I’m a homeschooling parent, so all of my kid’s school work is homework.
My little boy has this crazy perfectionist thing going on, where he becomes extremely anxious about writing. He’s not a great speller yet (c’mon, he’s eight) and he hates getting things wrong more than he likes being right, so it’s hard to get him to try.
I could force him to complete a bagillion worksheets, standing over him while he wriggles and cries and tries his damnedest to get out of it (I’m tired, I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, I need a nap, I’ll do chores, Mama, ANYTHING!) or I can let him do other things.
Those other things might be writing emails back and forth with his uncle Billy about video games they like to play, or chatting online with other kids his age in a Roblox server. I could force him to read boring textbooks, or he could read some unofficial Minecraft novels or old Goosebumps books on his Kindle Fire, or the next Harry Potter book in the series.
Do we have to do worksheet upon worksheet to teach decimals and percentages, or can I take him to the grocery store and have him compute the sale prices for me?
Say what you want about homework, but I have an eight year old that knows to find the total price of something that’s 20% off you multiply the base price by .8, then multiply the total by 1.07 to get the total with tax. And he’ll do it in his head.