My Son Won't Do His Homework (2007)
talentism.com
talentism.com
School is often arbitrary, pointless, and tedious. It's part of a large system that needs to serve many different interests, several of them legitimate. That's modern life. We're not so much beset by wolves and bears; instead, we have to deal with systems and social/cultural obligations. And while I don't so much care if the boy emerges from high school remembering all the Latin declensions or the details of the Treaty of Ghent, he's at least going to be familiar with what it takes to play the system.
For whatever it's worth: when I pay attention to his homework, I rarely find it pointless. And in the classes most imperiled by pointlessness, there homework usually takes the form of essays. And there is nothing in the world more valuable than being able to express ideas in writing. So he writes the essays, and I make him do drafts and drafts and drafts.
Like all teenagers, he is capable of of reason, judgement, introspective listening, and a sense of how he actually fits into the cosmos. In 5-10 minute bursts.
In other words: I might as well be the teacher addressing the question of whether the dog has the Buddha-nature. I try, but realistically. And then I make him write the papers.
It is worth recognizing the difference between compliance that comes at great cost and compliance that doesn't. In my case: I'll live with late assignments and mediocre grades, as long as the assignments eventually get done, in one giant batch with me checking them off if need be.
Could work great. Could also end up inhibiting his executive function and turning him into a heroin addict.
The formula for success is multiplicative: Ability * Motivation * Opportunity.
If any one of those factors is zero, success is zero despite how much of the others you have. The thing about forcing kids to do their homework is there's no such thing as a free lunch. Whatever you gain in terms of extra external opportunity may be easily offset (and then some) by reductions in intrinsic motivation, executive function, etc. Or not. The point is that it's a wicked problem[1], and as such there isn't any simple and/or one-size-fits-all solution. Keep in mind also that doing well is largely beneficial because it gives you more opportunities to do various things. But thanks to new social structures that are being built on top of the Internet, those sorts of opportunities are becoming less and less valuable every day. While having them will always be better than not having them, it may no longer make sense to optimize for them either, especially when you're young enough to have a decades-long arc.
https://www.tragedyandhope.com/th-films/the-ultimate-history...
Unfortunately I'm not sure there is a good written description of these anywhere, but IIRC they are described pretty well in this video series:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11g9Tnmvo3Q
Gatto's ideas about education are based on history and spirituality (esp. Christianity) rather than science, which can be somewhat offputting at first, but having read the best of the sciency books on the various aspects of childhood development and education I generally think Gatto has more to offer. (Not that the other books aren't good too, but they're generally more useful for designing education systems that scale rather than parenting, except for when the kid is less than five which it doesn't sound like yours are.)
That comment makes your perspective the complete opposite of the author's. The author kid moves his chess pieces randomly and the author writes a blog post about how the rules are not fair. You likely teach that sometimes you have to follow the rules to play the game.
This blog post reads like like a fool arguing that the rules of chess are stupid.
The recipe for "winning" the game of school is:
- follow directions very carefully - be good at memorizing things - never challenge authority
The market value of being able to carefully follow directions is nearly zero, and falling fast. That was a useful skill back when there were lots of good-paying factory jobs. Now it just makes you an excellent candidate for being replaced by software.
The market value of being able to memorize easily searchable facts is nearly zero, and falling even faster. Any test that can be "cheated" by using Wikipedia is testing a totally useless skill. (Useful tests are still hard when you have access to all the internet.)
As for obedience to authority, I'll stick with Thoreau: "Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves."
The evidence around us is overwhelming. Look at all the unemployed college graduates: those are the people who learned how to play the game, when they could have been learning something useful instead.
Now that I'm a couple decades removed from attending school, it's obvious --- painfully obvious, like so much that I often see opportunities that my son won't give a chance that make me want to shake him --- that if you pay attention to the directions and give even a little thought to how you might push on the apparent constraints the school provides, school is eminently playable.
Second, the point of learning how to play the school system isn't to be good at school. It's to be good at handling systems in general. Different systems, different constraints, but there are meta-lessons to be learned in dealing with any of them.
Disobedience is valuable when it's valuable.
One of high school English teachers was notoriously hard on guys. It was generally understood that she considered them goof-offs and slackers, and didn't give good grades to guys even for really hard work. I was at a disadvantage in that class even before I walked in the door.
