10 ms·

My Son Won't Do His Homework (2007)

98 points by namuol 13y ago

Yaa101 13y ago
School is only interested into that the kid submits to authority and will be scared of authority the rest of his life, because the people that make up school all are what they want the kid to be, they are more afraid even of the kid than authority. The parent describes a fantastic kid and should trust the kid and make sure to soften the impact of that school and prepare the kid for better times after school. In my country in Europe there are schools that care about natural curiosity and will not try to kill it, I don't know about the situation in the US where this takes place.
brg 13y ago
After hiring committee one day, we digressed into a discussion of the value of a high GPA from university. One of my colleagues made the point that the value of an individual with a high GPA from a four year degree is that you know the person will get done what needs to get done. To have a high GPA, a student needs to finish term papers on subjects they have no interest in, they need to study for exams in language for which they have no intention of using again, he will read books by authors he disagrees with and toil into the night on problem sets that have little perceivable utility. But in the end they will get it done, and if they maintained a high GPA they have shown that he will get it done year over year and always with high quality. So a high GPA often means that they are not lazy and self centered. It often means a candidate will not sit idle because a task is beneath her, and she will not pigeonhole on a perfecting an ancillary module when there are better things to do. A student who does not do what is required, who would fritter away on self entertainment via music or finger painting is not someone who can be relied on.
- hayksaakian 13y ago
  I don't question the value of reliability and persistence, but in your frame of reference, that's the most valuable attribute of a new hire. Is that really the truth?
  - epochwolf 13y ago
    For a hiring committee, most likely. A committee at any corporation would be incapable of measuring or understanding anything else. :P I joke but most managers at places at have hiring committees are more interested in underlings obeying orders than showing any form of excellence.
  - brg 13y ago
    It depends on the position and level one is hiring at, really. For a senior engineer or manager we want a leader, someone who both has vision and can get things done in an organization. For a junior engineer we need only someone who can execute. When looking at GPA, it is the later. In my experience it is a very rare college who who has the intuition or insight to drive any part of a product.
- dbpatterson 13y ago
  Having a low GPA does not indicate that the person spends their time "frittering away on self entertainment via music or finger painting" - it might mean that they don't waste their time on things that aren't valuable, and focus intensely on what is important - which could be the very skills that would be useful in whatever post-university life they will have. Granted, if you are trying to hire a drone who will mindlessly accomplish whatever they are tasked to do (and will never challenge stupid ideas), perhaps independence and creative thought are the last thing you want, but it's pretty intellectually bankrupt to conclude that anyone who doesn't get good grades is just wasting their time.
- rajivm 13y ago
  I guess it depends what you are hiring for... If you are hiring for someone that will just "do the work" and not care what it is, then it seems like this is sound logic. However, if you're looking for someone who is creative and passionate about their work, believes in what your business is trying to do, and the work they are trying to accomplish, and will find the best way to accomplish it -- school no longer seems so representative of this, where they know the tasks they are completing serve no purpose other than a "grade."
- tptacek 13y ago
  I suspect few people are reliable at all tasks, that there is a spectrum of reliability on arbitrary/tedious/unmeaningful tasks, and that where you fall on that spectrum is unrelated to how reliable you might be at meaningful work. In other words, I think your hiring committee is fallaciously flattening out human nature. For all I know that works fine for you, so don't let me stop you. But: your last sentence was pretty dismissive and harmed your argument.
  - brg 13y ago
    In no way is GPA the only dimension on which we evaluate candidates. The discussion arose when we asked if it was useful at all. And I agree with my colleague, it is indeed useful in predicting self control and persistance. I do however agree with you about the last comment. If there were not already replies, I would edit it to make the point in another way. But the intention is still the same. The time not being spent on homework, in the case of the article, is being spent on entertainment.
- steholmes 13y ago
  So he should do something he has no interest in so he can get a job where he's doing things he has no interest in?
- rwallace 13y ago
  This is apparently rational at a single level of analysis (at least if you take the stereotypical sociopathic corporation stance and don't care about the waste of life involved - I understand some people do think like this, though I'm mildly surprised to see someone admit to it on HN). It breaks down as soon as you step the analysis up to the next level and remember you're not the only employer in the world. People who have pieces of paper with high numbers on them and are actually good, can easily find jobs. Which, unless you are Google or Fog Creek, probably means they already have jobs. Very few employers get to cherry-pick from all the world, those candidates with the highest perceived desirability. The vast majority will be looking at applications from candidates whose perceived desirability was slightly lower. The question you should ask yourself is, would you rather hire someone whose perceived desirability was slightly lower because of the lack of a piece of paper with high numbers on it, or because of actual inability to do the job?
- jared314 13y ago
  I wish my parents had shared this view with me at the beginning of highschool, as opposed to the standard "knowledge is the path to a better life" mantra. I now try to explain to any young student I know that school is a game where you have to win despite the arbitrary information, inconsistant rules, social games, and bad teachers. It feels short-sighted, overly-realistic, and depressing, but it would have served me better than filling me with hopes and dreams.
- wtallis 13y ago
  Do you really want to hire somebody whose most notable talent is their ability to bullshit their superiors and tell them what they want to hear?
  - tnuc 13y ago
    Unfortunately that is how the hiring systems for most things work.
  - jussij 13y ago
    The unfortunate reality is in a lot of (big) organisation people who can bullshit progress the furthest. I've worked with plenty of managers that would rather not know the truth if it meant having to deal with a problem. To them denial is bliss.
- wheaties 13y ago
  While I don't completely agree the logic is sound. There are just too many inconsistent hurdles during adolescence to overcome and still come out ahead. That said, how do you weigh the merits of program choices? I ask because there are degrees which are of lesser difficulty depending on the school. How do you differentiate between a chemistry degree and an anthropology degree (not implying either is harder, mind you.)
- saraid216 13y ago
  I had a high GPA and was both lazy and self-centered. Just, FYI. That's why I have so much useless karma here on HN.
- greenlander 13y ago
  I interviewed thousands of new college grads. The guys who I made offers to were almost always guys who did stuff on their own. Right before I retired, the last guy I made a job offer to showed me an app he had written for his iphone that simulated how particles diffuse in a solvent, and his resume showed a link to the code that he wrote. His GPA was only a 3.5. But I totally got him: he was great because he had a passion for digging into stuff, and not just for jumping through professors' hoops. In general, the correlation I found between GPA and competence was this: Below 3.0, something is wrong. This person doesn't get fundamentals: he will write convoluted code and won't get a lot of basic concepts. He either isn't very bright or highly undisciplined or both. 3.0 - 3.5, this guy isn't good at jumping through hoops, but he might be great if he has a passion for programming and has done lots of side work. It's a mixed lot but there are a fair number of diamonds in the rough. 3.5 - 3.9, this is the sweet spot. Lots of great people in this category who did both great and school and also did stuff in their spare time. 3.9 - 4.0, oddly, the quality seemed to go down here a little bit. These are the people who spent all their Friday and Saturday nights studying instead of developing social skills, and didn't really do much besides jump through the professors' hoops and get an A in everything. A great engineer doesn't just blindly jump through every hoop. In the real world, the amount of work is highly unbounded, and a great engineer will be able to sort through it and figure out what's REALLY important and what's not. And they'll be able to articulate why they think that and negotiate with others. Sometimes, the 4.0 candidates were obsessive-compulsive people weren't grounded in the real world and couldn't think in practical terms. Obviously, I'm generalize and there are always exceptions. But if you interview thousands of candidates you see the trend.
  - kenster07 13y ago
    This is an irrational model for evaluating a candidate's talent. The best way to evaluate a candidate's talent is to make them code for you, plain and simple. Many people's motivations in university diverge from their motives in the professional world. Some people will work much harder when the result is a paycheck every two weeks, or when they have to feed a family, or because they see their work career as distinct from their academic career. But for the sake of argument, let's play along with this naive model. The university they attended matters almost as much as their GPA, as we all know that professors will tend to curve the difficulty of their course to conform to the quality of the students they are teaching. And you have an illogical attitude towards 3.9-4.0 students. Almost every student who attends an Ivy-caliber school had a 3.9-4.0 in high school. Surely, you aren't implying that the quality of a CalTech CS graduate is lower than the quality of a UCLA CS graduate, because the CalTech students' one-time GPA was likely a 4.0. And you certainly can't be saying that Ivy-caliber students are sheep who blindly jump through hoops.
- Aloisius 13y ago
  Considering the level of grade inflation today and the number of students who cheat in college and/or to get to college, I can't imagine taking GPA seriously.
- kenster07 13y ago
  No. Just no. Academia != real-world work. If the school system's mandate is to prepare and evaluate students for the workplace, it is not doing a very good job. The style of work and incentive systems differ greatly between your typical company and university. The differences in incentive systems are obvious, so I won't delve. But as for the style of work, I recall that in university, professors would ask students to write a computer program on PAPER for exams. Sure, there is some overlap between that and a workplace environment. But at the end of the day, it is not simulating a real-world work environment, where you would be able to run and test your program, debug it, look up little tidbits on Google, and so forth, before checking it in.
- kamaal 13y ago
