Karl Taro Greenfield’s article published in the October 2013 issue of The Atlantic discusses the potential drawbacks of a heavy workload on middle school American students, specifically his 13 year old daughter, Esmee. Greenfield addresses these drawbacks by choosing to complete his daughter’s homework for an entire week to truly see how the other half lives. My Daughter’s Homework is Killing Me successfully brings to life the hardships that today’s students face concerning the time the spend on homework and the lack of teacher understanding regarding the topic. Greenfield opens the article by criticizing the school system for the number of hours of homework assigned to his daughter each night. He approaches this argument by comparing it to
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When Greenfield first questions his daughter’s teacher about the troubling workload, she suggests that if Esmee cannot handle the work, “perhaps she should be moved to a remedial class.” As a response to this comment, Greenfield decides to remove the teacher in question from an email thread and ask other parents what they think. Although he generally receives the type of responses that he seeks out, by taking the teacher out of the email, Greenfield unintentionally creates feelings of hostility that the school district considers cyberbullying, taking focus off of the issue at hand and placing it onto himself. This could have easily been avoided if he instead questioned parents in person or sent a separate email that never included the teacher. Whilst being reprimanded for his cyberbullying actions, Greenfield shows homework assignments to the vice principal in an attempt to persuade him to see from where his anger stems. Despite his efforts, the administration did not believe the assignments were “outside of the norm in terms of content or time commitment.” Greenfield’s only fault in this strategy is that individual homework assignments do not convey the struggles that students are facing. To obtain a real response from teachers, it would be more beneficial to keep a log of how many hours Esmee spends on homework each night and chart when she finally turns in for the night. This would actually get attention from administration by physically showing them what the process of doing homework really entails. During parent-teacher conferences, Greenfield tries a different approach and attempts to directly “urge the teachers to give less homework,” This is a valiant effort because he goes straight to the source of the problem, but it lacks in suggestions to fix the problem. Teachers could potentially be
When Greenfield first questions his daughter’s teacher about the troubling workload, she suggests that if Esmee cannot handle the work, “perhaps she should be moved to a remedial class.” As a response to this comment, Greenfield decides to remove the teacher in question from an email thread and ask other parents what they think. Although he generally receives the type of responses that he seeks out, by taking the teacher out of the email, Greenfield unintentionally creates feelings of hostility that the school district considers cyberbullying, taking focus off of the issue at hand and placing it onto himself. This could have easily been avoided if he instead questioned parents in person or sent a separate email that never included the teacher. Whilst being reprimanded for his cyberbullying actions, Greenfield shows homework assignments to the vice principal in an attempt to persuade him to see from where his anger stems. Despite his efforts, the administration did not believe the assignments were “outside of the norm in terms of content or time commitment.” Greenfield’s only fault in this strategy is that individual homework assignments do not convey the struggles that students are facing. To obtain a real response from teachers, it would be more beneficial to keep a log of how many hours Esmee spends on homework each night and chart when she finally turns in for the night. This would actually get attention from administration by physically showing them what the process of doing homework really entails. During parent-teacher conferences, Greenfield tries a different approach and attempts to directly “urge the teachers to give less homework,” This is a valiant effort because he goes straight to the source of the problem, but it lacks in suggestions to fix the problem. Teachers could potentially be