Read other letters about this article

• Tuesday, October 25, 2005 01:32 PM

  Whiny much?

  I have two opinions about Mrs. Waldman's well-written and evocative essay. 1. the homework mentioned is indeed silly. 2. However, homework is not at all silly and is in fact conducive to one's academic progress.

  I say this as a person without children -- flame away! -- but who grew up in a very rough public school and then a private school in the lowest-ranking state (by SAT scores) in the nation. I always had homework and when I was younger I suffered for it. I failed one 6-week period of math due to an abject failure to organize my personal math log. I lost -- and was forced to pay for by my tough-love parents -- a handful of textbooks that I lost when taking them home to do my evening reading. But I don't rail against homework in general because it is a primary reason for my success.

  My workload when I was little was mostly rote or project-type stuff (for gifted class -- regular class was almost all memorization), with the middle grades devoted to papers, research, and reading. By high school I wrote at least one paper weekly. And I struggled nightly through my math homework. My high school's bench mark for homework was 30 minutes per course, which worked out to 2-3 hours of work nightly if all my classes were academic (which they usually weren't). This isn't an uphill in the snow story, however. In retrospect, I'm very glad I did all that work because, while my contemporaries were struggling through English and Math 101, having rarely written a paper or completed a full-length test, I was earning exemptions in English and History and skipping forward to classes in which I could accomplish something meaningful, and getting out of college-level math almost entirely. It was well worth it.

  Additionally, I believe it's rare that one becomes proficient at a skill without practice. Second, when your little one graduates he or she is in a marketplace -- and no one really cares why he or she doesn't have the best skills, merely that better alternatives are available. Third, we learn by both carrot and stick -- failing a subject in grade school or suffering the consequences of poor study and organizational habits is a step on the way to developing professional skills.

  —Nikita Read Nikita's other letters
  Permalink
  Flag
  Click "Submit Flag" if you feel this post is inappropriate. Explain why below if you wish.

  Cancel