  >> One of my colleagues made the point that the value of an individual with a high GPA from a four year degree is that you know the person will get done what needs to get done. What? The student's context of getting things done is learning, not scoring marks. So the student is not getting things done. In short the student has just gamed the system to ensure he looks like someone who gets things done. >>To have a high GPA Too high or too low marks are both an indication that something wrong is going with the student. >>But in the end they will get it done, and if they maintained a high GPA they have shown that he will get it done year over year and always with high quality. Sorry, if you subscribe to this theory all you will get is students coming in a assembly line whose only known expertise is to score marks. >>So a high GPA often means that they are not lazy and self centered. It often means a candidate will not sit idle because a task is beneath her, and she will not pigeonhole on a perfecting an ancillary module when there are better things to do. This needs some elaboration. Interviews are the equivalent of the examinations in the corporate world. When you hire nth order mug pots expert at scoring high marks, you are ideally hiring someone is too good at interviews. Think of it this way, if you spent approximately 3 hours practicing interviews everyday- you can soon(say in 2 years) reach a state where you can clear any interview in any company. Google, Microsoft, Adobe, FB- You name it, you would have likely covered anything that they can ever ask or will ever ask, you can even get to a stage where you can anticipate every damn question or the whole interview by just their initial questions. But to get there you will have to spend good amount of time practicing than actually doing the work you are supposed to do. Believe it or not many people actually do exactly this. I know of a person in my last company who would dedicate at least spend 2-3 hours in a day practicing interviews come hell or high water. The person hardly ever got the work done, but had one quality. Practice interviews well, and then change your company every 2-3 years, and from what I know is highest compensated among all my friends and previous colleagues I know.
- wglb 13y ago
  I do hope that works for you, but very much on my mind after reading this is Job's "misfit" quote: http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/38357.html http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/38357.html A student who does not do what is required... would have described me throughout much of my career, and there is a string of bosses, unfortunately, that may have ulcers as a result of employing me, what with my wild ideas and unchecked imagination.
DanBC 13y ago
> “My teacher didn’t like the project, because I put it on the wrong size paper.” > It is boring and condescending and even my son, at the age of twelve, can figure out that the rules are arbitrary, that they are enforced in a haphazard fashion Unfortunately, and it should not be like this, life is full of situations where rules are arbitrary, and applied in a haphazard fashion, often by people who are idiots. Your son is right. But it is important for him to learn how to deal with these people, otherwise he is himself up for a life of frustration and pain and disappointment. When attempting homework there are 3 things he needs to do. i) Work out what dull arbitrary rules are being enforced, and obey these. ii) Do the homework. iii) If possible find interest in the homework. Expand it to other subjects, understand why it's useful, where it comes from, who uses it in their day to day life, or what it's been replaced by. You can try the Phil Beadle books - his style might be too annoying for you. (http://www.amazon.com/Phil-Beadle/e/B0034NOMOU/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1 http://www.amazon.com/Phil-Beadle/e/B0034NOMOU/ref=ntt_athr_...) School does really suck for some people. There are lots of things that education based startups could address. It'll be tricky to get any change in education because it is so heavily political.
gz5 13y ago
Schools are still centered on producing industrial revolution outcome - factory workers. See Seth Godin and others for much more on this topic.
tptacek 13y ago
My son finds homework painfully aversive, as I did before him. But I cut him much less slack than I was given as a kid. School is often arbitrary, pointless, and tedious. It's part of a large system that needs to serve many different interests, several of them legitimate. That's modern life. We're not so much beset by wolves and bears; instead, we have to deal with systems and social/cultural obligations. And while I don't so much care if the boy emerges from high school remembering all the Latin declensions or the details of the Treaty of Ghent, he's at least going to be familiar with what it takes to play the system. For whatever it's worth: when I pay attention to his homework, I rarely find it pointless. And in the classes most imperiled by pointlessness, there homework usually takes the form of essays. And there is nothing in the world more valuable than being able to express ideas in writing. So he writes the essays, and I make him do drafts and drafts and drafts.
- wdewind 13y ago
  I'm curious, do you ever have discussions with him where you make it clear that you know he is "playing the game" so to speak, or do you also try and hold up the charade? (I know it's less black and white than that, I'm speaking in extremes to make a clear question.)
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Hah. Yes. Hah. Hahahaha. Like all teenagers, he is capable of of reason, judgement, introspective listening, and a sense of how he actually fits into the cosmos. In 5-10 minute bursts. In other words: I might as well be the teacher addressing the question of whether the dog has the Buddha-nature. I try, but realistically. And then I make him write the papers.
    - smokeyj 13y ago
      What if he doesn't like "playing the game"? No dinner?
      - tptacek 13y ago
MetaCosm 13y ago
First of all... June 2007 article. Secondly, school is a system, government is a system, large corporations are systems, learning to survive and advance within systems is valuable. Outright revolt as an individual is generally purposeless, use that creativity to find way to minimize effort while maximizing gain. I learned this trick far too late in my school career!
mgkimsal 13y ago
I've been there, as a kid, and I get his frustration (well, both the parent's and kid's). As much as homework sucks, and following the rules sucks, it's something everyone has to do at some point. Learning how to do it, and acknowledge it for what it is, is important. I can remember all of about 15 days between 1st and 11th grades where I actually did homework, as in, did school work at home. The rest of the time, I did whatever exercises/sheets/etc that needed to be handed in on the bus or during class before we went home. The 15 days - I remember having to go to the library to read up on some topics to write papers, and I remember having a few essays which took a bit of time to write longhand (and eventually word processed on a computer later). It wasn't until 12th grade that the assignments got hard enough that I ever struggled. By then it was somewhat too late - I didn't have any really strong innate ability to study something for more than a few minutes. Now today, that might not even matter at some level, with all answers a google away, but I think it still takes time to really study and learn a subject/problem/etc. The ability to focus yourself on something - anything - and get through the hard stuff you don't care about before getting to the stuff you might enjoy - that's a discipline I didn't have, and it took me many more years to get it back, even for things I wanted to get more involved in. Developing this habit/skill at a younger age will pay dividends, but it's hard for kids to appreciate that. The OP's kid may be mature enough in some ways to at least consider this angle - logically - when homework comes up. Do the stupid exercises on the size paper they want with the stupid number 2 pencil. Learn to adapt to whatever requirements are put before you quickly and with little fuss - focusing on the intellectual aspects first. As someone else mentioned, those are eventually mandatory in just about all walks of life, so learning to roll with that will help. It's possibly similar to healthy eating and exercise. Especially for kids - they can 'eat anything' and not get fat, stay thin, etc. Eventually, that goes away, and learning to eat healthy and exercise is something you have to adapt to to remain in good health. If you have a better grounding in healthy eating and physical fitness from a young age, it's not a big deal.
olympus 13y ago
There's a story from Gene Woolsey that I had to read my senior year in college (I was an Ops Research major, and Gene Woolsey is a pretty big deal in that field). The story went something like this: A group of students had just finished a big research project and were told to present a one page executive summary that outlined their work, results, and conclusions. They couldn't quite get it to fit on one page, so their executive summary was two pages, but the second page was only 1/8th full. No big deal, right? They showed up to meet with the head of the company that was sponsoring their research, and handed him the paper. He rips off the second page and throws it in the trash (losing a good portion of their conclusions). The head of the company reads the first page, then stops and says, "This summary is incomplete. Where are your conclusions?" The team was dumbfounded, and lost a few points on their grade because they didn't follow the rules. The moral of the story is: FOLLOW THE GD* RULES. If you want to use a different kind of paper, ask your teacher first. If you need an extension on the due date, ask your teacher first. If the guidance says to write a one page summary, do not write a two page summary. It's fine to be creative, but don't change the rules on your own because you don't have the authority to change the rules. In most things it is easier to ask permission than it is to ask forgiveness. It's not unusual to not want to do homework, but a lot of people in this modern generation think that it's okay to get bad grades and just blame it on the fact that they are not "book smart." Just about every movie marketed towards young people is a variation of the theme where a kid is secretly a prodigy but the "system" didn't realize it somehow. That is not how it works in real life. For every kid who skips all his homework and gets bad grades but is secretly Will Hunting there are a thousand kids or more who are getting bad grades and are going to end up flipping burgers as a career. It's time to start spanking your kids so they'll get better grades and won't suck at life. Btw, here's a link to the book if you want to read some stories from an actual genius: http://www.lionhrtpub.com/books/wp1.html http://www.lionhrtpub.com/books/wp1.html
- tptacek 13y ago
  Here's another comment on this thread that I disagreed with but found sensible, until the very end, where it recommends that adults hit children to make them do things.
  - 13y ago
SurfScore 13y ago
I completely agree on most things in school being useless, especially homework. However, I don't know of a single career path one can take where they never have to do boring, monotonous, or simply annoying things to succeed. CEOs have to handle investors and bullshit politics, professional athletes have to practice and work out, and even rich retired people had to do plenty of stupid pointless things to get to that point. Shit, even the Queen of England has to make appearances I'm sure she'd rather skip. Don't frame the homework as something he has to do to learn what he already knows, frame it as a stepping stone. If he doesn't do his homework, he will fail out of school. If he fails out of school, his chances of doing what he loves severely diminish (and having to work at Taco Bell is a lot worse than homework). Doing to homework now is the gateway to never having to do homework again.
