New York school eliminates homework - parents outraged

[Borgholio]

http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/2015030 ... y-instead/

KIPS BAY — A public elementary school is abolishing traditional homework assignments and telling kids to play instead — outraging parents who say they may pull their kids out of the school.

Teachers at P.S. 116 on East 33rd Street have stopped assigning take-home math worksheets and essays, and are instead encouraging students to read books and spend time with their family, according to a letter the school’s principal, Jane Hsu, sent to parents last month.

“The topic of homework has received a lot of attention lately, and the negative effects of homework have been well established,” Hsu wrote in her letter, which was sent home with students.

“They include: children’s frustration and exhaustion, lack of time for other activities and family time and, sadly for many, loss of interest in learning.”

Hsu explained that the school spent more than a year "analyzing studies focused on the effects of traditional homework" and decided that it was more important for the Pre-K through fifth grade students to do activities that “have been proven to have a positive impact on student academic performance and social/emotional development” such as reading at their own pace and playing.

"In fact, you may be surprised to learn that there have been a variety of studies conducted on the effects of homework in the elementary grades and not one of them could provide any evidence that directly links traditional homework practices with current, or even future, academic success."

The letter recommends limiting the time kids spend on TV, computers and video games, and told parents with concerns to speak to their children's teachers.

A Department of Education spokesman said the city does not have an overarching homework policy, so principals and teachers can use their discretion in assigning homework.

The change in homework policy is not going over well with parents, who have threatened to yank their kids from the school for fear they won't learn enough.

“They didn’t have much to begin with, but now homework is obsolete,” said Daniel Tasman, father of a second-grader at P.S. 116.

“They’ve decided that giving homework to younger ages [elementary school students] isn’t viable. I don’t necessarily agree. I think they should have homework — some of it is about discipline. I want [my daughter] to have fun, but I also want her to be working towards a goal.”

Tasman has already begun looking for another school for his daughter and recently entered her in a lottery for a charter school, he said.

"I was just thinking maybe I'll keep my daughter here for another year, but this pushed me over the edge," he said.

Angry parents said they have begun filling in the gap by creating their own homework assignments for their kids.

“This is their time to learn now, when they have good memory," said Stanley, a 33-year-old Murray Hill resident with a third-grade son at P.S. 116, who declined to give his last name out of concern for his son.

"I give him extra work, though. I go to Barnes & Nobles and give him my own homework."

The changes were supported by P.S. 116’s School Leadership Team, which is made up of staff and parents, according to Hsu's letter and minutes of a December 2014 meeting.

According to the minutes, the group became worried last year because so many kids were forced to sit out at recess after failing to turn in their daily homework assignments.

The School Leadership Team created a Homework Committee, which did research and found there was “no link between elementary school homework and success in school,” according to the minutes.

In response to DNAinfo's inquiries, Hsu released a statement defending the new homework policy — insisting that the playtime, conversations with relatives and unstructured reading was key to education.

“We are excited that we are redefining the landscape of homework — but we are certainly not eliminating homework,” Hsu said.

“We are creating opportunities for students and their families to engage in activities that research has proven to benefit academic and social-emotional success in the elementary grades. We look forward to seeing the positive impact our newly-designed homework options will have on our students and their families.”

So, kids get too much homework. School realizes this and eliminates homework, telling them to read books, play, or spend time with families instead. Parents are outraged. Borgholio wants to smack dumbass parents.

[Zaune]

I wonder how many of those parents are taking work home with them and grumbling about how it's taking them away from their kids.

[TronPaul]

When I was in school I survived not doing homework by being amazing at tests. Homework was disgustingly frequent, and overly long. I probably had less homework in college than I did in high school. Just like how standardized tests punish some and help others, homework crushes some students and makes others shine.

[Joun_Lord]

Homework was a real dick back when I was in school. It wasn't hard but there was a ton of it, teachers would just pile it on. I was one of the kids that liked to actually go out and fuck about in the woods doing woodsy things like looking for cool rocks and just enjoying some alone time (quite often with a good book, sitting with a nice fat novel on some rock on the side of a mountain is like close to paradise). Half the school year there was like only a few hours of light after school so with an hour or two of homework I'd barely be able to go outside. Then I'd get bitched at by my parents about how they never see me go outside anymore.

All that everyday, all work and no play makes Joun a dull boy, was one of the reasons I had a mini-meltdown in high school and kinda burned out for awhile.