So rather than fight an uphill battle due to my gender, I spent an extra hour on the first report (a paper on Romeo and Juliet) and carefully drew hearts and a large rose in colored pencil on the cover page. I then proceeded to behave a smidge more effeminately than my natural self whenever speaking to her, and breezed through that year while my male classmates struggled, with my teacher convinced I was a persecuted homosexual.
I'm not convinced it was helpful in the long term, because the work I avoided in that class didn't do me any favors. I've never done particularly well in English classes since, despite my love of reading and an over-sized vocabulary. But it certainly did give me an appreciation for the malleability of rules and systems when they are administered by imperfect humans.
My only secret for excelling at school was that my natural interests happened to coincide with the things school expects you to do. So I was intrinsically motivated to do most of them, and whenever intrinsically motivated people compete with extrinsically motivated people, it's hardly a competition at all.
Motivation dominates all other factors in learning. Nothing else comes close. People who want to learn something learn it orders of magnitude faster and more reliably than people who don't really care. Piles of psychological research back this up.
For example, if you actually wait to teach a child arithmetic until he or she expresses a genuine interest, a typical child can master all of elementary school math in about 20 hours of instruction. Reading is similar -- once the fire is lit, with a little phonetic guidance, a typical kid can become a fluent reader in weeks, not months.
So the real art of education becomes inspiring the desire, and then being ready to strike when the iron is hot. School actively thwarts this pattern.
> Second, the point of learning how to play the school system isn't to be good at school. It's to be good at handling systems in general. Different systems, different constraints, but there are meta-lessons to be learned in dealing with any of them.
That kind of general experience is something you get no matter what you're doing, so long as you're interacting with other human beings. The real question is whether school teaches better meta-lessons than other kinds of experience.
In school, all work is simulated. The worst and best possible outcomes are both abstract letters on a piece of paper. Contrast this with something as simple as putting a child in charge of planning a camping trip, and the variety of outcomes they'll experience and learn from. Nothing teaches responsibility like having to explain to your friends that you forgot to pack breakfast.
Memorization is not useless! The ability to access certain information in sub-speed latency is a valuable skill and should be learnt. This is called cached knowledge. One defining example is the multiplication table that we have to memorialize as a kid.
Searching is definitely useful, but the basic you should memorize, because you will use them over and over again. Do not be a programmer at work who have to repetitively google information several times a day that should be second nature because he refuse to memorize.
But that's a self-solving problem. Anything you truly use over and over again will become readily memorized. And people are demonstrably good at memorizing that kind of information.
My issue is with memorizing things that the learner has no intrinsic motivation to memorize.
I have yet to meet a smart person that can't do these things with ease. The only modification I would make, is to "only challenge authority when it is in your best interest to do so." It is generally best to go around authority or ignore it if the consequences are manageable. Challenging authority is generally a waste of time.
This is an appealing theory, and I know lots of people who think it is true. However the "never challenge authority" bit poorly describes the people that I know who did best at school.
Respect authority? Sure. Follow the rules you're ordered to follow? Sure. But question authority, ridicule authority, and be a general PITA? That describes several very good students that I knew!
Many friends I know got through very well because they knew the rules of the game, and notably got some exceptional treatment because they made sure that they were taken seriously by the administration. One way not to do that is to be completely insufferable and unreasonably stubborn(which is how a lot of teenage kids act, granted).
Sure you can be a PITA if you want, but unless you're the sort of person who loves being a PITA for its own reward (I was, to my shame), it probably won't get you anything meaningful.
No one is being forced to play chess.
To have a high GPA, a student needs to finish term papers on subjects they have no interest in, they need to study for exams in language for which they have no intention of using again, he will read books by authors he disagrees with and toil into the night on problem sets that have little perceivable utility.
But in the end they will get it done, and if they maintained a high GPA they have shown that he will get it done year over year and always with high quality.
So a high GPA often means that they are not lazy and self centered. It often means a candidate will not sit idle because a task is beneath her, and she will not pigeonhole on a perfecting an ancillary module when there are better things to do.
A student who does not do what is required, who would fritter away on self entertainment via music or finger painting is not someone who can be relied on.
I joke but most managers at places at have hiring committees are more interested in underlings obeying orders than showing any form of excellence.