guylhem 13y ago
The core problem in the blog post is the (perceived) arbitrary judgement of the value of the work. Let's suppose the parent evaluation is right, which is not self evident given how the emotional attachments impairs judgement. The article says the work was poorly graded because the paper was not of the "right size". We can suppose that the grader either a) didn't have the time to properly grade b) had to follow strict and pointless rules even if they were evidently stupid c) had a poor judgement. The c case is the biggest problem - when an evaluation fonction returns wrong results. b and a could be special cases of c (not having a schedule or following stupid rules could be having a poor judgement) Now let's think for a minute than N% of the graders are giving results that are no better than random assessment of the pupils. Given how, in a schoolchildren life, a number of educators will be met, N% of the results will be meaningless (apply statistics, SD, etc.) Now think of those randomly declared having "good grades" become graders (teachers) themselves. I wonder how the equilibrium works out in a society - at which value of N will society turn education from acquiring knowledge to jumping through hoods and having a certificate in witchcraft (replace witchcraft by anything you think is wrong and pointless) [Even worse- think, if for example the school district is poor and recruts graders of a lesser quality, that this raises to (N+X)%]
jacalata 13y ago
So, if we take the author at his word, then either the teacher had an unwritten rule for the size of the paper, or the student and the author both somehow managed to not read or to forget this rule. If it's a, then rules lawyer the hell out of the idiot teacher. If it's b, then looks like both of them are bad at details and instructions, which is a skill that certainly deserves some attention. So why was that the end of the story?
- aspensmonster 13y ago
  Probably because it doesn't matter if it was one of the instructions or not, because it's entirely irrelevant to anything other than an arbitrary "follow instructions" assignment. Coincidentally that sort of assignment is precisely what the author complains about.
  - jacalata 13y ago
    And reading and writing are irrelevant to whether the kid could do the equations, but if he doesn't have either skill then he needs help, not just for dad to say the teacher is mean. I consider understanding arbitrary rules to be similarly as basic a skill.
protomyth 13y ago
I have no understanding of why schools are allowed to assign homework in the first place. The kid is at school 7 hours and then most schools try to assign a couple of hours of homework on top of that. I seem to remember a work / life balance thread about working over 40 hours a week is bad. So, why is it ok for our children?
jostmey 13y ago
We learn math & science because it gives us electricity, airliners, and computers. Enough said.
- gruseom 13y ago
  If that were the reason, they would never have existed in the first place.
- gaze 13y ago
  Nah. We do it because it's cool. Those things are side effects.
jcampbell1 13y ago
“My teacher didn’t like the project, because I put it on the wrong size paper.” Either you are bullshitting, or you better learn what size paper to do your homework on. Winning is easier than being right, and winning is much more fun. I don't have a teenage kid, but there I think there are two thing that are important. 1) Acquiring new knowledge should be self-rewarding. 2) Winning is fun. This parent seems to have a kid that hasn't experienced the joy of the #2. He seems to actively prevent his kid from winning because he thinks winning is wrong. This is a common theme where parents constrain their children to do no better than themselves. Children of immigrants tend to be incredibly successful because their parents have no such inhibitions.
- hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
  > Winning is easier than being right, and winning is much more fun. Hence why we have a society full of puppets with new cars in the garage. What an awful way to think, I'm disgusted by your reasoning. For whatever meaning of "winning" you have, life only matters if you do what you believe in, otherwise it's not worth living.
  - nbouscal 13y ago
    So in this case, 'what you believe in' is not following the instructions as to which size of paper to use? This is what my mom always referred to as 'cutting off your nose to spite your face.'
    - simplexion 13y ago
      If my face was more concerned about the media I attached my work to than my work itself, I would definitely cut off my nose to spite it. FUCK YOU, FACE!
  - jcampbell1 13y ago
    I am sorry. I wrote that from the wrong perspective. I was raised in a tiny town in the southern US, where being "right" has something to do with "praising jesus". Thanks to my parents, I was encouraged to "win" and now I live in NYC, and have a great job, a wife I love and respect, and an awesome daughter. My point is not about right vs. winning, it is more about giving your children the tools to do well in any environment.
vonskippy 13y ago
Paying bills is stupid. Cleaning house is boring. Going to work EVERY day is stupid. Following rules is stupid. Doing what you're told is stupid. etc etc etc. Bwahahaha - your kid is screwed. The world is full of arbitrary and down right stupid rules (assuming he ever gets a job, he'll love the tax codes that apply to him, but not to rich people or corporations). You need to straighten out his young punk ass - and do it now. Before you say "but what about his mad art/music skillz", I'm afraid I'd need an outside expert to qualify those before I believe they exist. I put my 8 year old daughter's artwork on my office wall and tell her it's beautiful - lucky (for her and me) shes a whiz at science and will get a real job later in life. No one succeeds in life that can't even manage to get a measly high school degree from a "see spot run" public school. You are the parent - NOT the twelve year old - what part of that escapes you? Maybe it's time for private school, where the whole "leave no moron behind" concept doesn't exist. Obviously you and the kids present school system have already failed. Maybe it's not too late for the kid.
- moron4hire 13y ago
  art is not a real job?
  - epochwolf 13y ago
    For a lot of artists, unfortunately it's not. They need to have a job to support their art habit/hobby.
    - moron4hire 13y ago
      Perhaps that is because they focused too much on so-called "real" work and never developed their art enough to make a living. Perhaps they need so much money because they went to a university to learn what is free at any library.
      - epochwolf 13y ago
        Or no one is willing to pay enough for their skills.
Diamons 13y ago
Really can't help much but here's my story. I've gone through the majority of high school and college (I'm a junior next semester) without doing much of my homework. I'll do the occasional essay that's worth 20% of your grade or whatever and I won't miss exams, but I won't read (or even buy) the assigned books and responses. I do this because I have much more interesting stuff I like to work on instead of wasting time on homework, but I got along fine. I maintain a steady 3.4 GPA without doing any readings/more than half my homeworks/missing a lot of days of school simply because I feel like it. I value certain things above school. I say this because I truly believe your son will be fine. People like him are creative and genius way beyond comprehension. They simply refuse to do things the way they are supposed to be done, and that's the sign of someone who's going to be successful one day or another, just not when the definition of success is doing what everyone else is doing how everyone else is doing it.
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swayvil 13y ago
Sounds like the kid values his time.
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joyeuse6701 13y ago
mm, This may be minutae to some, but I think it's important: Learning math is not tedium. By that I mean gaining the problem solving skills and the mindset required for mathematics is invaluable. Jeopardy facts however I can't defend.
Spooky23 13y ago
Unfortunately, you need to deal with chickenshit sometimes. I was a history nut in high school -- I received perfect scores on all of the Regents exams (state tests in NY), and got 5's on two history AP exams, one of which I didn't take the class for. It was my passion. But I did receive a "C" in Global studies class my junior year -- because my binder didn't have the tabs organized correctly. (Wrong colors, wrong order) My classmates even complained, because I could have taught the class! End of the day, it didn't affect my life much, gives me a funny story to tell, and prepared me for the bureaucratic hazing that was to come from the State University of New York. As long as your son understands that less than perfect grades will keep him out of Stanford, Harvard, etc, relax.
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snowwrestler 13y ago
If I can impart one thing I've learned in my life to my child, it will be this: no one cares how smart or talented you are. They care about what you do. What you accomplish. Some of the things you accomplish are great things that only you could do--your life's work. Accomplishing these will among the greatest experiences of your life. But a lot of the things you accomplish will seem pointless and boring. Doesn't matter--you still need to do them. In school it's homework; in real life it's time sheets, contracts, taxes, auto registration, insurance, memos, etc. Accomplishing these will suck...but you still need to do them. In fact failing to do so is a good way to keep yourself from having the opportunity to accomplish great things.
moron4hire 13y ago
How do you win a rigged game? Stop playing the game and make everyone else play your game. According to my parents, I was exactly like your son in the mid 80s. They homeschooled me to make sure I wasn't held back from my potential. It wasn't without its challenges, but nothing is. I'm doing pretty well now. I had a brief foray into "doing what I was told" in college, and figured out it was not going to get me to graduate with the grades I wanted, so I found an adviser who understood me, who would trust I could take care of myself and just sign off on my self-directed path through my degree. I had a longer foray after college (it seems I learn certain lessons slowly) and eventually grew so sick of getting up early every morning and driving an hour to work in shitty traffic that I just quit. I quit everything for almost a year. For a year, I worked the hardest I've ever worked on whatever I wanted. And it got me nowhere. Except... Except it taught me that the world can't destroy me. It taught me that I'm capable of so much and it is only myself to blame for submitting to bosses or procrastination for not getting it done (and really, doing what your boss tells you to do is a form of procrastination). Everyone told me I was going to be ruined, that I'd not find work again because I'd been off so long "in this economy!" Dire consequences were in store for me, to not grovel at the feet of the recruiters, to not beg for my old job back. Bunch of lily-livered cowards. No such thing happened, and the idea is patently absurd. No, the only thing that can destroy me is myself. I see all these people saying "You gotta pay your dues" and "sometimes you just have to suck it up and do what you're told". And it is such complete and utter fucking bullshit. You don't have to do a single god damn thing you don't want to in this world. The world won't destroy you. You gotta buy this car to drive to work, drive to work to pay for this car. Yeah, screw that. What the hell do you need a degree for when the only people who are getting anywhere in this world are doing it by starting companies and getting out of the rat race? What the hell do you need a recruiter for when the only jobs they have to give you are going to make you a miserable son of a bitch? What the hell do you need anything for? All you really need is a pencil and some paper, and the only reason you need that is because it's the only way to communicate with enough people. Write. Write. Write. Draw. Compose. Program. Mathematicate. A robot can dig a ditch for you, so why are you digging ditches? Do the one thing that humans can do that computers cannot: create. Don't let anyone tell you what to create. Create whatever you want. People fail not because they fail to create the right things, they fail because they fail to create anything. And to all you people in here, talking about "you have to play the game," "that's the system," "deal with it": you're certainly free to ruin your own life, but leave the poor, damn kids alone.
