A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

I recently found out that my nephew's school had no take-home homework before high school, instead having kids complete assignments during class time. At first, I was flabbergasted that they would deny kids the discipline building of managing unstructured time without direct supervision. Homework- at home- seemed like such a fundamental part of the schooling experience.

Now, I'm thinking that was pretty much they only way they could think of to ensure kids were doing things themselves.

I know it was a rough transition for my nephew, though, and I don't know that I would have handled it very well either. I'm not sure what would be a better option, though, given how much of a disservice such easy access to a mental crutch is.

> I recently found out that my nephew's school had no take-home homework before high school, instead having kids complete assignments during class time. At first, I was flabbergasted that they would deny kids the discipline building of managing unstructured time without direct supervision.

Good!

If they want to give kids the chance to develop the skill of managing unstructured time, that could easily be fit into the school day/week in a variety of ways.

In most K-12 schools, there is a lot of time in the day that is used incredibly ineffeciently.

For my personal experience, college was a time management joke after high school, mainly because I didn’t have to spend so much bullshit/wasted time in classes.

> Homework- at home- seemed like such a fundamental part of the schooling experience.

That’s a very privileged stance to take (I usually don’t play the “privilege card”, but it’s appropriate here).

For many/most students, the home is not particularly conducive for doing homework a variety of reasons.

Maybe not for the median HN contributor, many not for the median middle class person in the US, but these groups are not the majority of students.

> For many/most students, the home is not particularly conducive for doing homework a variety of reasons.

I think this speaks to the parents and the type of home environment that they create. This is one of the major sources of disagreement between the right and the left, where the former (sometimes strongly) feel the parents bear responsibility for the type of environment their kids grow up in while the latter (equally strongly) feel that they can't really help themselves due to external factors (abuse, addiction, sickness, etc.).

I think the lefty one is more accurately that the children cannot help what kind of home their parents provide.

Maybe their parents have a responsibility to do better, but if the parents are not delivering on their responsibility, should the children bear the consequence?

The counterargument is : If there are no consequences, what is the incentive to bear responsibility?

Ultimately this argument does not have a clear answer because it's driven by beliefs, not facts.

  > If there are no consequences, what is the incentive to bear responsibility?

Sorry, but if a starving child is not enough of an incentive, I'm not sure we're talking about people that can be incentivized.

Either they want to provide for their children but are unable to or they just don't care.

Punishing the former does nothing to help the child, likely only exacerbates that situation as, last I checked... parents who care for their children really do not like their children being taken away from them.

Punishing the latter, you can only incentivize the latter to maybe do the bare minimum, skirting whatever they can get away with. You end up in an endless cat and mouse game needing to constantly check in and monitor kids. I mean child abuse is already illegal, and we don't seem to be able to get this problem solved.

Personally, I think it is a lot cheaper to just feed kids than to fund the services needed to constantly monitor parents, all the legal fees to prosecute them, and then all the fees to put children in foster care where the situation might repeat itself. Feeding them also has the added benefit of them not starving while all those things are happening. It guarantees the child gets food.

I'm all for punishing negligent parents, I'm not sure anyone is against that. But you know what I'm also against? Starving kids. Stop making this false dichotomy. It just ends up with starving kids.

I'll try once more. There are children starving globally every day. How many of them are you saving personally? If not all, why not? How many should we save collectively? And which "we" should be responsible for which children (neighbourhood, town, city, country, region)? If so, why? These are not trite questions. Think carefully before answering.

Don't move the problem. We weren't discussing world hunger.

Your objection to the first question is already captured in the ones that follow. Try to put some more thought into it, yeah?

Okay, I'll tone down the snark (it's only there because you got my back up). Ultimately as you think about these questions, you will realize that the answers are not absolute, but based on degrees. You might think "hmm, I can't solve world hunger, but maybe I can help all the kids in my neighbourhood/city/state." Essentially what you will settle on a quantity and duration that seems reasonable to you. The thing with reasonable is that if you scratch the surface, it's little more than a line in the sand. Your own personal line based on your personal beliefs and values. Turns out everyone else has a personal line too, just in a slightly different spot, based on their different beliefs and values. That's why there's no one right answer. In civil society, everyone compares their lines and through debate, settle on one. Since it's a compromise, no one is actually happy with the outcome, but it's the best outcome we can arrive at given the problem.

Your current position is one of intolerance: It seems impossible for you to understand why the line could be in any spot other than the one you picked. If that's the starting point, then you can never come to an agreement.