When looking at GPA, it is the later. In my experience it is a very rare college who who has the intuition or insight to drive any part of a product.
Granted, if you are trying to hire a drone who will mindlessly accomplish whatever they are tasked to do (and will never challenge stupid ideas), perhaps independence and creative thought are the last thing you want, but it's pretty intellectually bankrupt to conclude that anyone who doesn't get good grades is just wasting their time.
If you are hiring for someone that will just "do the work" and not care what it is, then it seems like this is sound logic.
However, if you're looking for someone who is creative and passionate about their work, believes in what your business is trying to do, and the work they are trying to accomplish, and will find the best way to accomplish it -- school no longer seems so representative of this, where they know the tasks they are completing serve no purpose other than a "grade."
In other words, I think your hiring committee is fallaciously flattening out human nature. For all I know that works fine for you, so don't let me stop you.
But: your last sentence was pretty dismissive and harmed your argument.
I do however agree with you about the last comment. If there were not already replies, I would edit it to make the point in another way. But the intention is still the same. The time not being spent on homework, in the case of the article, is being spent on entertainment.
It breaks down as soon as you step the analysis up to the next level and remember you're not the only employer in the world. People who have pieces of paper with high numbers on them and are actually good, can easily find jobs.
Which, unless you are Google or Fog Creek, probably means they already have jobs. Very few employers get to cherry-pick from all the world, those candidates with the highest perceived desirability. The vast majority will be looking at applications from candidates whose perceived desirability was slightly lower.
The question you should ask yourself is, would you rather hire someone whose perceived desirability was slightly lower because of the lack of a piece of paper with high numbers on it, or because of actual inability to do the job?
I've worked with plenty of managers that would rather not know the truth if it meant having to deal with a problem.
To them denial is bliss.
His GPA was only a 3.5. But I totally got him: he was great because he had a passion for digging into stuff, and not just for jumping through professors' hoops.
In general, the correlation I found between GPA and competence was this:
Below 3.0, something is wrong. This person doesn't get fundamentals: he will write convoluted code and won't get a lot of basic concepts. He either isn't very bright or highly undisciplined or both.
3.0 - 3.5, this guy isn't good at jumping through hoops, but he might be great if he has a passion for programming and has done lots of side work. It's a mixed lot but there are a fair number of diamonds in the rough.
3.5 - 3.9, this is the sweet spot. Lots of great people in this category who did both great and school and also did stuff in their spare time.
3.9 - 4.0, oddly, the quality seemed to go down here a little bit. These are the people who spent all their Friday and Saturday nights studying instead of developing social skills, and didn't really do much besides jump through the professors' hoops and get an A in everything.
A great engineer doesn't just blindly jump through every hoop. In the real world, the amount of work is highly unbounded, and a great engineer will be able to sort through it and figure out what's REALLY important and what's not. And they'll be able to articulate why they think that and negotiate with others. Sometimes, the 4.0 candidates were obsessive-compulsive people weren't grounded in the real world and couldn't think in practical terms.
Obviously, I'm generalize and there are always exceptions. But if you interview thousands of candidates you see the trend.
The university they attended matters almost as much as their GPA, as we all know that professors will tend to curve the difficulty of their course to conform to the quality of the students they are teaching.
And you have an illogical attitude towards 3.9-4.0 students. Almost every student who attends an Ivy-caliber school had a 3.9-4.0 in high school. Surely, you aren't implying that the quality of a CalTech CS graduate is lower than the quality of a UCLA CS graduate, because the CalTech students' one-time GPA was likely a 4.0. And you certainly can't be saying that Ivy-caliber students are sheep who blindly jump through hoops.
For evaluating talent, sure, but the job interview process isn't about finding the most talented candidates, it's about finding the candidates who would do the job the best. The point of the parent and grandparent comments was that GPA was an important indicator for the non-talent portions of the jobs they were hiring for.
From personal experience, I've worked with several people who were absolutely brilliant when presented with a new and interesting problem, but as the novelty wore off (usually on the scale of weeks) and their excitement waned, their ability to actually complete their work dropped off, too. That's not something you can tell by just making them code for you.
