Quote:
Originally Posted by habernac
rarely or never did homework, I just didn't care, really. Got mostly B's and C's, though I no doubt could have had better marks. A little bit of homework is ok, but you don't want to see kids stuck doing the stuff for 12 hours on the weekends.
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Yeah, that was me, too. I couldn't be bothered to do assignments at home when there was more exciting and interesting stuff to get involved in--like playing street hockey for 3.5 hours a day.
Seriously--I think it's easy to forget that children's brains are always developing, and if anything we need to COMPENSATE for the fact that they spend most of their time in school by granting them plenty of leisure time in which to play, socialize, explore the world, learn for themselves, etc. I think the mistake comes in thinking that learning school material is the only important form of learning children engage in.
I was a pretty average student in Junior High and High School, mostly because of my refusal to do homework. (it wasn't a principled stand or anything--I just found it boring). There was plenty of hand-wringing among my teachers and a little by my parents that I would always be an underachiever, because unlike my siblings, I was barely passing and showed little interest in improving. Now I'm less than a year from my PhD--so the "preparation for University" angle doesn't hold a lot of water for me. It's time we all let kids be kids for their own health, in my opinion.
This all became a little more immediate for me since I just learned that I'm going to be a dad.