I went to school many decades ago now. But after the 3rd grade I never did homework outside of projects where they wanted me to build something at home. Thanks to standardized testing I was never failed in any grade despite never doing homework. Since in the state I grew up in the standardized end of year tests were used to determine how much funding the public school system I attended got during the next year. I'm not trying to brag but if they failed me they would have had to throw out my end of year scores which would have tanked their funding. I wasn't supposed to know this of course but my father was good friends with the superintendent of my county public school system. Who told us sometime around the time I was in 7th grade.
My Dad would regularly pull rank on the teachers and principles at the schools I attended if they did something to make him angry. He never abused it but if he thought something wrong was going on he could always make one phone call and get any staff member he wanted into trouble. This of course didn't always bode well for me because they'd do things to take it out on me (and the rest of the students since my Dad was rather popular with all my peers). Dad was always volunteering to do stuff at my schools up until I got to 6th grade when they wouldn't let him hang out at the school on his days off doing things like fixing the basketball courts and lots of other misc. stuff the school always claimed they didn't have funding to fix.
Anyway, I'll never forget in the 3rd grade my mean teacher raising a big stink about the fact that I hadn't turned in any homework all week. At the time I was going through some stuff (parents got divorced suddenly, had my Mom one day then the next she was just gone). I pretty much told my teacher I wasn't going to do the work because I already knew the material. She said I was going to be in big trouble after class and gave me detention. Which meant I missed the bus and my Dad had to be called. Then Dad had to drive 2 hours in from where he was working that week (nearest nuclear power plant) to come pick me up. Entire time my teacher is sitting there with a smug look on her face because she just knew I was going to get the ass whoopin' of my life after she ratted me out to my Dad.
Well it didn't turn out that way and I'll never forget what my Dad told her after he got finished yelling at her for calling him at work for no good reason and making him leave work early. He said;
Then he took me home and he basically told me "I don't care what you do at home as long as you're taking care of your little siblings and getting passing grades while you're at school".
So after that I just never did homework again for any of my classes and maintained a good GPA even throughout high school. Since I guess word got around that any of my grades that were below a C grade (so all the Fs I got from not turning in homework) were to be thrown out and not spoken of again.
In 8th grade I missed so many days due to regular suspensions from fighting that they were forced to let me return for the last 4 weeks of the school year so my end of grade test grades wouldn't be thrown out and not calculated into the average. I didn't like fighting but I had a bit of a bully problem during those middle school years. So pretty much every day I was having to defend myself from someone. Was lucky if it was just one guy usually it was 3+. Those children never got in trouble because they had rich parents pouring money into things like the football team. So I always ended up being the one sent home for 3 days. I didn't keep up with how many I was out for the 8th grade but I remember it came up to like 2-3 months of missed school. Of course, I didn't do any of the homework they sent during that time either. So all those Fs got tossed out at the end of the year because I was always top 3 (usually #1) on the end of year test scores. They let me come back to sit in in-school suspension for 4 weeks just so I'd be able to eek by on days attended.
In 7th and 8th grade I actually requested them to just let me come into ISS every day since I could actually get work done in there. It was a room where they had dividers between all the desks. So you did your work quietly and got to listen to classical music on the radio. I'd usually finish all class work by 10am then I got to go hang out with the janitor all day mopping floors. At lunch time we'd clean up the lunch room after all the students ate and went back to class. The lunch ladies would always hook me up with free ice cream, snacks and soda. Along with all the left overs I could eat. Much preferred it to dealing with having to be in class with the other students. Then after lunch I could go to the library, check out all the books I wanted then quietly read in the ISS room until it was time to go home. The only time I actually learned anything during my time in public school was when I was in ISS.
The public school system I attended was really bad. It was ranked last in the nation pretty much the entire time I was there. They never spent any money they took in on donations on anything else but the football and wrestling teams. When I graduated from the high school the "computer lab" was still just a bunch of old early-mid 80s computers running CP/M and our text books still had maps of the Soviet Union in them. I never saw a text book that was less than 15-25 years old the entire time I attended public school. Hell every school in the county was still sharing one T1 line when I graduated even though the entire town had gotten cable internet a few years before.
Seeing public schools in other states those didn't look much better than the ones I was forced to attend. Which is why I did everything in my power to ensure my little sister wouldn't have to go through them. We ended up sending her to a charter school instead then later on I saved up enough to send her to a private school. Which got her a head start on college. As of a couple of years ago she's now a doctor. If she'd been forced to attend public school like I was no way that dream would have ever came true for her.
