How caustic a lesson to teach your kid, that they should organize to cheat on homework, so they can artificially inflate their grade. I suppose it does set them up for a productive life of investment banking.

I think kids should be taught to perceive the mechanics of any system and leverage those mechanics, within the bounds of ethics and fairness. They should ignore what people say and focus on what they do.

I absolutely don't condone lying or cheating, and I think it's a huge problem in schools today. But kids aren't the only ones that lie. American education is predicated on a basic lie: that it's about learning. In fact, it's about sorting.

In law school, I had a lot of friends who wrote organized exams with good grammar and coherent structure. This is what school taught them was important. I wrote these horrible, rambling, repetitive exams with poor grammar and spelling and no structure other than conforming to what I thought the professor's grading checklist would look like. Ironically, I now have a job where I get to really think and learn and write, but I couldn't have gotten it without playing the sorting game.

Learning is great. But learning is what you do while researching Hacker News posts. School is no place for it.

> But learning is what you do while researching Hacker News posts.

How do you research HN posts? Fundamentally it comes down to a lot to knowing what source, person, or place of knowledge to trust. What are your rules of thumb to decide what to trust and not to trust?

Do you go to wikipedia and extend your research by looking in the citations, or use google right from the start?

I never saw school as a place to learn facts, but as a place to learn how to socialise and how to deal with life. Learning how to get a good grade is important, but only because people think that it represents your worth as an employee. My parents/TV/books/the internet taught me most of what I know.

I am way, way, WAY more concerned about the ethics my kid learns than I am about whether he gets a B or an A in World History.

Agreed. Though I wasn't saying I cheated to get my grades or that they were artificially inflated, just that I avoided homework. In my school your homework grades never counted towards you actual grades, and if your homework wasn't going to teach you something, what is the point?

I just didn't do the "dumb" homework. Physics and math and such were interesting to me, so I was happy to do those.

I laughed so much at your comment, cause I used the same techniques.

Or simply learn how to hack around nonsense rules, that are there just to make the school board like they are doing something useful. The important part of school is learning, all the grades and that are just instruments. Worshiping those instruments as sacred, doesn´t make sense. I guess that kids learning to play a dumb system will on average perform better at a later stages.

In terms of morality you may be correct, but if the child in the article could skip some rote memorisation or other busy work for an extra hour or two of sleep I would bet on her learning "more" at school.

Then just skip it! The lying is the issue. If you judge the homework as not being worthwhile, then don't do it, say you didn't do it, and move on.

The problem with that is that, in society currently, your grades are what matter -- at least if you want a normal job at a normal company.

To get a job, you have to have a college degree and a good GPA. To get that, you have to get good grades in college -- which means doing the homework and taking the tests. To even get into a decent college you have to have a good GPA in high school -- which, again, means doing the homework and taking the tests. Most companies don't care if you actually have the skillset, or if any of those homework assignments actually taught you anything, you need the credentials to get in the door to show it.

Grades aren't as big of a deal if you're going to be your own boss or start a business or found a startup, but in typical corporate America it's the end-all-be-all until you've got years of experience to show instead.

Does anybody really care about your GPA when applying for jobs? Resumes are filtered by many random criteria, but I've never seen grades being one of them - most jobs that require a degree won't particularly care about what you majored in, they want someone who can provably do the job - so experience matters, connections matter and can replace experience; knowledge and skills matter, but grades? Not really.

Unless the homework doesn't directly affect your grades, i.e. your teacher makes sure you've done it and then throws it away, like at my school.

I guess we in technology have some immunity to that. I work with musicians, carpenters, and yes rocket scientists. Not all got good grades, not even the best ones.

You're obviously right (although I think a lot of us figured these without parents helping us), but "memorization,not rationalization" isn't much better.

Do you really need to teach your kid this stuff even? The smart and smart-enough-but-lazy ones seem to figure it out just well enough for themselves.

If you mean, how to avoid homework, I wasn't taught any of it, it was all stuff I learnt throughout my schooling life.

I have been letting this roll around in my head for a while after reading the article and the comments here and I wonder....

To live is to work and to work creatively. To live is to accomplish things. To be great is to accomplish more. If we teach kids to value doing things by the book what kind of a lesson is that?

Our virtues are built out of the stuff of our vices. Productive laziness, the kind which says "I want to accomplish such and such but there must be a way without working that hard" is a virtue.

My advice is to figure out what homework is really important and try to figure out what you want to do. Shortcuts aren't cheating. Picking which homework to do is not cheating.

If what you learn out of school is to work hard, memorize things without understanding them, and do without sleep, then it is the perfect preparation for, say, doing data entry for someone. But if you want to be great, learning how to get out of homework is a much more valuable lesson....

nobody needs to do 3+ hrs of homework a night. when the load is so needlessly excessive, I think it's fine to cut some corners.

I did some of this too. Not everything (no crying), but I had a group who would take turns copying assignments for instance.

I particularly remember when writing long papers, I would do things like increase the character spacing, change the font size to 12.5, subtly adjust the margins, add a few words to the last sentence of a paragraph in order to push it on to the next line, etc. If I had to write a 10 page paper, I could get away with writing 8.5 pages and use these tricks to bring it up to the required length in a minute or two.

There were kids in my school who spent 3+ hours a night on homework, but certainly not me. I in no way regret getting a few Bs and Cs, coasting by with some cheating and the aforementioned tricks, and in general blowing off most of high school. I still got into a good college, in part due to SAT/PSAT scores, and I probably learned more and certainly had a better time than most of my classmates.

This seems horrible, but I upvoted it nonetheless because of its perspective.

I know what A levels are. What does AAAB mean? Does this mean you gave four subjects and scored 3 A's and 1 B? If that is correct, I'm curious what subjects you gave?

Yes it does. I got As in Maths, Physics and Electronics and a B in General Studies which is a joke compulsory subject that tested your writing skills.

Interesting: I would say "I took four subjects", and you say "I gave four subjects". Never heard that before!

I had a transient stay in a commonwealth country when I was a teenager. I "gave" a few A-level exams. I.e. I studied on my own and just showed up for a grueling exam organized by the British Counsel in my country. I picked the subjects that were easiest for me to study on my own ... Econ, Accounting and General Studies. Since I didn't take A-level math, I had some trouble in college (in North America).

While I agree that 3+hrs of homework a day doesn't accomplish much true learning, I think that most of these "tricks" don't either.

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted.

I would rather my child got interested in some areas and pursued them out of passion, getting mediocre grades; than followed these tricks to get good grades, but not have learned much else.

This is great advice (besides the cheating, obviously).