homework
Japanese kids can exercise their mouths and minds by participating in a contest to brainstorm ideas about the future.
Trapped and with his life hanging in the balance, this calm-and-collected Chinese student took the opportunity to get his math drills done.
As a kid, the end of summer was always the worst time of the year. It meant that your days of sleeping in late, playing video games and riding around outside on your bike were coming to an end, and the new school year was right around the corner.
So who better to remind all the kids in Japan that summer vacation is almost over than the official Japanese PlayStation Twitter account? When they sent out a tweet asking “Have you finished your summer homework?”, they got some pretty hilarious, and rightly deserved, responses.
Right now kids across Japan are rejoicing that their school summer break has finally arrived, despite the fact that, like other students in many other parts of Asia, they’re given stacks of homework to complete during their month off.
This homework is often piled on top of other summer cram-school study sessions, camps, and other activities their parents may have already signed their children up for up, and over the years mothers and fathers have found it increasingly hard to keep their kids from putting their summer homework off until the last minute, especially once they reach that “rebellious stage” children usually go through. In fact, summer homework leaves some parents so stressed out that they even seek out homework completion services than spend endless days nagging at their kids.
Fortunately that won’t be the case this year for one Japanese father, who had the ingenious idea of using reverse psychology on his kids in order to get them to finish their assignments quickly.
Juggling school life and regular life isn’t always easy. Sometimes you’ve got a million things to do and deadlines are coming down on you hard and fast, and you just need that little bit of extra time to finish up your paper. If you are this sneaky Japanese student, though, you’ve found a way to make technology seemingly going wrong make everything all right.
The following is a typical scene that many families in Japan will have recently experienced, and probably not for the first time: It’s August 31, the last day of summer vacation and the fall semester is starting in less than 24 hours. The kids who played all month suddenly realize that they have to do 40 pages of kanji and math drills, write a book report for a book they haven’t read, and fill in 30 days’ worth of journal entries–an assignment that they dutifully kept up with for all of the first week of summer break. They clamor for help, and despite the scoldings and I-told-you-so’s, “nice” parents and the more responsible siblings reluctantly pitch in.
Sure, the above isn’t an exemplary approach to avoiding bad grades, but recently an even more dubious method has been getting a lot of attention: online businesses have been offering to do your child’s homework and school projects for a fee! While the homework-by-proxy racket is nothing new, recent media coverage of the growing enterprise has brought to light this questionable practice and its appalling popularity among elementary and junior high school students.
What does this teach, and not teach, future adults? Why are parents taking advantage of these services for their young children? One twisted reason will probably surprise you.
Death is indeed the final departure, but that does not mean that the echoes of our lives can’t have some lasting effects on the lives of those who survive us. One Japanese school teacher understood that he was nearing the end of his time on earth and did what he could to dispel the certain grief of his beloved students the only way he knew how. He gave them one last homework assignment.