My Son Won't Do His Homework

I am going through hell with my son. He is twelve, and no matter what I do, no matter what my wife or my oldest daughter do, he won’t do his homework. We ground him, we take away all his gadgets, we prevent him from going to birthday parties and other social events that he loves. Other than corporal punishment (which is a place I won’t go), we have tried everything. It doesn’t matter… he doesn’t care. We can't force him to do something he thinks is wrong. And my personal hell is... he is right.

My son can listen to the radio and pick up his saxophone and play whatever he is hearing. Or, if his sax isn’t handy, he picks up whatever other musical instrument is around and plays that.

But he doesn’t do his homework.

I bought him a book about drawing and he gets up at night and reads it and sneaks around the house sketching things. The portraits he does are incredible. The comics he produces are funny, insightful and engaging. Everyone asks him to draw for them.

But he doesn’t do his homework.

My son is rarely if ever unhappy, and people are naturally drawn to him. He has a great delivery on jokes and has a photographic memory for any piece of pop culture he has seen. We riff on Simpson’s lines all the time, cracking each other up in the process. Then he’ll tell me movies he saw three years ago, shot by shot, line by line.

But he doesn’t do his homework.

My son is intellectually curious. He loves to learn new things and is always asking me “Why does something work this way?” or “What about that?”

But he doesn’t do his homework.

My son loves video games. I work at a video game company so I know how long it is supposed to take to finish all the missions in your average next gen video game. My son takes half that time. He holds competitions with his friends where, after he beats them, he shows them all the tricks that he has figured out about how to beat the game.

But dammit, he doesn’t do his homework.

The other day I insisted that my son finish a piece of homework. I sat down next to him and taught myself math that I never learned in all my years of high school and college (remember, he is twelve). I stayed up until midnight with him, browbeating him the entire time, my anger unchecked. Finally, we completed the problem, which had to do with plotting the parabola of a quadratic equation and reducing the result set to a graph of the system of inequalities. The project was about finding the cross section of a river based on a given quadratic equation.

The next morning my son woke early and went down and made his project interesting to him. He put in cartoon characters exploring the depth of the river, and drew a shark (which he labeled with his teacher’s name) about to eat a happy little duck (which he labeled “My Grades”). He drew a fisherman packing gear and assorted other fish and life. These were not just doodles – he actually helped clarify some of the information that he had been struggling with. By drawing the characters he was helping himself understand what the lesson was trying to teach.

My entire family was completely enthralled by what he had done. It was not only artistically creative and engaging, it actually helped clear up the very nature of the project. Justly proud, we anxiously looked forward to hearing how his teacher responded.

My son returned home from school downcast, shuffling his feet. I asked him what was wrong. “My teacher didn’t like the project, because I put it on the wrong size paper.”

I don't have much hair, but I am ready to tear what little I have out at the roots. My son doesn’t do his homework because his homework is stupid. I have spoken to educators and principles and academicians and grandparents and probably a hundred other people , and nobody has given me a decent answer to this question: "Why are you so convinced that my son is going to be an academic or an investment banker?" Because as far as I can tell, those are the only two things that schools prepare kids to be.

I have been sitting by my son's side for 7 years, doing his lessons. I believe I can state with the unequivocal clarity of someone that his given valuable time to a task that is largely worthless but required... the homework is just plain dumb. 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, and that the stuff that he loves (art and music and video games) will be a great future for him and the stuff he hates (math and science) is something he will never compete in, never have a chance at.

But school doesn’t care, because school does not have the objective of helping my son produce the maximum amount of value in the future that he will probably encounter. School cares about ensuring that he knows how to take tests, follow directions and can do math that he will never have to care about for the rest of his life. School cares that he can either prove that he is worthy of being in the top 5% that will go on to be homogenized and brainwashed in a top-notch school so that they are almost completely without originality of thought or perspective or that he gets the hell out of the way for those kids that meet that description. School cares that he can be measured and managed, so that he will be a good little cog in a habitual big wheel.

As a parent I am caught between two worlds. I am 100% certain that school is doing great damage to his future prospects, but I also know that the game is rigged to be in favor of kids who get the right grades. Because recruiters can’t seem to get off the “experience and education” kick that does so much damage to our society and our children, I know that my children’s future job prospects are being controlled by people who have never once taken a critical look at what really goes into producing value for a business or market. They just know that their client (the hiring manager) told them they wanted somebody from Stanford with a certain GPA. And if they can get that butt in that seat they can then go deal with the next client.

I want to focus on what will make my kids successful, on what will allow them to provide the most possible value to their clients, their society and themselves. But I have to focus on what will get them work, even if that will hurt them, society, the companies that hire them and everyone around them. This is the very definition of broken system, the very epitome of how we are driving ourselves off a cliff all in the name of safe driving. This is why Talentism matters so much to me.