kenster07 13y ago
The primary goal of the education system should be to prepare students to reach their full potential in the real world. It is not achieving this goal optimally. The best and brightest are often stuck being taught the same material, at the same rate as the median student. We had to spend a year learning Algebra I, for some ungodly reason. How many of us could have learned it in literally one month? How many of us could have finished our entire high school's math curriculum in a year? Why should the A we could have gotten in one month be equated to the A of a person who needed a full school year to learn it? Food for thought.
kjhughes 13y ago
Sugata Mitra believes that our education model, including the emphasis on rule-following, isn't broken but works to address the Victorian needs of the "bureaucratic administrative machine" of the British empire. http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_... His Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLE) provides an alternative approach.
chubbard 13y ago
So the author doesn't believe in homework or at least admits he thinks its pointless, and so does his son. My my my I wonder where a smart little boy learned that from?
parsec 13y ago
This article is horrible. Of course parents think their kids drawings are cute, and their music is wonderous. But unless he is truly virtuoso, or actually has a photographic memory as suggested, he should probably learn some maths as well, and you as a parent should work as hard as you can to get him excited about things that will get him a job instead of rubbing off your callous despisery of "academics and investment bankers" on him. (Seriously... "homogenized and brainwashed", "almost completely without originality of thought or perspective", "good little cog in a habitual big wheel"... what makes you hate academics so deeply?) The entire world is in recession right now, you really think cartoonery is going to get him hired faster than a strong math and science background? But let's pretend that parabolas actually are worthless and boring (God forbid I ever learn your opinion of Gaussians, Betas, Erfs, Einastos, Hernquists, Exponentials, etc.). Sounds like the real issue is the educational system, not the content. Don't for an instant try to say that Music and Maths are not intimately related. Look for gifted or accelerated programs, try to get him enrolled in a Millenium / Magnet school, just try to get him excited. Seriously though, you should hold your tongue when talking about academics. You really think Bohr was homogenized? Was Tesla brainwashed? Was Von Braun a cogwheel? I guarantee people find my "art" just as amusing as your kids little shark doodle.
jspiros 13y ago
This story reminds me of my experience growing up and going to public school in Ohio (in the United States). When I did classwork, I did it very well. When I took tests, I was always in the top of my class (which led to me being in the highest-level classes offered at my schools). And when it came to class participation, the teachers always had praise for me. I spent most of my time outside of school learning new things from books, the internet, and everyone around me. But I almost never did my homework. This was almost the sole source of strife between my mother and I, and between both of us and school administrators. Going from 8th to 9th grade required a special exception, and recommendations from almost every one of my teachers, as my GPA was below the point normally required to progress to the next grade. I am lucky in that the teachers I had were sympathetic enough to stand up for me, and confident in my abilities using other methods of evaluation. We (my mother and I) considered other schools, other formats of school, but in the end we settled on something modeled after Unschooling. When I was 13-going-on-14, halfway through my 9th grade year (freshman year of high school in the United States), my mother took me out of school using the legal provision for homeschooling. As she was a single working mother, I spent the rest of the years that my peers were in high school learning things on my own and seeking out my own learning opportunities. (A year or so later, I learned C, Objective-C, and the Cocoa frameworks and started a Mac applications business a year or so later with friends I met on the internet.) Granted, I had the following things going for me: a supportive mother, generally being "well-behaved", living in a small town where it was safe to leave me to my own devices, living in a college town which gave me access to more learning resources, and an in-built self-motivated learning style. I also think it helped that I went through the public school system for many years before I left, as it meant I had friends and a social life that stuck with me even after leaving the school itself. So, I'm sure it's not for everyone, but for some, and maybe OP's son, it's worth considering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling
lpvn 13y ago
My theory is that some people have a threshold of 'pointlessness aversion' inadequate to the western school system. The son of the author is like that: he finds his homework useless so he won't do it. Perhaps we should admit that our society is too harsh with certain groups of people who happen to lack some abilities, I know it's been this way throughout the whole human history but since we reached an advanced level of material development we should at least reconsider this social dynamic.
brudgers 13y ago
A few years ago, I read The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning by Kralovec and Buell. The authors build a well-presented case against homework for children younger than high-school age based upon their claims that there is little evidence that homework for younger children has any long or short term benefit. The authors observe that homework is disruptive to family dynamics because it is an ongoing source of conflict between parents and their children. They also observe that the primary reason schools assign homework to younger children is because parents demand it. Both of these observations are consistent with my experience both within my own family and my observations of the families of my child's peers. On the other hand, I have no way of verifying or denying the author's claims about homework studies failing to demonstrate long term benefits from homework. Overall, I am glad I read it because it gave me some perspective on the issue. My son still is responsible for doing his homework, and we as parents clearly communicate this to him. Anyway, if you're parenting, I'd say it's perhaps worth checking out. As an aside, I strongly recommend Juliet Schor's Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture about the way corporations have come to market to children - and it's probably only gotten worse with them having online lives. End of Homework: http://www.amazon.com/The-End-Homework-Disrupts-Overburdens/dp/0807042196/ref=sr_sp-atf_image_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1370231905&sr=8-3&keywords=book+end+homework http://www.amazon.com/The-End-Homework-Disrupts-Overburdens/... Born to Buy: http://www.amazon.com/Born-Buy-Commercialized-Consumer-Culture/dp/0684870568/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370232915&sr=8-1&keywords=born+to+buy http://www.amazon.com/Born-Buy-Commercialized-Consumer-Cultu...
datz 13y ago
guy I hate to say it - but is is either school or other talents. you can't half ass both and get away with it. it is either C student and entrepreneur-facilitating, marketable outside talents or A student and no-little outside talents. B student and mediocre outside talents will lead to mediocracy and failure. so decide which you want to encourage. i would go for outside talents but you better make damn sure your son has the right tutor, influences, and environment to hone his natural inclinations outside the traditional academic system.
kuenx 13y ago
I stopped doing my homework when I was twelve, too. Or maybe eleven. I started again when I went to technical colleague. Worked out well.
alex_doom 13y ago
Even though this is from 5 years ago I hear this argument from many people with kids. I think it's a bit of a cop out, and feels like they want recognition that their child is special and deserves attention. No one ever looks at this from a teachers perspective. They are caught in the middle of trying to help children with wide variety of learning styles and the political machine of a school district learning mandate. They can only do so much to help. If a parent feels their child doesn't fit the mold and thinks the system is rigged, they should help their child understand how the school system work and how that relates to the rest of the working world. Where nearly everything else is based on metrics. If they feel their child understand the material but the tests and homework are causing problems, find the path that accomplishes the goals of a passing grades. You'd be surprised if you just ask, that a teacher will tell you what they are going to be grading on. Is it just test or is it an overall judgement of how the child is doing? As a kid I figured out that the key to "doing well" was to impress by showing off in areas where you really do excel. Is the child more creative? Then answer the homework or tests with creative answers and get the answer they are looking for but done in a fashion that may be different than what was expected. Do they have to do a book report? Make that look better than every other kid in class. In short I pretty much skated through middle school and high school by doing the bare minimum to achieve an C but impressed in other creative areas that demonstrated effort and ability to comprehend the material. Anyway that's my rant.
niknak24 13y ago
I don't have kids, and am self taught in my choice of profession. If he doesn't want to do certain things then he won't, I'm sure he will be successful without specific qualifications.
gpf 13y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_model From personal experience with a similar situation. It's a major leap of faith, but you'd be surprised what a kid can do in an environment that permits them to.
gibbitz 13y ago
not leaving high school for a GED and college my sophomore year was the biggest mistake I ever made. I'm never getting those two years back. I'm also not getting the 10 years of college back either. I taught myself what I do for a living and very little of my education led to where I am today. Intellectual curiosity is what created the text books we spoon feed our kids and is the most important trait that can be fostered in them. It will put food on their tables and advance the human race beyond where it is today. I just try to keep this in perspective while raising my two daughters.
simulate 13y ago
It would be interesting to learn how his son is doing today, six years later.