So yeah. Homework has always been stupid busy work in my opinion. I'm not going to say all teachers are dumb but I have two in my immediate family and they're the dumbest members of our family. The worse part is they're also the types that think they're smart and know everything. So it's pretty annoying having to deal with them over the holidays since they're also the types that always want to bring up subjects at the dinner table like politics (which is rude). Although I'd be lying if I said my Dad and I didn't enjoy trolling them (according to the teachers we're both "dumb" because we don't hold any degrees. Despite the fact that we make much more than they do and are actually considered skilled labor).
My Dad has a phrase for people like my old teachers and the ones in my family. He called them "educated dumb asses". In other words: people that think because they read a book means they know everything. Dad had to deal with a lot of them in his last decade or so working at the power plants. They all thought my Dad was dumb because he didn't hold the same degrees they did and because he barely finished high school. But any time shit hit the fan they always came running because they needed my Dad. Since he'd been working in the plants since he was 18 years old and forgot more than most of his peers knew about keeping them running and fixing stuff within them.
My Grandfather was "dumb" as well. Actually couldn't even read and write. But he supervised building most of the power plants on the east coast still supplying probably 90+% of the power being generated today. Specifically, the turbines but also most of the things around them to make them work. Well the mechanical aspects of the plants anyway. He was the smartest men I've ever known and he could barely sign his own name. Instead of learning to read and write he always made sure he had a man working under him that was good at keeping the books. Something he learned while being forced to serve in the Army during Korea after he got a few promotions and ended up being in charge of a bunch of men.
Don't get me wrong I love reading and learning new things. But most of the things I've learned in my life was despite academia and not because of it. Most things in school are a total waste of time. My Dad taught me most of the things he did by throwing me to the wolves then helping me when I screwed up. He encouraged me to take things apart (he and I both enjoyed taking clocks apart) then trying to put them back together. He always had something for me to do around the farm like tearing down an engine and rebuilding it or helping out with putting a new roof on a barn. Always something new to learn and some type of work to be done. I learned a lot more about life and fixing stuff at home than I ever did at my school. Especially when it came to computers/CS and technology in general. When I got my first TRS-80 it was already very out of date compared to top of the line stuff coming out and even that Trash-80 was miles ahead of what they were forcing us to use at my grade school at the time.
My Dad would regularly pull rank on the teachers and principles at the schools I attended if they did something to make him angry. He never abused it but if he thought something wrong was going on he could always make one phone call and get any staff member he wanted into trouble. This of course didn't always bode well for me because they'd do things to take it out on me (and the rest of the students since my Dad was rather popular with all my peers). Dad was always volunteering to do stuff at my schools up until I got to 6th grade when they wouldn't let him hang out at the school on his days off doing things like fixing the basketball courts and lots of other misc. stuff the school always claimed they didn't have funding to fix.
Anyway, I'll never forget in the 3rd grade my mean teacher raising a big stink about the fact that I hadn't turned in any homework all week. At the time I was going through some stuff (parents got divorced suddenly, had my Mom one day then the next she was just gone). I pretty much told my teacher I wasn't going to do the work because I already knew the material. She said I was going to be in big trouble after class and gave me detention. Which meant I missed the bus and my Dad had to be called. Then Dad had to drive 2 hours in from where he was working that week (nearest nuclear power plant) to come pick me up. Entire time my teacher is sitting there with a smug look on her face because she just knew I was going to get the ass whoopin' of my life after she ratted me out to my Dad.
Well it didn't turn out that way and I'll never forget what my Dad told her after he got finished yelling at her for calling him at work for no good reason and making him leave work early. He said;
.
Then he took me home and he basically told me "I don't care what you do at home as long as you're taking care of your little siblings and getting passing grades while you're at school".
So after that I just never did homework again for any of my classes and maintained a good GPA even throughout high school. Since I guess word got around that any of my grades that were below a C grade (so all the Fs I got from not turning in homework) were to be thrown out and not spoken of again.
