so incredibly sad.