My last post was about poverty. This one will be very much a UMC concern. Sigh. The different worlds we live in…

In the past six weeks, Jonah has been swamped with homework. He had five huge cumulative midterm exams and one huge project for an elective class that was supposed to be fun, but wasn’t. After he puts in a full day at school, he goes up to his room and works until 11 or so. Is he using his time efficiently? Probably not. He hates memorizing boring biology terms, so it probably takes him longer than it should, but even if he worked like a robot, I doubt that he would be done much earlier. He has a lot to do. His classes are a lot harder than the classes that I took in high school.

At a party last week, one dad told Steve that his son, who goes to a magnet high school for smart kids, does homework until 1 am every evening.

WTF.

Kids aren’t getting the time to flesh out their personalities and discover their interests and daydream, because they are memorizing biology terms. And I don’t even think that the ability to spit back pages of terms will matter much in the future. The key job market skill that kids will need in the future is adaptability. And the key life skill that all kids should acquire is how to have fun.

Sometimes I think that all this homework is a plot to train kids to work some soul-crushing, 80-hour per week UMC job. It’s not teaching them knowledge. It’s training them to sit at a desk for hours and hours.

As a parent, I think it’s time to push back. It’s better to be a B student and have a life, than to be an A student who has never had the time to develop.