To try to lighten my load I started taking ROTC. Not because I liked ROTC, I was in my hippies "The Man sucks" phase but because other then occasionally on weekends doings some afterschool shit there was no homework.

Some homework is okay but piling it on will burn out kids right quick. Combine that with the legions of other problems such as bullying, parental activists fucking shit up, rabbit food lunches (thanks Obama!!!! !!! !!!'s wife), a feeling of high school not even mattering because either way you are going to be flipping burgers, and shit teachers its no wonder so many kids want to quit skool.

These parents in this article just sound like dicks. Seriously saying kids need homework because they lack discipline? Sounds like the fucks that make kids do backbreaking but worthless labor to "build character" and beat the fuck out of them to teach them a lesson.

[Grumman]

"I think they should have homework — some of it is about discipline.”

"If the teachers don't teach her to do unpaid, unsupervised overtime, who will?"

All that everyday, all work and no play makes Joun a dull boy, was one of the reasons I had a mini-meltdown in high school and kinda burned out for awhile.

Mine was in university. Four weekly assigned tasks, and then the bigger, one-off assignments on top of that. Once homework got to the stage where I was constantly thinking "Well, that's one finished. Now for the next one," productivity nosedived.

[Batman]

You people 'have' noticed this is an elementary school, right?

[GuppyShark]

I did all my primary school 'homework' in class time anyway. I think it's a positive step to not require students take work home with them, especially as a lot of students do not have home environments condusive to learning.

[Flagg]

In 9th grade I decided not to do homework period. I got by on C's and D's. When I'm at school is when I should learn and do work, not at 1am on a Tuesday morning writing a 5 page essay on a book that we had to read over the weekend (HA! Like that happened.) for English, 20 pages of new algebra shit I still can't do (despite being tutored and really trying) nor have ever needed to for Math, and last but not least, write a 3 page biography of a randomly assigned important historical American person with no material on them given to us, we were to go to the library and check out books on our person. I got Sacagawea. I don't know that I entirely believe this person existed. That was for History. It was the last time I ever did a homework assignment.

So I'm 100% behind this. Make it national.

[Flagg]

I wonder how many of those parents are taking work home with them and grumbling about how it's taking them away from their kids.

All of them probably. But I bet they get paid for it or have massive salaries.

[Simon_Jester]

You people 'have' noticed this is an elementary school, right?

This is a significant point; you can make a case for waiting a year or two to start assigning homework.

But I do worry about the wisdom of not doing it at all, simply because we live in a society that relies so heavily on the assumption that people will learn how to do abstract tasks under their own power and independently figure stuff out without constant coaching.

When I was in school I survived not doing homework by being amazing at tests. Homework was disgustingly frequent, and overly long. I probably had less homework in college than I did in high school. Just like how standardized tests punish some and help others, homework crushes some students and makes others shine.

One would think it wise to provide multiple avenues for shining; the student who is persistent and committed to working as long as it takes to get things finished really loses an advantage when homework is taken out of the picture.

These parents in this article just sound like dicks. Seriously saying kids need homework because they lack discipline? Sounds like the fucks that make kids do backbreaking but worthless labor to "build character" and beat the fuck out of them to teach them a lesson.

Allow me to make an observation.

We're seriously expecting a majority of American students to go to college and pick up four year degrees. Not just the smart kids, the average ones, and even the mildly below-average ones. And a college diploma is now considered more or less a prerequisite for jobs that are decent, let alone actually good.

Now, what happens when you go to college? For one, the amount of time you spend in a classroom and exposed to your teachers drops off by about a factor of two or three. For another, the work gets far more complicated... even as you're having to do a lot of the actual work of coming to understand the material on your own time. As you're having to sweat over intricate, tricky problems and come up with thorough analyses of complex subjects on your own, with little or no supervision.

As you are, in short, being expected to learn and work like an adult professional, without a caretaker constantly peering over your shoulder and reminding you to stay on task every five minutes.

You can call it "character building" or you can call it "irrelevant bullshit," but at some point any human being who wants to have a good life is going to have to learn how to work responsibly without close supervision. And to persist and grapple with intellectual challenges, rather than deciding they are 'bullshit too hard stuff' and shrugging them off. People who fail to learn this basic life skill are doomed to a life of ignorance and drone-labor. Because nobody is ever going to want to rely on them for anything that requires independent judgment or independent responsibility.

Maybe training people for that shouldn't start in the first or second grade...

