As a parent I will respond with the general observation that what most kids in my city (SF) need is more sleep and less rote work. I will _opine_ that what the

As a parent I will respond with the general observation that what most kids in my city (SF) need is more sleep and less rote work. I will _opine_ that what they need is more time outside. Out of the classroom. Out of the house. On the beach and in the forest etc etc. Unfortunately quantity of work [sheets] and number of hours invested are a convenient proxy for 'challenging' in public education. Fortunately my daughters go to a charter school which is ahead of the curve on contemporary research into education and learning, and compared to their peers in mainline SFUSD, they are relatively insulated from that false equivalence. The cliché but oft-recounted 'tiger mom' childhood saturated completely by academics sounds to me frankly like hell, and I would work hard to ensure that mirroring its excesses in the US does not become the fad. Me, I'd far rather we have a generation of rounded kids with experience of the physical (especially, natural) world, than a cadre well trained from birth for knowledge worker jobs which may not even exist when they become adults.