Back to School Night

I recently went to "back to school" night at my daughter's middle school. She's in seventh grade, the second year of multiple classes with multiple teachers. This middle school seems to take it's work ethic very seriously -- every teacher believes they are preparing their students for success in high school by giving consistent nightly homework. It is literally the case that my daughter spends anywhere from 2-4 hours per night performing homework. Much of this work I would characterize as "logistics" (i.e. collecting, sorting, stapling, figuring out how to get a piece of writing to show up on the worksheet given out by the teacher) or "busywork" (i.e. repeated exercises on worksheets, fill-in the blank questions, etc.).

During this "back to school" night, we parents followed our children's schedules for seven minute meetings with each teacher. One of the teachers that my daughter has told us that while she will post the homework assignment on her web page, she won't post the actually worksheet or reading material, because she wants her students to "learn responsibility."

The further away from that moment I get, the more it drives me crazy. Responsibility? I imagine that this teacher thinks that she is doing the business world a favor by drilling into her students that they must protect and keep track of her precious worksheets. But the fact is, as an employer, I don't really care if my employees can keep track of individual pieces of paper. I care that they can perform the tasks associated with the documents they deal with. And I trust that in this age of digital communications, they will figure out how best to deal with the documents they need.

It is often the case that my employees will ask for a document to be emailed to them, or to be made available on a common storage server on our network. By accommodating my employees in this way I accept that there are better ways to do things than by photocopying one per employee and expecting them to keep track of it.

For a seventh grade teacher to assume that the skill of keeping track of a piece of paper is more important than the work that is associated with that piece of paper is really ridiculous. I hope that it is a reflection of her mistaken understanding of what "responsibility" means in the real world, and not just a cynical mechanism to establish and maintain power over helpless students.