And I agree that schools are different. I occasionally considered candidates from schools that people snicker about, like San Jose State. But they had better have aced everything and really stand out from the pack to overcome that handicap. Sometimes, great people have life circumstances that corral them into lame schools. On the other hand, I'd give pretty serious consideration to a candidate from Harvey Mudd or CalTech with a 3.1. (But even at those great schools, the < 3.0 rule seemed to apply: candidates with a really low GPA couldn't pass the technical parts of interviewing. You'd be surprised how many CS graduates from top schools can't implement the C library strrev() function or return a pointer to the nth element of a linked list.)
You're breakdown of GPA is interesting and reasonable. It would be interesting to see if it correlates with first reviews and time at level.
If the school system's mandate is to prepare and evaluate students for the workplace, it is not doing a very good job.
The style of work and incentive systems differ greatly between your typical company and university. The differences in incentive systems are obvious, so I won't delve.
But as for the style of work, I recall that in university, professors would ask students to write a computer program on PAPER for exams. Sure, there is some overlap between that and a workplace environment. But at the end of the day, it is not simulating a real-world work environment, where you would be able to run and test your program, debug it, look up little tidbits on Google, and so forth, before checking it in.
What? The student's context of getting things done is learning, not scoring marks. So the student is not getting things done. In short the student has just gamed the system to ensure he looks like someone who gets things done.
>>To have a high GPA
Too high or too low marks are both an indication that something wrong is going with the student.
>>But in the end they will get it done, and if they maintained a high GPA they have shown that he will get it done year over year and always with high quality.
Sorry, if you subscribe to this theory all you will get is students coming in a assembly line whose only known expertise is to score marks.
>>So a high GPA often means that they are not lazy and self centered. It often means a candidate will not sit idle because a task is beneath her, and she will not pigeonhole on a perfecting an ancillary module when there are better things to do.
This needs some elaboration.
Interviews are the equivalent of the examinations in the corporate world. When you hire nth order mug pots expert at scoring high marks, you are ideally hiring someone is too good at interviews. Think of it this way, if you spent approximately 3 hours practicing interviews everyday- you can soon(say in 2 years) reach a state where you can clear any interview in any company. Google, Microsoft, Adobe, FB- You name it, you would have likely covered anything that they can ever ask or will ever ask, you can even get to a stage where you can anticipate every damn question or the whole interview by just their initial questions. But to get there you will have to spend good amount of time practicing than actually doing the work you are supposed to do.
Believe it or not many people actually do exactly this. I know of a person in my last company who would dedicate at least spend 2-3 hours in a day practicing interviews come hell or high water. The person hardly ever got the work done, but had one quality. Practice interviews well, and then change your company every 2-3 years, and from what I know is highest compensated among all my friends and previous colleagues I know.
A student who does not do what is required... would have described me throughout much of my career, and there is a string of bosses, unfortunately, that may have ulcers as a result of employing me, what with my wild ideas and unchecked imagination.
> It is boring and condescending and even my son, at the age of twelve, can figure out that the rules are arbitrary, that they are enforced in a haphazard fashion
Unfortunately, and it should not be like this, life is full of situations where rules are arbitrary, and applied in a haphazard fashion, often by people who are idiots.
Your son is right. But it is important for him to learn how to deal with these people, otherwise he is himself up for a life of frustration and pain and disappointment.
When attempting homework there are 3 things he needs to do.
i) Work out what dull arbitrary rules are being enforced, and obey these.
ii) Do the homework.
iii) If possible find interest in the homework. Expand it to other subjects, understand why it's useful, where it comes from, who uses it in their day to day life, or what it's been replaced by.
You can try the Phil Beadle books - his style might be too annoying for you. (http://www.amazon.com/Phil-Beadle/e/B0034NOMOU/ref=ntt_athr_...)
School does really suck for some people. There are lots of things that education based startups could address. It'll be tricky to get any change in education because it is so heavily political.
The parent describes a fantastic kid and should trust the kid and make sure to soften the impact of that school and prepare the kid for better times after school.
In my country in Europe there are schools that care about natural curiosity and will not try to kill it, I don't know about the situation in the US where this takes place.
A group of students had just finished a big research project and were told to present a one page executive summary that outlined their work, results, and conclusions. They couldn't quite get it to fit on one page, so their executive summary was two pages, but the second page was only 1/8th full. No big deal, right? They showed up to meet with the head of the company that was sponsoring their research, and handed him the paper. He rips off the second page and throws it in the trash (losing a good portion of their conclusions). The head of the company reads the first page, then stops and says, "This summary is incomplete. Where are your conclusions?" The team was dumbfounded, and lost a few points on their grade because they didn't follow the rules.
