If my DD's friends and peers are anything to go by-- a lot of them rationalize not-quite-cheating (that is, what THEY consider to not "really" be cheating) by offering up the idea that if they didn't cheat, they honestly feel that no human being is capable of doing what is sometimes/often asked. In some instances, students actually articulate that they feel that it's OBVIOUS that cheating is intended, at least tacitly.
I know that I've also seen that sentiment associated with such studies before.
To be clear, my family and I see nothing defensible about academic malfeasance of any kind, and we have a great deal of disdain for it. If you have to cheat, you have by definition just admitted your own incompetence. It saddens me that this conclusion seems to be slipping over time.
Now, I'm certainly not defending the practices that the father in this article is illustrating... BUT... having read the specifics of what was being demanded, I have to also say that my DD, at 10 (when she was a freshman in high school) would have been polishing off that entire evening in about two hours flat, maybe less. But then again, she is HG+. So.
There is a component to this that parents like our erstwhile Homework Dad don't really want to examine too hard. That is, that not all kids ARE "elite" material. His daughter seems to be struggling (though not terribly hard) to keep up with the workload. My question is-- why is he not seeing this as an indicator that maybe this placement demands too much for her to keep up with?
I understand his angst. The work itself isn't the problem-- it's the output demand that is the issue. That is a separate issue, but it's the one underlying this phenomenon; there is no more depth. Only volume. That is what "GT" means now in secondary in almost every instance I've personally seen. It's rigid, inflexible, and very much like a sausage-grinding operation-- I'm reminded of the line from Dune; Spice must flow.
We've struggled with this throughout my DD's school career ourselves. But I knew better than to think that I was going to be successful in reducing that volume through complaints about it. Output demand has always been the limiting factor in my DD's academic placement. She could DO the material in AP Comp as a nine year old. She just couldn't keep up with the written output demands and all of the assessments daily.
But here's the part that I'm perplexed by-- why on earth is HomeworkDad not doing something about this toxicity? Why didn't he see this coming? We did. We opted NOT to place our DD into high school at a point in her life when she could not realistically keep up with those output demands.
