Too Much Homework?

My two kids, 4^th grade and 7^th grade had no homework over school brake. I thought this a bit strange for the older one. I remember having homework over vacation.

As I listen to the radio today I hear that around the world kids get much more homework than we do and how we put too much stress on everything BUT school work and then we wonder why our kids can’t compete in a global market. There is a new movie out called 2,000,000 minutes that looks at the differences between our schools and other schools around the world.

Let me just say that I think things have gone too far to the left and we are way too easy on the kids these days and that is why we are loosing our leadership roll in the world. We spend way too much time worrying about all the extra-curricular stuff and not enough on what is important. Lets try to remember folks, we send kids to school to learn, not to play sports, or play music, or make nice drawings. All this is good but must be kept in moderation as the main goal of school is to product a person that can make it in the real world.

We need to refocus what kids study. We need to get back to the basics, Math, Science, English and History. All else is extra, it is nice to have but should not be the main focus of the school.

During the interview I heard with the 2M Minute guy the thing that hit me is in other countries, like China and India they post the honor students on the front page of the paper, they are looked up to. Here we put the sport kids there. . . How many of them will make a living at sports? Add to that the fact that lots of schools are dropping the honor roll – we don’t want the kids to stress out thinking about grades. . . .

God do we have it BACKWARDS. Sports are fun, they are a nice hobbies, they need to be put back where they belong since they will not make a living for our kids. We need to stop worrying about who is coaching our kids to play basketball or baseball and start worrying about who is teaching them to do math and science.

All I can say is lets start by getting rid of all the liberal BS, this new math that no one understands – I am an electrical engineer and I had problems figuring out my 4^th graders math homework. . . lets go back to the old way things were taught. Stop trying to fix things, you are making them worse not better. I would love to see us go back to say a 1960’s curriculum updated for the current level of engineering and science. The basics of Math and Science have not changed that much. . . . The kids focus needs to be on learning, not playing. They can play after the school work is done just like we did. I don’t think it is a coincidence that our economy and country has started the downward spiral over the same time that the liberal have been messing with our schools to make them more “friendly” and make sure the kids don’t get stressed over their grades. . . we have given up pushing our kids to succeed, we are teaching them to just get by, that mediocre is good enough, we are teaching them to fail.