Then again, maybe it should. I can tell you from experience that one of the most crippling weaknesses many of my students have is that they aren't willing to keep working without supervision and immediately respond to "go do this" by dropping 'this' and starting to socialize. And the second most crippling weakness is failure to persist, to spend a few minutes seriously thinking about how to do something, to open a book and look things up before going "I don't know what that means" and deciding they can live their lives happily without ever knowing what that means.

Make that calculated decision to not do something, to not try, once and it's a case of getting some perspective.

Make that calculated decision to not try every time for a period of years... and you turn into a ne'er-do-well.

"I think they should have homework — some of it is about discipline.”

"If the teachers don't teach her to do unpaid, unsupervised overtime, who will?"

Students don't get paid for time spent IN school either; if the parents want to fix that they can either pay the kids themselves, or pay the school district the many, many billions of dollars a year it'd take to give the kids a few dollars a day throughout a school year.

So 'unpaid' is a rhetorical flourish on your part. That leaves the words 'unsupervised' and 'overtime.'

Do kids need to learn to work 'overtime?' Arguably yes, because like it or not, mindless work-to-the-clock drones are not now and never have been the ones who genuinely succeed in life. Very few impressive things are accomplished by working exactly as long and hard as you are told to and then quitting at the first moment it is legally allowed for you to do so.

Do kids need to learn to work 'unsupervised?' Hell yes, especially since the demand for assembly line and ditch digging jobs isn't likely to rebound any time soon, and even the demand for stock clerks and burger-flippers appears to be in relative decline. Menial tasks performed under constant supervision are on the way out. Creative and complicated tasks where your boss tells you "go do this" and checks back in a week to see what you accomplished are on the way in.

In other words, "do your classwork along with thirty other kids doing the same thing at the same time" is out, "do your independent homework-study project" is in.

In 9th grade I decided not to do homework period. I got by on C's and D's. When I'm at school is when I should learn and do work, not at 1am on a Tuesday morning writing a 5 page essay on a book that we had to read over the weekend (HA! Like that happened.) for English, 20 pages of new algebra shit I still can't do (despite being tutored and really trying) nor have ever needed to for Math, and last but not least, write a 3 page biography of a randomly assigned important historical American person with no material on them given to us, we were to go to the library and check out books on our person. I got Sacagawea. I don't know that I entirely believe this person existed. That was for History. It was the last time I ever did a homework assignment.

So I'm 100% behind this. Make it national.

So... some time in the middle of high school, you decided to stop learning new mathematics and seeking applications for it, to not actually learn how to research a previously unknown topic because if you don't already know what it is it can't be very important, and to not try to practice picking up information from text quickly and representing it accurately on the fly.

Gee, I wonder what kind of lifestyle the average person can expect if they adopt that as their willfully-ignorant-and-slacking stance toward life...

[Highlord Laan]

"I give him extra work, though. I go to Barnes & Nobles and give him my own homework."

Holy shit. One of them is getting it right. Take you son to a bookstore or library. Pick out a couple books, read and discuss. Even better if Mom or Dad join in.

[aerius]

There's a healthy balance somewhere between loading up junior school kids with 4 hours of homework every day and giving them no homework at all. Kids aren't fucking stupid, even a 10 year old knows when he's getting bullshit make-work projects, and at some point he's going to quit fucking caring. I think the way my junior school did things was mostly right, we'd get a few long term projects each term and it was up to us to decide when we wanted to work on them. The total time spent on each project was in the 5-15 hour range (for the average student) depending on grade level and all we had to do was get it done by the due date. Which is pretty much how it is in the real world, minus the near impossible deadlines.

[Mr Bean]

There's a healthy balance somewhere between loading up junior school kids with 4 hours of homework every day and giving them no homework at all. Kids aren't fucking stupid, even a 10 year old knows when he's getting bullshit make-work projects, and at some point he's going to quit fucking caring. I think the way my junior school did things was mostly right, we'd get a few long term projects each term and it was up to us to decide when we wanted to work on them. The total time spent on each project was in the 5-15 hour range (for the average student) depending on grade level and all we had to do was get it done by the due date. Which is pretty much how it is in the real world, minus the near impossible deadlines.

Let me give you two examples of teachers I had growing up. Lets call them Blue and Orange.

