Letters to the Editor
sfsclark
Published Letters: 15
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Homework Hell
[Read the article: Homework hell]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I've got three kids - ages 13, 9, & 5 and Ayelet is right on the money. First, these kids are in school from 8:30-3:00 5 days a week. I work five days a week from 8:30 -4:30 unless I am in a crunch period and need to work longer. Usually when I get home I am not in the mood to start a second shift of magazine work. Why should my nine-year-old?
My five-year-old brought home coloring pages that the teacher had written "Handed in Late" in bold red marker. Can you hand in coloring late? When I asked him about it he said "but she told us not to go fast, she said to take our time." Poor kid, he believed what she told him.
I do not know how old the angry letter writers are or where they went to school. But I can tell you this: My husband went to the crappiest public schools in rural Colorado in the 1960s - in good weather they hiked after lunch from @ 1-3. Evidently the teachers were finished for the day around 12:30. I have no memory of doing any substantial homework until 7th grade. My husband has a PhD from an ivy leagaue unviersity and is a professor of history. I have an undergrad degree from a good private college and edit a magazine. Our futures were not compromised by playing after school. Our parents never even checked our homework or even knew what we were supposed to be doing and both of us appear to have good work habits. Our experiences are not unique. On the contrary this was public school in the 1960s and 1970s at least in eastern Penn. and Colorado. Futures were not destroyed by lack of homework.
Most of my kids' homework is make work. We did not have this. They are being killed by work sheets. Every year we ask the teachers how long homework should take and every year they say 15-20 minutes a day. And then they promptly assign an hour's worth of work for my grade schoolers. Forget my 7th grader. She and her friends work on average (according to discussions with their moms) @ 5 hours a night. How many of the nasty letter writers work 11-hour days five days a week.
It also presupposes that children have no lives other than school - no family obligations, no chores, no church obligations, no hobbies.
That the U.S. is lagging behind in science and engineering is not because kids are shirking their work or are being coddled by yuppie parents.
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You've got a point - but let go of the anger, it is unhealthy
[Read the article: Should cafes be kid-free?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Okay, I've got three kids and we discipline, albiet inconsistently so our kids are about 1/2 the time well behaved, and I can tolerate a lot of noise. Still, I agree that many people let their children run wild in inappropriate locations lke nice restaurants, and I too blame the parents. (A classic is when my husband and I have gone to hear classical music, leaving our brood at home with a sitter and some chucklehead brings his/her toddler, can't start too early with a little culture - and what a surprise, the three year old doesn't like classical music!)
BUT...so many of you SALON readers of the parent/child articles articles, like those who respond sometimes Aylete Waldman, have got to settle down. The contempt and hatred you direct at moms and kids is exhausting to read, I cannot imagine what it is like to be you! Direct your anger at the war or at George Bush. But taking a "principled," deeply felt stand on kids in restaurants seems, well, rather silly.
My suggestion: Dinner out after 8 p.m. Coffee between 1-3 (nap time). 20 mg of prozac with your coffee in the morning.
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Oh, Angry Women of Salon, Listen Up!
[Read the article: The stay-at-home mystique]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This is for all the incredibly angry women whose unhappy childhoods and unresolved issues with their mothers or better looking younger sisters have turned them into little child-hating dictators who read Salon (esp. mmefiori - who calls herself an Epsicopalian and yet seems to have missed that at the heart of the Christian faith is hospitality and grace - perhaps you skipped too many conversion classes! God is not capitalism dear, the bottom line is more than just profits!)
It is not that "mommies" who work want breaks. It is that women who are not mommies don't have enough life outside of work and thus work becomes their life (true of men too of course -with or without the wife!). Thanks to these overly ambitious childless women and men the work week just keeps on getting longer. 9-5 not anymore thanks to those whose lives are devoted to the all mighty dollar so they can continually renovate homes and take exotic vacations with their husbands or boyfriend de jour. Its muscle flexing really - read Forbes magazine it reads like a bodybuilding trade magazine - all about endurance, pushing the limits - behind a desk and with an expense account. Let' see how many hours we can put it, how many Blackberrys we can purchase, how much we can complain about work exhaustion, and go on and on about a work life that interest no one. Its now stealth employment. And the great thing is - they ususally have these incredibly dull. soul destroying jobs that they have convinved themselves are actually important - marketing soup or doing public relations work for a hotel.
Here's your next group to go after: single welfare mothers -- there are still some left - think of the hand outs they are getting!!! Think about the hours they don't work! Think about the sick time they take when one of their kids is sick!!
OR: better yet go after Salon - women dishing women has always been a great marketing strategy. hmmmmm. Maybe we are being set up. Maybe if people stopped reacting to these deliberately controversial mom vs non-mom stories they would stop running them. Shall we ladies?