98 points by namuol 13y ago

School is only interested into that the kid submits to authority and will be scared of authority the rest of his life, because the people that make up school all are what they want the kid to be, they are more afraid even of the kid than authority. The parent describes a fantastic kid and should trust the kid and make sure to soften the impact of that school and prepare the kid for better times after school. In my country in Europe there are schools that care about natural curiosity and will not try to kill it, I don't know about the situation in the US where this takes place.

brg 13y ago

After hiring committee one day, we digressed into a discussion of the value of a high GPA from university. One of my colleagues made the point that the value of an individual with a high GPA from a four year degree is that you know the person will get done what needs to get done. To have a high GPA, a student needs to finish term papers on subjects they have no interest in, they need to study for exams in language for which they have no intention of using again, he will read books by authors he disagrees with and toil into the night on problem sets that have little perceivable utility. But in the end they will get it done, and if they maintained a high GPA they have shown that he will get it done year over year and always with high quality. So a high GPA often means that they are not lazy and self centered. It often means a candidate will not sit idle because a task is beneath her, and she will not pigeonhole on a perfecting an ancillary module when there are better things to do. A student who does not do what is required, who would fritter away on self entertainment via music or finger painting is not someone who can be relied on.

hayksaakian 13y ago
I don't question the value of reliability and persistence, but in your frame of reference, that's the most valuable attribute of a new hire. Is that really the truth?
- epochwolf 13y ago
  For a hiring committee, most likely. A committee at any corporation would be incapable of measuring or understanding anything else. :P I joke but most managers at places at have hiring committees are more interested in underlings obeying orders than showing any form of excellence.
- brg 13y ago
  It depends on the position and level one is hiring at, really. For a senior engineer or manager we want a leader, someone who both has vision and can get things done in an organization. For a junior engineer we need only someone who can execute. When looking at GPA, it is the later. In my experience it is a very rare college who who has the intuition or insight to drive any part of a product.
dbpatterson 13y ago
Having a low GPA does not indicate that the person spends their time "frittering away on self entertainment via music or finger painting" - it might mean that they don't waste their time on things that aren't valuable, and focus intensely on what is important - which could be the very skills that would be useful in whatever post-university life they will have. Granted, if you are trying to hire a drone who will mindlessly accomplish whatever they are tasked to do (and will never challenge stupid ideas), perhaps independence and creative thought are the last thing you want, but it's pretty intellectually bankrupt to conclude that anyone who doesn't get good grades is just wasting their time.
rajivm 13y ago
I guess it depends what you are hiring for... If you are hiring for someone that will just "do the work" and not care what it is, then it seems like this is sound logic. However, if you're looking for someone who is creative and passionate about their work, believes in what your business is trying to do, and the work they are trying to accomplish, and will find the best way to accomplish it -- school no longer seems so representative of this, where they know the tasks they are completing serve no purpose other than a "grade."
tptacek 13y ago
I suspect few people are reliable at all tasks, that there is a spectrum of reliability on arbitrary/tedious/unmeaningful tasks, and that where you fall on that spectrum is unrelated to how reliable you might be at meaningful work. In other words, I think your hiring committee is fallaciously flattening out human nature. For all I know that works fine for you, so don't let me stop you. But: your last sentence was pretty dismissive and harmed your argument.
- brg 13y ago
  In no way is GPA the only dimension on which we evaluate candidates. The discussion arose when we asked if it was useful at all. And I agree with my colleague, it is indeed useful in predicting self control and persistance. I do however agree with you about the last comment. If there were not already replies, I would edit it to make the point in another way. But the intention is still the same. The time not being spent on homework, in the case of the article, is being spent on entertainment.
steholmes 13y ago
So he should do something he has no interest in so he can get a job where he's doing things he has no interest in?
rwallace 13y ago
This is apparently rational at a single level of analysis (at least if you take the stereotypical sociopathic corporation stance and don't care about the waste of life involved - I understand some people do think like this, though I'm mildly surprised to see someone admit to it on HN). It breaks down as soon as you step the analysis up to the next level and remember you're not the only employer in the world. People who have pieces of paper with high numbers on them and are actually good, can easily find jobs. Which, unless you are Google or Fog Creek, probably means they already have jobs. Very few employers get to cherry-pick from all the world, those candidates with the highest perceived desirability. The vast majority will be looking at applications from candidates whose perceived desirability was slightly lower. The question you should ask yourself is, would you rather hire someone whose perceived desirability was slightly lower because of the lack of a piece of paper with high numbers on it, or because of actual inability to do the job?
jared314 13y ago
I wish my parents had shared this view with me at the beginning of highschool, as opposed to the standard "knowledge is the path to a better life" mantra. I now try to explain to any young student I know that school is a game where you have to win despite the arbitrary information, inconsistant rules, social games, and bad teachers. It feels short-sighted, overly-realistic, and depressing, but it would have served me better than filling me with hopes and dreams.
wtallis 13y ago
Do you really want to hire somebody whose most notable talent is their ability to bullshit their superiors and tell them what they want to hear?
- tnuc 13y ago
  Unfortunately that is how the hiring systems for most things work.
- jussij 13y ago
  The unfortunate reality is in a lot of (big) organisation people who can bullshit progress the furthest. I've worked with plenty of managers that would rather not know the truth if it meant having to deal with a problem. To them denial is bliss.
wheaties 13y ago
While I don't completely agree the logic is sound. There are just too many inconsistent hurdles during adolescence to overcome and still come out ahead. That said, how do you weigh the merits of program choices? I ask because there are degrees which are of lesser difficulty depending on the school. How do you differentiate between a chemistry degree and an anthropology degree (not implying either is harder, mind you.)
saraid216 13y ago
I had a high GPA and was both lazy and self-centered. Just, FYI. That's why I have so much useless karma here on HN.
greenlander 13y ago
I interviewed thousands of new college grads. The guys who I made offers to were almost always guys who did stuff on their own. Right before I retired, the last guy I made a job offer to showed me an app he had written for his iphone that simulated how particles diffuse in a solvent, and his resume showed a link to the code that he wrote. His GPA was only a 3.5. But I totally got him: he was great because he had a passion for digging into stuff, and not just for jumping through professors' hoops. In general, the correlation I found between GPA and competence was this: Below 3.0, something is wrong. This person doesn't get fundamentals: he will write convoluted code and won't get a lot of basic concepts. He either isn't very bright or highly undisciplined or both. 3.0 - 3.5, this guy isn't good at jumping through hoops, but he might be great if he has a passion for programming and has done lots of side work. It's a mixed lot but there are a fair number of diamonds in the rough. 3.5 - 3.9, this is the sweet spot. Lots of great people in this category who did both great and school and also did stuff in their spare time. 3.9 - 4.0, oddly, the quality seemed to go down here a little bit. These are the people who spent all their Friday and Saturday nights studying instead of developing social skills, and didn't really do much besides jump through the professors' hoops and get an A in everything. A great engineer doesn't just blindly jump through every hoop. In the real world, the amount of work is highly unbounded, and a great engineer will be able to sort through it and figure out what's REALLY important and what's not. And they'll be able to articulate why they think that and negotiate with others. Sometimes, the 4.0 candidates were obsessive-compulsive people weren't grounded in the real world and couldn't think in practical terms. Obviously, I'm generalize and there are always exceptions. But if you interview thousands of candidates you see the trend.
- kenster07 13y ago
  This is an irrational model for evaluating a candidate's talent. The best way to evaluate a candidate's talent is to make them code for you, plain and simple. Many people's motivations in university diverge from their motives in the professional world. Some people will work much harder when the result is a paycheck every two weeks, or when they have to feed a family, or because they see their work career as distinct from their academic career. But for the sake of argument, let's play along with this naive model. The university they attended matters almost as much as their GPA, as we all know that professors will tend to curve the difficulty of their course to conform to the quality of the students they are teaching. And you have an illogical attitude towards 3.9-4.0 students. Almost every student who attends an Ivy-caliber school had a 3.9-4.0 in high school. Surely, you aren't implying that the quality of a CalTech CS graduate is lower than the quality of a UCLA CS graduate, because the CalTech students' one-time GPA was likely a 4.0. And you certainly can't be saying that Ivy-caliber students are sheep who blindly jump through hoops.
Aloisius 13y ago
Considering the level of grade inflation today and the number of students who cheat in college and/or to get to college, I can't imagine taking GPA seriously.
kenster07 13y ago
No. Just no. Academia != real-world work. If the school system's mandate is to prepare and evaluate students for the workplace, it is not doing a very good job. The style of work and incentive systems differ greatly between your typical company and university. The differences in incentive systems are obvious, so I won't delve. But as for the style of work, I recall that in university, professors would ask students to write a computer program on PAPER for exams. Sure, there is some overlap between that and a workplace environment. But at the end of the day, it is not simulating a real-world work environment, where you would be able to run and test your program, debug it, look up little tidbits on Google, and so forth, before checking it in.
kamaal 13y ago
>> One of my colleagues made the point that the value of an individual with a high GPA from a four year degree is that you know the person will get done what needs to get done. What? The student's context of getting things done is learning, not scoring marks. So the student is not getting things done. In short the student has just gamed the system to ensure he looks like someone who gets things done. >>To have a high GPA Too high or too low marks are both an indication that something wrong is going with the student. >>But in the end they will get it done, and if they maintained a high GPA they have shown that he will get it done year over year and always with high quality. Sorry, if you subscribe to this theory all you will get is students coming in a assembly line whose only known expertise is to score marks. >>So a high GPA often means that they are not lazy and self centered. It often means a candidate will not sit idle because a task is beneath her, and she will not pigeonhole on a perfecting an ancillary module when there are better things to do. This needs some elaboration. Interviews are the equivalent of the examinations in the corporate world. When you hire nth order mug pots expert at scoring high marks, you are ideally hiring someone is too good at interviews. Think of it this way, if you spent approximately 3 hours practicing interviews everyday- you can soon(say in 2 years) reach a state where you can clear any interview in any company. Google, Microsoft, Adobe, FB- You name it, you would have likely covered anything that they can ever ask or will ever ask, you can even get to a stage where you can anticipate every damn question or the whole interview by just their initial questions. But to get there you will have to spend good amount of time practicing than actually doing the work you are supposed to do. Believe it or not many people actually do exactly this. I know of a person in my last company who would dedicate at least spend 2-3 hours in a day practicing interviews come hell or high water. The person hardly ever got the work done, but had one quality. Practice interviews well, and then change your company every 2-3 years, and from what I know is highest compensated among all my friends and previous colleagues I know.
wglb 13y ago
I do hope that works for you, but very much on my mind after reading this is Job's "misfit" quote: http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/38357.html http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/38357.html A student who does not do what is required... would have described me throughout much of my career, and there is a string of bosses, unfortunately, that may have ulcers as a result of employing me, what with my wild ideas and unchecked imagination.

