“I feel like I’m working towards my death. The constant demands on my time since 5th grade are just going to continue through graduation, into college, and then into my job. It’s like I’m on an endless treadmill with no time for living.”
“How long is your child’s workweek? Thirty hours? Forty? Would it surprise you to learn that some elementary school kids have workweeks comparable to adults’ schedules? For most children, mandatory homework assignments push their workweek far beyond the school day and deep into what any other laborers would consider overtime. Even without sports or music or other school-sponsored extracurriculars, the daily homework slog keeps many students on the clock as long as lawyers, teachers, medical residents, truck drivers and other overworked adults. Is it any wonder that,deprived of the labor protections that we provide adults, our kids are suffering an epidemic of disengagement, anxiety and depression?”
Reblogging because, speaking as an autistic person, most of my meltdowns at school came from homework.
Math homework in particular, which gives me the hypothesis that the time we spend teaching math at levels far above what students are going to need in their daily lives and the amount of homework accompanying such is a part of the problem…
Yeah my time in education taught me that homework is kind of a waste of everyone’s time. It can’t be relied on for assessment/evaluation purposes because there’s no reliable way for a teacher to know the student didn’t copy off of someone else, and it can’t be used for instruction because the student works on it when the teacher isn’t around to give, well, instruction. Like standardized testing, it’s basically a pointless relic of a very outdated model of education that America and other countries still cling to because adapting modern techniques costs more money, time, and effort than they’re willing to give.
Down with homework.
I know we’re talking about the kids here, but speaking as someone who trained to be a teacher but is no longer a teacher for mental health reasons: homework also puts a huge strain on the teachers. That shit needs to be marked. As well as the class work. In the bigger schools a single teacher can have hundreds of students. As a trainee I had roughly 200. And they all produced work that needed marking. You end up using up your non-teaching periods – earmarked for sorting out the next classes, preparing future work etc – and a lot of it ends up getting marked during lunch breaks and/or is taken home.
I remember one of my fellow trainees took two entire boxes of work to mark home with him for the weekend. The weekend!
There are a lot of initiatives being put in place or being tried out for reducing marking time (only do every other book! Only tick or cross! Use prewritten feedback! Use stamps! Etc) and this always struck me as completely fucking pointless. If the student isn’t getting good helpful tailored personal feedback – what the fuck is the point?
The homework eats up both the students non-school time and the teachers. It causes extra stress for both. It causes extra anxiety for both.
It’s fucking ridiculous. So basically what I’m saying is that I agree. Homework should be abolished.
If there are any other teachers out there still hanging on, may I recommend watching a video for homework? You can’t really prove they haven’t done it, and things like Khan Academy are great for students who want to pause and re-wind information and can’t do that during a class. It shouldn’t be anything new, just re-capping what you did in class. And if anyone in senior management calls you on it, you can talk about review of learned content strengthening the neural pathways to the memory making it more accessible in the long run, and shifting information from the short term to long term memory centres of the hypothalamus (senior management at my old school were all humanities teachers, whenever I felt spiteful I would blind them with very earnest science…)
people seem to have trouble understanding why i’m an anti-capitalist, so i’m going to try and put it into simple, real-life terms.
i work at a restaurant. i make $12 an hour, plus tips. minimum wage where i live is relatively high for my country – the national minimum wage is $7.25/hr, and has not been raised since 2009. before taxes, working full time, my yearly income is about $22,000 a year. ($25,000 if you count tips)
at my job, we sell various dishes, with an average price of about $10-$15. we get printouts every week detailing how much money we made that week; in one week, our restaurant makes about $30,000. (one of our other locations actually makes this much on a daily basis!)
i’m not going to go into details, but after the costs of production
(payroll for employees, rent for the building, maintenance, and wholesale food purchasing) are accounted for, the restaurant makes an estimated profit of $20,000 per week.
this profit goes directly to the owner, who does not work at this location. the owner of my restaurant has actually been on vacation for a few months, but still profits from the restaurant, because they own it. i have met the owner exactly twice in my year of working here.
to put this into perspective, the owner of this restaurant earns in 2 days what they pay me in one year. and that’s just from this single location – the owner has several other restaurants, all of which make more money than the one i work at. this ends up resulting in the owner having an estimated net worth of tens of millions of dollars, even after accounting for the payroll for every single worker in their employ.
now, i have to ask you: does the owner of my restaurant deserve this income? did they earn it? did their labor result in this value being created?
the naive answer would be “yes”; the owner purchased the location and arranged for the raw ingredients to be delivered, did they not?
the actual answer is “no”. the owner may have used their initial capital to start the location, but the profit is a result of my labor, and the labor of my co-workers.
the owner purchases rice at a very low bulk price of about 25 cents a pound. i cook the rice, and within a few minutes, that pound of rice is suddenly worth about $30. the owner did not create this value, i did. the owner simply provided the initial capital investment required to start the process.
what needs to be understood here is that capitalists do not create value. they use the labor of their employees to create value, and then take the excess profit and keep it.
what needs to be understood is that capitalists accrue income by already HAVING money. the owner of my restaurant was only able to get this far because they started off, from the very beginning, with enough money to purchase a building, purchase food in bulk, and hire hundreds of employees.
that is to say: the rich get richer, and they do so by exploiting the labor of the poor.
the owner of my restaurant could afford to triple the income of every single person in their employee if they felt like it, but this would mean that they were generating less profit for themselves, so they do not.
the owner of my restaurant pays me the current minimum wage of my area, because to them, i am not a person. i am an investment. i am an asset. i am a means to create more money.
when you are paid minimum wage, the message your boss is sending you is this: “legally, if i could pay you less, i would.”
every capitalist on the planet exploits their workers for their own gain. every capitalist, even the small business owners, forces people to stay in poverty so that the capitalist can profit.
Vancouver is known for being Canada’s most unaffordable real estate market, but according to a new study, the city ranks above all other metro areas across North America too.
Simon Fraser University adjunct professor Andy Yan used 2016 census data to determine the affordability index ratios of major metropolitan areas across Canada and the United States. Yan, who is the director of the Simon Fraser University City Program, determined the top 25 unaffordable housing markets by comparing a city’s median home prices to median household incomes.
Greater Vancouver took the top spot for the worst housing affordability with a ratio of 11. This means the median home price of $800,220 is 11 times the median household income of $72,662.
Los Angeles and San Jose followed Vancouver with a ratio of 8.8 and 8.3, respectively.
NECA announced new toys based on Henry Selick’s Coraline at San Diego Comic-Con, all of which are due out in the fourth quarter of the year.
Pictured above is a set of four PVC figurines – Coraline, her guardian cat, Wybie, and Other Mother – which stand between 1.25" and 5.5" tall.
Pictured below are 7" articulated Coraline figures, one in her striped shirt and one in her raincoat. They each feature a full inner armature and movable eyes, are dressed in real fabric clothing, and come with a display stand.
ruby-dear archive 