What do you do in the morning? I wake up, brush my teeth, shower, eat breakfast and then drive to school. I double check my homework, because if I have missing homework, my teachers will make me write a email home, and I will get in trouble by my parents. Why should I care? Isn’t school the place to learn, and outside of school is free time to do what I want? Well, if I don’t do my homework then my parents don’t let me do Sports, which is what I want to do with my free time. I want to do good in school and please my parents, but I only want to do good in school, literally. Shouldn’t I spend my free time doing what I want, and not trying to do homework just to please my parents? Welcome to my world.
The point I am trying to get at, if you can’t already see is that our life is being controlled by school all day. There are two different sides to the story. When you ask your middle school head, she will say that school takes seven of the fourteen hours of your day that you are awake. That’s half the time you are awake. When you ask Logan LaPlante, who was in this TED talks video, he would strongly disagree. I believe in the latter. It is true that you are in school seven hours a day, but you are driving to and from school for a hour of your seven hours of free time. So now you are down to six. You have two hours of homework, or the average teen does. So now we are down to four hours of free time. If you participate in any other school club/activity/sport then you have about one hour a day doing that. So quickly we have whittled ourselves down to three hours. We all need to eat, so breakfast and dinner amount to about an hour and a hlaf of homework a night. So now I have one and a half hours of free time. Now if your parents make you do chores that’s another half an hour. So the average kid has about one hour of free time, of the fourteen waking hours.
Now why would anyone do this? Well for me, it is because I want to impress the people I care about. I want free time to do what I choose, but I want to impress the people I care for. I need to find balance, but how. The only way to do it is to do my homework, but then I don’t get to pursue what I love, lacrosse. I like the idea of Logan’s to hack my learning, or even better, hack the system.
I don’t mean to hack it by using a computer, I want it to be hacked by words. The teachers blame the homework load of having too little class time, but to me they are just taking the easy way out. Instead of giving us hours of homework, why don’t they just make their teaching more efficient? This way, we can get more done in a class period. Also, if they need to teach us so much in a year, why don’t the teachers lower their expectations? How about we shoot to be done with Trigonometry by the end of highschool, not Calculus, then in College you could take Calculus.
What I am trying to get at is the teachers could improve, so the balance is easier for us kids. Now, the reason I think that learning should be changed is when I had a conversation with a high schooler, he said that very few people actually do homework, and he spends his weekends catching up on sleep. This made me realize that their is no balance, you can’t have it both ways, which is why I choose to attack learning in a different way. If there was no homework, then we colleges would have a better look into our personalities, and who we actually are, because we would be doing things we love, not homework.
School takes up much more than the seven hours it tells you, as I just showed. I have shown that it is nearly impossible to keep balance in our lives as we know them right now, and that the reason homework is a big deal is because our teachers haven’t adapted but made us adapt. I don’t think that we need to reform our learning, we just need to make it better.
