Some day, I hope to get around to a review of The End of Homework – a manifesto for a long-overdue rebellion.

Until then, a haphazard thought: Where do we get off calling it “homework”“?

“Schoolwork” is work you do at school. Homework should mean doing the dishes or raking the yard. Depending on the assignment and your point of view, this thing we mistakenly call “homework” is

• Schoolwork you didn’t get done, and your 504 plan says you have to get recess, so your teacher makes you take it home
• A math worksheet some misguided soul who hasn’t heard about calculators thinks will finally pound the multiplication tables through your thick skull
• An overpressured teacher’s response to “accountability” and the upcoming multiple-guess tests that will determine whether her school is acceptable
• A belief that since a certified professional can’t cover everything he’s required to cover during his work day, maybe parents can do it when they get home from theirs, coupled with an apparent assumption that a six-to-seven-hour work day isn’t long enough for a nine-year-old
• A notion that family dinners, play time, and parent-child relationships are all dangerous activities, best extirpated before they inculcate bad habits
• A theory, based on some Greek myth no one can remember, about a guy named Responsibilius, that homework builds character.

Confucius wrote

If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone …. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.”

From The Analects of Confucius, Book 13, Verse 3 (James R. Ware, translated in 1980)
(Worth looking at in its fuller form, and with the Chinese )
 

Well, I’m open to suggestions as to a correct name for “homework.”

* School Spill?

* Daily Evening Student Punishment? (DESPerate)?

* “That stuff we used to fight about every night, before we took control of our evenings"?