Comments

[Craig Silverman]

We live a life similar to yours in our home. My son who is also 12 has to be pushed like a boulder up a mountain to get his homework done. With summer only a few days away we are ready for some family time that does not include frustration. He made the honor role this year in each and every term, but at what expense? My relationship with him gets strained and he is simply acting his age. Yes, he prefers to ride a bike, to go for a swim in the pool or a jump on his longboard to studying for a test on ancient Rome. So what! Talent and creativity needs to be nurtured and not driven out of our kids. They should be embraced for not taking "no" for an answer so that later in life they will still be curious.

[laurence haughton]

When the late Gordon MacKenzie would visit schools he asked that the artists in the room raise their hands:

"The pattern of responses never varied. First grade: En mass the children leapt from their chairs, arms waving wildly. Every child was an artist. Second grade: About half the kids raised their hands, shoulder high, no higher. Third Grade: At best, 10 kids out of 30 would raise a hand. Tentatively. Self-consciously. And so on up through the grades. ... By time I reached sixth grade, no more than one or two did so and then only ever-so-slightly -- guardedly -- their eyes glancing from side to side uneasily, betraying a fear of being identified by the group as a 'closet artist.'"

[Sara Bennett]

You and your son know intuitively what everyone should know intellectually--that there's no correlation between homework and academic achievement in elementary school and very little correlation later on. (And the only correlation is that students who do homework generally do better on teacher-created tests and teacher-given grades!) You can read more about homework at my website, stophomework.com, or in the book I co-authored, The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It.

[Jeremy Langhans]

homework is so last semester.

[Colin Kingsbury]

Homework teaches discipline and persistence. Success in life is driven in large part by your ability to bite down and push through the tasks you don't enjoy, whether it's cold calls or sticking to a diet and exercise plan. It's a tiny minority of people who enjoy these things, and they're the real social deviants.

In my case, it was 5th grade when my parents decided it was time to get me out of public school. The place I ended up was like the Nightmare on Elm Street of homework, but I did a lot better. I can't say if I was happier there at the time, but there is no way I would have followed the course that I did had I stayed where I was.

[laurence haughton]

Sports, music, and art all teach discipline and persistence. So if that's the purpose of homework, it's easily replaced.

[Jeff Hunter]

I have talked to many educators. None of them has stated that the purpose of the homework is to "increase discipline." Most of them think it actually hurts the learning experience, but they are required by district and state policy to assign it.

The state of California says that the purpose of homework "is to practice skills previously taught or to have students apply their previously learned knowledge and skills to new problems." (http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/documents/math-ch1.pdf)

This begs the question: why? This says what homework does, but it doesn't say why it has value. The implication is that the skills a kid is learning in school are important and that the best way to develop proficiency in those skills is work assigned for individual application.

I have worked on years worth of homework with my kids. Some of it is indeed important. But most of it is teachers seeking to meet the district requirement by assigning repetitions of work that was already covered during the regular school hours. I have sat with my kids as they literally went through hours of working and reworking the same problem. It has taught each of my kids to hate subjects that they started out loving.

Every employer I know of (and I would assume that you are no exception Colin) wants engaged employees who are passionate about their jobs. Most employers do not want employees who hate their work but persist through it anyway. It is a fallacy to believe that we are teaching our kids that the heart of innovative capability (and therefore their future job prospects) is best served by doing something you hate for an extended period of time no matter the consequences.

[Sean Rehder]

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude." ~ Emerson

[Colin Kingsbury]

I'll go along with the idea that homework as it's implemented in practical terms today is counterproductive. However, I think it's a second-order problem.

The real issue is in low-quality teaching, in which I'd include systemic things like curriculum design as well as individual teacher performance. My experience, at least, was that in a low-quality educational environment, I was overwhelmed by a sense of general futility at the enterprise in general. It's hard to run the race when you don't care about the prize.

After being transplanted into a much better school, I did better not in spite of, but because of the increased workload and harder material. The material itself stopped just shy of anachronistic and we were taught math by working out tons of problems, geography by learning the capitols of every state and country, and history by memorizing dates and names. It was "old school" in the literal sense. Though we had to take some standardized tests for state rules, they would have laughed at the idea of teaching to them because most students probably could have passed the tests two or three years ahead of their grade. The students were socioeconomically above average, but not otherwise distinguished. A few were definitely hard cases, and yet they too came out a lot better than they went in. This was all without Ritalin or anything else.

My question here is whether treating educational malaise by cutting back on homework is like treating obesity with liposuction. Sometimes you have to treat the symptom in order to treat the disease. But I think it's important to know which is which.

[John Sumser]

The trouble, I think, is buying into the homework idea in the first place. It's no longer clear that societal rewards flow towards people who do their homework (particularly at twelve). My experience was that I had a choice. I could support my kids or I could support a system that asked for their souls and gave them precious little in return.

The surprise was that once I ceased to be an advocate for the system and took up my proper role as an advocate for my children, the homework seemed to get done.

It's a clever system that causes parents to act as prison guards for their children. Take your children's side.