It’s September, school is back in session, the tourists are leaving the Coast – it’s not technically fall yet but it feels like it is, and I’m actually kind of happy about that.
Fall always seems to carry with it the same feeling I had when I was in elementary school, the feeling that a summer of freedom has come to a close and right around the corner is the seemingly endless drudgery of school followed by homework followed by more school followed by more homework …
Although I’m a grownup now – on paper anyway – so it’s basically just work followed by more work, but there is one big difference between now and when I was in school, and that’s homework. Simply put, I don’t do homework anymore – or at least I do it very rarely and only when I absolutely have to in order to meet a deadline.
But in school, homework was a constant from a pretty young age. And it sucks. I don’t want to do more work when I go home, I want to relax, watch TV, maybe meet a couple friends for a beer or something.
So why do children have to do it?
In university it’s a little different. You get a few hours of lectures for each class and then it’s up to you to get the work done. If you’re organized – I never was – you factor that time into your school week and it doesn’t necessarily have to be homework.
But in elementary and high schools, kids spend six hours a day in class and are then expected to spend another couple hours at home doing more work. One could argue that it evens out to be about an eight-hour day, just like a regular job – but I’m not convinced.
In Michael Moore’s recent documentary, Where to Invade Next?, Moore investigates the practices in several European schools, including in Finland where homework basically doesn’t exist and children love going to school.
Morgan Spurlock – you might remember him from the film Super Size Me – discovered the same thing in Danish schools for his CNN series Inside Man. No homework, happy school children.
I’m not trying to single out and criticize anyone individually here. As far as I understand it, School District No. 46 has a fairly European way of thinking about their curriculum. But what is the point of homework? What are you supposed to be learning on your own that can’t be taught during the school day?
I’ve never met a single person – ever – who said, “Gee, I can’t wait to go home and keep working.”
If anything – and I’m looking at this in retrospect – homework only made school more menial and uninteresting when it could be fun and engaging – like in Scandinavian countries. If I had to go back in time and redo high school like Zac Efron did in 17 Again – the title is fairly self-explanatory – I probably wouldn’t even do the homework. What are they going to do, fail me?