Blue gave us project assignments one a week. Blue would announce them on Tuesday, tell us we had a week to do them as they were due again next Tuesday. Blue had a clear system. Tuesday assignments were handed in about last week's lesson and an assignment was given for this weeks lesson due the next week. On Tuesdays/Wednesdays/Thursdays we'd learn and on Friday we'd review the week before lesson and whatever project he had us due. Monday we'd go over an in class test on last week's subject. The system was clear, Monday's and Fridays were devoted to what we had learned, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays was learning.

Orange believed that for every hour spent in their class should generate two hours of homework. This may be a fair standard in college where you may spend only twelve hours in glass per week not so much in the rural south where classes were fifty five minutes long and if everyone followed Orange's advice the kids would have 14 hours of homework every evening. When I pointed out to Orange the insanity of expecting high school students to devote 21 hours a day to school work they insisted that it was their own personal standard and what other teachers assigned did not matter. I then suggested to Orange that a school system is an interdependent system and if the teacher before us had assigned us ten hours of homework would Orange be fine with us ignoring Orange's homework as prior homework took precedent. At which point Orange sent me to the front office for taking a tone disrespectful school staff and I quite naturally as a teenager told Orange to go fuck themselves and left. What Orange did not expect me to do was to go directly to the principles office and relay everything I'd said. At which point Orange got written up for not bothering to call the office when a student leaves their lass and I got written up for swearing and leaving.

It was a fun story to relate to my friends at the time as I had a nice slip from the principle detailing everything I said. I lost it years ago but had I the brains I'd have love to have gotten that framed.


TL: I did every one of Blue's assignments and passed the class easily and retained most of it to this day. I don't even remember what Orange looked like and got a 80 in the class after ignoring the homework completely and acing every single test... mostly by cheating.

[Korto]

These parents in this article just sound like dicks. Seriously saying kids need homework because they lack discipline? Sounds like the fucks that make kids do backbreaking but worthless labor to "build character" and beat the fuck out of them to teach them a lesson.

That's funny. To me they sound like concerned parents, wanting the best for their children, wanting them to grow up educated and with the habits and mental fortitude to work hard to succeed, and willing to go out and actually do something about it - which if they are working long hours themselves, including having to take stuff home as Zaune speculates, is an extra load on top of that. Maybe they're wrong in thinking homework is essential, maybe they're not, but their intention is laudable. They deserve to be respected for it, not abused and slandered.

[Thanas]

I'll just note that I have always had to do homework and that it helped me enormously in life. If we eliminate homework in high school and elementary school (granted this is only about elementary schools) then how are kids going to cope with a serious field of study at college/university, where one has to do at least one hour of homework for every hour of class?

[Purple]

I'll just note that I have always had to do homework and that it helped me enormously in life. If we eliminate homework in high school and elementary school (granted this is only about elementary schools) then how are kids going to cope with a serious field of study at college/university, where one has to do at least one hour of homework for every hour of class?

You are neglecting one thing here. In university, and a lesser extent high school the homework and in fact class work you do is in a field that you have chosen to devote your self to. Yes it is difficult but it is also engaging. And bottom line is that you are there by choice and even if it is very hard it is ultimately satisfying. You might be struggling but you are struggling because you want to be there doing that thing. And that makes all the difference. That at least is my experience with it.
Contrast that with primary school where it's just busy work pushed on you for reasons you do not understand in fields you do not care about and are likely not talented in and are most likely not going to pursue in your life.

[Thanas]

Contrast that with primary school where it's just busy work pushed on you for reasons you do not understand in fields you do not care about and are likely not talented in and are most likely not going to pursue in your life.

What? In primary school my homework consisted mostly of learning how to write properly and how to do basic maths. I don't see why homework in that are things that one is not going to pursue in his life. Primary school gives the foundation for high school, you better believe students need that.

[NoXion]

I didn't get homework in primary school, and when I got to secondary school and was assigned homework my reaction was "fuck that shit!" and I didn't do any of it. My parents didn't have their work follow them home, so my position was and still is that school has no right to take up my personal time outside of lessons. Yet later on in life I still managed to complete not one but two maths-heavy distance learning courses on physical science from the Open University.

So this notion that one has to be forced into pointless bullshit make-work in order to be prepared for working at higher academic levels is frankly complete bullshit in my experience. Purple is right; there's a whole world of difference when one is doing something hard but which is nonetheless something one wants to do. It was hard work but I succeeded because I was willing to put the required effort in, not because I had the threat of punishment over my head if I didn't.

[Purple]

Contrast that with primary school where it's just busy work pushed on you for reasons you do not understand in fields you do not care about and are likely not talented in and are most likely not going to pursue in your life.

