The Continuing Saga of the Anti-Homework Crusade

I've now written several thousand words to administrators and my son's 9th Grade Honors English teacher about the district homework policy-- and despite the fact that I'm a veteran teacher, I'm starting to feel like a crank-- but let me lay out the assignment and the situation so you know what I'm dealing with; my son is reading Catcher in the Rye and he generally has to read a reasonable amount, three chapters a night or so . . . but along with the reading he needs to complete two literary analysis journals per chapter . . . each journal must be at least 150 words and must analyze language, rhetoric, style, metaphors, similes, imagery etcetera-- these aren't free response journals-- and so if he's got three chapters of reading then he also needs to complete 900 words of literary analysis, and there are 26 chapters in the book so this adds up to 52 literary analysis journals . . . or 7800 words of literary analysis . . . 26 pages; in a few weeks, he's doing more analytical writing than we draft in the entire Rutgers Expos course . . . Zman recognized the fact that the assignment is more than ten percent of the length of The Catcher in the Rye . . . and the journals are due at the end of the book and she doesn't give feedback along the way or use them in class, the kids just grind them out (or copy stuff from the internet or steal their older sister's journals or write dream diaries, it doesn't matter because she can't humanly grade them all) and once I really understood the length and insanity of this assignment and how cavalierly disrespectful of time and intellectual energy it is, my only recourse was to find the district homework policy and see if I had a leg to stand on, and it turned out I had three legs to stand on . . . as the assignment is in flagrant violation of three parts of the policy:

4. The number, frequency, and degree of difficulty of homework assignments should be based on the ability and needs of the pupil and take into account other activities that make a legitimate claim on the pupil's time;

5. As a valid educational tool, homework should be clearly assigned and its product carefully evaluated and that evaluation should be reported to the pupil;

7. Homework should always serve a valid learning purpose; it should never be used as a punitive measure;

and so I wrote several emails arguing that this assignment was incredibly time-consuming and onerous in nature-- kids were spending all weekend on it, staying up until 2 AM, etc, etc-- and that the teacher was not "carefully evaluating" the product, nor could she ever carefully evaluate the product . . . she was going to receive well over 1000 journal entries from her students, so she might spot check a few or grade a few at random-- and neither option is acceptable-- and the assignment was obviously punitive because she kept telling kids "if you don't like it, drop Honors and go to College Prep," making this some sort of hazing/initiation/badge-of-honor ritual to whip kids into shape and break them . . . so I met with the principal Friday and it was a positive meeting in regards to the fact that they were hearing my concerns and the superintendent and the principal and the head of humanities met today and agreed to discuss this assignment and expectations in general with the English department, but that could be everyone just humoring me and hoping this will blow over, so I told the principal and superintendent that they need to enforce the district policy and my son brought a petition to school today with the district homework policy on it and got a bunch of signatures-- he is going to meet with his teacher tomorrow and discuss the assignment . . . the teacher keeps asking me if Alex needs help on the assignment and I've told her he doesn't . . . he's actually done a great job and he's caught up-- he's done 32 journals, without feedback, which is shameful-- and I've advised him not to do any more writing until he gets feedback on every journal he's written . . . what a shitshow and what a sad way to read Catcher in the Rye (I wonder if Mark David Chapman Had to complete an assignment like this when he read Catcher and it sent him over the edge) and I'm sure this isn't over and I'm going to end up angrily reciting a lot of numbers at a Board of Ed meeting.