DanBC 13y ago

> “My teacher didn’t like the project, because I put it on the wrong size paper.” > It is boring and condescending and even my son, at the age of twelve, can figure out that the rules are arbitrary, that they are enforced in a haphazard fashion Unfortunately, and it should not be like this, life is full of situations where rules are arbitrary, and applied in a haphazard fashion, often by people who are idiots. Your son is right. But it is important for him to learn how to deal with these people, otherwise he is himself up for a life of frustration and pain and disappointment. When attempting homework there are 3 things he needs to do. i) Work out what dull arbitrary rules are being enforced, and obey these. ii) Do the homework. iii) If possible find interest in the homework. Expand it to other subjects, understand why it's useful, where it comes from, who uses it in their day to day life, or what it's been replaced by. You can try the Phil Beadle books - his style might be too annoying for you. (http://www.amazon.com/Phil-Beadle/e/B0034NOMOU/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1 http://www.amazon.com/Phil-Beadle/e/B0034NOMOU/ref=ntt_athr_...) School does really suck for some people. There are lots of things that education based startups could address. It'll be tricky to get any change in education because it is so heavily political.

gz5 13y ago

Schools are still centered on producing industrial revolution outcome - factory workers. See Seth Godin and others for much more on this topic.

tptacek 13y ago

My son finds homework painfully aversive, as I did before him. But I cut him much less slack than I was given as a kid. School is often arbitrary, pointless, and tedious. It's part of a large system that needs to serve many different interests, several of them legitimate. That's modern life. We're not so much beset by wolves and bears; instead, we have to deal with systems and social/cultural obligations. And while I don't so much care if the boy emerges from high school remembering all the Latin declensions or the details of the Treaty of Ghent, he's at least going to be familiar with what it takes to play the system. For whatever it's worth: when I pay attention to his homework, I rarely find it pointless. And in the classes most imperiled by pointlessness, there homework usually takes the form of essays. And there is nothing in the world more valuable than being able to express ideas in writing. So he writes the essays, and I make him do drafts and drafts and drafts.

wdewind 13y ago
I'm curious, do you ever have discussions with him where you make it clear that you know he is "playing the game" so to speak, or do you also try and hold up the charade? (I know it's less black and white than that, I'm speaking in extremes to make a clear question.)
- tptacek 13y ago
  Hah. Yes. Hah. Hahahaha. Like all teenagers, he is capable of of reason, judgement, introspective listening, and a sense of how he actually fits into the cosmos. In 5-10 minute bursts. In other words: I might as well be the teacher addressing the question of whether the dog has the Buddha-nature. I try, but realistically. And then I make him write the papers.
  - smokeyj 13y ago
    What if he doesn't like "playing the game"? No dinner?
    - tptacek 13y ago

MetaCosm 13y ago

First of all... June 2007 article. Secondly, school is a system, government is a system, large corporations are systems, learning to survive and advance within systems is valuable. Outright revolt as an individual is generally purposeless, use that creativity to find way to minimize effort while maximizing gain. I learned this trick far too late in my school career!

mgkimsal 13y ago

I've been there, as a kid, and I get his frustration (well, both the parent's and kid's). As much as homework sucks, and following the rules sucks, it's something everyone has to do at some point. Learning how to do it, and acknowledge it for what it is, is important. I can remember all of about 15 days between 1st and 11th grades where I actually did homework, as in, did school work at home. The rest of the time, I did whatever exercises/sheets/etc that needed to be handed in on the bus or during class before we went home. The 15 days - I remember having to go to the library to read up on some topics to write papers, and I remember having a few essays which took a bit of time to write longhand (and eventually word processed on a computer later). It wasn't until 12th grade that the assignments got hard enough that I ever struggled. By then it was somewhat too late - I didn't have any really strong innate ability to study something for more than a few minutes. Now today, that might not even matter at some level, with all answers a google away, but I think it still takes time to really study and learn a subject/problem/etc. The ability to focus yourself on something - anything - and get through the hard stuff you don't care about before getting to the stuff you might enjoy - that's a discipline I didn't have, and it took me many more years to get it back, even for things I wanted to get more involved in. Developing this habit/skill at a younger age will pay dividends, but it's hard for kids to appreciate that. The OP's kid may be mature enough in some ways to at least consider this angle - logically - when homework comes up. Do the stupid exercises on the size paper they want with the stupid number 2 pencil. Learn to adapt to whatever requirements are put before you quickly and with little fuss - focusing on the intellectual aspects first. As someone else mentioned, those are eventually mandatory in just about all walks of life, so learning to roll with that will help. It's possibly similar to healthy eating and exercise. Especially for kids - they can 'eat anything' and not get fat, stay thin, etc. Eventually, that goes away, and learning to eat healthy and exercise is something you have to adapt to to remain in good health. If you have a better grounding in healthy eating and physical fitness from a young age, it's not a big deal.

olympus 13y ago

There's a story from Gene Woolsey that I had to read my senior year in college (I was an Ops Research major, and Gene Woolsey is a pretty big deal in that field). The story went something like this: A group of students had just finished a big research project and were told to present a one page executive summary that outlined their work, results, and conclusions. They couldn't quite get it to fit on one page, so their executive summary was two pages, but the second page was only 1/8th full. No big deal, right? They showed up to meet with the head of the company that was sponsoring their research, and handed him the paper. He rips off the second page and throws it in the trash (losing a good portion of their conclusions). The head of the company reads the first page, then stops and says, "This summary is incomplete. Where are your conclusions?" The team was dumbfounded, and lost a few points on their grade because they didn't follow the rules. The moral of the story is: FOLLOW THE GD* RULES. If you want to use a different kind of paper, ask your teacher first. If you need an extension on the due date, ask your teacher first. If the guidance says to write a one page summary, do not write a two page summary. It's fine to be creative, but don't change the rules on your own because you don't have the authority to change the rules. In most things it is easier to ask permission than it is to ask forgiveness. It's not unusual to not want to do homework, but a lot of people in this modern generation think that it's okay to get bad grades and just blame it on the fact that they are not "book smart." Just about every movie marketed towards young people is a variation of the theme where a kid is secretly a prodigy but the "system" didn't realize it somehow. That is not how it works in real life. For every kid who skips all his homework and gets bad grades but is secretly Will Hunting there are a thousand kids or more who are getting bad grades and are going to end up flipping burgers as a career. It's time to start spanking your kids so they'll get better grades and won't suck at life. Btw, here's a link to the book if you want to read some stories from an actual genius: http://www.lionhrtpub.com/books/wp1.html http://www.lionhrtpub.com/books/wp1.html

tptacek 13y ago
Here's another comment on this thread that I disagreed with but found sensible, until the very end, where it recommends that adults hit children to make them do things.
- 13y ago

SurfScore 13y ago

I completely agree on most things in school being useless, especially homework. However, I don't know of a single career path one can take where they never have to do boring, monotonous, or simply annoying things to succeed. CEOs have to handle investors and bullshit politics, professional athletes have to practice and work out, and even rich retired people had to do plenty of stupid pointless things to get to that point. Shit, even the Queen of England has to make appearances I'm sure she'd rather skip. Don't frame the homework as something he has to do to learn what he already knows, frame it as a stepping stone. If he doesn't do his homework, he will fail out of school. If he fails out of school, his chances of doing what he loves severely diminish (and having to work at Taco Bell is a lot worse than homework). Doing to homework now is the gateway to never having to do homework again.