What? In primary school my homework consisted mostly of learning how to write properly and how to do basic maths. I don't see why homework in that are things that one is not going to pursue in his life. Primary school gives the foundation for high school, you better believe students need that.

Perhaps I am confusing my terminology than. English is not my first language.
Put simple I am referring to the part of your education after grades 1-3 (during which you pick up basic skills such as reading, math etc.) and up until what Wikipedia tells me you in Germany would refer to as the 9th grade. So basically the period where the student is first exposed to a myriad of subjects such as Geography, Chemistry, Physics etc, most of whom will due to the inherent nature of human specialization only be relevant when trying to solve crossword puzzles. It is in that period 4-9 that homework is just busy work with no engagement for the student. For it's purpose is, or at least should be to expose the students to just enough of each field so that they can chose where to specialize toward. Not to bury him in labor.

[Simon_Jester]

It was a fun story to relate to my friends at the time as I had a nice slip from the principle detailing everything I said. I lost it years ago but had I the brains I'd have love to have gotten that framed.

TL: I did every one of Blue's assignments and passed the class easily and retained most of it to this day. I don't even remember what Orange looked like and got a 80 in the class after ignoring the homework completely and acing every single test... mostly by cheating.

It's an amusing story. On the other hand, the problem here seems to have more to do with Mr. Orange's inability to do basic arithmetic and think about the logical consequences of his own actions, and not so much with homework per se.

I didn't get homework in primary school, and when I got to secondary school and was assigned homework my reaction was "fuck that shit!" and I didn't do any of it. My parents didn't have their work follow them home, so my position was and still is that school has no right to take up my personal time outside of lessons. Yet later on in life I still managed to complete not one but two maths-heavy distance learning courses on physical science from the Open University.

Lucky boy.

Would it be appropriate for me to counter with half a dozen anecdotes about people who didn't do their homework in high school and turned into ne'er-do-wells. We've already got one such anecdote on this thread, if you want me to research more I could try.

So this notion that one has to be forced into pointless bullshit make-work in order to be prepared for working at higher academic levels is frankly complete bullshit in my experience. Purple is right; there's a whole world of difference when one is doing something hard but which is nonetheless something one wants to do. It was hard work but I succeeded because I was willing to put the required effort in, not because I had the threat of punishment over my head if I didn't.

Quite a lot of people never pick up the knack of doing it at all, even when they want to do it. Or think they want to do it. They say "yeah, I want my business to succeed," then they don't put in the time and effort to make it work. Or they say "yeah, I want a college diploma," and again don't put in the time and effort. Or they say "yeah, I'd like to be able to do X," then they don't do any research about how to do X, just sort of fart around and give up on their goals (or fail hilariously).

You are fortunate, in that you managed to avoid becoming an ignorant slacker, despite not getting the traditional method of training in how to avoid becoming one.

Perhaps I am confusing my terminology than. English is not my first language.
Put simple I am referring to the part of your education after grades 1-3 (during which you pick up basic skills such as reading, math etc.) and up until what Wikipedia tells me you in Germany would refer to as the 9th grade. So basically the period where the student is first exposed to a myriad of subjects such as Geography, Chemistry, Physics etc, most of whom will due to the inherent nature of human specialization only be relevant when trying to solve crossword puzzles. It is in that period 4-9 that homework is just busy work with no engagement for the student...

This is wrong.

Among the many things you learn during those years- not all of them, just SOME:

-How to actually write, to represent your opinions at paragraph length.
-How to truly read, not in the sense of being able to recite what it says on the page, but to actually extract relevant facts from text.
-How to do calculations beyond the most rudimentary ones, and how to use your ability to do basic calculations in order to actually accomplish useful things.
-Numerous fundamental scientific facts that are necessary to have even the most rudimentary understanding of technology or the world around you.
-The basic outlines of the history of your own country and society, and the world in general, the laws under which you live and the institutions governing them.

And you seriously think all this is makework?

This is... so obviously wrong it's sad.

[biostem]

I have no problem with kids getting a short 10-15 mins piece of homework, just to reinforce the day's lesson. It's the hour+ projects that I find objectionable. Heck, if teachers of different courses could coordinate things so, say, math homework incorporates vocabulary words and stuff from science class, all the better. A lot of it also has to do with how one approaches homework - I tended to knock out my HW as soon as I got home, just to get it out of the way, so I could then relax the rest of the night. Some kids dwell on it/dread it so much that there develops a mental block, thus making it a worse experience for them.

