Kids have too much homework! Hasn’t this argument been around forever?

[JohnT]

We sent Sophia to a college preparatory academy for her high school and 3 hours of homework was a minimum for her. The first year was tough - 9th graders learning Cornell notes and all that - but it got easier as they adjusted to the workload. And, as I noted above and also in my post about The Gestalt (the hive mind our kids have because of their phones), the homework pressures are intense and the ways the children deal with it are different as well.

What we cannot do is expect the same rules and expectations which worked in 1984 to work today. They are just inadequate for the situation:

Things are difficult, midway through 10th grade, the stresses are piling up and the destination seems as long as the journey already made. I ask Sophia sometime during this if she would like to talk to a therapist, perhaps someone focused on academic pressure, and Sophia says (in effect) “No, thanks though. I always have Maddie or McKenna or Bethany to talk to and I’m always there for them. We cheer each other up all the time.”

This is when Sophia and her friends (even the guys) started ending conversations with “I love you”. I first thought it was a girl thing, maybe even a Sophia thing, but they all do that, and continue to this day. Love. It’s what they tell each other they do for the other.

…

COVID strikes, completely ruining Senior year and piling additional pressures on the kids above and beyond the loss of prom, the loss of the senior trip, more. The school adapted quickly but with little preview, getting a number of online courses for some subjects, especially the maths, so the students can continue their education.

And these sites were fucking terrible, just terrible. The problem wasn’t getting the correct answers, it was that the software was designed so you had to enter the answer for each step of the question, and if you didn’t get that answer exactly right, you could not go on to finish the problem. One example Sophia showed me said something like "to 2 decimal spaces, what is the answer to… ". One of the steps had the answer of “4”. Just that: “4”. And the software refused to accept “4” until she entered it as “4.00”, then she was allowed to go on to the next step. And, of course, it took FOREVER to get these online assignments done.

The kids freak for a bit. College admissions (they think) are completely on the line here, they are going to bomb Trig 2 or whatever, their grades are going to tank, they’ll have to go to UTSA instead of UT, UT instead of Rice, Rice instead of Stanford, etc. I would have panicked myself! But they were resourceful and things calmed down quickly, within a week or so. And, later, in a relaxed moment, Sophia told us why:

For the math tests and quizzes, each kid assigned themselves specific problems, with all problems eventually tackled. You worked through your assigned problems, telling the group which answers were going to be accepted by the computer for all steps on questions 11, 22, and 33. The other kids did the same, throwing the answers on a shared Google doc. Therefore, instead of doing 40 questions, you do three and 12 others do 3 as well.

I wrote an email to the school administration that they may give consideration to using the Senior class as “evaluators” for these systems rather than trying to teach, but they ignored my sage advice, crammed a lot of work on the kids, and in the end, gave them all the highest grade they had ever attained in that course at anytime during the semester, pre-COVID or post-COVID, so there were “D” kids who got an A because their first quiz scored a 96. All that effort on the kids behalf wasted, the opportunity to conduct an end-user review on new systems was lost as well.

Regardless, the teenagers adapted swiftly to the new environment, realized the different parameters didn’t change the primary objective, and developed and executed a plan where all of them would succeed, and they did all this with no consultation with any authority figure whatsoever.

For example: cheating. Us 1984 grads considered cheating to be wrong. We did it, but furtively, with fear of being caught, and if someone said they weren’t going to help you cheat, you could beat them up… but you couldn’t call someone who didn’t want to cheat immoral … that would be just weird.

The Gestalt thinks otherwise, especially post-COVID. To them, passing around your term paper to the other kids to read and comment on just fucking makes sense. You’re there to help each other, you all have a common goal, and life is hard enough to go at it alone like they do in those old movies like *Metropolitan". So they’re constantly helping each other on their essays, quizzes, homework, papers, and more. Sophia once said that she’s pretty good at giving people points to discuss on their 5-paragraph essays no matter the topic, and I would not be surprised if she’s good because she’s done this often.

And, to be honest, it’s hard to blame them. At no other point in our lives were we 1984ers forced to go it alone like we were in our education. We collaborated at work, we collaborated at love, we collaborated in our marriages, we collaborated in our volunteer efforts, we collaborated at church… but we were taught that collaborating re: education was wrong. And the Gestalt thinks this is insane , purposely using isolation to damage ourselves for no good end whatsoever.

Anyway, yes, there is a lot of homework. And the kids are handling it in different ways than we would because they have technology to both intellectually assist and emotionally support each other which we did not have. And that’s OK.