Who wants more parabolas? No one! When do we want them? Never!

I was a bad student. I graduated high school in the bottom 10% of my class, and were it not for a teacher who gave me a D instead of an F in their class, I would have had to repeat the twelfth grade. I’m not proud of it, but I’ll be honest, to this day I do not care I was a bad student other than harboring a little guilt for the time that some teachers may have wasted on me. Me. Who was constantly told by teachers, “Chris, you’re smart. You just don’t apply yourself.”

I can’t comment on my intellect because I’ve never considered myself “smart,” but I definitely didn’t apply myself academically. I had no problem applying myself in subjects or activities I found valuable. When I find value in something, I very deeply apply myself. My trouble with school was I found little (to no) value in it.

To me, school was an administration asking kids to memorize facts they’d never need nor use in their adult lives. I don’t mean that as a blanket statement. You need English and math, a knowledge of science and history and communication. But you don’t need calculus or a fine understanding of organic chemistry to survive or even thrive in this world (unless those subjects pertain to your CHOSEN vocation). What you do need is an understanding of taxes but find a school that teaches that to students.

School also is designed for a student to succeed. Which is great. If you do the work, study, attend classes, you will get As. Built-in success. Or built-in opportunity would be better. It’s not like there are only so many As a school can give, leaving students to compete and fight for their success. If every kid does good, every kid gets an A. Yea!

That is NOT the real world. The real world is NOT designed for success. Lots of days it feels designed for failure. In life, you can do everything right and still not get that A.

Another issue I had with school was homework. You go to school for six or eight hours a day then come home with another sometimes four hours of homework. My wife actually had a teacher tell her class, “All you need to do is devote one hour of homework to my class a night.” One hour. On top of her subjects. Never mind that this teacher was asking her students to devote more time to her class outside of class than in, where the typical period was 40 mins. Homework to me was pointless busy work that I very rarely saw reflected in the work lives of adults around me. Yes, there are days adults need to bring their work home with them. But that is not every day. In many careers, quitting time is quitting time then comes family time. Homework impedes on daily personal time often for no reason.

I’m mentioning this now because homework is making headlines in the news lately and many districts around the country are considering banning or have banned homework from students’ school careers. Or, at least, the districts have moved to not base a students’ grade on their homework and have also limited the amount of homework teachers were able to assign by stipulating that homework can’t be a task that wasn’t started in class.

In the end, I think school burns out children. So often, they’re asked to do way more work than adults are asked to do on a daily basis. They’re asked to bounce between many different subjects throughout the day that use different areas of the brain to process with nothing more than a five-minute break between. It’s exhausting. I know. I do it almost daily, running a company where I wear many hats. I bounce from accounting, to editorial, to advertising, to design, to other tasks every day. And it often makes my head hurt, and I can’t wait for “quitting time,” so I can decompress. But because of homework, kids don’t get much of an opportunity to “decompress.”

Everyone knows what’s it like to be slammed with work throughout the day and looking forward to going home but knowing today is a day you need to bring your work home with you and you’re probably not going to stop until you pass out. But that’s not every day. But for a kid it is.

At this point, you might think I’m hopeless or that I’m against school. I’m not. Not even close. I’m against memorization. I want education. Real education in our children’s lives. But I don’t think real education comes through homework. Or general homework. It definitely doesn’t come through busy work. It comes by way of showing kids the value in what they do. I just think schools need to offer more value and not more parabolas.

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