My five year old is pretty well adjusted. He can dress himself, build Lego rocket ships, talk in full (if bizarre) sentences and wipe his own bottom - all pretty much the standard requirements for a short person of that age.
When I was a kid, we were also expected to walk to school by ourselves, play in the yard unsupervised, eat graham crackers and warm milk without choking and learn all Pete Seeger songs.
Today's teachers apparently have different expectations. Yes, it's cool that he's learning numbers and reading and differential calculus, but why does my kindergartner have homework?
If he can't learn to write a capital and lowercase "N" in the six hours a day he spends at school, how is an extra 5-10 minutes of practice at home going to help? And why does a teacher think it's appropriate to send homework back as "incomplete" when he colored in only 12 of the 532 shapes on the page? Seriously, lady. It's like she doesn't even know he has Legos at home.
All I can think is that, like training them to stand in line quietly and respond to a loud bell, the homework is step one in indoctrinating a passive workforce, which will do any kind of bullshit busywork they are assigned.
As someone who got through school with straight As by completing all homework in the hallway before class, I'm tempted to start making up my own homework for him and sending it back in with him.
Assignment 1:
Connect the dots to discover which public employees are working against public interests!
