Tonight’s Homework
“Some evenings, when we force her to go to bed, she will pretend to go to sleep and then get back up and continue to do homework for another hour. The following mornings are awful, my daughter teary-eyed and exhausted but still trudging to school. I wonder: What is the exact nature of the work that is turning her into a sleep-deprived teen zombie so many mornings?” Are kids getting too much homework these days? Karl Taro Greenfeld definitely thought that was the case for his 13 year-old daughter. So he decided to do her homework for a week. From the The Atlantic back in 2013: My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me.
+ It turns out the homework debate continued long after Greenfield turned in his assignments: From the NYT Upshot: Worried About Risky Teenage Behavior? Make School Tougher. “More demanding academic standards decreased the number of days teenagers drank as well as the rate at which they engaged in binge drinking.” (Someone might need to write “I will not confuse correlation and causation” a hundred times on the chalkboard.)