Homework is (usually) lame

I think that most high school students, and students in general will agree with the idea that homework isn't very enjoyable.  However, it does serve a purpose.  Allowing students to reinforce skills and knowledge gained in class and perhaps generate questions for the next class are all very important reasons for teachers to assign homework.  However, teachers (not all but some) have begun to drift away from assigning purposeful homework and instead simply assigned homework because it is what is expected, or because it is part of the curriculum.

While to some degree 'busy work' may be necessary for some students to practice ideas covered in class, this isn't always the case and such homework should simply be 'strongly recommended' so that students who don't feel the need (different from desire) to do it can spend their after school time doing other things besides hours and hours of homework. 

Homework isn't the only thing taking up high-schoolers' after school time.  Most student participate in at least some extracurricular activity such as a sport.  These activities (especially stage crew, sports, or other competitive clubs) can take up several hours of a student's time, not to mention that teenagers need to eat, perhaps spend time with their family, and require more sleep than any other age group excepting infants.  However with an half-hour (or more) of homework from the usual 5 or so academic class a student might have in a day (6 classes per day, one of which is usually gym or an off lab) plus extracurricular activities, plus dinner, plus out of school activities, plus a recommended 8 hours of sleep, there simply isn't enough time for every item to get the attention that it deserves.  The things that usually suffer in this case are family time, non-school activities, and sleep.  This can have very negative consequences such as straining parent/child relationships, limiting creativity, and decreasing student's ability to fight of disease or function in school (the very thing that is keeping them from sleep).

A variety of solutions to this problem exist, but the one that I (and probably most high-schoolers' would agree) prefer is to only assign necessary amounts of homework.  If instead of half an hour to 45 minutes of homework from 5 classes, students only needed to do 20 minutes from 3 classes, an hour and a half of time would be created for students to spend time with their family, express their creativity, explore their interests outside of school, or sleep as they see fit.  I think that this has a high chance of having a positive impact on students' lives and their ability to succeed in school.

Connecticut school shooting and the second amendmet

A great tragedy struck Newtown, Connecticut this Friday.  12 girls and 8 boys aged 6 to 7 were killed along with 6 adults between the ages of 27 and 56 at Sandy Hook Elementary School by a single gunman, 20 year old Adam Lanza.  While people across the country have been offering prayers, condolences, and other forms of help, this shooting again brings up the issue of gun control.

It is in times like this, or when criminals rob a bank with high powered automatic weapons, when politicians and the general populous alike push for stricter gun regulation.  I don't believe that this is the right answer.  Clearly something needs to be done to keep people safe, something should be done, but not stricter regulations on guns.  While such regulations might be necessary to prevent accidental discharge incidents, I don't think that limiting the second amendment is what will best help prevent tragedies similar to what happened on Friday, or heavily armed bank robberies.

The people who do these things are criminals.  The Columbine shooters didn't own their guns, and although Adam Lanza might have owned his, I don't think strict gun regulation would have prevented him from doing what he did.  Clearly if they're going to rob a bank, or shoot up schoolchildren, the law isn't an inhibition for them.  This means that if they need a gun to break the law, they will break the law to get a gun.  Therefore, gun regulation doesn't prevent such crimes, it just makes them more illegal.

In my opinion, something more appropriate would be to have tighter security measures at schools, be they security guards, metal detectors, police, etc.  However, it is important to recognize that we can't totally prevent these terrible crimes, people will find a way.  Therefore we can't create policies that are restrictive in the hopes that they will finally eliminate shootings.

In closing, I'd like to offer a prayer for the families and community affected by Friday's disaster.

Heroes and the Economy

Anyone who lives under a rock might not have noticed that a vast number of recent movies have been about superheroes (and heroines), heroes new and old have been fighting crime and bringing people to the theaters in a way that I believe is similar to what happened during the Great Depression, and for the same reason.

Here are some recent superhero movies from the past couple years (or movies that will be coming out soon):
Man of Steel (superman redoux coming soon)
The Dark Knight Rises
Wreck-it Ralph
The Amazing Spider-man
The Avengers
The Green Lantern
Iron Man 2
Iron Man 3 (coming soon)
X-men First Class
The Green Hornet
Captain America: The First Avenger
Thor
Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
Kick-Ass

Excluding the unreleased movies, that is 12 superhero movies released during 2010-2012 for an average of four per year.  These movies (most of them anyway) have had huge profits and this excludes non-hero movies (Twilight, Harry Potter, the soon-to-be-released Hobbit, etc.).  During the Depression, people would go to the theaters (if they could afford it) to take their minds off of the hard life that existed outside the theater.  I think that the recent 'Great Recession' is the reason behind the influx of superhero and other movies (I'm focusing on superhero movies because I think that they best represent the type of film that people would go to in order to escape the outside world).  Isn't there something about history repeating itself...?  Yeah, I thought so.

It seems to me that Americans (and perhaps people in other countries that have high movie attendance also) are ostriches putting there heads in the ground until the trouble passes.  We are letting our lives flow by and complaining to the few people who are (hopefully) trying to fix our problems like Obama, or our congresspersons (using the royal 'we' and 'our' here with the knowledge that not everyone is being an ostrich, just an apparent majority).  I think that all Americans pull their heads out of the ground and instead of calling out Obama, or our other leaders, for failing to fix our problems, we should do something for ourselves and maybe we can get ourselves out of the recession instead of hoping for someone to lead us out.