In 8th grade I missed so many days due to regular suspensions from fighting that they were forced to let me return for the last 4 weeks of the school year so my end of grade test grades wouldn't be thrown out and not calculated into the average. I didn't like fighting but I had a bit of a bully problem during those middle school years. So pretty much every day I was having to defend myself from someone. Was lucky if it was just one guy usually it was 3+. Those children never got in trouble because they had rich parents pouring money into things like the football team. So I always ended up being the one sent home for 3 days. I didn't keep up with how many I was out for the 8th grade but I remember it came up to like 2-3 months of missed school. Of course, I didn't do any of the homework they sent during that time either. So all those Fs got tossed out at the end of the year because I was always top 3 (usually #1) on the end of year test scores. They let me come back to sit in in-school suspension for 4 weeks just so I'd be able to eek by on days attended.
In 7th and 8th grade I actually requested them to just let me come into ISS every day since I could actually get work done in there. It was a room where they had dividers between all the desks. So you did your work quietly and got to listen to classical music on the radio. I'd usually finish all class work by 10am then I got to go hang out with the janitor all day mopping floors. At lunch time we'd clean up the lunch room after all the students ate and went back to class. The lunch ladies would always hook me up with free ice cream, snacks and soda. Along with all the left overs I could eat. Much preferred it to dealing with having to be in class with the other students. Then after lunch I could go to the library, check out all the books I wanted then quietly read in the ISS room until it was time to go home. The only time I actually learned anything during my time in public school was when I was in ISS.
The public school system I attended was really bad. It was ranked last in the nation pretty much the entire time I was there. They never spent any money they took in on donations on anything else but the football and wrestling teams. When I graduated from the high school the "computer lab" was still just a bunch of old early-mid 80s computers running CP/M and our text books still had maps of the Soviet Union in them. I never saw a text book that was less than 15-25 years old the entire time I attended public school. Hell every school in the county was still sharing one T1 line when I graduated even though the entire town had gotten cable internet a few years before.
Seeing public schools in other states those didn't look much better than the ones I was forced to attend. Which is why I did everything in my power to ensure my little sister wouldn't have to go through them. We ended up sending her to a charter school instead then later on I saved up enough to send her to a private school. Which got her a head start on college. As of a couple of years ago she's now a doctor. If she'd been forced to attend public school like I was no way that dream would have ever came true for her.
So yeah. Homework has always been stupid busy work in my opinion. I'm not going to say all teachers are dumb but I have two in my immediate family and they're the dumbest members of our family. The worse part is they're also the types that think they're smart and know everything. So it's pretty annoying having to deal with them over the holidays since they're also the types that always want to bring up subjects at the dinner table like politics (which is rude). Although I'd be lying if I said my Dad and I didn't enjoy trolling them (according to the teachers we're both "dumb" because we don't hold any degrees. Despite the fact that we make much more than they do and are actually considered skilled labor).
My Dad has a phrase for people like my old teachers and the ones in my family. He called them "educated dumb asses". In other words: people that think because they read a book means they know everything. Dad had to deal with a lot of them in his last decade or so working at the power plants. They all thought my Dad was dumb because he didn't hold the same degrees they did and because he barely finished high school. But any time shit hit the fan they always came running because they needed my Dad. Since he'd been working in the plants since he was 18 years old and forgot more than most of his peers knew about keeping them running and fixing stuff within them.
My Grandfather was "dumb" as well. Actually couldn't even read and write. But he supervised building most of the power plants on the east coast still supplying probably 90+% of the power being generated today. Specifically, the turbines but also most of the things around them to make them work. Well the mechanical aspects of the plants anyway. He was the smartest men I've ever known and he could barely sign his own name. Instead of learning to read and write he always made sure he had a man working under him that was good at keeping the books. Something he learned while being forced to serve in the Army during Korea after he got a few promotions and ended up being in charge of a bunch of men.
Don't get me wrong I love reading and learning new things. But most of the things I've learned in my life was despite academia and not because of it. Most things in school are a total waste of time. My Dad taught me most of the things he did by throwing me to the wolves then helping me when I screwed up. He encouraged me to take things apart (he and I both enjoyed taking clocks apart) then trying to put them back together. He always had something for me to do around the farm like tearing down an engine and rebuilding it or helping out with putting a new roof on a barn. Always something new to learn and some type of work to be done. I learned a lot more about life and fixing stuff at home than I ever did at my school. Especially when it came to computers/CS and technology in general. When I got my first TRS-80 it was already very out of date compared to top of the line stuff coming out and even that Trash-80 was miles ahead of what they were forcing us to use at my grade school at the time.