As for the parents' outrage - as someone already pointed out, they could easily go over the lesson w/ the kids again, if they so choose.

[White Haven]

As I'm in no way a professional or relevant expert, I'm going to contain my commentary to my own experiences and extrapolations from them.

I suffered from an overly active bullshit sensor as a child. This very frequently bit me right in the grades with regards to homework because I know from long experience that I, personally, did not need it (high test scores, understanding of content). Accordingly, I took it as a personal attack that I was being instructed to burn my free time at home on homework. This resulted in a lot of un-done homework in middle school and beyond, which in turn tanked a great number of grades in a great number of classes. At the same time, I had a mix of pride and academic honesty that prevented me from just cheating off of someone else's homework. Now, while the end effect was a product of my own stubbornness, I can't help but look back on the system that my stubbornness rebelled against as a failure on some level. I can say, conclusively, that a non-zero number of students (at least one; again, I'm limiting myself to purely personal experiences to avoid overgeneralizing) in a large proportion of my classes (basically everything below trigonometry and calculus in math and excepting chemistry in sciences) were being punished with poor grades for, essentially, reacting like kids to having their free time wasted on useless makework.

I hasten to add that I am not attempting to claim that all homework is useless makework for all people; fuck no. There were some classes where I needed the homework. There are a lot of students in basically all classes that may benefit from homework. But for me, personally, it was useless makework the vast majority of the time. When it wasn't, I suffered as well, because I'd built up this level of resistance to the idea of homework as useless crap and, in true Boy Who Cried Wolf fashion, when it wasn't, I didn't believe my teachers when they told me that, and that's the story of why I had to take Calculus twice.

Ultimately, the system needs to be able to teach people who learn best in different ways and at different rates, but it needs to find a better way of doing that than just pitching every teaching method full-bore at every student and hoping. Overall teaching methods are a complex issue, and one I won't even try to address here as they're beyond the scope of the thread and, frankly, I'm not a teacher. Ideally, you don't want to leave any part of the decision-making process in student hands, but you can't avoid that; they already have control of the decision whether to do the homework or not, so you can't avoid 'all zeros, then a 97 on a test' if that's what's going to happen. Maybe some sort of reactive weighting of a section's homework based on the test score for that chapter, weight it more lightly the higher the test score goes? I'm just spitballing at this point; all I know for sure is that one size literally cannot ever fit all, and modern/future IT systems might actually finally let us break out of that going forwards.

[GuppyShark]

In my schooling, there was rarely assigned homework, homework was mostly 'if you don't finish the assignment in the allotted class time you can do it as homework.'

I don't think there was a homework requirement in the South Australian curriculum.

I did suffer a little in Year 12 (senior year for the US) for not completing assignments but I attribute that more to discovering the opposite sex than a lack of history with homework.

[Batman]

To be honest while I agree with S_J in principle I have to agree with Purple in spirit, some of the stuff they teach you in school is of decidedly limited utility in the real world. Not understanding vector calculus eventually cost me my Abitur (twice) and so far it had exactly zero effect on my life because very few people need vector calculus for anything. Same goes for history. The number of jobs you're applying to which require you to know who was POTUS in 1857 is not all that large.

[Rogue 9]

To be honest while I agree with S_J in principle I have to agree with Purple in spirit, some of the stuff they teach you in school is of decidedly limited utility in the real world. Not understanding vector calculus eventually cost me my Abitur (twice) and so far it had exactly zero effect on my life because very few people need vector calculus for anything. Same goes for history. The number of jobs you're applying to which require you to know who was POTUS in 1857 is not all that large.

James Buchanan, worst PotUS of all time, in case you were curious. (Technically speaking, Franklin Pierce was finishing up his term until inauguration in March, but Buchanan held the office for most of the year.)

My story is much the same as White Haven's. When 10th grade/sophomore year rolled around they made us take the pSAT like they do, and I aced it. When I got called into the principal's office afterward I had no idea what the hell I'd done this time, only to find out he wanted to grill me on why I had a C in English class but a perfect 800 on the English portion of the SAT prep test. The answer? High school English classes are nonsense makework and I knew it. I could already write essays, reviews, and persuasive papers backwards, forwards, and in my sleep, and had a command of the language more advanced than my teacher's, so I felt no need to do said nonsense makework about subjects I didn't give two shits about.