My Son Won't Do His Homework (2007)

This is apparently rational at a single level of analysis (at least if you take the stereotypical sociopathic corporation stance and don't care about the waste of life involved - I understand some people do think like this, though I'm mildly surprised to see someone admit to it on HN).

It breaks down as soon as you step the analysis up to the next level and remember you're not the only employer in the world. People who have pieces of paper with high numbers on them and are actually good, can easily find jobs.

Which, unless you are Google or Fog Creek, probably means they already have jobs. Very few employers get to cherry-pick from all the world, those candidates with the highest perceived desirability. The vast majority will be looking at applications from candidates whose perceived desirability was slightly lower.

The question you should ask yourself is, would you rather hire someone whose perceived desirability was slightly lower because of the lack of a piece of paper with high numbers on it, or because of actual inability to do the job?

I wish my parents had shared this view with me at the beginning of highschool, as opposed to the standard "knowledge is the path to a better life" mantra. I now try to explain to any young student I know that school is a game where you have to win despite the arbitrary information, inconsistant rules, social games, and bad teachers. It feels short-sighted, overly-realistic, and depressing, but it would have served me better than filling me with hopes and dreams.

I've been there, as a kid, and I get his frustration (well, both the parent's and kid's). As much as homework sucks, and following the rules sucks, it's something everyone has to do at some point. Learning how to do it, and acknowledge it for what it is, is important.

I can remember all of about 15 days between 1st and 11th grades where I actually did homework, as in, did school work at home. The rest of the time, I did whatever exercises/sheets/etc that needed to be handed in on the bus or during class before we went home. The 15 days - I remember having to go to the library to read up on some topics to write papers, and I remember having a few essays which took a bit of time to write longhand (and eventually word processed on a computer later).

It wasn't until 12th grade that the assignments got hard enough that I ever struggled. By then it was somewhat too late - I didn't have any really strong innate ability to study something for more than a few minutes. Now today, that might not even matter at some level, with all answers a google away, but I think it still takes time to really study and learn a subject/problem/etc.

The ability to focus yourself on something - anything - and get through the hard stuff you don't care about before getting to the stuff you might enjoy - that's a discipline I didn't have, and it took me many more years to get it back, even for things I wanted to get more involved in. Developing this habit/skill at a younger age will pay dividends, but it's hard for kids to appreciate that. The OP's kid may be mature enough in some ways to at least consider this angle - logically - when homework comes up. Do the stupid exercises on the size paper they want with the stupid number 2 pencil.

Learn to adapt to whatever requirements are put before you quickly and with little fuss - focusing on the intellectual aspects first. As someone else mentioned, those are eventually mandatory in just about all walks of life, so learning to roll with that will help.

It's possibly similar to healthy eating and exercise. Especially for kids - they can 'eat anything' and not get fat, stay thin, etc. Eventually, that goes away, and learning to eat healthy and exercise is something you have to adapt to to remain in good health. If you have a better grounding in healthy eating and physical fitness from a young age, it's not a big deal.

There's a story from Gene Woolsey that I had to read my senior year in college (I was an Ops Research major, and Gene Woolsey is a pretty big deal in that field). The story went something like this:

A group of students had just finished a big research project and were told to present a one page executive summary that outlined their work, results, and conclusions. They couldn't quite get it to fit on one page, so their executive summary was two pages, but the second page was only 1/8th full. No big deal, right? They showed up to meet with the head of the company that was sponsoring their research, and handed him the paper. He rips off the second page and throws it in the trash (losing a good portion of their conclusions). The head of the company reads the first page, then stops and says, "This summary is incomplete. Where are your conclusions?" The team was dumbfounded, and lost a few points on their grade because they didn't follow the rules.

The moral of the story is: FOLLOW THE GD* RULES. If you want to use a different kind of paper, ask your teacher first. If you need an extension on the due date, ask your teacher first. If the guidance says to write a one page summary, do not write a two page summary. It's fine to be creative, but don't change the rules on your own because you don't have the authority to change the rules. In most things it is easier to ask permission than it is to ask forgiveness.

It's not unusual to not want to do homework, but a lot of people in this modern generation think that it's okay to get bad grades and just blame it on the fact that they are not "book smart." Just about every movie marketed towards young people is a variation of the theme where a kid is secretly a prodigy but the "system" didn't realize it somehow. That is not how it works in real life. For every kid who skips all his homework and gets bad grades but is secretly Will Hunting there are a thousand kids or more who are getting bad grades and are going to end up flipping burgers as a career. It's time to start spanking your kids so they'll get better grades and won't suck at life.

Btw, here's a link to the book if you want to read some stories from an actual genius: http://www.lionhrtpub.com/books/wp1.html

I completely agree on most things in school being useless, especially homework. However, I don't know of a single career path one can take where they never have to do boring, monotonous, or simply annoying things to succeed. CEOs have to handle investors and bullshit politics, professional athletes have to practice and work out, and even rich retired people had to do plenty of stupid pointless things to get to that point. Shit, even the Queen of England has to make appearances I'm sure she'd rather skip.

Don't frame the homework as something he has to do to learn what he already knows, frame it as a stepping stone. If he doesn't do his homework, he will fail out of school. If he fails out of school, his chances of doing what he loves severely diminish (and having to work at Taco Bell is a lot worse than homework). Doing to homework now is the gateway to never having to do homework again.