Trinitas Blog

(This is part two of a five-part series on homework. Here's a link to last week's post about Getting the Time Commitment Right in case you missed it.)

Of all the contentious issues that come up in schools—and believe me, there are a few—homework is the issue that causes the most strife between teachers and students, students and parents, and then parents and teachers. Personally, I am against homework. That position keeps me young and gives me some common ground with students. Still, regardless of my personal feelings on the issue, homework is a necessity in schools that have high academic goals for their students.

Because schools that are committed to providing a good education rely on some homework to help them deliver, it is important for teachers and families to take the homework as seriously as the in-class time. My aim here is to offer a few suggestions for making homework more productive and less contentious; in fact, I hope to help you see it in a whole new light.

Of all the contentious issues that come up in schools—and believe me, there are a few—homework is the issue that causes the most strife between teachers and students, students and parents, and then parents and teachers. Personally, I am against homework. That position keeps me young and gives me some common ground with students. Still, regardless of my personal feelings on the issue, homework is a necessity in schools that have high academic goals for their students.

Because schools that are committed to providing a good education rely on some homework to help them deliver, it is important for teachers and families to take the homework as seriously as the in-class time. My aim here is to offer a few suggestions for making homework more productive and less contentious; in fact, I hope to help you see it in a whole new light.

Parent Orientation marks the beginning of the school year and is one of the few opportunities I will have to address all Trinitas parents together in a face-to-face setting. In the weeks leading up to this night, I cast about for an idea, a theme for this address that will encourage, challenge, and perhaps, inspire each of you as we head into the new school year together.

There is a passage from Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine that I reflect upon at the end of every Summer. It comes as the main characters, two brothers of Logic school age, are realizing that this season of their life is coming to an end:

And they left the mellow light of the dandelion wine and went upstairs to carry out the last few rituals of summer, for they felt that now the final day, the final night had come. As the day grew late they realized that for two or three nights now, porches had emptied early of their inhabitants . . . and surely when they abandoned the conflict the war with Time was really done, there was nothing for it but that humans also forsake the battleground. (p. 281)

Summer has always felt like that to me, like “a war with Time,” where every moment is grasped tighter. This is why I always tell students that Summers are Sacred. It is a kind of Sabbath, a season when we labor through rest.

Shh. Don’t tell the kiddos, but the summer is winding down. There are certainly a few students out there who can hardly wait for school to start, but the vast majority may not even want to think about school before the alarm goes off on that first morning back. The former will be ready to go, but the latter will spend the first three weeks of school re-acclimating themselves to the speed and rigor of academic life. Fortunately, there are a few things parents can do to prepare students’ hearts and minds to return to school in the fall.

One of my favorite summer songs, “Summertime,” was composed by Gershwin in 1934 for the opera Porgy and Bess but it wasn’t until the first lady of song, Ella Fitzgerald, recorded the lullaby in Berlin in 1968 that the song came to be identified with the relaxingly smooth vibe that marks the three months between May and September.

In this post-postmodern age in which we live, truth has become so relative that actual truth, real truth, true truth is hardly recognizable. Relative truth is a truth that is true for me but may not be true for you, or one that is true for me relative to the situation I am in—it may not even be true for me in a different situation. Relative truth is so dependent upon individual feelings, place, and time that we have to differentiate it from the actual objective truth somehow, as I did above by using the term true truth. This is bonkers, and it screams for a lecture on the importance of language, but that can be saved for another day. Just remember that whoever defines the terms controls the conversation.

One of the great purposes of this life is our sanctification, that process whereby we—with the help of the Holy Spirit—become more like Christ throughout our lifetime. We are eternal beings, bound for glory, and this life offers us lots of opportunities to prepare. Becoming like Christ consists in part, as the Apostle Paul says, of putting off the old man (Col 3:9) and putting off our sins (Col 3:8). I don’t know about you, but I seem to have a lot of sin to put off, and I couldn’t even start the project of putting it off until I knew what sin was and what God thought about my sin. I should have started a lot earlier in life than I did! Talk about wasted youth, sheesh.