Kindergarten. Now with homework.
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!
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!
posted by Tzipporah at 9:16 AM
5 Comments:
This is the best.
Also, don't resist the homework. How will your child EVER be able to keep up with the Chinese in any other way? They are already building Lego replicas of Apple products for THEIR kindergarten homework.
I am not sure I would pass the assignment since the government employee inside the dots doesn't look anything like a kindergarten teacher!
I did my algebra, geometry, and physics homework when the teacher asked me to do the assigned problems on the blackboard. Everybody knew I never bothered to actually do my homework, but unless I solved the problems wrong when called-up, it wasn't an issue. I was called-up every day.
Yep, straight A's. Other than my monumental attitude problem and snarkiness, I was considered a model student.
Of course, this wasn't kindergarten. At that age I had no excuse for attitude or snarkiness.
I'm just rejoicing in the fact that I can completely ignore their requests. Cause as far as I'm concerned, she is asking ME to do homework, and frankly, I already got me some.
Not all kindergarten teachers give homework. I give family homework every rare once in a while (for example, to record the shape of the moon each night when we were studying lunar cycles) and once most of my kids are reading I let kids who want and choose to take a book home to read to their parents. That's it.
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