> Homework.
>
> Oi. Yet another reminder of how I only have 6 days of vaction left. Arrgh.
>
> The question I pose in these wee hours it this: is homework good or bad? Here's my take.
>
>
> Homework because of incomplete assignments.
>
> I think that this is good. If you don't finish it at school, you do it at home.
>
>
> Assigned homework.
>
> Horrible idea. You do work at *school*, you
>don't just go there, sit for six hours, and then
>do the work at home. Many teachers forget that
>children have a life outside school. One of my
>(former) teachers said "At (school name) we want
>to do school work, go home, and then do more
>work." That's entirely presumpeous and
>arrogant. What, all I do is schoolwork?


At this point in your life, you have probably the *most* free time you'll ever have until you're retired. Trust me, it only gets WORSE from here. In my Freshman orientation at college, we were told that we would be expected to work for 2 hours outside of class for every hour we spent in class. Now, I'll be the first to admit that I didn't actually hold to that ethic, but a lot of people, especially in the science and engineering majors, *do*. They *have* to. And when you get out of school, you'll go to work at a company that'll expect you to sometimes do more than just sit in your cube for 8 hours and collect your paycheck, as Mousie so eloquently points out somewhere else in this thread.

That being said, there *is* something to be said for personal time. I've been in two jobs now where personal time for employees was pretty much a foreign concept. I don't agree with that. I understand the needs of the business, I know when I'm required to get up in the middle of the night and fix a problem. However, I don't appreciate having to get up in the middle of the night and fix something that could have waited until morning, which I've been asked to do time and time again. I also think vacations should be sacred--I'm not wearing a pager or carrying a cell phone on vacation. If I'm the only person who is qualified or able to do something, then that's a single point of failure and is a very poor business practice.

But, getting back to the point, hell, in High School, you get three friggin months off in the summer to do whatever the hell you want to. Do you know what I'd do for 3 months paid vacation EVERY SINGLE YEAR, with no possibility of being called in to work (when have they ever decided they had to have an emergency week of school in July?) I'd probably willingly and happily work 80 hour weeks every week for that kind of vacation policy. I guess I should be a High School teacher. And I would, if teachers were alowed to beat students still. That's the only thing I can think of that might make being a High School teacher bearable.

-- Dave