Esmee is in the eighth grade at the NYC Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies, a selective public school in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. My wife and I have noticed since she started there in February of last year that she has a lot of homework.
We moved from Pacific Palisades, California, where Esmee also had a great deal of homework at Paul Revere Charter Middle School in Brentwood. I have found, at both schools, that whenever I bring up the homework issue with teachers or administrators, their response is that they are required by the state to cover a certain amount of material.
Oct 15, 2013 - Esmee is in the eighth grade at the NYC Lab Middle School for Collaborative. In most schools when it comes to assignments and test dates. Jan 3, 2019 - Applications experience a variety of failures at the MQI, including for. In the following PTFs: Version Maintenance Level v8.0 8.0.0.12 v9.0 LTS. Can be found in 'WebSphere MQ Planned Maintenance Release Dates'.
There are standardized tests, and everyone—students, teachers, schools—is being evaluated on those tests. Crack james bond quantum solace pc games. I’m not interested in the debates over teaching to the test or No Child Left Behind. What I am interested in is what my daughter is doing during those nightly hours between 8 o’clock and midnight, when she finally gets to bed. During the school week, she averages three to four hours of homework a night and six and a half hours of sleep. I am surprised by the amount of reading.
Reading and writing is what I do for a living, but in my middle age, I’ve slowed down. So a good day of reading for me, assuming I like the book and I’m not looking for quotable passages, is between 50 and 100 pages. Seventy-nine pages while scanning for usable material—for a magazine essay or for homework—seems like at least two hours of reading. But the math is easier than I thought. We are simplifying equations, which involves reducing (–18m 2n) 2 × (–(1/6)mn 2) to –54m 5n 4, which I get the hang of again after Esmee’s good instructions.
I breeze through those 11 equations in about 40 minutes and even correct Esmee when she gets one wrong. I may be overconfident.) I then start reading Angela’s Ashes while Esmee studies for Earth Science. We have only one copy of the book, so we decide it will be more efficient to stagger our work. I’ve never read Angela’s Ashes, and it’s easy to see the appeal. Frank McCourt, whom I once saw give a beautiful tribute to Peter Matthiessen at a Paris Review Revel, is engaging and funny.
But after 30 minutes I am only about 16 pages in, and Esmee has finished studying for Earth Science and needs the book. So we switch. It is now time for me to struggle with Earth Science. The textbook Esmee’s class is using is simply called Earth Science and was written by Edward J. Tarbuck and Frederick K.
“The term synergistic applies to the combined efforts of Tarbuck and Lutgens,” says the biographical note at the beginning. “Early in their careers, they shared frustrations with the limited availability of textbooks designed for non-majors.” So they rolled up their sleeves and wrote their own textbook, which reads exactly like every other textbook. “If you look again at Table 1,” begins the section on silicates, “you can see that the two most abundant elements in Earth’s crust are silicon and oxygen.” I spend the next five minutes looking for Table 1, which is 12 pages earlier in the book. Then come carbonates, oxides, the sulfates and sulfides, halides, and—I am asleep after about 20 minutes. When I wake up, I go out to find Esmee in the living room, where she is buried in Angela’s Ashes. I struggle with Earth Science for another half hour, attempting to memorize rather than understand, before I give up and decide I have to get my reading done.
Since Esmee is using our copy of Angela’s Ashes, I figure I will just read another 63 pages of the novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, which I started yesterday.
I don’t make it. I’m asleep for good after about 15 pages. Esmee stays up until a little after midnight to finish her reading. Total time: 3–5 hours I don’t remember how much homework was assigned to me in eighth grade.
I do know that I didn’t do very much of it and that what little I did, I did badly. My study habits were atrocious. After school I often went to friends’ houses, where I sometimes smoked marijuana, and then I returned home for dinner; after lying to my parents about not having homework that night, I might have caught an hour or two of television. In Southern California in the late ’70s, it was totally plausible that an eighth grader would have no homework at all. If my daughter came home and said she had no homework, I would know she was lying.