guylhem 13y ago

The core problem in the blog post is the (perceived) arbitrary judgement of the value of the work. Let's suppose the parent evaluation is right, which is not self evident given how the emotional attachments impairs judgement. The article says the work was poorly graded because the paper was not of the "right size". We can suppose that the grader either a) didn't have the time to properly grade b) had to follow strict and pointless rules even if they were evidently stupid c) had a poor judgement. The c case is the biggest problem - when an evaluation fonction returns wrong results. b and a could be special cases of c (not having a schedule or following stupid rules could be having a poor judgement) Now let's think for a minute than N% of the graders are giving results that are no better than random assessment of the pupils. Given how, in a schoolchildren life, a number of educators will be met, N% of the results will be meaningless (apply statistics, SD, etc.) Now think of those randomly declared having "good grades" become graders (teachers) themselves. I wonder how the equilibrium works out in a society - at which value of N will society turn education from acquiring knowledge to jumping through hoods and having a certificate in witchcraft (replace witchcraft by anything you think is wrong and pointless) [Even worse- think, if for example the school district is poor and recruts graders of a lesser quality, that this raises to (N+X)%]

jacalata 13y ago

So, if we take the author at his word, then either the teacher had an unwritten rule for the size of the paper, or the student and the author both somehow managed to not read or to forget this rule. If it's a, then rules lawyer the hell out of the idiot teacher. If it's b, then looks like both of them are bad at details and instructions, which is a skill that certainly deserves some attention. So why was that the end of the story?

aspensmonster 13y ago
Probably because it doesn't matter if it was one of the instructions or not, because it's entirely irrelevant to anything other than an arbitrary "follow instructions" assignment. Coincidentally that sort of assignment is precisely what the author complains about.
- jacalata 13y ago
  And reading and writing are irrelevant to whether the kid could do the equations, but if he doesn't have either skill then he needs help, not just for dad to say the teacher is mean. I consider understanding arbitrary rules to be similarly as basic a skill.

protomyth 13y ago

I have no understanding of why schools are allowed to assign homework in the first place. The kid is at school 7 hours and then most schools try to assign a couple of hours of homework on top of that. I seem to remember a work / life balance thread about working over 40 hours a week is bad. So, why is it ok for our children?

jostmey 13y ago

We learn math & science because it gives us electricity, airliners, and computers. Enough said.

gruseom 13y ago
If that were the reason, they would never have existed in the first place.
gaze 13y ago
Nah. We do it because it's cool. Those things are side effects.

jcampbell1 13y ago

“My teacher didn’t like the project, because I put it on the wrong size paper.” Either you are bullshitting, or you better learn what size paper to do your homework on. Winning is easier than being right, and winning is much more fun. I don't have a teenage kid, but there I think there are two thing that are important. 1) Acquiring new knowledge should be self-rewarding. 2) Winning is fun. This parent seems to have a kid that hasn't experienced the joy of the #2. He seems to actively prevent his kid from winning because he thinks winning is wrong. This is a common theme where parents constrain their children to do no better than themselves. Children of immigrants tend to be incredibly successful because their parents have no such inhibitions.

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
> Winning is easier than being right, and winning is much more fun. Hence why we have a society full of puppets with new cars in the garage. What an awful way to think, I'm disgusted by your reasoning. For whatever meaning of "winning" you have, life only matters if you do what you believe in, otherwise it's not worth living.
- nbouscal 13y ago
  So in this case, 'what you believe in' is not following the instructions as to which size of paper to use? This is what my mom always referred to as 'cutting off your nose to spite your face.'
  - simplexion 13y ago
    If my face was more concerned about the media I attached my work to than my work itself, I would definitely cut off my nose to spite it. FUCK YOU, FACE!
- jcampbell1 13y ago
  I am sorry. I wrote that from the wrong perspective. I was raised in a tiny town in the southern US, where being "right" has something to do with "praising jesus". Thanks to my parents, I was encouraged to "win" and now I live in NYC, and have a great job, a wife I love and respect, and an awesome daughter. My point is not about right vs. winning, it is more about giving your children the tools to do well in any environment.

vonskippy 13y ago

Paying bills is stupid. Cleaning house is boring. Going to work EVERY day is stupid. Following rules is stupid. Doing what you're told is stupid. etc etc etc. Bwahahaha - your kid is screwed. The world is full of arbitrary and down right stupid rules (assuming he ever gets a job, he'll love the tax codes that apply to him, but not to rich people or corporations). You need to straighten out his young punk ass - and do it now. Before you say "but what about his mad art/music skillz", I'm afraid I'd need an outside expert to qualify those before I believe they exist. I put my 8 year old daughter's artwork on my office wall and tell her it's beautiful - lucky (for her and me) shes a whiz at science and will get a real job later in life. No one succeeds in life that can't even manage to get a measly high school degree from a "see spot run" public school. You are the parent - NOT the twelve year old - what part of that escapes you? Maybe it's time for private school, where the whole "leave no moron behind" concept doesn't exist. Obviously you and the kids present school system have already failed. Maybe it's not too late for the kid.

moron4hire 13y ago
art is not a real job?
- epochwolf 13y ago
  For a lot of artists, unfortunately it's not. They need to have a job to support their art habit/hobby.
  - moron4hire 13y ago
    Perhaps that is because they focused too much on so-called "real" work and never developed their art enough to make a living. Perhaps they need so much money because they went to a university to learn what is free at any library.
    - epochwolf 13y ago
      Or no one is willing to pay enough for their skills.

Diamons 13y ago

Really can't help much but here's my story. I've gone through the majority of high school and college (I'm a junior next semester) without doing much of my homework. I'll do the occasional essay that's worth 20% of your grade or whatever and I won't miss exams, but I won't read (or even buy) the assigned books and responses. I do this because I have much more interesting stuff I like to work on instead of wasting time on homework, but I got along fine. I maintain a steady 3.4 GPA without doing any readings/more than half my homeworks/missing a lot of days of school simply because I feel like it. I value certain things above school. I say this because I truly believe your son will be fine. People like him are creative and genius way beyond comprehension. They simply refuse to do things the way they are supposed to be done, and that's the sign of someone who's going to be successful one day or another, just not when the definition of success is doing what everyone else is doing how everyone else is doing it.

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swayvil 13y ago

Sounds like the kid values his time.

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joyeuse6701 13y ago

mm, This may be minutae to some, but I think it's important: Learning math is not tedium. By that I mean gaining the problem solving skills and the mindset required for mathematics is invaluable. Jeopardy facts however I can't defend.

Spooky23 13y ago

Unfortunately, you need to deal with chickenshit sometimes. I was a history nut in high school -- I received perfect scores on all of the Regents exams (state tests in NY), and got 5's on two history AP exams, one of which I didn't take the class for. It was my passion. But I did receive a "C" in Global studies class my junior year -- because my binder didn't have the tabs organized correctly. (Wrong colors, wrong order) My classmates even complained, because I could have taught the class! End of the day, it didn't affect my life much, gives me a funny story to tell, and prepared me for the bureaucratic hazing that was to come from the State University of New York. As long as your son understands that less than perfect grades will keep him out of Stanford, Harvard, etc, relax.

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snowwrestler 13y ago

If I can impart one thing I've learned in my life to my child, it will be this: no one cares how smart or talented you are. They care about what you do. What you accomplish. Some of the things you accomplish are great things that only you could do--your life's work. Accomplishing these will among the greatest experiences of your life. But a lot of the things you accomplish will seem pointless and boring. Doesn't matter--you still need to do them. In school it's homework; in real life it's time sheets, contracts, taxes, auto registration, insurance, memos, etc. Accomplishing these will suck...but you still need to do them. In fact failing to do so is a good way to keep yourself from having the opportunity to accomplish great things.

moron4hire 13y ago

How do you win a rigged game? Stop playing the game and make everyone else play your game. According to my parents, I was exactly like your son in the mid 80s. They homeschooled me to make sure I wasn't held back from my potential. It wasn't without its challenges, but nothing is. I'm doing pretty well now. I had a brief foray into "doing what I was told" in college, and figured out it was not going to get me to graduate with the grades I wanted, so I found an adviser who understood me, who would trust I could take care of myself and just sign off on my self-directed path through my degree. I had a longer foray after college (it seems I learn certain lessons slowly) and eventually grew so sick of getting up early every morning and driving an hour to work in shitty traffic that I just quit. I quit everything for almost a year. For a year, I worked the hardest I've ever worked on whatever I wanted. And it got me nowhere. Except... Except it taught me that the world can't destroy me. It taught me that I'm capable of so much and it is only myself to blame for submitting to bosses or procrastination for not getting it done (and really, doing what your boss tells you to do is a form of procrastination). Everyone told me I was going to be ruined, that I'd not find work again because I'd been off so long "in this economy!" Dire consequences were in store for me, to not grovel at the feet of the recruiters, to not beg for my old job back. Bunch of lily-livered cowards. No such thing happened, and the idea is patently absurd. No, the only thing that can destroy me is myself. I see all these people saying "You gotta pay your dues" and "sometimes you just have to suck it up and do what you're told". And it is such complete and utter fucking bullshit. You don't have to do a single god damn thing you don't want to in this world. The world won't destroy you. You gotta buy this car to drive to work, drive to work to pay for this car. Yeah, screw that. What the hell do you need a degree for when the only people who are getting anywhere in this world are doing it by starting companies and getting out of the rat race? What the hell do you need a recruiter for when the only jobs they have to give you are going to make you a miserable son of a bitch? What the hell do you need anything for? All you really need is a pencil and some paper, and the only reason you need that is because it's the only way to communicate with enough people. Write. Write. Write. Draw. Compose. Program. Mathematicate. A robot can dig a ditch for you, so why are you digging ditches? Do the one thing that humans can do that computers cannot: create. Don't let anyone tell you what to create. Create whatever you want. People fail not because they fail to create the right things, they fail because they fail to create anything. And to all you people in here, talking about "you have to play the game," "that's the system," "deal with it": you're certainly free to ruin your own life, but leave the poor, damn kids alone.