The moral of the story is: FOLLOW THE GD* RULES. If you want to use a different kind of paper, ask your teacher first. If you need an extension on the due date, ask your teacher first. If the guidance says to write a one page summary, do not write a two page summary. It's fine to be creative, but don't change the rules on your own because you don't have the authority to change the rules. In most things it is easier to ask permission than it is to ask forgiveness.
It's not unusual to not want to do homework, but a lot of people in this modern generation think that it's okay to get bad grades and just blame it on the fact that they are not "book smart." Just about every movie marketed towards young people is a variation of the theme where a kid is secretly a prodigy but the "system" didn't realize it somehow. That is not how it works in real life. For every kid who skips all his homework and gets bad grades but is secretly Will Hunting there are a thousand kids or more who are getting bad grades and are going to end up flipping burgers as a career. It's time to start spanking your kids so they'll get better grades and won't suck at life.
Btw, here's a link to the book if you want to read some stories from an actual genius: http://www.lionhrtpub.com/books/wp1.html
To clarify, I only recommend open palm spanking. Not switches/lashes/paddles/belts. It doesn't bruise, only stings for a few seconds, and in my opinion is actually more humane than sticking your kid in solitary confinement. I don't see it as a problem as long as it is administered in moderation (like most things).
Edit: softer tone and spelling
(Also: Dave and Jeremy do more managing than I do, although I have more impact on hiring than they do; We have two kids, 13 and 11 about to be 14 and 12.)
Economic or "jail" punishments aren't suitable in many cases when it comes to kids.
You might be interested in checking out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement
It covers the types of operant conditioning with definitions. From this article, you can blast off into tons of reading. Read carefully - these are holy topics to some writers and they will carefully shape their message to support their viewpoints.
If it is to be a learning experience, this will produce obedient slaves and avoid any creativity. Not a good thing in this day and age.
If it is to be a real world experience, the head is engaging in sabotage, and should be removed by the board.
"In most things it is easier to ask permission than it is to ask forgiveness."
I'm really not sure about that. Besides that, I agree with your conclusion.
Regarding corporeal punishment, I find it odd how the western world believes the practice should be stopped while it did produce result (like kids doing their homework).
Whatever, european and american kids won't get spanked, won't get better grades, will suck at life - bad thing for them, good thing for the other kids :-)
Wait, it's unfair for the european and american kids. We should give them away a liberal art degree (but only if they spend enough time and $ at a place where they are supposed to acquire an education)
| If you want to use a different kind of paper, ask
| your teacher first
I understand the value of 'gaming the system,' but the size the paper used for a math assignment is probably something that didn't get a lot of emphasis when the teacher was assigning it. That said, do you really want to sit back and 'game the system' rather than trying to improve it? Such arbitrary decision-making on the part of the teacher really detracts from their effectiveness. Not only that, it just sounds like something that is teacher-specific. I doubt that the school as a whole is trying to reach for some overriding goal that is served by punishing children for using the wrong sized paper on homework assignments.
Life is full of incredibly arbitrary criteria that actually make sense in terms of someone else's workflow. You don't know that workflow, you're just given rules to follow. It is best to follow those rules, no matter how stupid they are.
I realize that sometimes we just have to follow arbitrary rules, but the attitude of, "keeping one's head down," is not how change happens.
Do you know that the teacher had not clearly stated to the class what the penalties would be for the wrong paper size?
In either case I can see the teacher acting as described. And wouldn't fault the teacher for doing so. If, indeed, the teacher was enforcing an arbitrary rule which had not been clearly communicated, then I would fault the teacher. But I suspect this was not the case. The rule was present and the kid was supposed to know it, but forgot.
Bwahahaha - your kid is screwed. The world is full of arbitrary and down right stupid rules (assuming he ever gets a job, he'll love the tax codes that apply to him, but not to rich people or corporations).
You need to straighten out his young punk ass - and do it now.
Before you say "but what about his mad art/music skillz", I'm afraid I'd need an outside expert to qualify those before I believe they exist. I put my 8 year old daughter's artwork on my office wall and tell her it's beautiful - lucky (for her and me) shes a whiz at science and will get a real job later in life.
