PolySciGuy

A valid point, but as I have said several times I have no problem when the ends justify the means
The goal of homework (the entire school system, actually) is to teach, and if I have already learned the material... the means are now moot

The goal of buisiness busiwork is the action. Restocking shelves sucks, but the only way to restock shelves is to... restock shelves

So far, homework has taught me to rebel against incompetent authority, I suspect that will make incompetent authority hate me later on, so it might be hard for me to find a job, but I believe my ideas would make me one that is hard to fire

RightinNYC

Don't worry about incompetent authority. If you're good at what you do, they can only do so much to you. Of course, being able to convince them that you're on their side is useful.

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PolySciGuy

well if the ones I know are any measure of the rest of the world that is easier done than said!

Kelzie

Except you will be stuck in situations in your adult life where the ends don't justify the means. Where quite honestly, the means have no connection to the ends. And in those situations it will be better if you have a history of gritting your teeth and just doing it, not looking for a waiver to sign.

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PolySciGuy

name one............

faithful_servant

Never. PSG, I was a lot like you when I was in school. On tests I got one D, one B and every other test grade was an A for the entire time I was in school. But I HATED homework. Homework is designed to teach you far more than facts, it teaches you self-discipline, self-motivation and self-reliance. Learning the facts is easy, learning that there are times when you simply must set aside immeadiate pleasures in favor of drudgery fo rlong term benefits can be learned no other way than by DOING it. I knew the friggin' quadratic equation inside and out within 5 minutes and I still had to solve that stupid POS 200 times. Did it help me to remember it 30 years later? Nope. But it did teach me that I could endure through the utterly boring and seemingly unending chore of doing it. Bottom line is that you need to get some self-discipline and so your homework with as much effort as you take your tests. In the real world, how you do your daily job is far more important to your employer than coming up with one great idea. This is the lesson that homework teaches you. You won't learn it by reading this, you have to experience it. You have to understand that the real world is almost all about the daily grind and if you're good at that, you'll EARN the right to be one those who live off of thier great ideas. I worked my butt off doing some of the most monotonous, repetitive work you can imagine and I did it well. Now, I'm as close to a free-lancer as my company has. I have the freedom to walk into any dept. and find ways to make them operate better. In the last three years, I've improved my employers bottomline by over 10% and I'm doing what I really enjoy. But it came at the cost of spending 15 years doing grunt work (both physical and mental). Learn the lesson of homework and stop this foolishness. If you want a real senior project,organize a sustainable outreach to your local retirement community. Something that will outlast you and touch people's lives for years to come. Do something that truly matters instead of something that only feeds your own desires.

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talloulou

In my home school is most definitely a JOB. One of the very few jobs my kids have and the one that is most important.

RightinNYC

But at the same time, in many fields, an employer would rather have someone who figures out a logical way to avoid going through a costly process while still achieving the same results over someone who simply does what they're asked to do.

Innovation and a desire to improve are incredibly important characteristics, and doing grunt work doesn't hone those skills.

Obama08

I'm in high school as well, and I don't think parents or teachers would ever go for this. I do agree that some teachers give way too much of it which does make you hate the subject and lowers the amount of information you learn. Homework should be given in very low doses as a means of lightly reinforcing what was learned.
But what your waiver idea would damage is advanced classes such as AP and IB...which my high school has a lot of. The whole purpose of "advanced placement" is that the student is always being challenged.
You’re usually getting so much information in these classes that it’s almost sort of necessary for the student to be doing 2 hours of work a night. Why should AP students receive a weighted grade if they're not doing the extra work (2 hours of homework a night)???
I can see how easy classes that aren't advanced shouldn't be giving as much homework, but when it comes to certain subjects and how much information you get, its in some ways necessary that you get a lot of homework.

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Kelzie

Well...it's going to be a somewhat technical answer, since you don't work at my job...but...

I work at a wine store. And like most retailers these days, we have a computer system to keep track of our sales, etc. Now this system isn't automatic, it logs all of our sales for the day and than sends it to corporate at night and clears itself to be ready for the next day.

Now the way the tracking system used to be set up was that we would have to send the numbers at the beginning of the next day. So we used the sku numbers from several products that we knew we would sell to double check the number the registers had against the number we were sending to corporate.

Well with our (semi) updated system, the numbers clear automatically. But every morning I still enter a string of numbers into the register to print out a copy of numbers that are always zero. And every morning I enter that into the computer, because I can't receive updated info about out inventory without those numbers. Which are always zero.

And yes, before you point out that it's a pointless procedure, remember I already told you so. And yes corporate knows it. And yes we do it anyway. Presumably because it will cost too much money for corporate to hire someone to re-write the computer program, but I don't really know. All I know is that I have to do it.

One of many examples, albeit the one that will sound like the least amount of gibberish. You will do things that are tedious and seem useless. It's better to get used to them when your job doesn't hang on it.