kenster07 13y ago

The primary goal of the education system should be to prepare students to reach their full potential in the real world. It is not achieving this goal optimally. The best and brightest are often stuck being taught the same material, at the same rate as the median student. We had to spend a year learning Algebra I, for some ungodly reason. How many of us could have learned it in literally one month? How many of us could have finished our entire high school's math curriculum in a year? Why should the A we could have gotten in one month be equated to the A of a person who needed a full school year to learn it? Food for thought.

kjhughes 13y ago

Sugata Mitra believes that our education model, including the emphasis on rule-following, isn't broken but works to address the Victorian needs of the "bureaucratic administrative machine" of the British empire. http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_... His Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLE) provides an alternative approach.

chubbard 13y ago

So the author doesn't believe in homework or at least admits he thinks its pointless, and so does his son. My my my I wonder where a smart little boy learned that from?

parsec 13y ago

This article is horrible. Of course parents think their kids drawings are cute, and their music is wonderous. But unless he is truly virtuoso, or actually has a photographic memory as suggested, he should probably learn some maths as well, and you as a parent should work as hard as you can to get him excited about things that will get him a job instead of rubbing off your callous despisery of "academics and investment bankers" on him. (Seriously... "homogenized and brainwashed", "almost completely without originality of thought or perspective", "good little cog in a habitual big wheel"... what makes you hate academics so deeply?) The entire world is in recession right now, you really think cartoonery is going to get him hired faster than a strong math and science background? But let's pretend that parabolas actually are worthless and boring (God forbid I ever learn your opinion of Gaussians, Betas, Erfs, Einastos, Hernquists, Exponentials, etc.). Sounds like the real issue is the educational system, not the content. Don't for an instant try to say that Music and Maths are not intimately related. Look for gifted or accelerated programs, try to get him enrolled in a Millenium / Magnet school, just try to get him excited. Seriously though, you should hold your tongue when talking about academics. You really think Bohr was homogenized? Was Tesla brainwashed? Was Von Braun a cogwheel? I guarantee people find my "art" just as amusing as your kids little shark doodle.

jspiros 13y ago

This story reminds me of my experience growing up and going to public school in Ohio (in the United States). When I did classwork, I did it very well. When I took tests, I was always in the top of my class (which led to me being in the highest-level classes offered at my schools). And when it came to class participation, the teachers always had praise for me. I spent most of my time outside of school learning new things from books, the internet, and everyone around me. But I almost never did my homework. This was almost the sole source of strife between my mother and I, and between both of us and school administrators. Going from 8th to 9th grade required a special exception, and recommendations from almost every one of my teachers, as my GPA was below the point normally required to progress to the next grade. I am lucky in that the teachers I had were sympathetic enough to stand up for me, and confident in my abilities using other methods of evaluation. We (my mother and I) considered other schools, other formats of school, but in the end we settled on something modeled after Unschooling. When I was 13-going-on-14, halfway through my 9th grade year (freshman year of high school in the United States), my mother took me out of school using the legal provision for homeschooling. As she was a single working mother, I spent the rest of the years that my peers were in high school learning things on my own and seeking out my own learning opportunities. (A year or so later, I learned C, Objective-C, and the Cocoa frameworks and started a Mac applications business a year or so later with friends I met on the internet.) Granted, I had the following things going for me: a supportive mother, generally being "well-behaved", living in a small town where it was safe to leave me to my own devices, living in a college town which gave me access to more learning resources, and an in-built self-motivated learning style. I also think it helped that I went through the public school system for many years before I left, as it meant I had friends and a social life that stuck with me even after leaving the school itself. So, I'm sure it's not for everyone, but for some, and maybe OP's son, it's worth considering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling

lpvn 13y ago

My theory is that some people have a threshold of 'pointlessness aversion' inadequate to the western school system. The son of the author is like that: he finds his homework useless so he won't do it. Perhaps we should admit that our society is too harsh with certain groups of people who happen to lack some abilities, I know it's been this way throughout the whole human history but since we reached an advanced level of material development we should at least reconsider this social dynamic.

brudgers 13y ago

A few years ago, I read The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning by Kralovec and Buell. The authors build a well-presented case against homework for children younger than high-school age based upon their claims that there is little evidence that homework for younger children has any long or short term benefit. The authors observe that homework is disruptive to family dynamics because it is an ongoing source of conflict between parents and their children. They also observe that the primary reason schools assign homework to younger children is because parents demand it. Both of these observations are consistent with my experience both within my own family and my observations of the families of my child's peers. On the other hand, I have no way of verifying or denying the author's claims about homework studies failing to demonstrate long term benefits from homework. Overall, I am glad I read it because it gave me some perspective on the issue. My son still is responsible for doing his homework, and we as parents clearly communicate this to him. Anyway, if you're parenting, I'd say it's perhaps worth checking out. As an aside, I strongly recommend Juliet Schor's Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture about the way corporations have come to market to children - and it's probably only gotten worse with them having online lives. End of Homework: http://www.amazon.com/The-End-Homework-Disrupts-Overburdens/dp/0807042196/ref=sr_sp-atf_image_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1370231905&sr=8-3&keywords=book+end+homework http://www.amazon.com/The-End-Homework-Disrupts-Overburdens/... Born to Buy: http://www.amazon.com/Born-Buy-Commercialized-Consumer-Culture/dp/0684870568/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370232915&sr=8-1&keywords=born+to+buy http://www.amazon.com/Born-Buy-Commercialized-Consumer-Cultu...

datz 13y ago

guy I hate to say it - but is is either school or other talents. you can't half ass both and get away with it. it is either C student and entrepreneur-facilitating, marketable outside talents or A student and no-little outside talents. B student and mediocre outside talents will lead to mediocracy and failure. so decide which you want to encourage. i would go for outside talents but you better make damn sure your son has the right tutor, influences, and environment to hone his natural inclinations outside the traditional academic system.

kuenx 13y ago

I stopped doing my homework when I was twelve, too. Or maybe eleven. I started again when I went to technical colleague. Worked out well.

alex_doom 13y ago

Even though this is from 5 years ago I hear this argument from many people with kids. I think it's a bit of a cop out, and feels like they want recognition that their child is special and deserves attention. No one ever looks at this from a teachers perspective. They are caught in the middle of trying to help children with wide variety of learning styles and the political machine of a school district learning mandate. They can only do so much to help. If a parent feels their child doesn't fit the mold and thinks the system is rigged, they should help their child understand how the school system work and how that relates to the rest of the working world. Where nearly everything else is based on metrics. If they feel their child understand the material but the tests and homework are causing problems, find the path that accomplishes the goals of a passing grades. You'd be surprised if you just ask, that a teacher will tell you what they are going to be grading on. Is it just test or is it an overall judgement of how the child is doing? As a kid I figured out that the key to "doing well" was to impress by showing off in areas where you really do excel. Is the child more creative? Then answer the homework or tests with creative answers and get the answer they are looking for but done in a fashion that may be different than what was expected. Do they have to do a book report? Make that look better than every other kid in class. In short I pretty much skated through middle school and high school by doing the bare minimum to achieve an C but impressed in other creative areas that demonstrated effort and ability to comprehend the material. Anyway that's my rant.

niknak24 13y ago

I don't have kids, and am self taught in my choice of profession. If he doesn't want to do certain things then he won't, I'm sure he will be successful without specific qualifications.

gpf 13y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_model From personal experience with a similar situation. It's a major leap of faith, but you'd be surprised what a kid can do in an environment that permits them to.

gibbitz 13y ago

not leaving high school for a GED and college my sophomore year was the biggest mistake I ever made. I'm never getting those two years back. I'm also not getting the 10 years of college back either. I taught myself what I do for a living and very little of my education led to where I am today. Intellectual curiosity is what created the text books we spoon feed our kids and is the most important trait that can be fostered in them. It will put food on their tables and advance the human race beyond where it is today. I just try to keep this in perspective while raising my two daughters.

simulate 13y ago

It would be interesting to learn how his son is doing today, six years later.