No one succeeds in life that can't even manage to get a measly high school degree from a "see spot run" public school.
You are the parent - NOT the twelve year old - what part of that escapes you?
Maybe it's time for private school, where the whole "leave no moron behind" concept doesn't exist. Obviously you and the kids present school system have already failed. Maybe it's not too late for the kid.
More recent examples abound in the music industry, in which you can be wildly successful, yet make less than what amounts to minimum wage.[2]
The importance of art to understanding human condition cannot be understated. Yet, for whatever reason, societies by and large does not reward the people who produce it financially. There's certainly a lot wrong with our education system, but blaming it for the starving artist syndrome is unfair.
The authors observe that homework is disruptive to family dynamics because it is an ongoing source of conflict between parents and their children. They also observe that the primary reason schools assign homework to younger children is because parents demand it. Both of these observations are consistent with my experience both within my own family and my observations of the families of my child's peers.
On the other hand, I have no way of verifying or denying the author's claims about homework studies failing to demonstrate long term benefits from homework.
Overall, I am glad I read it because it gave me some perspective on the issue. My son still is responsible for doing his homework, and we as parents clearly communicate this to him. Anyway, if you're parenting, I'd say it's perhaps worth checking out.
As an aside, I strongly recommend Juliet Schor's Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture about the way corporations have come to market to children - and it's probably only gotten worse with them having online lives.
End of Homework: http://www.amazon.com/The-End-Homework-Disrupts-Overburdens/...
Born to Buy: http://www.amazon.com/Born-Buy-Commercialized-Consumer-Cultu...
But I did receive a "C" in Global studies class my junior year -- because my binder didn't have the tabs organized correctly. (Wrong colors, wrong order) My classmates even complained, because I could have taught the class!
End of the day, it didn't affect my life much, gives me a funny story to tell, and prepared me for the bureaucratic hazing that was to come from the State University of New York. As long as your son understands that less than perfect grades will keep him out of Stanford, Harvard, etc, relax.
Of course parents think their kids drawings are cute, and their music is wonderous. But unless he is truly virtuoso, or actually has a photographic memory as suggested, he should probably learn some maths as well, and you as a parent should work as hard as you can to get him excited about things that will get him a job instead of rubbing off your callous despisery of "academics and investment bankers" on him. (Seriously... "homogenized and brainwashed", "almost completely without originality of thought or perspective", "good little cog in a habitual big wheel"... what makes you hate academics so deeply?) The entire world is in recession right now, you really think cartoonery is going to get him hired faster than a strong math and science background?
But let's pretend that parabolas actually are worthless and boring (God forbid I ever learn your opinion of Gaussians, Betas, Erfs, Einastos, Hernquists, Exponentials, etc.). Sounds like the real issue is the educational system, not the content. Don't for an instant try to say that Music and Maths are not intimately related. Look for gifted or accelerated programs, try to get him enrolled in a Millenium / Magnet school, just try to get him excited.
Seriously though, you should hold your tongue when talking about academics. You really think Bohr was homogenized? Was Tesla brainwashed? Was Von Braun a cogwheel? I guarantee people find my "art" just as amusing as your kids little shark doodle.
I say this because I truly believe your son will be fine. People like him are creative and genius way beyond comprehension. They simply refuse to do things the way they are supposed to be done, and that's the sign of someone who's going to be successful one day or another, just not when the definition of success is doing what everyone else is doing how everyone else is doing it.
Secondly, school is a system, government is a system, large corporations are systems, learning to survive and advance within systems is valuable. Outright revolt as an individual is generally purposeless, use that creativity to find way to minimize effort while maximizing gain.
I learned this trick far too late in my school career!
Some of the things you accomplish are great things that only you could do--your life's work. Accomplishing these will among the greatest experiences of your life.
But a lot of the things you accomplish will seem pointless and boring. Doesn't matter--you still need to do them. In school it's homework; in real life it's time sheets, contracts, taxes, auto registration, insurance, memos, etc. Accomplishing these will suck...but you still need to do them. In fact failing to do so is a good way to keep yourself from having the opportunity to accomplish great things.
Either you are bullshitting, or you better learn what size paper to do your homework on. Winning is easier than being right, and winning is much more fun.
I don't have a teenage kid, but there I think there are two thing that are important.
1) Acquiring new knowledge should be self-rewarding. 2) Winning is fun.
This parent seems to have a kid that hasn't experienced the joy of the #2. He seems to actively prevent his kid from winning because he thinks winning is wrong. This is a common theme where parents constrain their children to do no better than themselves.
Children of immigrants tend to be incredibly successful because their parents have no such inhibitions.
Hence why we have a society full of puppets with new cars in the garage.
What an awful way to think, I'm disgusted by your reasoning. For whatever meaning of "winning" you have, life only matters if you do what you believe in, otherwise it's not worth living.
My point is not about right vs. winning, it is more about giving your children the tools to do well in any environment.
But I almost never did my homework.
This was almost the sole source of strife between my mother and I, and between both of us and school administrators. Going from 8th to 9th grade required a special exception, and recommendations from almost every one of my teachers, as my GPA was below the point normally required to progress to the next grade. I am lucky in that the teachers I had were sympathetic enough to stand up for me, and confident in my abilities using other methods of evaluation.
We (my mother and I) considered other schools, other formats of school, but in the end we settled on something modeled after Unschooling. When I was 13-going-on-14, halfway through my 9th grade year (freshman year of high school in the United States), my mother took me out of school using the legal provision for homeschooling. As she was a single working mother, I spent the rest of the years that my peers were in high school learning things on my own and seeking out my own learning opportunities. (A year or so later, I learned C, Objective-C, and the Cocoa frameworks and started a Mac applications business a year or so later with friends I met on the internet.)
Granted, I had the following things going for me: a supportive mother, generally being "well-behaved", living in a small town where it was safe to leave me to my own devices, living in a college town which gave me access to more learning resources, and an in-built self-motivated learning style. I also think it helped that I went through the public school system for many years before I left, as it meant I had friends and a social life that stuck with me even after leaving the school itself. So, I'm sure it's not for everyone, but for some, and maybe OP's son, it's worth considering.
Let's suppose the parent evaluation is right, which is not self evident given how the emotional attachments impairs judgement.
The article says the work was poorly graded because the paper was not of the "right size".
We can suppose that the grader either a) didn't have the time to properly grade b) had to follow strict and pointless rules even if they were evidently stupid c) had a poor judgement.
The c case is the biggest problem - when an evaluation fonction returns wrong results. b and a could be special cases of c (not having a schedule or following stupid rules could be having a poor judgement)
Now let's think for a minute than N% of the graders are giving results that are no better than random assessment of the pupils.
Given how, in a schoolchildren life, a number of educators will be met, N% of the results will be meaningless (apply statistics, SD, etc.)
Now think of those randomly declared having "good grades" become graders (teachers) themselves.
I wonder how the equilibrium works out in a society - at which value of N will society turn education from acquiring knowledge to jumping through hoods and having a certificate in witchcraft (replace witchcraft by anything you think is wrong and pointless)
[Even worse- think, if for example the school district is poor and recruts graders of a lesser quality, that this raises to (N+X)%]
I can remember all of about 15 days between 1st and 11th grades where I actually did homework, as in, did school work at home. The rest of the time, I did whatever exercises/sheets/etc that needed to be handed in on the bus or during class before we went home. The 15 days - I remember having to go to the library to read up on some topics to write papers, and I remember having a few essays which took a bit of time to write longhand (and eventually word processed on a computer later).
It wasn't until 12th grade that the assignments got hard enough that I ever struggled. By then it was somewhat too late - I didn't have any really strong innate ability to study something for more than a few minutes. Now today, that might not even matter at some level, with all answers a google away, but I think it still takes time to really study and learn a subject/problem/etc.
The ability to focus yourself on something - anything - and get through the hard stuff you don't care about before getting to the stuff you might enjoy - that's a discipline I didn't have, and it took me many more years to get it back, even for things I wanted to get more involved in. Developing this habit/skill at a younger age will pay dividends, but it's hard for kids to appreciate that. The OP's kid may be mature enough in some ways to at least consider this angle - logically - when homework comes up. Do the stupid exercises on the size paper they want with the stupid number 2 pencil.
Learn to adapt to whatever requirements are put before you quickly and with little fuss - focusing on the intellectual aspects first. As someone else mentioned, those are eventually mandatory in just about all walks of life, so learning to roll with that will help.
It's possibly similar to healthy eating and exercise. Especially for kids - they can 'eat anything' and not get fat, stay thin, etc. Eventually, that goes away, and learning to eat healthy and exercise is something you have to adapt to to remain in good health. If you have a better grounding in healthy eating and physical fitness from a young age, it's not a big deal.
No one ever looks at this from a teachers perspective. They are caught in the middle of trying to help children with wide variety of learning styles and the political machine of a school district learning mandate. They can only do so much to help. If a parent feels their child doesn't fit the mold and thinks the system is rigged, they should help their child understand how the school system work and how that relates to the rest of the working world. Where nearly everything else is based on metrics.
If they feel their child understand the material but the tests and homework are causing problems, find the path that accomplishes the goals of a passing grades. You'd be surprised if you just ask, that a teacher will tell you what they are going to be grading on. Is it just test or is it an overall judgement of how the child is doing?
As a kid I figured out that the key to "doing well" was to impress by showing off in areas where you really do excel. Is the child more creative? Then answer the homework or tests with creative answers and get the answer they are looking for but done in a fashion that may be different than what was expected. Do they have to do a book report? Make that look better than every other kid in class.
In short I pretty much skated through middle school and high school by doing the bare minimum to achieve an C but impressed in other creative areas that demonstrated effort and ability to comprehend the material.
Anyway that's my rant.
Don't frame the homework as something he has to do to learn what he already knows, frame it as a stepping stone. If he doesn't do his homework, he will fail out of school. If he fails out of school, his chances of doing what he loves severely diminish (and having to work at Taco Bell is a lot worse than homework). Doing to homework now is the gateway to never having to do homework again.
Food for thought.
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_...
His Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLE) provides an alternative approach.
From personal experience with a similar situation. It's a major leap of faith, but you'd be surprised what a kid can do in an environment that permits them to.
According to my parents, I was exactly like your son in the mid 80s. They homeschooled me to make sure I wasn't held back from my potential.
It wasn't without its challenges, but nothing is. I'm doing pretty well now. I had a brief foray into "doing what I was told" in college, and figured out it was not going to get me to graduate with the grades I wanted, so I found an adviser who understood me, who would trust I could take care of myself and just sign off on my self-directed path through my degree. I had a longer foray after college (it seems I learn certain lessons slowly) and eventually grew so sick of getting up early every morning and driving an hour to work in shitty traffic that I just quit.
I quit everything for almost a year. For a year, I worked the hardest I've ever worked on whatever I wanted. And it got me nowhere.
Except...
Except it taught me that the world can't destroy me. It taught me that I'm capable of so much and it is only myself to blame for submitting to bosses or procrastination for not getting it done (and really, doing what your boss tells you to do is a form of procrastination). Everyone told me I was going to be ruined, that I'd not find work again because I'd been off so long "in this economy!" Dire consequences were in store for me, to not grovel at the feet of the recruiters, to not beg for my old job back. Bunch of lily-livered cowards. No such thing happened, and the idea is patently absurd. No, the only thing that can destroy me is myself.
I see all these people saying "You gotta pay your dues" and "sometimes you just have to suck it up and do what you're told".
And it is such complete and utter fucking bullshit. You don't have to do a single god damn thing you don't want to in this world. The world won't destroy you. You gotta buy this car to drive to work, drive to work to pay for this car. Yeah, screw that. What the hell do you need a degree for when the only people who are getting anywhere in this world are doing it by starting companies and getting out of the rat race? What the hell do you need a recruiter for when the only jobs they have to give you are going to make you a miserable son of a bitch?
What the hell do you need anything for? All you really need is a pencil and some paper, and the only reason you need that is because it's the only way to communicate with enough people. Write. Write. Write. Draw. Compose. Program. Mathematicate. A robot can dig a ditch for you, so why are you digging ditches? Do the one thing that humans can do that computers cannot: create. Don't let anyone tell you what to create. Create whatever you want. People fail not because they fail to create the right things, they fail because they fail to create anything.
And to all you people in here, talking about "you have to play the game," "that's the system," "deal with it": you're certainly free to ruin your own life, but leave the poor, damn kids alone.
It's a defense mechanism. Some people need to believe that being a good little cog was their only option. Because the alternative is to admit that they find real freedom terrifying.